Cabbages & Kings: Price of free speech

“You thought you saw a hole in the moon,
It was a speck of dust on your telescope lens!
There aren’t seven colours arching the sky
Yet none of us doubts that the rainbow bends…”
From Dhoka Cola
by Bachchoo

The French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo dedicates itself to critical attacks on political and religious targets and to deflating the egos of the pompous rich and the undeservingly celebrated. It lampoons Islam, Christianity, Judaism, the socialism of the present French government and the capitalist policies of the previous one.

On Wednesday, the magazine’s offices were attacked by terrorists wearing black commando uniforms and carrying AK-47s and a grenade launcher.

They killed 12 people and critically injured over 10. The magazine was first attacked in 2011, and was subsequently guarded by two security guards, who were among the dead in this latest attack which claimed the lives of four of France’s leading cartoonists.

William Faulkner, the grumpy American writer is reported to have said, “I hate Jews! But before you pass judgment on me for that statement, take into account that I hate everyone else also!” Hebdo was viciously critical of a variety of beliefs, vanities and evils, but there was little doubt as to who carried out this atrocity.

One eyewitness reported that the masked gunmen shouted “Allah hu Akbar” as they got away in a car. Another said they calmly stated, “We have avenged the Prophet”. I don’t think they meant Zarathustra!

The last cartoon published on social media by the magazine depicted the self-appointed Caliph of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi speaking into a microphone.

The caption above him in French says, “By the way, best wishes!” The cartoon’s irony escaped the supporters of the ISIS or Al Qaeda.

The news and comment radio and TV channels have been abuzz with the details of this attack. It is for France what 9/11 was for the United States.

Several Muslims, from France and Britain, representatives of Islamic organisations and individual members of the public have condemned the attack, disowning this barbarism from an Islamic perspective and saying what I have not heard them say before.

That was, from two Muslim spokesmen, a comment on free speech and civilisation. One of them said and I paraphrase “this is Europe where we live and deeply respect the values of free speech which are part of the liberty, equality and fraternity we enjoy.

If the people who perpetrated this brutal attack don’t believe in these values, they should go back or go and live in those societies in which their primitive and murderous ideas prevail.”

It is a vain demand. The deviants, Muslim immigrants are a tiny faction of a fraction of the population who are dedicated to terrorising Europe while dreaming of bringing Sharia.

This murderous assault on a magazine is a declaration that the price of free speech is death. The Muslims whose argument I paraphrased are right. This declaration defines or draws the divide between civilisations.

In this instance, and for a very brief moment the AK-47 has proved mightier than the pen. But those who wielded this particular sword are pariahs, fugitives and murderers to be hunted down in this civilisation.

In the territories controlled by the ISIS, for instance, these murderers and other beheaders and executioners would be heroic guardians of their definition of “civilisation” and of their state.

Within hours of the killings, President François Hollande was on the scene addressing the French nation. He vowed to uphold the sanctity of free speech.

British Prime Minister David Cameron, speaking on behalf of the British nation in the Westminster Parliament a few hours after news of the atrocity was transmitted around the world, asserted the same thing.

The concept of free speech cannot be divorced from a civilisational, social and legal context. The societies that adopt it realise that it is the liberation of the faculty that makes us human to think and to share what you think without fear.

That doesn’t mean that individuals can say what they like. Incitements to deprive others of liberty or life are not constructs that should be allowed free expression.

It is necessary to make a strict distinction between insult to sentiment and incitement to hatred. The first has to be tolerated, the second banned. In a globalised society it is inevitable that one section of thinking humanity will question the traditions, beliefs, customs and social and political assumptions and structures of another.

The principle of free speech assumes that these questionings or criticisms, in any literary form, be it academic or scientific analysis or cartooned caricature, will be part of free social discourse, however heated.

The demonstrators who stood with placards denouncing the reproduction of cartoons lampooning the Prophet Muhammad outside the offices of Charlie Hebdo are a welcome manifestation of free speech. The bigots who invaded its offices and murdered people in cold blood are not.

India’s democracy is regularly, almost routinely now, marvelled at and labelled a miracle, a happening against all odds. That India has fixed-term elections and that the parties contesting these accept their verdict is the fundamental qualification of a working democracy.

The other, just as fundamental, is that the state be the defender of the rights of all of its citizens. This includes the untrammelled right to free speech.

Within India’s diversity it may be difficult to strike a balance between the freedom to hold and promulgate opinions about religion, about historical truths and about the acts and character of revered personalities.

Two principles should govern the maintenance of this balance. Firstly, the state should never succumb to blackmail. And secondly that while the state should defend the expression of eccentric and possibly insulting views, it shouldn’t sponsor their generation.