Posted on 01/26/2015 1:03:50 PM PST by Enza Ferreri
This article was published on The Occidental Observer
By Enza Ferreri
One “thought experiment” in the recent – but not yet concluded - debate on freedom of speech surrounding the Charlie Hebdo massacre particularly impressed me:
Here is a thought experiment: Suppose that while the demonstrators stood solemnly at Place de la Republique the other night,… a man stepped out in front… carrying a placard with a cartoon depicting the editor of the magazine lying in a pool of blood, saying, “Well I’ll be a son of a gun!” or “You’ve really blown me away!” or some such witticism. How would the crowd have reacted? Would they have laughed?... He would have been lucky to get away with his life.Perhaps because he’s a philosopher and by profession he's obliged to analyse the logical consistency and theoretical validity of statements, Brian Klug here encapsulates the problem with the default mainstream "Je Suis Charlie" position.Masses of people have turned the victims of a horrific assassination… into heroes of France and free speech. The point of the thought experiment is not to show that such people are hypocrites. Rather, it is to suggest that they don’t know their own minds. They see themselves as committed to the proposition that there are no limits to freedom of expression... But they too have their limits. They just don’t know it.
There is no such thing as absolute freedom of speech.
Even those who sincerely believe that they uphold this principle often don't realise they wouldn’t be prepared to accept any word expressed in any circumstance.
Similarly, philosophers like Karl Popper maintain that in any debate you cannot question everything. The debaters must share some common assumptions, including the use of the same language and basic definitions of at least some of the main concepts relevant to the discussion.
This corresponds to relativity in the physical world. To establish if and at what speed a train is moving, you need something still to compare it with.
Questioning everything results in chaos, which ultimately means questioning nothing.
This is one of the fallacies often propounded by the so-called "New Atheists" like Richard Dawkins: question everything.
The prevailing ideology of relativism, wedded to the policy of multiculturalism, does something similar to questioning everything, by denying the idea that some doctrines are better than others and rejecting a shared set of belief as a sine qua non for a society.
By believing in everything we believe in nothing. Hence the current confusion about freedom of speech and in particular the failure to recognise exactly when this good is paid for too dearly at the expense of society.
Therefore the discussion shouldn’t be around yes or no to free speech but about what should limit free speech and why.
The best way to do that is to establish the principles and goals to guide our decision about what expressions shouldn’t be permitted by law as their effects are so deleterious that they outweigh the benefits of free speech.
The most cited examples of such expressions are falsely shouting "Fire!" in a crowded place and incitements to commit crime.
But, beyond obvious cases like these, we can immediately see that we cannot reach a consensus, since people in our fractured society have widely-different goals and principles.
Much of this diversity in the West is produced by the influx of large masses of people from countries with worldviews, religious doctrines, ways of life profoundly diverging from ours.
The Hebdo attack tragically revealed one such irreducible conflict of ideas that makes it impossible for Westerners and devout Muslims to agree on when free expression should be limited.
Not even Charlie Hebdo (henceforth CH), the much-trumpeted supreme paragon and defender to the death of free speech, believed in absolute freedom of speech, as demonstrated by its sacking of the cartoonist Siné for a column considered anti-Jewish but, compared to the rag's ordinary fare, too mild for words. Later Siné won a 40,000-euro court judgment against CH for wrongful termination.
CH wasn’t the paper of free speech, but of double standards.
Recently the rag’s long-standing lawyer Richard Malka made evident his opinion that people can be too free in their speech when he chastised Nouvel Obs magazine for publishing a criticism of CH’s slain editor “Charb” by its co-founder Henri Roussel.
I don’t consider Charb et al martyrs. You can be a martyr to a cause, but when your cause is nothing (that’s what nihilism, in the end, is), you can’t be one.
Neither is their paper “satirical”: satire must express something more than the mere immature desire to attack and destroy.
According to encyclopaedias and dictionaries, satire has the intention to shame into improvement; its purpose is constructive social criticism, ridiculing stupidity or vices, showing the weaknesses or bad qualities of a person, government, society, etc.
There is no attempt at improving anything in CH’s crude depiction of sodomy among the three Persons of the Holy Trinity, no constructive social criticism in its celebration of Christmas with a cartoon of Baby Jesus thrown in a public squat toilet between a loo-paper roll (Mary) and a toilet brush (Joseph). No stupidity or vices are exposed – as opposed to demonstrated - by the drawing of the Virgin Mary making the vulgar “umbrella gesture” to fleeing Iraqi Christians while shouting the same words uttered during the massacre in which its drawer, Riss, was wounded, in an eerie coincidence: "Allahu Akbar". No weaknesses or bad qualities are shown by the sketch of a dishevelled, desperate Madonna who, dripping liquid, says she was raped by the three Wise Men.
“Are we all supposed to march in solidarity with that?” asks Patrick Buchanan.
CH’s crass, adolescent humour revolving around sex (preferably of the homosexual variety) and excrements is unfunny and sad. It reminds me of a song by 1960s-70s Italian singer-songwriter Fabrizio De Andre’, about Charles Martel returning from the Battle of Poitiers after having defeated the Moors. The supposed humour concerns his long abstinence from sex imposed by the war, ending in his encounter with a prostitute.
De Andre’, like CH, was a product of the ’68 culture with its visceral hatred for anything Christian. Neither is satire: no intelligent message is put across, it’s turpitude and vile defamation just for the sake of it. In a word: destructive. Which is what the counterculture is all about.
Here we get to answer the question regarding the core principles and goals that must be protected from attacks, the line that freedom of speech must not cross. Charles Martel is a symbol of a Europe united by the same belief in Christianity and prepared to defend that belief on which its civilisation was founded and without which, as it is under everyone’s eyes now, is sinking.
