Now, more than ever we realize to what extent we are “being spoken to” with an average and mediocre language that is superimposing and speaking inside us, against us, crushing us and making us powerless. We would like so much to evoke the memory of a banality for the many people overcrowding the social networks with messages of condolences, ready to enroll themselves in the new war of  civilization against Islam (on the right-wing) or in the equally unbearable profession of freedom of speech (on the left-wing): there is no freedom decoupled from an actual power of trasforming the existing reality -the rest is just chit-chat. In these hours, we are most of all feeling the lack of a cold, detached and meaningful thinking.

To  avoid any misunderstanding, and in order to try carrying on a difficult  and uncomfortable discourse, we say: we are outraged by what has happened!  We are light years away from this kind of deeds! We do not deem it to  represent or to be in any way useful to the causes and interests of the populations that paid and keep paying for the effects of wicked imperialist policies. Once we have dismissed and paid due attention to this aspect – do we realize how humiliating and surreal it is to have to write these parentheses? To have to take an a priori stance in support of the Western Civilization, [except for being put at the stake is already a confirmation of the Western discourse of which the islamophobic “libertarian” satire is an integral part of homogenization] – we keep on reasoning…

In the last 20-25 years, the Euro-Atlantic West directly carried out inter-religious and inter-ethnic wars and clashes or activated them through its proxies, in order to keep its geo-strategic domination over territories that to a great extent happen to be home to a majoritarian population of the Islamic faith. It is not a matter of justifying a massacre making sense only for those who carried it out and for those who want to stir up new clashes of civilizations. Yet, the fact remains that it is unavoidable and mandatory to ask ourselves how many dead these 30 years of Euro-American meddling in Middle East has produced. Interferences that have been orchestrated  according to demand, utilizing and favouring or, on the contrary, punishing and fighting a political and militant Islamism that, in turn, never ceased to mutate, fragment, rejoin and recompose itself according to the alliances and the interests that were/are at stake.

The intelligence agencies and the general staff of USA, Great Britain, France, Germany and Italy never stopped playing (ir)responsibly with puppets that in turn for some time have begun to counter-use their sponsors and uneven supporters. Let’s consider what happened in Libya, Mali, Syria, and now at the gates of Kobane with the Islamic State, the political instigator of this stupid and pointless massacre. Today, some of this dirty and dissimulated war has returned back home to us, with interest. And as it’s happening increasingly often, it doesn’t take the clear and politically legitimate shapes of the ancient world, but the delirious and death-bringing physiognomy of a world on the verge of a systemic implosion. The shit we are exporting elsewhere is paying us back in the same coin. Paradoxically, the cui bono of this act is meeting the interests of the apologists of civilizational wars -not only those followers of Salvini, LePen and the new Caliphate, but also of the United States. The US are, from far away, slyly laughing, will now have the chance to appreciate their manoeuvre of passing the buck to Europe not only in terms of the economic crisis, but also the more ill-fated outcomes of that “war to terrorism”, of which they are the main promoters.

Lastly, we want to devote a few more words to satire and the much celebrated freedom of speech. From 2001 onwards, Charlie Hebdo has created its economic base on an islamophobic nevrosis founded on bearded men, veiled women and imaginary enemies. We understand the core of satire as bothering those who are commanding. Expressing something ironically by means of a cartoon doesn’t entail being exempted from being subject to a value judgement based on the content. Targeting minority groups that are being discriminated on the basis of precise historical responsibilities is not the same thing as ridiculing the religious and cultural power that is hegemonic in one’s own country. In France, the so-called issue of the “internal enemy”, by now ubiquitous all over Europe, is shaped around and above the colonial removal. Hence, there is no abstract freedom you can possibly talk about, and Charlie Hebdo, from a desecrating journal, has become a magazine that was horrifying even some of its former columnists. To conclude, despite all the sympathy we can feel for the victims nous ne sommes pas Charlie Hebdo, a journal that has turned very bad.

The litmus-test of this discrepancy in the hierarchy of existing reality is provided by the easiness with which the synecdoche operates between the author of a criminal act and their social group. Because of this, when a Muslim is shooting the whole of Islam is responsible; when a person of colour is making a robbery their whole ethnicity is allegedly culprit (as shown by the number of killings of young Black people in the US by policemen). On the other hand, when a Catholic integralist brutally kills dozens of youngsters in name of the defence of Judaic-Christian Europe (as happened in Utoya), the episode is promptly de-politicized and relegated to the psychiatric realm.

The general mess we are living in cannot but produce monsters (from both sides) -this is something we must be aware of. The only possible, non-assimilated response is to look amongst ourselves and craft relations of force capable of imposing our discursive terrain without being dragged onto someone else’s treacherous such. Refusing the call for enrolment, even to the price of resulting unpopular today, in order to avoid producing further catastrophes tomorrow.

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