The massacre at Charlie Hebdo
Je Suis Charlie
by accordingtohoyt
JesuisCharlie
Here I was, trying to make this blog less political.
Not because I’m afraid to be political, and I intended to continue to say things that need to be said, but because I have said most of what I want to say. As in, I don’t want to force topics. If a political/social topic presents I will write, but for the rest, I thought, I’ll write about writing, and home and kids, and- And resume the free chapters, and post more about writing and literature, because that is as important to me as politics and my area of expertise, even if I write about writing as it reflects/influences society.
And I woke up in the morning to the news of the massacre at Charlie Hebdo.
It wasn’t going to be an easy day. I think I have a touch of the ninja flu. (Think? Well, it could be hormonal.) Anyway, so-
My first thought was grief.
We’re going to be clear here. I thought most of the humor Charlie engaged in juvenile. It was about at the level of college newspapers in the US. Or like the Onion. But they were further up the tree in French culture, because French culture or at least what I get of it, is a lot about cocking a snook at everything that’s respected or revered.
But they stood out. Oh, they made fun of every religion. But they made fun of Islam too. And when Islam threatened them, they weren’t scared. They published this cover:
charliehebdo
You can’t help liking people like that. Oh, I’m fairly sure they would have bothered me or at least bugged me, had they been my friends. I’d eventually have gone “Stop with the itch powder and the fart jokes, guys, and grow up” - and then we’d have gone out for a bottle of red.
I’ll never know how I’d have got along with them, even should I get a chance to meet them, because they paid for their courage and their unbending gallantry with their lives this morning.
This was sad. I felt sad, and very angry at the cochons sales (an insult to every decent dirty pig) who did this. I wanted to cry
And then…
I went to facebook.
If there is one thing that my “community” - the community of my so called colleagues - can do is take a bad situation and make it worse.
The people who speak truth to power TM were alternately worrying about the backlash against poor defenseless Muslims and whining that no one was giving the same attention to a victimless bombing of an NAACP office - or the hair salon next to it, of course - in Colorado Springs, for which they said there was a white suspect. (Was there a white suspect? Who knows? If it’s true, none of the sources in town know it. They don’t even know who was supposed to be bombed (the bomb was faulty and mostly achieved a lot of noise.) The fact that no one in the press is running with this makes me suspect it’s a non-event.)
Let’s suppose, however, that this non-event in my home town was everything they think it is. Someone motivated by race hatred decided to bomb one of the most institutionally ossified civil rights organizations. Someone who is lame and tried to bomb the offices after closing. Okay.
Which piece of news do you think deserves more attention? The one that somewhere in the US there might be a racist who wants to scare a lobbying/lawfare organization? (Don’t they always tell us racists are everywhere? So this shouldn’t be news, right?) A racist who didn’t kill anyone? Or the one about nineteen innocents murdered because they insulted the prophet of a barbaric and intolerant religion?
And which one should a bunch of white women who make their living by writing be more interested in?
The one where they’re not scared they’ll get their necks cut, of course.
Which is when I started to see red.
The film of red grew as these asinine cowards, these craven and self-regarding poltroons, started saying things like that the brave men and women who risked their lives for free speech should have been more careful of the feelings of others. These are the same people who routinely, three times a day, post some dig at Christianity, some mockery of Americans, some pseudo-witty comment about Republicans. But see, none of those people threaten to kill them.
The brave social(ist) justice warriors are ever ready to speak truth to the power that will not hurt them. Towards Islam, otoh they adopt the crouching position and kiss the terrorists gangrenous blood-soaked pudenda.
Is this their pathological admiration of anyone who has the cojones to do what they’d like to do and cut the throats of everyone who disagrees with them? After all, these are the idolaters of Che, he who clubbed children and puppies to death. Are they, in their heart, hyenas who dream of being lions? Or perhaps - since the lion is a lazy beast who relies on size and intimidation - they are lions who dream of being hyenas.
But I might give them too much credit. Perhaps just as after nine eleven, they find themselves scared. After all these barbarians they keep trying to dress in the robes of the noble savage, might not know that they are quite willing to betray their countrymen in order to be the ones killed last.
