I made these Je Suis Charlie pencils and have them out for free at the It’s Only Fashion office.
The first paragraph I drafted for this post called what happened yesterday at Charlie Hebdo unthinkable. Of course, I had to delete that and start again because it obviously was not just thinkable, but doable. Three of our fellow human beings went into an office and killed twelve other fellow human beings because they were offended by their cartoons. It all sounds so ludicrous, doesn’t it?
Of course, to say the murders were about cartoons is to miss the point. The killers are bit players in an existential struggle between modernity and traditionalism and modernity is winning. When you are winning, you do not resort to tactics like terrorism. Terrorism is for losers.
You see, if they were not losing the argument already, they had many other options to object to and oppose the satiric cartoons of Charlie Hebdo. They could protest outside the office. They could have billboards saying “Chalie Hebdo is a poopy head.” They could write letters to the editor or to the advertisers asking them to stop running ads in the magazine. They could call for a boycott of products advertised in Charlie Hebdo. But their side is losing and they know it. So they decided to smash things and kill people. Continue reading
