A Tribute to Charlie Hebdo

We are not all Charlies!

The day after… After such a tragedy which touched us deeply, in mind and body, which touched the survivors and thousands of sincere people, the day after is terrible.

Cabu, one of the elders of Jazz Hot, is no more. The way he died is so alien to his natural kindness and generous spirit that it leaves us appalled with an unending, sickened feeling.

Charlie Hebdo really has been murdered, as the Islamic Nazis who succeeded in doing just that claimed it as they retreated. The circumstances leave a terrible aftertaste, a feeling of revolt, a yen for a kind of relieving violence that is truly the only response to the initial violence of those Islamic Nazis.

Freud has explained the ineluctable permanence of violence in history, whether inflicted by such Islamic Nazis or used in retaliation by the people who have suffered its blows. That is how the world works, even though the Christian narrative may give the wrong impression.

Given the circumstances the political and media consensus could be a healthy thing if it were sincere but it is profoundly dishonest and perverse.

No, we are not all Charlies!

What made Charlie Hebdo a target—the target—is the fear or corruption of the politicians, of the media and of the uninformed majority of the people who have chosen to be uninformed (information is available everywhere if one chooses to trust one’s judgement rather than the media and the politicians) who decided against promoting the same message as Charlie Hebdo. Theirs was not a ‘political’ message; it was just common sense—the survival of democracy is based on freedom of speech. And if, when writers choose to talk about Islam, one fails to be strict about that principle, and correspondingly, about ‘laïcité’ (secularism), which is one of the grounds of freedom of speech, then it is an individual and collective failure.

The blame lies with the politicos, from the left or the right, far-left and far-right, who have not given the adequate response to Islamism, which exists globally, which is religious version of the racial Nazi totalitarianism. They did not fight against it in the name of democracy. That is the true and deep reason why France is mourning today, mourning for its values and for some of its worthiest children, those who had the clearest, the most acute perception of Islamism’s true nature. They were destined to be hurt by Islamism.

Obviously because of their religious and national culture, neither Obama, Merkel or Cameron can understand what laïcité means, or allow impertinence against religious powers, or defend democracy against Islamism. I only wish they would just spare us their hypocritical condolences. They never agreed with the publication of the cartoons depicting the Prophet of Islam, they never agreed with that kind of free and democratic expression. They made the Islamo-Nazis stronger in their determination as they did business with the people who finance them, as they’ve become dependent on them economically and financially.

Except for a very few (including yours truly), the media and the politicians have not deemed it important to defend laïcité and freedom of speech as they should have, without weakness or compromise. It is a major fault and failure. It is the reason that made Cabu and Charlie Hebdo’s team the obvious target of the Islamo-Nazi soldiers.

The French so-called left has diluted its anticlerical tradition in the luxury of power, in Champagne and cocktail nibbles, content with a show of third-world charity and negating its past struggle against religious obscurantism. They are to blame for that, making Cabu and Charlie Hebdo’s team the obvious target.

The French politicians are also to blame for keeping their commercial and diplomatic ties (even taking part in their manoeuvres in Lybia or Syria) with the very countries who use Islamo-Nazi soldiers and set fire to the whole planet (the map of conflicts around the globe is quite explicit with the Islamic ideology at the heart of most, only targeting a different enemy). The political and economic establishment has been giving away, bit by bit, whole pieces of the national fabric (whether in sports, in the industry, the social sphere) even when it endangers national security. That, too, made Cabu and Charlie Hebdo’s team the obvious target.

The overwhelming consensus over the shooting was made incomplete by the silence or repressed glee of Muslim countries and their peoples. It was a parody of mourning as Charlie Hebdo’s ideals were perversely co-opted. It was a bad taste post-mortem that betrayed Charlie Hebdo’s history.

To portray the writing team that has always stood at the vanguard of the struggle against religion as the opium of the people and against the poison of irrationality, as a bunch of Christ-like martyrs for the atonement of everyone is to kill them a second time. They were always the supporters of individual freedom, enemies of conformism and forced consensus. They put their minds and lives at the service of the people, informing them in the tradition of the Enlightenment, a proud tradition at the basis of modern journalism.

It is a shameful travesty to see the media using Charlie Hebdo to sing the praise of their own corporation when they hardly deserve the title of ‘journalist’. Most so-called journalists are yes-men who carefully weigh their words every day out of fear and corruption. The media follow the orders of the oligarchic power and—despite this very shooting—try and deny the existence of Islamo-Nazism, locally and internationally. That, too, made Cabu and Charlie Hebdo’s team the obvious target.

