Liberty,
Western hypocrisy, and cultural context
Mohan
Jyoti Dutta
The recent terrorist attacks on the satirical
magazine Charlie Hebdo have put on the
global center-stage the ideas of free speech and liberty.
Mainstream media and politicians, a
large number of them from the West, have framed the attacks in the language of
liberty, suggesting that the attacks are acts of violence on the ways of the
free world, aka the West.
In solidarity with the magazine, the
twitter hashtag #jesuischarlie has
garnered global popularity. The hashtag expresses the global support for media
to draw and voice diverse, even provocative ideas, freely.
The #jesuischarlie
twitter feed also serves as a space for sharing many of the Charlie Hebdo images, equating the act
of sharing the images with assertions of freedom and liberty. The images of a
free global order juxtaposed against the images of extremist Islamic
fundamentalists, are presented in a binary. The many different depictions of
Islam and the prophet as the targets of satire stand in for the freedom and
liberty of the Western civilization.
These growing global conversations on the
question of free speech are indeed important conversations, fostering
opportunities for discussions of the ideals of liberty and freedom, and the
underlying values that guide these conversations.
As a scholar of communication, I believe
that it is vital for diverse worldviews to be heard and to be enabled. Conversations
on free speech and the freedom to express our vital conversations to have globally,
especially as we converse across sub-cultural and cultural norms, ideals of
respect and dignity, and deeply embedded cultural codes on appropriate
conversation.
Moreover, these conversations are
particularly salient today as nation states such as Israel and the US operate
globally to silence free speech and implement global networks of surveillance
on our speech, ideas, and expressions. Notions of free speech and liberty are
valued conversations in the backdrop of the growing consolidation of power in
the hands of the global elite, the oligarchic ownership of media, the
increasing global power of neo-imperial nation states, and the lack of
transparency in communication and information about the various acts of war
being carried out globally by powerful nation states.
The value of free speech offers vital
lessons about the possibilities of expression in a diverse world. These ideas
of free speech anchor our conversations on how we conceive the role of
communication in society and the important role of nurturing a space for a
variety of ideas, irrespective of the level of discomfort some of these ideas
may create in some of us. They also point toward much-needed conversations on
right to information, transparency, and accountability.
The Charlie
Hebdo attacks raise important questions: What is the realm of acceptable
speech? What is unacceptable speech? Who decides the limits to acceptability? Moreover,
they also offer opportunity for asking questions that are currently not being
discussed: How are conversations on free speech shaped by power structures? How
are conversations on free speech deployed toward achieving specific political
agendas and objectives? If free speech is also indicative of freedom of access
to information, how free is access to information in the global order today?
As is depicted in the broader global
discourses on mainstream media, in political speeches, and on social media such
as the #jesuischarlie hashtag, the Charlie Hebdo attacks have been framed
as attacks on the cherished ways of liberty and freedom in the Western world.
Having been set up in the backdrop of depictions of Islamic culture and
extremism, Charlie Hebdo has emerged
on the global discursive space as a signifier of the supposed Western
commitments to liberty and freedom.
The Western media as well as much of the
social media discourse originating from the West in response to the attacks
depict the attacks on Charlie Hebdo
as the violent attack of Islamic terrorists on the Western ideals of liberty.
The images show an act of violence threatening an otherwise peace-loving
Western civilization.
As reflected in the march for liberty and
mainstream media conversations, there is an increasing convergence on the
depictions of the attacks as France’s 9/11. Close scrutiny of the 9/11
discourses point toward the ways in which these discourses were then deployed
to create a climate of support for US and allied invasions of Iraq and
Afghanistan. Depictions of liberty served as the instruments for
violating the sovereignty and liberty of the citizens of Iraq and Afghanistan,
suggesting the need to interrogate the attacks and their depictions closely and
critically. The narrative unfoldings in Iraq and Afghanistan, and later in
Libya and Syria, suggest that these discourses and propagandistic celebrations
of free speech and liberty in the West however are far from the reality of
practices of free speech in the West.
