No.

Jan 09, 2015 13:02







I've been crying for the past two days. I knew these people. Not personally, but their drawings have accompanied me throughout my life. I started crying when I heard that they had killed Cabu. Cabu who was a kind, poetic, pacifist, humanist, pro-environment artist with a bad haircut and soft manners. And no, not all the stuff Charlie Hebdo did was, as Tumblr-speak would have it, "problematic". They fought against far-right political parties, death penalty, and the meeting they were holding when they were shot was about fighting racism. They were deeply left-wing, sometimes very misguided and not funny, but they tried, and they would have been devastated to learn that they're being depicted after their deaths as some kind of 1920s racist propaganda paper by some idiots on the internet who know nothing. They made a mockery of religions and religious people (all of religious people, ALL of religions) because they believed that religion is a poison and that it was their right to do that; not only their right, but their duty in a democracy such as ours.

Right now, we're all very emotional. Two cars exploded last night in my neighborhood, and it has very probably nothing to do with the attacks, but it just reminded us that we're currently living in fear and that it's not going to get better right away. So we're not ready to hear stuff like "yeah but Charlie Hebdo were racist" because right now your rationality sits very badly with us and feels like a gratuitous slap in the face of our suffering. Charlie Hebdo have been called out on their "problematic" stuff when they were alive and they've been prosecuted for that, because we happen to have a democratic and judiciary system that works. We French know very well that some of the stuff they did was actually not only offensive, but could be harmful for people that are oppressed, and we have opposed them for that, in a peaceful, democratic way -- not that they were some sort of all-powerful untouchable media moghuls on a crusade, just a bunch of old guys making distasteful jokes in a failing satyrical newspaper.

At any rate, "when they were alive" was an appropriate time to do that, and we didn't wait for your social justice high horse to take care of it. Right now? You're being inappropriate and a dick. Calling them racist now achieves nothing, you're just pissing mourning people off and smearing murdered people's reputation for the sake of it. Saying "je ne suis pas Charlie" may make you a special snowflake, but the phrase "je suis Charlie" is not about adhering to some of the bad stuff that Charlie Hebdo published: it's about what they represented and what they were killed for; it's about unity in our country against terror. We weren't Charlie, we are now.
Would it be so hard for you to wait for their bodies to grow cold before starting with the "yes, but..."s?

I've read some people saying that Charlie Hebdo was promoting hate and that this is not about free speech and free press at all, let me just say: I despise you, and you have no idea what free speech is about if you think that that's not exactly what we're defending and what we're rising up for.

charlie hebdo

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