The Cultural Debate on Satire and Free Speech, and Questions Regarding Islam and Violence

[shadowkat]

There are two really interesting articles in the New York Times today regarding two important issues that have arisen as a result of the tragic shootings in France. I read them during my lunch break - in between hunting for window insulation kit, which I could not find.

1. Charlie Hebdu Attack Chills Satirists and Prompts Debate

Such debates unfold differently in different countries. But the conversation could be especially acute in the United States, where sensitivities to racially tinged caricatures may run higher than in places like France, where historically tighter restrictions on speech have given rise to a strong desire to flout the rules.

Charlie Hebdo has had “a much more savage, unforgiving, doing-it-for-the-sake-of-doing-it” spirit than any American publication, said Tom Spurgeon, the author of The Comics Reporter, a website that tracks comics news from around the world.

“That’s not so much an American impulse,” he said. Especially today, “there’s a sophisticated dialogue about what privilege means, and a feeling that you don’t need to insult people, especially downtrodden people, to make your points.”

Political cartooning’s emphasis on “kicking up” against authority goes back to its origins in the 17th century, when the end of Europe’s religious wars opened up political space where iconoclastic irreverence could flourish, the historian Simon Schama, a professor at Columbia, said in an interview.

“No one had a monopoly of authority, particularly any kind that could be exercised through reverence to images,” Mr. Schama said, adding that political parties “agreed to fight their battles with words and images rather than swords and guns.”

The powerful certainly made efforts to rein in the mockery, as when the French king Louis-Philippe’s censors banned disrespectful images of his plump physique, only to see one of his most dogged antagonists, Honoré Daumier, evoke him with an actual pear.

But it wasn’t just the powerful who felt the sting of cartoonist’s pens. In 19th-century Europe and America, minority groups who felt maligned, like Jews or Irish-Americans, also lodged frequent complaints against what they saw as stereotypes, only to be largely ignored.

“There have always been interest groups that have protested against political cartoons, but there was nothing they could do about it,” said Richard Samuel West, a scholar of political cartoons. In conflicts with whatever opponent, “you always saw the art form emerging triumphant.”

Continuing censorship battles in the 20th century gave rise to underground comics, with their nothing-is-sacred sensibility. And Charlie Hebdo, which arose in the wake of the 1960s battles over France’s then-restrictive speech laws, did outré political satire better than just about anyone, the cartoonist Art Spiegelman said.
Photo Joe Sacco, an author of long-form journalistic comics like “Footnotes in Gaza.” The line between satire and provocation is a delicate one in the cartooning world.

When it reprinted the Danish cartoons mocking the prophet Muhammad in 2006, “they were the only magazine to do it for absolutely the right reasons,” Mr. Spiegelman said. “The others that published the cartoons were baiting Muslims, but for them it was part of their self-perceived mission to be provocative, to provoke thought.”

The Iranian-French graphic novelist Marjane Satrapi, the author of “Persepolis,” praised Charlie Hebdo’s willingness to “give the finger to all kinds of authority,” whether religious or political. “I wasn’t always in love with what they did,” she said in a telephone interview from Paris, where she lives. “But I was in love with the idea we had one magazine that was this subversive.”

But not everyone in the comics world has taken such an admiring view. Mr. Spurgeon of The Comics Reporter said that when he posted some of what he called Charlie Hebdo’s “ugly, racist” covers in a show of solidarity on Wednesday, he got a number of emails from cartoonists challenging the decision.

“Some people questioned such work as simply cruelty hiding behind the idea of free speech,” Mr. Spurgeon said.

“But when it comes down to killing people,” he said, republishing them was an easy call: “For me, that’s black and white.”

Mr. Spurgeon attributed that response to a generational divide between American cartoonists who came of age in the anything-goes, do-it-because-you-can underground comics scene of the 1960s and ’70s, and younger cartoonists who are alert to what they consider the position of white male privilege that such work often issues from.

