I've been mulling it over on the ride home and what I'm thinking (more concisely than my last 2 sprawling posts, I hope) is that what's missing from many of these "free speech debates" is the calculus of power. that is to say: satire is a weapon, and how I personally feel about the deployment of that weapon really depends on how the deck is stacked.
when satire is used to "speak truth to power" or to mock those in power (like the spoof website gwbush.org run by the Yes Men, or the spoof Monsanto site that once existed, or cartoons lampooning Cheney or Trump or other ultra-powerful rich white guys) then I find it laudable and think that freedom of the press should absolutely be invoked to protect it. what I find harder to defend is when "satire" is being used by the party (or nationality or ethnicity or whatever) of the powerful to mock, belittle, and shame the less powerful -- as in the vicious "political cartoon" caricatures of Blacks, Native Americans, Asians and so forth that litter US newspaper history in various eras.
I'm not sure that an absolute standard of behaviour can be defined and enforced without any reference to this calculus of power. we implicitly acknowledge this when we state that children cannot enter into legal (or sexual) contracts because they do not have the knowledge, wisdom, experience (worldly power) to make informed decisions. another instance of this difficulty is in the history of court decisions regarding domestic violence; often a far more serious penalty is attached to violence involving a weapon than to bare-hands assault, but what if a 120 pound woman picks up a frying pan and whacks the 240 lb husband who has been battering her for months or years? is her "offence" really far more heinous than his, or is she merely using an "equaliser" to compensate for a gross imbalance of physical strength, reach, weight, etc?
early legal decisions based on the "rational man" principle of one approved code of conduct for any human being in any situation, would penalise the woman in such a situation for using disproportionate force or committing an aggravated assault. but more recent legal decisions informed by a growing itch for social justice, would try to take into account things like a history of being battered or terrorised, disparities of age, strength, training (what if the batterer is a cop or a boxer, with special training in hitting people?), and so on.
I think that free speech debates have yet to find a way around the problem that satire (including the giving of offence) can be used by the powerless to cock a snook at the powerful, mock the overlords, and that kind of thing; or it can be used by the powerful against relatively powerless targets, to stir up ethnic hatreds, promote and preserve popular bigotries, or set the stage for persecutions, invasions, and wars. the archetypical case of the latter I guess would be Streicher and Der Stuermer. the freedom-of-press argument did not suffice as a defence in his case.
further complicating the matter is the indisputable fact that being on the losing end of a power struggle does not necessarily make people nice, good, kind, or lovable. in fact the bitterness of daily humiliation and defeat tends to make people angry, vindictive, vicious and self-pitying. the more they are ground down and humiliated, the more vehemence, extremism, zealotry and all the rest are bred from this misery. which to me makes it kind of silly, to heap more public humiliations on the Arab/Muslim world (losers in the Great Game as of the current innings) and then complain that their response is shrill, unbalanced, overwrought, and all the rest. of course it is. what the heck else would we expect?
religious extremism, zealotry, and intolerance are on the rise in the US precisely in areas of the country gutted by outsourcing, disinvestment, unemployment, loan sharking and all the other ways of engineering poverty and unemployment. evangelical xtianity of the rightist revivalist flavour is on the rise in Mexico, so I am told, and it accompanies a decline in living standards, economic troubles, and all the rest. people living in poverty and insecurity, without hope, tend to cling harder and harder to simplistic faiths that promise deliverance (or better yet, vengeance on those who have wronged or are believed to have wronged them). American nutjob evangelicals believe in a vicious version of Revelation prophecy in which Christ, on rising again, will promptly dismember and torture all the people who disagreed with them -- godless wealthy gay liberals from Hollywood and New York in particular (this is the wacko theology purveyed by the Left Behind books for example). if things get bad enough for the lumpenproletariat and the ravaged peasantry in the US, I wouldn't be surprised to see more McVeigh incidents.
in other words, I think the stand-down of religious extremism in Europe has more to do with European social democracy, wealth sharing, social safety nets, food security, etc. than with some specific virtue of European intellectual, religious, or political history. imho it's hard to get that het up about your invisible friend in the sky (het up enough to kill people over doctrinal matters, that is) when you're well fed and secure from arbitrary detention and torture or expropriation, your children have decent schools and the prospect of a good job, you have a roof over your head and basic medical care, etc. Euroland has been providing this kind of security for some time, and I think one of the many benefits of this policy is a relative paucity of dangerous zealots. in times when the Dar al-Islam was a secure and wealthy polity, there was more freethinking, a relaxation of religious zealotry, and greater religious tolerance than in the desperate and marginalised "Arab street" today.