Christianity must be protected from its enemies, then as now. It’s not a question of preferential taste or personal desire: it’s the collective cohesion that is at stake, without which there is no Western society. Critically, given the decline of Christianity as a unifying force among Europeans, statements about the legitimacy of the interests of White Europeans in retaining their territories and their culture must be protected rather than marginalised or made illegal as “hate speech.”
It’s, at this point, a question of survival. Freedom of speech is not a suicide pact, as Alexander Boot put it.
That our heroes and the symbol of our fight for freedom must be the demented pornographers of CH shows what sorry state our civilisation has reached.
That revolting excuse of a rag has been a procession of covers offending Christianity, at a moment when like never before we need something to believe in and to rally around.
It's because of people like CH and De Andre’ and their successful propagation of desecrations of what had kept us together and strong for centuries, that we have been left with absolutely nothing to fight Islam with.
By disarming us, the CH journalists victims of the recent attacks have indeed invited their own death - in a deeper sense than is commonly thought.
Rights are coupled with responsibilities.
Who didn’t know that?
The article does not distinguish between government censorship and a corporate firing of an offending cartoonist. The company can fire whoever they want for insensitive speech/media. But that is far different than such speech being against the law.
yes, the “you can’t yell fire in crowded theatre” concept...
We have the truth--which is verifiable in ways that Islam's lies are not. We have abundant natural and human resources, that in an all-out war, should the other side choose to make it an all-out war, would be undefeatable.
The only question is whether or not we have the courage of our convictions. I think we don't now, but we could if we wanted it enough.
Precisely!
Is the author hoping to plant seeds of freedom of speech suppression? Probably but we see though the ruse once again despite the fancy garnisments of eloquent verbiage and mood setting images handpicked to appeal to his target audience. Just another deceiver doing the Socialist tap dance once again
Hold the bus here Buckwheat. If you are arguing the the government is responsible for protectiing Christianity, then we have a problem here.
I don’t see the article as socialist, especially after going to the publishing site. The source is somewhere in the constellation of Pat Buchanan/John Birch Society/Ku Klux Klan, judging from other articles they run and the comment sections. White supremacy? If it quacks like a duck...
Wow, he has “discovered” something my parents taught me (more years ago than I care to confirm).
Oh well, my folks were only Cajuns with an 11th grade education (thankfully, it was through Catholic schools, which placed them in the Harvard 1940s-level compared to the jokes attending our universities now).
Currently they seem to have an obligation to protect Islam, the religion of peace.
“That revolting excuse of a rag has been a procession of covers offending Christianity, at a moment when like never before we need something to believe in and to rally around.
“It’s because of people like CH and De Andre’ and their successful propagation of desecrations of what had kept us together and strong for centuries, that we have been left with absolutely nothing to fight Islam with.
By disarming us, the CH journalists victims of the recent attacks have indeed invited their own death - in a deeper sense than is commonly thought.”
What a bunch of revolting, sheep fodder! To intimate that Christianity, which has survived hundreds of years of every kind of attack that Satan himself could devise; could be defeated and Christians “disarmed” because of mortal words of any kind! I am almost at a loss to describe how stupid this is but then I realize that there are many people who will buy into it.
Absolute free speech may be uncomfortable at times but it surely beats the dumbed down, socialist drivel that is becoming our government. This moron has made the act of expressing an opinion grounds for execution! Amazing!
Christians disarmed? Hardly!
Well said. It’s utter tripe.
>Rights are coupled with responsibilities.<
.
The Constitution does not state that because it was written by basically disciplined and virtuous men who thought that their fellow citizens were just as responsible as they were.
The authors of the Constitution lived in an 18th century atmosphere where people were held responsible for their actions, not foreseeing the total madhouse of moral values of the late 20th and 21th centuries.
Good point. My mistake.
At this point in time there are probably a LOT of people who have never been exposed to the idea that rights and responsibilities are married to one another.
At this point in time there are probably a LOT of people who have never been exposed to the idea that rights and responsibilities are married to one another.
The obvious fallacy in the above discussion was the assumption of an equivalency between formalized debate and all other sorts of civil discourse.
Whereas a debate may need rules, that doesn’t prove that all speech needs rules, since not all speech is debate.
That's how you know you've reached the limit, genius.
The obvious criminal cases are it. Everything else is allowed by definition. Its a freedom thing.
P.S. Let me make this really clear, because my Spidey-sense tells me you're trying to creep through the back door here: YES, it IS appropriate free speech to mock Muslims for their murderous barbarity, their enslaving of women and non-Muslims, and their efforts to destroy Western Civilization and replace it with Sharia. Got that?
Even if it enrages them to violence. In fact, ESPECIALLY if it enrages them to violence, so that we can use their violence as justification to go to global war with their damned murder cult and wipe them off of the face of the Earth once and for all.
I hope I've made myself clear.
>Is the author hoping to plant seeds of freedom of speech suppression?<
.
Whose freedom of expression do you value more? That of the Christians or of the Muslims?
“I value both, equally.”, you say.
Good, you’re a good American. Expect a long fight and lots of bloodshed that the Muslims will win in the end because they are the more aggressive of the two religions.
“I value the Christian view more than I value the Muslim view.”
Good, you’re a good American. You will have to muzzle the right of the Muslim religion because its view is in total opposition of Christian teachings.
“I place a higher value on the Muslim view.”, you say.
Good, you’re a good American. Tell your lovely wife to buy herself a sexy burqa.
Only true if there is no fire.
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