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« on: January 09, 2015, 05:21:06 AM »
Will Self:
"But the question needs to be asked: were the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo really satirists, if by satire is meant the deployment of humour, ridicule, sarcasm and irony in order to achieve moral reform? Well, when the issue came up of the Danish cartoons I observed that the test I apply to something to see whether it truly is satire derives from HL Mencken's definition of good journalism: it should "afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted". The trouble with a lot of so-called "satire" directed against religiously-motivated extremists is that it's not clear who it's afflicting, or who it's comforting.
The last cartoon drawn by Charb, Charlie Hebdo's editor, featured a crude pictogram of a jihadist wearing a hat called a pakol – this would mark the fighter out as an Afghan, and therefore as unlikely to be involved in terrorist attacks in the West. Charb's caption flies in the face of this: above the Afghan jihadist it reads: "Still no attacks in France", while the speech bubble coming from his mouth reads: 'Wait, there's until the end of January to give gifts'
Setting to one side the premonitory character of this cartoon, and the strangeness of a magazine editor who was prepared to die for his convictions (or so Charb said after the Charlie Hebdo offices were firebombed in 2011), yet not to get the basic facts about his targets correct, is it right to think of it as satire? Whatever else we may believe about people so overwhelmed by their evil nature that they're prepared to deprive others of their lives for the sake of a delusory set of ideas, the one thing we can be certain of is that they're not comfortable; moreover, while Charb's cartoon may've provoked a wry smile from Charlie Hebdo's readers, it's not clear to me that these people are the "afflicted" who, in HL Mencken's definition, require "comforting" – unless their "affliction" is the very fact of a substantial Muslim population in France, and their "comfort" consists in inking-in all these fellow citizens with a terroristic brush.
This is in no way to condone the shooting of Charb and the other journalists – an act that, as I pointed out initially, is evil, pure and simple, but our society makes a fetish of "the right to free speech" without ever questioning what sort of responsibilities are implied by this right. But then it also makes a fetish of "freedom" conceived of as agency worthy of a Nietzschean Ubermensch – whereas the truth of the matter is, as most of us understand only too well, we are in fact grossly constrained in most of what we do, most of the time – and a major part of what constrains us are our murderous, animal instincts."
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