People in Nice, in southeastern France, hold posters reading ‘I am Charlie’ as they gather to express solidarity with those killed in an attack at the Paris offices of weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo, on the evening of Wednesday, Jan. 7, 2015. Lionel Cironneau/AP
“A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on. Ideas have endurance without death.”—JFK
I don’t want to talk about technology or cars for a minute.
I promise to get back to talking about the Challenger Hellcat, and whatever awesomely ludicrous thing Elon Musk comes up with next, soon.
But with continuous live blogs and hands-on reports of wearables and televisions streaming out of Las Vegas, we must stop and consider the horror of what has happened in Paris. A barbaric and unforgivable act, committed by uncivilized thugs hellbent on stifling any dissent and criticism they deem unworthy.
Jordan Golson
Jordan Golson is a technology and automotive reporter based in Durango, Colorado.
Masked men armed with rifles stormed the headquarters of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in the heart of Paris and killed 12 people. The dead included four political cartoonists, editor in chief Stéphane “Charb” Charbonnier and two police officers.
The three gunmen fled after a firefight with police, and are reported to have now been identified. One of the slain officers had been named Charbonnier’s bodyguard after he received numerous death threats from Islamic extremists.
The attack appears to have been in response to the magazine’s frequent publication of cartoons mocking the Islamic prophet Muhammad. One gunman reportedly shouted, “We have avenged the prophet Muhammad, we have killed Charlie Hebdo” as he jumped into a getaway car.
Although the shooting occurred at Charlie Hebdo, it was an attack on all journalists. More than that, though, it was an attack on all of us, because it was a direct offensive on a way of life, on freedom of speech, and on the storied tradition of speaking truth to power.
Journalism is, almost by definition, sharing information that might offend or cause discomfort to someone. As Finley Peter Dunne famously said, the job of a journalist is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Journalists are hardly alone in this; writers, artists and musicians have long courted controversy, especially when commenting on religion. Iran called for the assassination of author Salman Rushdie following the publication of his book The Satanic Verses, while artist Andres Serrano enraged many with his anti-Christian piece Piss Christ.
Whether it’s an interview with a CIA whistleblower who alerts us to widespread government surveillance who some consider a traitor, or reporting the details about an upcoming Apple product launch, it’s difficult to write anything of consequence that won’t upset someone (as most comment sections on the Internet show).
Satire is a particularly pointed form of social commentary, used for thousands of years to illustrate the hypocrisy, greed, and absurdity of the powerful. It isn’t all as elegant as that written by Aesop and Miguel de Cervantes, or even Stephen Colbert. Some is awkward and clumsy, and some of it is flat-out bad. You can argue, and many have, that the cartoons printed in Charlie Hebdo fall into this category. That is beside the point. Satire is an essential tool for revealing hard truths about our world. It must be protected in all its forms.
A man holds up an edition of Charlie Hebdo magazine as people gather on the Place Royale in Nantes, western France, on January 7, 2015, to show their solidarity with the victims of the attack on the offices of the satirical weekly in Paris. Muhammad’s speech bubble in the cartoon reads, in French, “A hundred lashes if you don’t die laughing.” Georges Gobet/AFP/Getty Images
Another bit of satire has been in the news recently, that of the North Korea-mocking movie The Interview. The film, a buddy comedy about two “journalists” hired by the CIA to kill North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, so enraged North Korea that—if you believe the U.S. government—it aimed an army of hackers at Sony Pictures Entertainment and stole sensitive data to embarrass Sony and force the company to withdraw the film.
It worked, sort of: several theater chains declined to show the film amid security fears. After much back and forth, Sony released the film online and in a small number of theaters. It has since become Sony’s highest grossing video on demand release.
The stereotyping verges on outright racism throughout the film and, in the long run, The Interview will likely be more meaningful for the future of movie distribution than as effective political satire. But, improbably, many more people are now familiar with North Korea’s disappointing record on human rights and its inability to feed itself than before the film was released.
The attack on Charlie Hebdo is ultimately about control. Masked cowards wanting to decide what we can and can’t see. Wishing to tell us what to believe in and what to hold dear.
This is nothing new, of course. There have always been radicals looking to force their view of the world on others. But this struck me dumb. Maybe it’s because I’m a writer, and the slain were writers. Authors and artists and other so-called intellectuals have always been the first to stand in the public square and call out evildoers, knowing the price they could pay for these necessary actions. Charbonnier and his staffers paid that price today. We all did.
The attack on Charlie Hebdo is ultimately about control. Masked cowards wanting to decide what we can and can’t see.
The goal of terrorism is to make us feel helpless and scared, to cower in the face of threats. To make us choose to live our lives in a way other than how we wish. To question our very existence.
When I heard the news of the massacre, I questioned mine. But probably not in the way that the terrorists wanted.
Nothing I have ever written has angered someone to the point of violence. I hope it never does. At times like this, I wonder what impact my writing—about cars and Apple, mostly—really has on the world. Or that of my colleagues, spending time in the desert to bring you the latest on über-thin televisions and self-driving cars. But personal expression—whether it’s a movie, a speech, a painting or a blog post—is given value by its reader. We write to be read. We write to have an impact on the world. Sharing hands-on impressions of the latest smart wristband may not change the world, but it has value. It matters in its way.
Today, all journalists have been attacked. Our colleagues in Paris have been brutally murdered for something they created with pen and ink (or their digital equivalents). Something they created that was simultaneously harmless and harmful, inane and enraging.
And with their tragic and indefensible deaths, we have been enraged. The cartoons in Charlie Hebdo may have been graceless and intentionally provocative and not funny. Tech journalism may sometimes be unimportant and vapid and self-indulgent. But all speech plays a part in creating a civilized society, whether from Demosthenes and Bill O’Reilly, Marshall McLuhan and Lawrence Lessig, or TechCrunch and Gizmodo.
As Charbonnier said two years ago, “I’d rather die standing than live on my knees.” We all have an obligation to stand with him, to tell truth to power, and to forever ensure that our fellow journalists did not die in vain.
May the ideas live on. Je suis Charlie.
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