Is Everybody Charlie Now?

Posted first on the Internationalist Perspective blog - Fischer

Charlie-Hebdo saw it as its mission to ridicule all forms of hypocrisy, demagoguery, obscurantism, doublespeak and scumbaggery, without respect for any authority. Capitalists and Stalinists, Muslims, Christians and Jews, they all were dragged through the mud. Sometimes in very funny ways, sometimes it was just “stupid and mean” (“bête et méchante” was its slogan), always it was merciless. The French state banned its predecessor (Hara Kiri-Hebdo). Both the right and the left detested the paper. The big media regarded it as a mangy, mentally disturbed little brother.

But now, it seems, we’re all Charlie. The entire “civilized” world embraces the little paper which only yesterday was so despised. The next issue of Charlie will be subsidized to print 3 million copies, in order to show the terrorists the finger. And of course, it will have a caricature of the prophet Muhammad on its cover.

What a spectacle it was last Sunday, these gigantic demonstrations in France and beyond, united behind the cry “Je suis Charlie” – “I am Charlie”. What a patriotic feast it was in France, as if “les bleus” (the national soccer team) had won the world cup. Tricolores everywhere and people singing the Marseillaise, that bloodthirsty racist national anthem:

Aux armes citoyens
Formez vos bataillons
Marchons, marchons
Qu’un sang impur
Abreuve nos sillons

(“to arms citizens, form your battalions, let’s march, let’s march so that impure blood waters our furrows”)

Leading the parade were prime ministers and other dignitaries of more than forty countries. In short, the whole civilized world, united in its resistance to barbarism: among them the leader of Israel and his Palestinian vassal, the foreign secretaries of Russia and Turkey, the German chancellor, high representatives of the US, Egypt and so on. People on whose hands there’s far more blood than on those of the terrorists. Blood of anonymous civilians in Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Palestine, Afghanistan, Ukraine and many other places were the media don’t bother to send reporters to. And in their prisons, there is no shortage of journalists and other people locked up for saying or writing what they think. But such details could not spoil the fun in Paris. Here in the French capital, in the glaring spotlights of the world’s media, we’re all for freedom of expression, we’re all for a world without violence, a world without hate. Nous sommes tous Charlie!

Today that is. Tomorrow we go home and it’s back to business. Tear-gassing demonstrations in Istanbul, locking up journalists in Moscow, whipping and killing dissidents in Cairo and Riyadh, shooting kids in Cleveland and dropping bombs on Gaza… and everywhere, cutting pensions and wages and health care to spend more on armaments to fight barbarism.., and everywhere, militarizing the police and spying on everybody to protect us from terrorists… and everywhere, closing down newspapers because they don’t make enough profit for capital, so that most media are concentrated in very few hands, while shouting: “Long live the freedom of the press!”

And when soon the entire world economy suffers another deep dip those same representatives of the civilized world will ask us for more sacrifices to shore up capital’s profitability and French prime minster Hollande will repeat what he said last week: “Nous sommes tous ensemble. Francais, serrez les rangs. Nous sommes tous Charlie!”

And other world leaders will repeat it the world over: we’re all in the same boat, support your local capital, look how bad our enemies are. Don’t fight us, even though we attack you, fight with us against them, the forces of barbarism. “Nous sommes tous Charlie!”

All this makes us quite curious about the content of the next issue of Charlie-Hebdo. If the paper remains true to its mission, it will point out the irony of the whole spectacle. The crocodile tears, the phony solidarity, the disgusting operation of ideological recuperation. If it doesn’t , Wolinski will turn over in his fresh grave.

Meanwhile, there was a lot less solidarity with the victims of Boko Haram in northern Nigeria. For the media, this was but a footnote, even though many more people died than in Paris. But wait, these were black people, right? And this happened in Africa? Then it’s normal that our media paid little attention to it. What are you saying? That our media are racist? How dare you!

Of course “our” media are nationalist and implicitly racist. That is the window through which they want us to see the world. There is a logic to its selection of what’s important and what’s not, and it’s the logic of capital. The “freedom of the press” celebrated in Paris, does not exist. The media have perverted “Je suis Charlie!” to an imperialist slogan, perfectly fitting capitalism’s course towards more violence, more misery and war.

Sander