And so they hasten to lave the hand that would behead them, and to denounce their countrymen loudly. Hence, the next batch of screaming, saying that this is all the right wing’s fault - somehow, in another country. That they’re afraid of what the “right wing” will do - no you’re not, you base flees on the scrotum of a traitorous dog. If you were scared of us, you’d also kiss our behinds - and that the right wing is “gloating” over this and being “racist.”
First of all, we are not gloating over this. It takes such a state of moral corruption to gloat over someone killing cartoonists for funny cartoons - even when the someone is a band we consider dangerous - that I don’t think any sane man or woman could try it. Yes, I know, you could feel that way, but you are not sane. Your double think, your fear and your hatred has long ago driven any sanity from your poor Social(ist) Justice Warrior minds. Such as they ever were.
Second calling us racists is an act of idiotic projection that simultaneously reveals your ignorance and your real feelings. I have no idea how you managed to convince yourselves Muslims are a different race. Most Muslims (though there are Muslims of every color) are the same race I am (Hispanic/Latino is a cultural definition, not a race one): White, of Mediterranean sub-race.
Oh, sure, we tan a little better, and some of us have a sort of ‘fro. That does not another race make, unless you’re going by the nineteenth century definition of “every country a race.”
And you probably are, because in your beffudled, endarkened mind culture is hereditary. This is why multiculturalism is necessary and classes in every language under the sun for third generation Americans, because culture can’t be changed and can’t be learned and can’t be unlearned.
You racist pustules on Hitler’s backside!
Humans prove you wrong every day. EVERY single day. Including the Jews Hitler tried to exterminate and who came to the US with no help, no special classes, no help in keeping their culture and their traditions, and adapted and changed and became AMERICANS and successful. You are proven wrong by barely literate Italians, by French, by Germans, by people of every nation who came to this country and became fluent in English and capable, and whose children competed with and intermarried the children of people already here.
You are the racists, you who believe that because someone comes from elsewhere, or has a tan, or speaks with an accent, they are less than human and less than capable. You cling to your imagined superiority and go around shouting at other white people that they have “privilege” trying to be more touchy-feely than they are.
And you believe that if only America - or the west, for whom, in your mind, America is a proxy - withdrew from the world, the little brown peoplez would be happy and peaceful. (And probably sing spirituals on their doorsteps every night, right, you depraved, unthinking racist scum?)
This would be okay if your diseased, craven cowardice didn’t leak out from the holes of our leftist mass media and go out to keep the monsters who keep Islam at war with the world and the world at war with Islam in power in every Islamic country.
It would be forgivable if your inability to reason and logically process facts didn’t mean that the kleptocrats in Arab regimes didn’t wave your words as an excuse in order to send their young men out to kill us, instead of staying at home, challenging the authority of their loathsome satraps.
With your words, your mollycoddling, your excusing of abhorrent deeds, your covering them under the tattered blanket of victims of racism, you prevent a sick, murderous culture from changing. You keep human beings in subjection. And you encourage the murder of innocents for no greater crime than speaking their minds.
The blood of the staff of Charlie Hebdo is on your hands. No matter how much you wipe them on the cloth of self-regard and self excusing, you cannot run from yourself.
I hope in the back of your mind, the horror of what you are doing burns like acid. I hope you wake in the night screaming “mea culpa.”
I hope so, because that would mean you are redeemable.
But I doubt it. You’ll continue, in your smug way, bending knee to every tyrant and kissing the backside of everyone you are afraid of.
Depart from us. Forget you were ever our brothers.
We, the Liberty Tribe, we, the proud, we free men will bend no knee to tyrant or king, to caliph or to prophet.
We will respect those who’ve earned our respect, not those who say “convert or die.”
We free men mourn the staff of Charlie Hebdo. We might not have agreed with them on most things, but they were our brothers and sisters, unafraid in the face of threats or attacks.
Rest in peace and may free men remember them and honor them. And may their example light the path.
ONLY speaking unafraid and confronting the worst movements with unbended knee will we reform the tyranny that holds most Muslims in subjection. Only knowing they’re beyond the pale will bring reform. And only then will there be peace.
by accordingtohoyt
JesuisCharlie
Here I was, trying to make this blog less political.
