Satire is starting to make good sense

ON the morning of the Nice massacre, I walked past Cafe Procope, the oldest restaurant in Paris and a favourite of the great scholar Voltaire, who is wrongly credited with the quote: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

ON the morning of the Nice massacre, I walked past Cafe Procope, the oldest restaurant in Paris and a favourite of the great scholar Voltaire, who is wrongly credited with the quote: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

Late that night, as the French celebrated Bastille Day and families thronged to watch fireworks in towns and villages, an Islamist Tunisian, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, managed to murder 84 men, women and children in less than a minute as he crazily drove a heavy refrigerator truck through the crowd massed on the Promenade des Anglais. Cafe Procope, founded in 1686, is famed for its food but also for hosting great thinkers. Not only Voltaire (whose real name was François-Marie Arouet) but French literary figures including Beaumarchais, Balzac, Verlaine and Hugo. Influential Americans Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson also spent time there, debating and drafting their ideas, some of which influenced the US Constitution. Few places have hosted so many contributors to the Age of Enlightenment as this old restaurant, and I was reminded as I later sat at Voltaire’s desk, kept in an upper room, that while he may not have made his often misquoted remark on free speech, he did say: “Superstition sets the whole world in flames; philosophy quenches them.” Amazingly, the Western world is still wrestling with superstition as the war against Islamist fundamentalism so clearly demonstrates. And it has made so many accommodations to appease those who take the Koran literally that the enlightened view of free speech has been all but neutered. Look at the way politicians in Australia have rejected the principle of free speech and clung to the noxious 18C clauses which support the altogether bizarre notion that criticism must not offend. The July 14 attack carried out in the French resort city of Nice took place just after the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo’s normal weekly deadline but was first dealt with in an online comment from the irreverent journal’s editorial board, no strangers to Muslim extremist murderers. The gist of the hastily written editorial published on Friday, July 15, was that this has not been a summer for the ­English (a play on words, as the Poms — no offence intended — had been knocked out of the European Cup, had voted for Brexit and the fact that the mass slayings by truck took place on the Promenade des Anglais). It continued “otherwise the weather is fine for the (political) right and will stay that way until 2017 (when the French are scheduled to hold their national election)”. It said that the attack in the heart of the southeast, where the right-wing Front National has a majority, has opened a thematic avenue for the Republicans, written a musical score for their campaign with a security and identity-inspired martial air opposed to the barbarians who did not respect the ­national day and crushed our children and country. This was bad luck for the Wets, as even the moderate mayor of Bordeaux, Alain Juppe, who leads polls to be the right wing presidential candidate, has pulled on his army boots and declared “We are at war”. The magazine said the gung-ho right wanted a permanent state of emergency and tanks to stop lorries driving into crowds. It said a curfew would be next, and that the testosterone-charged language of the right would become even more virile. “Up to now,” it concluded, “the campaign communications have been couched in terms from business schools — it future it will be exclusively in terms from military schools.” The magazine, famous for its anti-religious cartoons, devoted much of its latest issue, released on Thursday, to the Nice massacre and published several pages of sharply biting editorial cartoons. One, under the heading “the spiritual leaders call for calm”, showed a mullah clutching a Koran and saying “no stigmatisation of Arab-Muslims”, while a trucker beside him said “no stigmatisation of drivers of ­19-tonne refrigerated trucks.” In its editorial it mused that 2015 was the year French Islamist terrorism was discovered and the world was treated to commentary which ranged from “we won’t change our way of life” to “this is not the true Islam” but didn’t address the issue of religion. It also noted that Nice’s Islamist mass murderer didn’t need an armoury of highly militarised weapons, just a refrigerated truck rented for two days. Anti-democratic fundamentalism is so difficult to defeat because it is so totally contrary to the ideals at the heart of modern democracy. Perhaps a new app is needed for smartphones to provide the public with terrorist alerts, the editorial said. This satire is not too far from the truth. When a serving NSW police officer can blandly state that terrorists have rights too, and when both the Police Commissioner and his deputy (who were in charge of ­counter-terrorism) can claim to bear no responsibility for what all the evidence seems to demonstrate was a totally bungled operation in terms of strategy, Charlie Hebdo might well be providing the operations manual. No longer will calls for calm be sufficient to ease concerns about future atrocities, or the restatement of the nonsense that murderous Islamists globally have nothing to do with Islam. As for inviting homophobic imams to sit down with political leaders at the Elysee Palace or, say, somewhere like Kirribilli House, that might be something the Charlie Hebdo team would dream up — just for laughs.