Humor is a tricky import/export. Jeff Foxworthy's redneck routine wouldn't register in other cultures but then Jerry Lewis movies made it big in France.
Gallic satire has a long and dicey history — lurid, explicit, over-the-top lampoons demonizing Marie Antoinette as a self-serving lecher helped send those monarchs and hundreds of aristocrats to the guillotine.
It's never been about "leaving well enough alone" (because things left alone were in fact not well) .... France's foreign minister Laurent Fabius has asked, "Is it wise or intelligent to keep pouring fuel on fire?" bc, after all, Charlie's offices were already besieged and their editor was under constant police protection. One of those was the first to be mowed down.
I hate movies like "Human Centipede" but I hate censorship even more, and executing a conference room filled with editorial staff and cartoonists — cartoonists! — is about as grotesque as it gets.
I wonder if those cartoonists still used the "forgotten art supplies" most of us now find via the computer, because they were still hand-drawing their ideas, maybe doing quick sketches at the meeting table to start brainstorming or refine an idea.
Nick Kristof used a new word — is that all we're good at, "otherizing"?
Historian Margaret MacMillan said, "History doesn't repeat itself exactly, but it does bear repeating stanzas." For centuries, those who "pour fuel on the fire" are among the first to be extinguished.
Europeans who would themselves leave well enough alone at home and at their jobs would still read Charlie Hebdo for the laughs.
#censorshipservesanoppressor
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