The day after the Charlie Hebdo killings, as news was
breaking of a second shooting in the south of Paris, I found myself in the
cemetery of Montparnasse. I was
scared and I needed a place to think and it seemed to make sense to go and
surround myself with dead writers and artists; people who, while they hadn’t
actually died for their art, had nevertheless lived for it and had chosen Paris
as a home because it allowed them to make this choice. Gradually the fear gave way to anger
and then to a sense of resolution; the realization that unless one exercises
one’s right to free speech it ceases to exist. The dead cartoonists understood this, so did Beckett or
Baudelaire or Tristan Tzara. And taken
together there was something supremely beautiful in the ensemble of their lives
and work. You don’t need to agree
with, or even like, every one of them: I find Beckett too gloomy and Baudelaire
and Tzara (for different reasons) a little over the top. But the whole is greater than the sum
of the parts and Charlie Hebdo (a
magazine which in normal times has a circulation of 60,000) was, and remains, a
small part of that whole. Sitting
in the cemetery that morning and listening to the helicopters overhead it was
as if the position of the artist in society suddenly crystallized for me; while
any individual artist may look like a romantic rebel flicking a finger at societal
mores, artists as a group are the people who exercise, and hence guarantee,
certain legal rights that civil society provides for us all.
That was
Thursday; on Friday came the Hyper Cacher killings and then, almost before it
was all over, something else began: the “yes buts", the blaming and the
out-and-out lies. There was Tariq
Ramadan, professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies at the University of Oxford,
telling us that Charlie Hebdo were only in it for the money, that the French media has double standards when it comes to Jews and Muslims and hinting
at the complicity of the French Secret Services in the Charlie Hebdo shootings.
His proof? The fact that
Said Kouachi left his ID card in the getaway car. Former National Front leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen joined him in this conspiracy
theorizing, neither
of them pausing to think that the two brothers had criminal records as long as
your arm and that, even without the ID card, it would have been perfectly
simple for a forensic team to identify them. Nor thinking that maybe, just maybe, a couple of publicity
hungry low-lifes who knew they would soon be dead would have done everything
they could to draw attention to themselves. This was their fifteen minutes of fame; they wanted to enjoy
every moment of it.
Over in The Guardian, Tariq Ramadan’s Oxford
colleague, Timothy Garton Ash, had identified the real danger facing us: in a
kind of Boys Own meets Buffy editorial he declared that Dresden’s Pegida
movement was “a vampire we must slay”.
Elsewhere in the same publication Owen Jones was quick to invoke the name of Anders Breivik and to stress that we mustn’t give
in to islamophobia. Jeremy Harding at the LRB was concerned that because of the shootings it
would “now be even harder than it was a week ago to speak up against Israel’s
occupation of the West Bank”. Pegida
are extremists, Breivik is a loathsome murderer and the Israeli government has
committed many crimes against the Palestinians but is this really the right
time to be making all these points?
Surely they would be as valid in a month? Or (in the case of Breivik) three years ago?
Reading the
Anglophone press (and things were no better in the US where The New York Times refused to even
publish the new, inoffensive and eminently newsworthy Charlie Hebdo cover) felt like a long series of betrayals. Here was Will Self in professorial mode explaining
that rights come with responsibilities before degenerating into some kind of
bar room rant about French intellectuals.
Here was Tariq Ali explaining that the shootings were
all to do with foreign policy. Or
Israel. Or both. Here was Noam Chomsky drawing parallels with NATO
bombings in Serbia or the war in Iraq.
There are grains of truth in all of these positions but taken as a whole
and followed through to their logical conclusion what do they mean? That Charlie had it coming because they were irresponsible or
French? That Israel’s crimes make
any Jew a legitimate target? That
Western military engagement renders it morally impossible to express outrage at
murders committed on Western soil?
I was born
in London to an Italian father and New Zealand mother, studied in England and
the US and for the last ten years have called Paris my home. I am a product of what is sometimes
referred to as The West and sometimes as the Global North (although quite how
New Zealand can be considered either northern or western is another matter). Listening to the reactions of Self or
Ali or Chomsky it would appear that the only responsible position for a person
like me is to make my mea culpa and wait for the East or the downtrodden South
to punch me on the nose. Whether a
citizen can be held to account for his or her government’s actions is a moot
point (I feel about as much responsibility for England’s involvement in Iraq as
I do for Michelangelo’s Pietà or the victories of the New Zealand rugby team)
but even if one can determine a chain of moral causality that still leaves the
question of what course of action this complicity implies. If France as a whole has to accept some
responsibility for the shootings in Paris because of French military
intervention in Mali or US support for the State of Israel or Godefroy de
Bouillon’s involvement in the Crusades then what should France as a whole or
France’s politicians or any individual French citizen do about it?
It is
precisely here – at the “what to do” of moral philosophy – that the liberal
thinkers stop and precisely here where I would most value their input. Simply pointing out that nothing is as
clear cut as it seems is not enough.
Yes, world affairs are messy and no incident can be judged in an ahistorical
vacuum but it is because of this messiness that I want to know which ethical standards
will allow me to compare different acts of violence and distinguish between different
strata of moral agency. I do not
know what obligations are incumbent upon government and individual citizens
because of previous foreign policy errors and here too would be happy to have
some help. In the same way that I
turned to the artists to try and make sense of the attacks while they were
happening I turned towards the liberal press for guidance on how to react afterwards. For the time being the dead and buried
in Montparnasse have been more forthcoming with their advice.