whereas current Anglo/US/Euro policy in the Arab/Muslim world is -- with or without malice aforethought -- creating precisely the conditions optimal for the kind of desperate zealotry that we observe in these vindictive fatwas and intemperate demands in response to the offensive toons. and as to fears that we all stand to "lose our freedoms" if we are expected to show a little courtesy or sympathy towards people who have been deeply injured by our own governments and policies... ummm, I haven't noticed a pan-Arab army overrunning France, bombing the water treatment plants, looting the Louvre, and so on. not lately. the occasional mad bomber, but nothing sufficient to shut down the Enlightenment (except where our own politicians are looking for an excuse to do so, of course). whereas the whole pan-Arab world knows what has happened and is happening in Iraq and Gitmo...
well, I'm going on far too long as usual. this issue of the calculus of power is key to many ethical dilemmas so it interests me. The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
On the one hand we have caricatures, arguably unfunny and in poor taste, but still within the bounds of legal free speech. On the other we have people who not only want that free speech muzzled, but are threatening, with all too much credibility, to kill to make it so.
Now one can understand why they'd react, understand their past grievances, one can do all of that, but still not condone, or lose sight of what is at heart a pretty simple case of people threatening murder to quell free speech. If there's a case that should be easy to take a stand on for the left, unpretty in its details as the case may be, this should be it.
How many freethinkers in our own culture have not only been threatened for ridiculing, often in bad taste, our own prophets of right religious thought through the years when they still wielded power, but even paid with their lives for it? And can we now condone those who would mete out the same punishments, no matter what their background and just grievances in other matters? Bitsofnews.com Giving you the latest bits.
I personally don't like the Evans toons either. imho they were crudely drawn, leaning lazily on anti-semitic stereotypes -- again conflating an anti-semitic emotional buzz with his legitimate (imho) criticism of Israeli policy and the Occupation. But not much worse or better than the 'Mohammetoons' to my eye, so where was the worldwide rallying to his defence, or the taking-up of his toons by a dozen papers in hot defence of sacred free speech and Enlightenment/democratic values? The debate over Evans' firing was limited to NZ, I believe, and his only defenders appear to have been unsavory white supremacist types. The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
And second, are you seriously comparing someone getting fired for drawing anti-Semitic cartoons to threatening to kill cartoonists, newspaper staff, and people wholly unrelated to the matter other than being from the same country? Is that what you're saying here? 'cause I think my eyes must be going. Who spiked my drink with methanol? Was that you, Sirocco? Bitsofnews.com Giving you the latest bits.
anyway, the Evans case is of interest merely as suggestive evidence that the "civilised world" is rather selective when it comes to zealous defence of press freedom and the "right to offend."
do I have to keep repeating that I don't condone death threats, defend them morally or even find them strategically wise? however I also don't find waving red rags at bulls to be strategically wise.
I think Malooga's comments over at the Moon are insightful:
Again, who profits from all of this? Centralized Governments, Religions, Corporate Media, and a few bad artists. All of this is almost comic relief--more "buffo caricato", than "buffo nobile,"--from the major issues of war, poverty, imperialism, resource depletion, and ecologic catastrophe confronting mankind. [...] Each time the media has been breathless in fanning the flames of rightgeousness and indignation. It's a circus that has never brought people closer to understanding and respecting each other. Rather, it is more an idealization of a certain puerile adolescent state when one simply must break away from all authority figures, and indeed, the whole world [...] It should be obvious to all that corporate media has no real interest in exercizing any particular freedom to tell greater truths, and that intelligent, thinking and feeling Muslims these days have far more on their plate than taking the bait and thrashing around like a hooked fish on an issue that was not of their framing, and not essential to the greater struggles they face. [...] What I am attempting to do, is comment upon a culture that holds subversion of convention, provocation, and intellectual tittilation above human values such as the universality of suffering, and the longing for social justice. That's the greater frame into which this discussion should be placed. (It seems almost unnecesary to point out how difficult to craft, and rare, good art--representational or modern--that upholds these human values, truly is. Picasso, usually an extraordinarily quick worker, spent months of studies tweaking and retweaking the emotions and symbols of suffering in various ways before painting "Guernica.")
The boldface text for me is the "moi aussi" bit, so the boldfacing is mine not M's. The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
