Today a new cry can be heard among intellectuals in the US: ‘Je suis Charlie.’ It is a curious slogan, all the more so since few of the Americans reciting it had ever heard of, much less read, Charlie Hebdo before the 7 January massacre. What does it mean, exactly? Seen in the best light, it means simply that we abhor violence against people exercising their democratic right to express their views. But it may also be creating what the French would call an amalgame, or confusion, between Charlie Hebdo and the open society of the West. In this sense, the slogan ‘je suis Charlie’ is less an expression of outrage and sympathy than a declaration of allegiance, with the implication that those who aren’t Charlie Hebdo are on the other side, with the killers, with the Islamic enemy that threatens life in the modern, democratic West, both from outside and from within. Which seems so much the point - if some dude on Fox News can see a bunch of disparate nutters committing horrific acts and jump to the conclusion that Birmingham is Muslim-only, to what conclusion jump the thousands outside the west who now see a million hash-tagging endorsers of offensive cartooning?
Posted on: Tue, 13 Jan 2015 14:42:14 +0000
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