Not because I’m afraid to be political, and I intended to continue to say things that need to be said, but because I have said most of what I want to say. As in, I don’t want to force topics. If a political/social topic presents I will write, but for the rest, I thought, I’ll write about writing, and home and kids, and- And resume the free chapters, and post more about writing and literature, because that is as important to me as politics and my area of expertise, even if I write about writing as it reflects/influences society.
And I woke up in the morning to the news of the massacre at Charlie Hebdo.
It wasn’t going to be an easy day. I think I have a touch of the ninja flu. (Think? Well, it could be hormonal.) Anyway, so-
My first thought was grief.
We’re going to be clear here. I thought most of the humor Charlie engaged in juvenile. It was about at the level of college newspapers in the US. Or like the Onion. But they were further up the tree in French culture, because French culture or at least what I get of it, is a lot about cocking a snook at everything that’s respected or revered.
But they stood out. Oh, they made fun of every religion. But they made fun of Islam too. And when Islam threatened them, they weren’t scared. They published this cover:
charliehebdo
You can’t help liking people like that. Oh, I’m fairly sure they would have bothered me or at least bugged me, had they been my friends. I’d eventually have gone “Stop with the itch powder and the fart jokes, guys, and grow up” - and then we’d have gone out for a bottle of red.
I’ll never know how I’d have got along with them, even should I get a chance to meet them, because they paid for their courage and their unbending gallantry with their lives this morning.
This was sad. I felt sad, and very angry at the cochons sales (an insult to every decent dirty pig) who did this. I wanted to cry
And then…
I went to facebook.
If there is one thing that my “community” - the community of my so called colleagues - can do is take a bad situation and make it worse.
The people who speak truth to power TM were alternately worrying about the backlash against poor defenseless Muslims and whining that no one was giving the same attention to a victimless bombing of an NAACP office - or the hair salon next to it, of course - in Colorado Springs, for which they said there was a white suspect. (Was there a white suspect? Who knows? If it’s true, none of the sources in town know it. They don’t even know who was supposed to be bombed (the bomb was faulty and mostly achieved a lot of noise.) The fact that no one in the press is running with this makes me suspect it’s a non-event.)
Let’s suppose, however, that this non-event in my home town was everything they think it is. Someone motivated by race hatred decided to bomb one of the most institutionally ossified civil rights organizations. Someone who is lame and tried to bomb the offices after closing. Okay.
Which piece of news do you think deserves more attention? The one that somewhere in the US there might be a racist who wants to scare a lobbying/lawfare organization? (Don’t they always tell us racists are everywhere? So this shouldn’t be news, right?) A racist who didn’t kill anyone? Or the one about nineteen innocents murdered because they insulted the prophet of a barbaric and intolerant religion?
And which one should a bunch of white women who make their living by writing be more interested in?
The one where they’re not scared they’ll get their necks cut, of course.
Which is when I started to see red.
The film of red grew as these asinine cowards, these craven and self-regarding poltroons, started saying things like that the brave men and women who risked their lives for free speech should have been more careful of the feelings of others. These are the same people who routinely, three times a day, post some dig at Christianity, some mockery of Americans, some pseudo-witty comment about Republicans. But see, none of those people threaten to kill them.
The brave social(ist) justice warriors are ever ready to speak truth to the power that will not hurt them. Towards Islam, otoh they adopt the crouching position and kiss the terrorists gangrenous blood-soaked pudenda.
Is this their pathological admiration of anyone who has the cojones to do what they’d like to do and cut the throats of everyone who disagrees with them? After all, these are the idolaters of Che, he who clubbed children and puppies to death. Are they, in their heart, hyenas who dream of being lions? Or perhaps - since the lion is a lazy beast who relies on size and intimidation - they are lions who dream of being hyenas.
But I might give them too much credit. Perhaps just as after nine eleven, they find themselves scared. After all these barbarians they keep trying to dress in the robes of the noble savage, might not know that they are quite willing to betray their countrymen in order to be the ones killed last.
