I am disappointed by the reaction to the murders in Paris yesterday. Commentary seems to fall along two basic divides. On the first, half of the pundits are focused on connecting the killers to Islam and the other half to claiming the killers were not Islamic. On the second, there are those who declare solidarity with the magazine – most notably by producing cartoons honoring the dead.
All of them miss the point.
It hardly matters if the killers were Islamic or not and whether or not they were, it is not our role to define them. Connecting them to Islam is a way of condemning Islam and its followers. Assuming it is an accurate association, what have I achieved? Have I somehow limited the power of the killers or simply grown it by bringing others into their fold? And if I claim there is no connection, have I achieved anything more? Does it help me limit the killers? This argument is irrelevant. They believe they are motivated by Islam and that is all that matters. Our commentary on the subject is about as useful as Angela Merkel weighing in on which Jews are the real Jews.
And what of the solidarity shown? Doesn’t it have value? I think it is worthless. Lots of people drawing pictures about the power of the pen is all poetic and stuff – but it ignores what the editors were doing with the pen. The staff of Charlie Hedbo weren’t trying to be martyrs: they were attacking an ideological target. They were rhetorical fire-bombers who lost their lives in the process. We don’t stand with them by pointing at them and saying “courageous.” We stand with them by throwing our own firebombs at the targets they identified. They died fighting. We shouldn’t stop by honoring them – we stand with them by carrying on the fight.
There is nothing totalitarians like less than mockery. I wouldn’t throw the same firebombs as Charlie Hebdo – I don’t believe the goal is to undermine Islam. I think the goal is far more basic, limit the power of the destructive Islamists; the destructive and find fuel in Islam. I want to weaken the destroyers and strengthen those who are productive and positively spiritual. These positive people exist in every community and every religion.
How do we do this? Through the power of the pen.
Forget honoring Charlie Hedbo – I’m not sure they’d care. Forget trying to tar the rest of Islam with their brush – or denying that connection. Focus on separating and weakening the destroyers by mocking them. Mercilessly.
A totalitarian state kills its citizens when they step out of line. Nothing is more dangerous to it than the spread of subversive ideas. Within such a state, a small number of people leverage fear to keep the masses in check. And they succeed, up to a point. But when the masses gather together, there are quite simply too many targets to kill. Unless they have tremendous depths in the ranks of their executioners, their regime of fear will fall.
In our current world, new totalitarians are trying to establish themselves. They are trying to ban what they consider “subversive ideas” – globally. They don’t care if we honor Charlie. They care if we attack them. They are trying to establish a new law, a law outside our legal traditions. We must rise above this. We must mock. And we must do it en mass.
We must be the mass of people – the crowd that is too large to kill. We must subvert them. But we must also deny them the depths of their ranks. Because of this, we must mock the destroyers, but not Islam as a whole. To attack more broadly would be to create willing executioners on the side of the totalitarians. Instead, we need to isolate them, mock them and destroy their characters in our minds, in the minds of those whose religion they claim to share and, most insidiously, in their own minds as well.
This is my first shot.