The jingoism and propaganda in the
Western elite, media, and popular discourses suggest the need for caution in
our interpretations of events. They suggest that any conversation about the
ideal of free speech needs to be juxtaposed amid critical consideration of the
actual practices of free speech in the Western world. Critical consideration
also needs to attend to the depiction of a peace-loving Western civilization. These
critical considerations hopefully offer anchors for global conversations on
free speech, with careful attention paid to other anchors and values that need
to be placed in the mix.
Let me begin by interrogating the
materiality of practices of free speech in the West. Does the Western claim to
liberty and freedom of speech hold up when interrogated by the evidence on
hand?
For instance, what do Operation Iraqi
Freedom and the US attacks on Afghanistan and Libya tell us about the Western
ideals of liberty? Is the Western civilization an exemplar of peace and
liberty?
The images of liberty circulated conveniently
in the aftermath of the attacks on Charlie
Hebdo, much like the images of 9/11 circulated after the attacks on the
World Trade Center towers, ignore the violence and attack on liberties of
people elsewhere carried out by the West, such as the violation of the fundamental
liberties of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan carried out by US-led and allied
imperial invasions. These depictions of a peace-loving Western civilization
strategically erase the war machineries and instruments of violence that form
the fabric of Western civilizations. The binary in the depiction of Western
liberty remains oblivious to the large numbers of deaths across the Middle East
caused by Western imperial invasions. The metaphors of liberty and peace remain
oblivious to the large numbers of civilian casualties in Pakistan and in the
Middle East that caused by US-sponsored drone attacks.
Moreover, critical interrogations also
point toward the Western attacks on spaces of articulation across the globe
that have challenged or threatened the Western narrative of freedom and liberty.
The Iraqi television station and a hospital in Falujah were some of the
earliest targets of Operation Iraqi Freedom, justifying these aggressions as
strategic attacks on Iraqi instruments of propaganda. Similarly, critical attention
needs to be paid to the attacks on journalists. Consider for instance, US
attacks on journalists across the Middle East. Early on in its attacks on Afghanistan, the United States
bombed Al Jazeera, and then bombed the Sheraton Hotel in Basra, Iraq, housing
Al Jazeera journalists. Israel, another
bastion of democracy and liberty, has been accused of involvement in carrying
out war
crimes against journalists, including killing 17 journalists. Or consider
the cartoonist Mohammad Saba’aneh who has been jailed
by Israel for speaking out.
The rhetoric of liberty originating
from the West ironically remains silent about the attack on free speech
reflected in the US
response to the whistleblowers who have reported on the US army abuses of
power and torture of civilians. The rhetoric of liberty remains conveniently
silent about the violence on Bradley Manning for exercising his right to
speech. Similarly, the US rhetoric of liberty and freedom of speech remains characteristically
silent about the US treatment of Edward Snowden for revealing the large scale
surveillance operations carried out by the US or the corresponding attacks on our
fundamental communicative liberties by these large scale surveillance
operations carried out by the US.
Moreover, when it comes specifically to
the idea of free speech, close examination disrupts the Western propaganda of
free speech. Western society is not equally open to all forms of speech. Which
of the diverse worldviews are deemed acceptable by societal norms and which of
these views are treated as not acceptable depend a great deal on the broader
socio-political context and the structures of power within which these conversations
about free speech are situated.
For instance when in 2006, the magazine Charlie Hebdo had published a series of
images depicting the Prophet Mohammed in pornographic frames, the magazine was
asked whether it would depict Moses in the same way, particularly within the
broader context of Israeli attacks on Palestine. The magazine remained silent. In
2009, when the French cartoonist Sine, then working at Charlie Hebdo had
published a cartoon that was considered by some groups as anti-Semitic in tone,
he was asked by the then-editor to apologize and had to go on trial on charges
of anti-Semitism.