In an essay from the website The Hooded Utilitarian that circulated widely on social media, Jacob Canfield, a 24-year-old cartoonist in Ann Arbor, Mich., argued that Charlie Hebdo’s “white editorial staff” members were not simply free-speech martyrs but frequent, deliberate peddlers of “a certain, virulently racist brand of French xenophobia.”

While I was aware of the generation gap regarding this issue, it hadn't occurred to me how differently the French and the US view the issue and why.

Recently, while watching Ken Burns documentary on Mark Twain, Burns raised the point that one of things that made Mark Twain - the American novelists, unique amongst the others - was that he addressed the issue of race. Not only that, but he addressed it as American issue that permeates our cultural history and divides us as a country and nation. Race is a big deal in the US in a way that I don't think it is in other countries. After all France doesn't have over 100 years of slavery, and ahem, racial violence to live down. The two countries have historically dealt with race differently. Various persons of color have retreated to France during various periods of US history to do the things they couldn't do in the US. I'm not saying there isn't racism in France, just that it's handled differently. I don't believe there is quite the level of "institutionalize" racism or "discrimination" in France that there is in the US. Nor the number of white supremacist groups. There is racism, but it may not be nearly as insidious.

Next up is the issue of censorship. As the above article points out? France looks at censorship very differently than the US. The US historically has had freedom of speech, well for the most part. The US does censor things - hello, the ratings game, and well, various books have been banned on a local level. But generally speaking - freedom of speech is pretty much a given here. While France didn't have freedom of speech until far more recently in its history - so its, and understandably so, far more protective of that right.

So you have a world-wide debate on a topic that various countries will look at completely differently based on their own history and problems. Fascinating.

Personally? Unless it can be clearly identified as hate-speech or speech that incites violence and hatred, I honestly think it should be permitted. It is admittedly difficult to determine what constitutes hate speech. Far more so than one might think.
Satire does walk a very fine line, as does a lot of off-color racial jokes and various words. It often depends on context, tone, and who is telling the joke and why.
Take for instance, Jonathan Swift's infamous and rather brilliant satirical piece, "A Modest Proposal - For Preventing The Children of Poor People in Ireland From Being Aburden to Their Parents or Country, and For Making Them Beneficial to The Public".

This is what he proposed:

I do therefore humbly offer it to public consideration that of the hundred and twenty thousand children already computed, twenty thousand may be reserved for breed, whereof only one-fourth part to be males; which is more than we allow to sheep, black cattle or swine; and my reason is, that these children are seldom the fruits of marriage, a circumstance not much regarded by our savages, therefore one male will be sufficient to serve four females. That the remaining hundred thousand may, at a year old, be offered in the sale to the persons of quality and fortune through the kingdom; always advising the mother to let them suck plentifully in the last month, so as to render them plump and fat for a good table. A child will make two dishes at an entertainment for friends; and when the family dines alone, the fore or hind quarter will make a reasonable dish, and seasoned with a little pepper or salt will be very good boiled on the fourth day, especially in winter.

That's an example of sharp satire. Satire is by its very nature offensive, it's supposed to be. And it does not work for everyone. I'm willing to bet everyone reading this has at one time or another been offended by satire, and loved it. That's sort of the whole nature of satire. If the satirist is making fun of something you hold dear - it will offend you. If they are making fun of something that you despise, you will love it.

Satire is not meant to be taken literally. Swift for example, did not in any way shape or form intend to do what he proposed, he was attacking various English politicians and sociologists views regarding the poverty issue in Ireland. George Bernard Shaw was also a social and political satirist - whose Pgymallion and Major Barbara poke fun at the British class system. As was Mark Twain, whose novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been banned by various schools on account of being "racist". And currently there's the film, The Interview, which is a rather crude and somewhat silly satire about two idiots trying to kill the ruler of North Korea. The film satirizes North Korea and its leader, as does Team America: World Police. (North Korea attempted to ban or censor the film with a cyber-attack on the distributor, which only resulted in more people watching the movie than otherwise. I can sort of see why they were upset about it but I also think they over-reacted and would have been better off just ignoring the whole thing.)