Lastly, in spite of the repeated threats and the recent violent episodes in France, the government did not think it important to protect Charlie Hebdo more efficiently. Leaving only one lonely policeman, offered like a lamb to slaughter as an alibi, a mere show of protection, was a bureaucratic and political mistake. It is a shame for democracy and a tragedy for the victims. It actually sends a message that betrays what those politicians who keep crying over spilt blood on television screens really had in mind. They did not really try to protect Charlie Hebdo. They do no really try to protect democracy.

The criminals will probably be portrayed as madmen. It’s quite a fashionable approach these days. It was the same during the Soviet era. It’s practical if you want to absolve everybody, parties and religions, the media, all those who do not want to believe, out of religious reluctance, that a religion is an ideology and that, as such, when taken out of the private sphere, it can be a danger for society. An ideology is a system of beliefs, a narrow vision of the world, and, as is the case of the Coran, it can carry within itself, in its founding texts things that are thoroughly incompatible with democracy and freedom of speech. And democracy cannot accept ideas whose purpose is to destroy democracy. Those who refused to see that are to blame, too, for making Cabu and Charlie Hebdo’s team the obvious target.

Those left-wing people couldn’t understand that in an open and overcrowded world, migrations (however tragic as in the South of Italy) are forms of colonisation and weapons in the hands of demographic superpowers who are not democratic powers and are engaged in a struggle against democratic powers. Einstein said it a long time ago but it is a most powerful weapon. Refusing to realize that also made Cabu and Charlie Hebdo’s team the obvious target. Oligarchic powers use that situation on the global scale to fight the social and political victories won by democracy, opposing the poor to the poor in the vibrant tradition of ruling masters described by Machiavel.

"National union” is for defeat, Pétain-style. When a whole writing team is massacred in Paris, it is truly a democratic debacle.

Charlie Hebdo was killed yesterday. Charlie Hebdo has ceased to exist for the dead are irreplaceable. Charlie Hebdo was made of men and women, it was not a press group with industrial groups backing them with the support of the establishment, like most other media. A replica can probably be arranged and will be, to keep a clean conscience or to co-opt the name of Charlie Hebdo perversely. But there’s no way the soul of Charlie Hebdo can live on without the soul of the deceased. Charlie Hebdo, like Jazz Hot, is made of people who pass on a certain spirit, from one generation to the next, sometimes not smoothly but always with the respect for a special legacy.

The probable demise of Charlie Hebdo is leaving a gaping hole in the mind of the people who shared the same mind set, in the field of political possibilities, in the world of the media, of social comment. The death of Charlie Hebdo boils down to the destruction of a cultural legacy. Cabu is an artist as much as a journalist and Islam has a habit of destroying historical legacies since its infancy. It is a historical and cultural fact that defines Islam, its texts and its practice. Reading a few books is all it takes to understand that.

The other tragedy, and it is a global one, is the fact that one billion and a half people are imprisoned in a totalitarian religious ideology. They have no way out and are not even aware of it. When they are, the pressure from the inside is almost as strong as the pressure from the outside. In that ideological amalgam, there are not many voices who can be raised to try and reform it without being singled out and suffering its exterminating wrath. That is a major deadlock of our time. The oligarchic powers at the heart of democracies will clearly not fight its effects or try and influence its ideological reform as they directly benefit from that stalemate.

Our century started out with the 9/11 attacks. It is not a good time for people who want to be free. After the 7/1 shooting, democratic decline is now obvious. There are other authoritarian regimes whose pressure is equally useful to keep the few nations who have tried to live in a democracy silent. But with its massive demographic support the international Islamo-Nazi movement is a geostrategic danger. The hypocritical speeches we heard yesterday cannot hide that the establishment have sold to dictatorships their own crafts and factories, keeping their own people unemployed and in a state of addiction (to leisure, drugs, screens) and work methodically to lowering the level and quality of life and democratic principles.

In line with the whole Jazz Hot team, my tribute to Charlie Hebdo and Cabu, is to keep on developing an original approach, refusing the rising racist and xenophobic tide, and, despite the weight of global hypocrisy, to refuse any form of "national union” with corruption. This means keeping out of the political mainstream since there can be no agreement with this corrupted political power. This means we have to keep on keeping on, with our modest means and our independent spirit. Even though, the day after, one can wonder what’s the point.