If the 2015 Charlie Hebdo massacre happened today, would the Western establishment declare ‘Je Suis Charlie’? Or would they lecture us not to look back in anger, and threaten to arrest protestors for the crime of Islamophobia?
Exactly ten years ago, two crimes were committed against the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.
First, on January 7th, 2015, Islamists committed mass murder at the paper’s Paris office, in retribution for Charlie daring to publish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. The terrorists shot dead eight cartoonists and journalists, two police officers, and two others, in a bloody demonstration of their hatred for free speech and freedom of the press—the lifeblood of our democratic civilisation.
Then, in the days and weeks that followed, the elites of Western society conspired to commit a free-speech fraud. They posed behind ‘Je Suis Charlie’ banners and declared their support for the victims. Yet, they were soon demonstrating their contempt for the real freedom of expression that allows such a provocative publication as Charlie Hebdo to exist in the first place.
It soon became clear that the threat to free speech in France and the West came not just from a few Islamist barbarians at the gate. Freedom had more powerful enemies within the citadels of civilisation itself.
Many politicians and public figures could hardly wait to stop paying their rhetorical respects to Charlie’s satirists and again start demanding their own restrictions on Charlie-style offensive or ‘hateful’ words and images.
An unusual international consensus emerged, almost implying that the Charlie satirists were not innocent victims. At one end of this unholy alliance, Pope Francis condemned the murders, but added that “there is a limit” to free speech, that “you cannot make fun of the faith of others” and that it was “normal” for those who do so to “expect a punch.”
At the other end, the official voice of the Chinese Communist regime agreed with His Holiness that “there should be limits on press freedom” and that “unfettered and unprincipled satire, humiliation and free speech are not acceptable.”
And in the middle of the consensus, this Vatican-Beijing-endorsed idea that there were “limits” to what the likes of Charlie should be allowed to say and that “unfettered satire and free speech” was unacceptable also became the conformist party line for many in the supposedly liberal West.
Where the Islamists aimed to kill free speech outright with bullets, these liberal voices sought to smother it slowly with “buts”, as expressed in the mantra, “Of course I support free speech, BUT not for hate speech/insults/provocations” etc.
At the time of the Paris massacre, I wrote in the Prologue to my book Trigger Warning: is the fear of being offensive killing free speech?:
Perhaps we need to face the hard fact that the Islamic gunmen who attacked the offices of Charlie Hebdo acted not just as the soldiers of an oldish Eastern religion but also as the armed extremist wing of a thoroughly modern Western creed …. From the official censors of the police and the political elite to the army of unofficial censors online, the cri de Coeur of these crusaders against offensive speech is You-Can’t-Say-That. The Islamist gunmen took that attitude to a murderous extreme.
As I also wrote there, the response to Charlie Hebdo signalled the end of the age of Voltaire, the eighteenth-century French writer whose views on tolerance and free speech were famously summarised (by his British biographer) as “I disprove of what you say, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it.” Instead, in the 21st century, we have entered the age of those I called the reverse-Voltaires, whose slogan is, “I know I will detest what you say, and I will fight to the end of free speech for my right to stop you saying it.”
In the ten years that have passed since the Charlie Hebdo murders, the attacks on free speech have got worse. We have witnessed sporadic Islamist assaults: from the 2020 beheading of French teacher Samuel Paty after he allegedly showed pupils Charlie cartoons in a class on freedom of expression, to the 2022 stabbing of Salman Rushdie, British-American author of The Satanic Verses, on a stage in New York State where he was giving a talk on literary freedom.
The more damaging and sustained assaults on free speech over the past decade, however, have come from powerful reverse-Voltaires within European and Western society: from many of the same politicians and public figures who have again crept out of their bunkers and paid lip service to freedom around the tenth anniversary.
Europe has become preoccupied with the nonsense idea that there is “too much” free speech, especially online. We have seen the advance of formal censorship from governments, courts, and EU institutions, seeking to control public debate and silence dissenting, especially conservative, voices under the pretext of combatting ‘hate speech,’ ‘fake news’ and ‘disinformation’. And the cowardly imposition of effective blasphemy laws to protect Islam from criticism, a self-loathing act of surrender to Islamism.
The latest stage of this censorious crusade is European politicians declaring war on Elon Musk, not primarily because of what he says on X/Twitter, but because of what he allows others the freedom to say.
We have also witnessed the advance of informal censorship online, as practised by Big Tech giants and their woke ‘fact checkers,’ backed by leftist twittermobs. And, in response, we have seen the insidious spread of self-censorship among those who are fearful of expressing a non-conformist opinion or simply unsure of what they are ‘allowed’ to say these days.
All of which makes free speech an even more pressing issue today. It should not only be defended as a foundational value of free societies, but also wielded as a weapon in the culture war against woke authoritarians who want to police what we say as a step towards controlling what we think.
Some conservatives have not always been comfortable with free speech, partly because, like democracy, it involves putting faith in the wisdom of ordinary people. From the Inquisition to right-wing regimes of the twentieth century, conservative forces have often tried to suppress free speech as the stuff of dangerous heresies.
Today, however, the stamping boot is very much on the other foot. As I wrote in a Democracy Watch column for europeanconservative.com last year, after the Brussels mayor and police tried and failed to close down the National Conservative conference, conservatives are “the new heretics now”, the ones being persecuted for expressing ideas that go against the grain of the conformist You-Can’t-Say-That culture.
Both for reasons of political principle and practical self-preservation, national conservatives should take up the banner of free speech discarded by their opponents. But without making the same mistake as the Left, who—like Josef Stalin or the Ayatollahs—will happily defend free speech only for those who agree with their prejudices. With the exception of direct incitement to violence, we need to uphold free speech and open debate for all—or none at all.
As part of our commitment to reclaim and advance the founding principles of European civilisation, europeanconservative.com stands for the Enlightenment values expressed by the likes of Spinoza, who in the 17th century set a standard that we are still struggling to achieve: “In a free state, every man may think what he likes and say what he thinks.”
As for those cowards and charlatans who share the Islamists’ underlying fear of free speech while pretending to support Charlie Hebdo, let us leave the last word to one veteran cartoonist who survived the massacre, Barnard Holtrop, who declared ten years ago that “We puke on all these people who suddenly say they’re our friends.”
Free speech, with no ifs and no buts. Now more than ever, Je Suis Charlie—et Voltaire.