And so they hasten to lave the hand that would behead them, and to denounce their countrymen loudly. Hence, the next batch of screaming, saying that this is all the right wing’s fault - somehow, in another country. That they’re afraid of what the “right wing” will do - no you’re not, you base flees on the scrotum of a traitorous dog. If you were scared of us, you’d also kiss our behinds - and that the right wing is “gloating” over this and being “racist.”
First of all, we are not gloating over this. It takes such a state of moral corruption to gloat over someone killing cartoonists for funny cartoons - even when the someone is a band we consider dangerous - that I don’t think any sane man or woman could try it. Yes, I know, you could feel that way, but you are not sane. Your double think, your fear and your hatred has long ago driven any sanity from your poor Social(ist) Justice Warrior minds. Such as they ever were.
Second calling us racists is an act of idiotic projection that simultaneously reveals your ignorance and your real feelings. I have no idea how you managed to convince yourselves Muslims are a different race. Most Muslims (though there are Muslims of every color) are the same race I am (Hispanic/Latino is a cultural definition, not a race one): White, of Mediterranean sub-race.
Oh, sure, we tan a little better, and some of us have a sort of ‘fro. That does not another race make, unless you’re going by the nineteenth century definition of “every country a race.”
And you probably are, because in your beffudled, endarkened mind culture is hereditary. This is why multiculturalism is necessary and classes in every language under the sun for third generation Americans, because culture can’t be changed and can’t be learned and can’t be unlearned.
You racist pustules on Hitler’s backside!
Humans prove you wrong every day. EVERY single day. Including the Jews Hitler tried to exterminate and who came to the US with no help, no special classes, no help in keeping their culture and their traditions, and adapted and changed and became AMERICANS and successful. You are proven wrong by barely literate Italians, by French, by Germans, by people of every nation who came to this country and became fluent in English and capable, and whose children competed with and intermarried the children of people already here.
You are the racists, you who believe that because someone comes from elsewhere, or has a tan, or speaks with an accent, they are less than human and less than capable. You cling to your imagined superiority and go around shouting at other white people that they have “privilege” trying to be more touchy-feely than they are.
And you believe that if only America - or the west, for whom, in your mind, America is a proxy - withdrew from the world, the little brown peoplez would be happy and peaceful. (And probably sing spirituals on their doorsteps every night, right, you depraved, unthinking racist scum?)
This would be okay if your diseased, craven cowardice didn’t leak out from the holes of our leftist mass media and go out to keep the monsters who keep Islam at war with the world and the world at war with Islam in power in every Islamic country.
It would be forgivable if your inability to reason and logically process facts didn’t mean that the kleptocrats in Arab regimes didn’t wave your words as an excuse in order to send their young men out to kill us, instead of staying at home, challenging the authority of their loathsome satraps.
With your words, your mollycoddling, your excusing of abhorrent deeds, your covering them under the tattered blanket of victims of racism, you prevent a sick, murderous culture from changing. You keep human beings in subjection. And you encourage the murder of innocents for no greater crime than speaking their minds.
The blood of the staff of Charlie Hebdo is on your hands. No matter how much you wipe them on the cloth of self-regard and self excusing, you cannot run from yourself.
I hope in the back of your mind, the horror of what you are doing burns like acid. I hope you wake in the night screaming “mea culpa.”
I hope so, because that would mean you are redeemable.
But I doubt it. You’ll continue, in your smug way, bending knee to every tyrant and kissing the backside of everyone you are afraid of.
Depart from us. Forget you were ever our brothers.
We, the Liberty Tribe, we, the proud, we free men will bend no knee to tyrant or king, to caliph or to prophet.
We will respect those who’ve earned our respect, not those who say “convert or die.”
We free men mourn the staff of Charlie Hebdo. We might not have agreed with them on most things, but they were our brothers and sisters, unafraid in the face of threats or attacks.
Rest in peace and may free men remember them and honor them. And may their example light the path.
ONLY speaking unafraid and confronting the worst movements with unbended knee will we reform the tyranny that holds most Muslims in subjection. Only knowing they’re beyond the pale will bring reform. And only then will there be peace.