Scott Swanson
In a world in which people are considerate and honorable, in which individual freedoms are respected, in which people are free to express what’s on their minds, the thought of someone being killed because of his or her views is noxious.
Unfortunately, that is, increasingly, not the world in which we live.
The slaughter of a dozen people earlier this month in the terrorist attack on the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo harshly illuminates that reality. When masked gunmen stormed into an editorial meeting at the newspaper and shot the editor and several cartoonists, and some other bystanders, then killed two police officers during their getaway, shouting in perfect French “Hey! We avenged the Prophet Muhammad!” in video footage recorded by a nearby camera, any naîve notion otherwise should be quickly dismissed.
I don’t think I’m waxing overly pessimistic when I say we live in a cruel and hostile world, more so than many of us remember from the past. Of course, the world has always held plenty of evil, but with the almost instantaneous communication capabilities we have today it’s certainly become a lot more visible, a lot closer to home.
As we’ve begun a new year, this is a distasteful reality. And what’s even more distasteful is the fact that it’s not just far away.
What’s ultimately at issue in this Paris tragedy is freedom – freedom of thought, of course, but also freedom of conscience. The Muslim terrorists clearly had a problem with Charlie Hebdo’s irreverent – universally acknowledged as such – depiction of their religion’s founder.
Frankly, we don’t have anything quite like Charlie Hebdo in the United States. The newspaper was pure satire and made fun of everybody. A New York Times report noted that Charlie Hebdo “portrayed France’s top politicians and intellectuals as wine-swilling slackers indulging in sexual acts or suggesting the pope was stepping aside to be with his girlfriend.” It was nasty, but funny to its readers, who understood that the newspaper carried on a venerable tradition of satire that dates back to the days of the French Revolution.
The editor of Le Monde, one of the most widely respected newspapers in the world, noted in an interview soon after the massacre that Charlie Hebdo was read by everyone – from the far right to the far left, rich, poor, educated and ignorant – because no one or no subject was off-limits.
The issue from the week prior to the terrorist attack included a mock debate about whether Jesus exists and a faux greeting New Year’s greeting card from the leader of the Islamic State (ISIS) with the caption “To your health.”
This is a brand of political expression and insolent humor that really goes beyond anything we’re used to in the United States. The newspaper reprinted Danish cartoons that had infuriated the Muslim world and prompted death threats against the cartoonist, it briefly renamed itself “Charia Hebdo” and appointed the Prophet Muhammed as its editor-in-chief, and its last issue before the attack contained a haunting image of an armed, cross-eyed militant with the words “Still no attacks in France” and the retort: “Wait! We have until the end of January to offer our wishes.”
Rough stuff.
Freedom of conscience, freedom of expression is something most of us take for granted. We who have lived through the era in which the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1960s and ‘70s, led by Chief Justice Earl Warren, strengthened many protections for free speech, have become accustomed to a baseline default rule that anything goes unless a specific exception applies. Apart from certain narrow exceptions, the government normally cannot regulate the content of speech.
In other words, unless what you’re saying is going to incite immediate, lawless action (such as yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater), may cause a hearer to immediately retaliate or breach the peace, or can be defined as obscenity, it’s pretty much protected under the First Amendment.
That’s not the case in France where, as the Le Monde editor noted, there is no First Amendment, but a strong tradition of free expression.
The world is changing and so are our freedoms. Again, I am cautious about being overly pessimistic, but the enemies of free expression – distasteful though it might be to some of us – are slowly creating walls that will increasingly encumber us Americans. Despite the legal protections, America’s liberties are under attack.
I doubt if too many staff members at “Red Eye w/Greg Gutfeld” or “South Park,” or The Onion or the Weekly World News, or other bastions of in-your-face sarcasm, have ever felt the need to hire armed bodyguards, as Charlie Hebdo editor Stéphane Charbonnier did (his bodyguard was one of the dozen victims in the attack).
Rather, I see the threats are coming from less aggressive sources: political correctness. Slow, silent, steady increases in restraints on access to information about how we’re governed and about those who live among us. Efforts to curb abuses on the Internet.
In a Saturday Essay in the Wall Street Journal last fall on threats to free speech, John O’Sullivan wrote: “It isn’t just some Muslims who want the false comfort of censoring disagreeable opinions. Far from it. Gays, Christians, feminists, patriots, foreign despots, ethnic activists—or organizations claiming to speak for them—are among the many groups seeking relief from the criticism of others through the courts, the legislatures and the public square.”
He’s right. We all have a tendency to want to say what we think but not let anybody else do so. This isn’t new, either. Any honest reading of U.S. history will reveal people using libel suits or worse to squelch the opposition.
Thankfully, here in America we still haven’t reached the point that some other supposedly civilized countries have, of fining or jailing people who express views not in synch with the popular notions of what’s right or wrong. But more and more, if what you want to say or do is going to offend enough people, you’re on dangerous ground.
An example is the florists, bakers and others in the U.S. – in Oregon – who have been fined for not cooperating with gay couples who wanted to purchase their products or services for their weddings.
A gay couple should be able to buy whatever they want. But to force someone to violate their conscience to provide someone else a desired product or service is – well, it used to be pretty much unconstitutional. But suddenly the lines are getting really blurred.
So what’s next? Will I, writing a “think” piece for your contemplation, criticize an action taken by local leaders and suddenly find myself looking out through the bars?
“Pshaw!” you say. “Don’t be ridiculous!”
Hmmmm. I probably would have said the same thing 20 years ago if someone had told me that an Oregonian business person could lose his or her business for declining to create a cake.
I remember when I was a kid, reading in a history book about Quakers in England who regularly went to jail – or worse – because they believed they should only remove their hats only in the presence of God – not government officials. Their commitment to their principles were one of the factors that led to the establishment of the First Amendment protections for liberty of conscience and speech.
Freedom of conscience and, particularly freedom of expression, though, are always fragile. There’s usually emotion involved, because you’re usually saying things somebody else doesn’t want to hear.
In the case of the Charlie Hebdo victims, it was a fatal fragility.
That should make us value our freedom all the more.