In another instance, France, the
supposed voice of Western liberty, banned
the protests against Israel in 2014.
The exercise of tools of appropriate
speech codes to subvert diverse academic expressions is also evident in the US
academic structures and universities. In the US, the academic Professor
Steven Salaita was de-hired from his job at the University of Illinois
Urbana Champaign for criticizing the recent spate of Israeli attacks on
Palestine in strong language. A code of “incivility” was called upon to justify
the de-hiring of this academic as a personnel decision by the administration.
In each of these instances, civility, as
a speech code, is positioned in opposition to free speech. This articulation of
civility then suggests another axis to the conversation of free speech, noting
that indeed in the West, articulations of free speech don’t exist in vacuum.
Instead, decisions are consistently made by appealing to other sets of
standards and values, and using these bases to justify speech that violates the
dominant codes of conversation. The outcomes of these decisions on realms of
speech thus deviate significantly from the avowed rhetorical position of
commitment to free speech deployed in the propaganda campaign carried out by
the West.
These incidences point to the hypocrisy
in Western discourses of freedom of speech. That there is not such a monolithic
idea of free speech, that freedom of speech is almost always situated in
relationship to broader aspects of context are ideas that need nuanced
consideration, especially as our circles of conversation become increasing
global in scope. These critical and nuanced considerations are particularly
salient within the broader context of the strategic uses of the language of freedom
to carry out neo-colonial invasions on the global stage.
Free speech as an ideal therefore is
almost always balanced with other ideals in a given society. As an ideal, the
concept of free speech can certainly offer valuable guidelines for policies and
for conversations on policies. Notions of free speech, I hope, can also address
ideas of transparency, access to information, and the freedom to pursue
information particularly in instances where such information is shrouded under
opaque policies.
Conversations on free speech, in other
words, are much needed in the world today.
Moreover, these conversations on free
speech also need to be situated in relationship to the questions of the quality
of speech. The question about the freedom of Charlie Hebdo to publish its Islamophobic cartoons needs to be
complemented by conversations on the quality of the cartoons published by Charlie Hebdo, the racist undertones of
the images, and the feelings of disenfranchisement that might be produced by
images that attack the worldviews of a minority community. Especially worth
considering in the debates on free speech are the effects of speech, especially
within the context of the differential powers of different communities and the
effects of particular forms of speech in certain communities. Worth considering
for instance is the right to communicative dignity of communities that are disenfranchised
or are at the margins. Speech that contributes to the disenfranchisement of
marginalized and/or minority communities need to be considered in relationship
to the potential effects of such forms of marginalization.
Depictions and negotiations of freedom
of speech thus are shaped by the broader political, economic, social, and
cultural environment, and the various commitments of any given society. As
dominant power structures deploy communication to serve their agendas of
consolidating power, free speech serves as a key tool for rendering visible the
strategies of power consolidation. As a tool thus, free speech can provide
important avenues for questioning the policies that are made within particular
structures and the effects, benefits, and costs of such policies.
Free speech in a nutshell is an important
value. As a guiding principle, it can offer valuable insights for how we come
to understand the relationship among communication, culture, and society when
it takes into account complexities, nuances, cultural values, and structural
formations.
In a social media environment where the
varieties of discourses about religion are grounded in diverse value systems,
it is vital to engage dialogically with these differences and at the same time
foster collaborative spaces for encouraging conversations on commonalities.
Points of criticism and thoughtful debate might indeed offer bridges for
exploring opportunities for dialogue amid difference, thus working through
articulations of free speech not as a way to denigrate a culture or circulate
chauvinistic ideas of two cultures, but to promote spaces for conversation
through difference.
The concept of dialogic quality thus
adds a much-needed layer of complexity and nuance to the current conversations
on freedom of speech. The attacks on Charlie Hebdo offer an opportunity for
these critical conversations.