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| Anthony Freda Art |
Activist Post
January 22, 2015
In the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, social media was filled with predictable tag lines, hashtags, and memes. It was the result of a general public who had briefly tuned in to current events or the fact that there was a country outside of their own expressing “sympathy and solidarity” with the victims of the terrorist attack. All this proved, however, was that the culture creation machine was well at work at producing feel good messages and that a simple Tweet was quite enough to make the majority of people contented that they had done their patriotic duty.
Critical thinking? Not necessary.
Within hours of the attacks, social media was flooded with “I stand with Free Speech” and “Je suis Charlie.” Americans, unaware of anything that happens outside of their own borders (or within) were happy to retweet and share familiar sounding memes while the French were happy to indulge themselves in the fantasy that they are a free people.
Yet with French President Francois Hollande’s speeches extolling the virtues of free speech and expression, the reality of the matter is that the “Je suis Charlie” meme should have carried the tagline “Je suis Hypocrite.”
The French government and French society in general is by no means a society of free expression. While Christianity and Islam are regular targets of derision and attack by magazines like Charlie Hebdo, other religions are considered more equal in such utopias.
For instance, in 2009, an 80-year-old columnist for Charlie Hebdo was actually put on trial on charges of “inciting racial hatred” for making a joke that then-President Sarkozy’s son was converting to Judaism for financial gain. For all the talk of standing with free speech, the gentlemen making the joke found himself standing quite alone.
Indeed, even the act of “denying the holocaust” is a punishable thought crime in France. While the suggestion that the Nazi regime did not inflict unspeakable crimes against Jewish people is anti-historical in and of itself, a nation of true free speech would not punish the expression of the thought by criminal proceedings.
