Flocking to Buy Charlie Hebdo, Citizens Signal Their Support of Free Speech
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Version 0 of 1. For people who are supporters of not just free speech but newspapers, too, the images of Parisians queued up at dawn Wednesday to get their hands on a printed artifact was heartening. The French distributors of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo said the latest issue’s initial printing of three million copies had been increased to perhaps five million, and there were reports that the now-precious editions were being auctioned on eBay for hundreds of dollars. The image on the cover was of a weeping Prophet Muhammad, framed by two thoughts: “I am Charlie” and “All is forgiven.” But the sentiment that drove the sales probably had less to do with those messages and more to do with the impulse to preserve a world in which the speech of the many cannot be held hostage by a few. The overwhelming response to the special issue of the newspaper, which normally has a print run of 60,000, is a sign that the citizens buying it wanted more than just a totem memorializing the fallen journalists; they were making an affirmative, political act, a vote in support of free speech. Just last month, consumers had responded in large numbers to the opportunity to stream “The Interview,” the Sony film that had been withdrawn from theaters after the studio was hacked by forces supported by the government of North Korea. The message is clear and powerful: Dictators and rogue states are free to control what is seen by people who labor under their rule, but the rest of us have no interest in living like that, where others control the movies in theaters or the selections on newsstands. We may or may not all be Charlie Hebdo, but we certainly want to be free to read the paper if we wish. It is a principle we have been fighting for since the time of Rousseau and Voltaire, one that is deeply embedded in civil society. And in a modern, web-enabled world, the effort to limit speech will ultimately be fruitless. The fecklessness of those attempts was underlined during the Edward Snowden leaks, when British security forces in the offices of The Guardian oversaw the destruction of hard drives with power tools. Free expression does not live in a single hard drive, film or newspaper; it is widely distributed and reflexively defended as a fundamental right. But even as it becomes more and more obvious that speech of all kinds will carve its own route to an ocean of readers, the impulse to rein it in endures. Not all the French were reveling in unbridled expression of speech. Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, a comedian who has made highly provocative statements since the shooting at Charlie Hebdo’s offices, was detained as an “apologist for terrorism” for statements he made on his Facebook page that were seemingly in support of one of the attackers. His arrest highlights the fact that one man’s free expression is another man’s hate speech or sedition. In Israel, the conservative Jewish newspaper HaMevaser scrubbed out the German chancellor Angela Merkel from a photograph, along with other female leaders who had participated in a solidarity march in Paris, because photos containing women are considered inappropriate in ultra-Orthodox publications. In the United States, long seen as a bastion of free speech by the rest of the world, the current administration is only now pulling back its attempts to prosecute and subpoena journalists accused of publishing leaked information that the government does not want disclosed. Just this week, James Risen, a reporter for The New York Times, ended a seven-year fight with the Justice Department, which had tried to compel him to reveal in court his confidential sources. After significant pressure from civil liberties and news media organizations, the government finally said it would not make him testify. The efforts to limit speech here are persistent, and the recent death of the lawyer who defended both the poet Allen Ginsberg and the comic Lenny Bruce against obscenity charges is a reminder that those efforts cross many generations. Even as people flock to buy the new issue of Charlie Hebdo, others will question the wisdom of publishing an image of Muhammad after the horrific attack on its offices last week. But it will always be thus. The bleeding edge of the debate over free expression often involves unpalatable and sometimes patently offensive subject matter. Sometimes it’s trivial — should the makers of a buddy movie be allowed to depict the fiery assassination of North Korea’s leader, as happened at the end of “The Interview”? The answer has to be yes, or the dominoes fall toward much more vital, much more precious speech. Defending free speech means defending knuckleheads and visionaries alike. We may prize the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s address at the Lincoln Memorial, but it was the rights of the Nazis to march and wear uniforms in Skokie, Ill., that became a touchstone in the country’s free speech movement. News and commentary of all sorts frequently causes pain to its subjects and the audience, but it is precisely the unruly and the offensive that require protection. No one is safe from the slings and arrows of unfettered speech: an image of Christ immersed in an artist’s urine, Sinead O’Connor ripping a photo of the pope in half, Eminem fantasizing in rhyme about killing his lover — all of it is intended to offend. But each is worthy in its own way of being defended. The copies of what has been called the “survivors’ issue” of Charlie Hebdo are a physical reminder that freedom has costs and only survives through its exercise. The current issue will become an heirloom — reminding future generations not only that there used to be such a thing as printed newspapers, but that there was a time when most of the world stood with France in their defense. |