The difficulty with free speech or any human right for that matter is you have to tolerate the fact that other people have these freedoms too and you may not like how they choose to exercise them. It's sort of similar to "free will" - the problem with "free will" is that other people have it too, specifically people who scare you, like the nitwits who shot the journalists in France or the guys who decided to turn planes into bombs during 9/11. If only the universal architect (or the source or God or whatever you wish to call it) had been a wee bit more selective in parsing out that gift.


2. The other interesting article deals with how so many violent terrorist activities are associated with Islam or mention Islam, and what does that say about Islam. This by the way is an article from the perspective of the Muslim community and how they are relating to these crimes that appear to be associated with their religion.

Raising Questions Within Islam After the France Shooting

Others, though, insist that the sources of the violence are alienation and resentment, not theology. They argue that the authoritarian rulers of Arab states — who have tried for decades to control Muslim teaching and the application of Islamic law — have set off a violent backlash expressed in religious ideas and language. Promoted by groups like the Islamic State or Al Qaeda, that discourse echoes through Muslim communities as far away as New York or Paris, whose influence and culture still loom over much of the Muslim world.

“Some people who feel crushed or ignored will go toward extremism, and they use religion because that is what they have at hand,” said Said Ferjani, an official of Tunisia’s mainstream Islamist party, Ennahda, speaking about the broader phenomenon of violence in the name of Islam. “If you are attacked and you have a fork in your hand, you will fight back with a fork.”

Khaled Fahmy, an Egyptian historian, was teaching at New York University on Sept. 11, 2001, after which American sales of the Quran spiked because readers sought religious explanations for the attack on New York.

“We try to explain that they are asking the wrong question,” he said. Religion, he argued, was “just a veneer” for anger at the dysfunctional Arab states left behind by colonial powers and the “Orientalist” condescension many Arabs still feel from the West.

“The Arab states have not delivered what they are supposed to deliver and it can only lead to a deep sense of resentment and frustration, or to revolution,” he said. “It is the nonviolence that needs to be explained, not the violence.”

Only a very small number of Muslims pin the blame directly on the religion itself.

“What has ISIS done that Muhammad did not do?” an outspoken atheist, Ahmed Harqan, recently asked on a popular television talk show here, using common shorthand for the Islamic State to argue that the problem of violence is inherent to Islam.

Okay, these self-righteous atheists are beginning to get on my nerves, they are almost as bad as the religious zealots. Adolf Hitler was an atheist, folks. Nazi Germany was not religious, it separated itself from religion. Hitler worshiped power. Huge swathes of humanity have been killed by atheists. To state that the reason they were killed is because the individual did not fear God or did not believe in God is as silly as stating that the reason the people in France were killed or the twin towers was blown up is because the individuals believed in God or were religious. Religious belief or the lack of it has zip to do with these acts. They did these acts for other reasons. Either out of rage, frustration, or most likely a desire for power and control. It's actually usually about power and money. The people who do horrible things are worshiping power and/or money not God, not love, not life.

The common thread that I'm picking up here is that people are using horrible acts of violence to justify their own prejudicial views. Which is not helping. It's just adding fuel to the fire.

That said, I agree with the University Professor who stated that: "We try to explain that they are asking the wrong question. Religion, he argued, was “just a veneer” for anger at the dysfunctional Arab states left behind by colonial powers and the “Orientalist” condescension many Arabs still feel from the West."

I honestly think that lies at the crux of it. All that fiddling around in the Middle East and Persia during the Victorian period and early part of the 20th Century is coming back to hit Europe and the US in the proverbial ass. This is more economically based than religious based. Religion is sort of the mislead or red herring. If think about it, historical conflicts really aren't about religion, but about property, wealth and power. The fights in the Bible are all property disputes and power disputes. Not really religion based, although it may appear to be that way on the surface.

Comments

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

Oh, I don't mean to state they don't have as much as an issue - I know they do, it's just different. The US sort of institutionalized racism in the slave trade. Europe had long abandoned it, when it was still going strong in the US in the 1800s.