After Paris attacks: Less freedom, more war?

Liam Flenady writes that After Paris attacks: Less freedom, more war?.

Much of the Left inside France have been reluctant to criticise Charlie Hebdo itself, and have not sought to challenge the “Je suis Charlie” slogan.

The magazine is politically mixed and represents different things to different people. It has often been hyper-criticalof the far right, anti-immigrant National Front, but at the same time its “provocative” portrayals of Muslims and of the prophet Mohammed clearly draw upon racist tropes and seems intent on tapping into a general Islamophobic cultural milieu.

The view that Charlie Hebdo is not racist since it also satirises Christianity and French politicians fails to recognise the objective power structures that exist in our societies, which fundamentally determine how the cartoons are viewed.

The front cover of the first edition of Charlie Hebdo since the attack, released on January 14, continues the publication’s poor record, depicting a racially stereotypical image of the prophet Mohammed holding up a “Je suis Charlie” sign, with the headline reading “All is forgiven.”

Guardian journalist Joseph Harker remarked: “In depicting the prophet Muhammad it is deliberately offending the vast majority of muslims around the world.”

In the aftermath of the bloodshed, however, critiquing Charlie Hebdo is not the main task of the day. It can become a distraction from the real issue of how to respond to the attacks.

Instead, in a time when anti-war and anti-imperialist movements in the West are struggling to reassert, the response of the international left to the attacks should be to challenge the mainstream narrative of mere “tolerance” and “Western values”.

Instead, the left should point out that the ongoing imperialist wars and interventions in the Middle East and elsewhere, as well as structural injustices within Western societies, are largely to blame for the rise of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism.

This must be combined with a defence of freedom of speech and democracy that both condemns the killers and Western government attempts to exploit the violence to push its own undemocratic agenda.

Emphasis Mine

Freedom of speech is a vital, political necessity for the oppressed minorities. Their voices must be heard. Their needs must be addressed.

However, freedom of speech for the oppressors is a tool of subjudgation.

This is the inherent contradiction in the ideal of freedom of speech.

Historically, freedom of speech was a privilege granted by the rulers.

In ancient Rome, the plebian tribunes had this freedom granted after bitter civil strife. Yet, this freedom was not absolute as the rulers would murder outspoken tribunes with immunity when the tribunes went too far.

At the dawn of Capitalism, this freedom became a right because the nascent capitalist class needed to draw the workers and peasants into the fight against the feudal overlords. Even then, this right was negated by murder and execution as in the fate of Camille Desmoulins, the editor and publisher of Le Vieux Cordelier.

With the victory of the capitalist class, this right was withdrawn from the workers and peasants through legal restrictions and monetary constraints. The legal attack started with the libel laws, then with the sedition laws, and finally with the ant-terrorism laws. The monetary restrictions concern the capital needed to run a press, and to maintain journalists.

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