In the wake of the brutal and targeted killings of staff at French magazine Charlie Hebdo a huge volume of cartoon eulogies have emerged. The common trend amongst these cartoons is a contrast; the violence of the gun with the pacifism of the pencil. Bleeding pencils, snapped pencils, weeping pencils, all have flooded our timelines to reinforce the point that not only were the cartoonists non-combatants, but that freedom of speech is dichotomous with violence.
This contrast, however, is a false one. Cartoons, like the rhetoric of freedom of speech, have never been distinct from violence. Sinister caricatures of a racist Jewish archetype haunt Europe still. The distorted characterisations of various racial others formed the architecture of the European race sciences which in turn permeated European empire. The height of so called ‘enlightenment values’ was simultaneously the height of European expansion into the rest of the world, often with the purported goal of their spread.
Who, misquoting Voltaire regarding freedom of speech, acknowledges his Napoleon; French ‘freedom’ spread by an Imperial Philosopher King with musket and bayonet? The ‘enlightened absolutism’ of much enlightenment thought shifted from Kings within Europe to Europe as King of the world. Just as the ruler legitimated their rule through enforcing the values of the enlightenment upon the populace, so Europeans’ right to its colonies and ‘mandates’ was made legitimate by the same.
The cry of ‘liberté, egalité, fraternité’ thus echoed over vast Imperial holdings long after the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen were on the books. French colonial violence was justified by the language of rights dangled above the heads of French colonial subjects. The historical violence associated with French rights discourse and racial caricature may be easily forgotten by those to whom it was never directed.
But some cannot forget; cannot remove the vicious caricatures of dead Arab men and raped Nigerian women from those historical continuities. A cartoon of a bullet ridden Arab futilely holding up the Qur’an in defence is not separate from Sisi welcomed in France with the blood of thousands on his hands. The mockery of raped African women cannot be removed from French military cooperation deals, residual Imperial taxes and military bases in West Africa. For some, there is no joke to get, the cartoons, like the language of ‘freedom of speech’, necessarily evokes all the above.
It is to those people that the propaganda of the Charlie Hebdo killing is pitched. Charlie Hebdo, and indeed ‘freedom of speech’ generally, is a stand in for French-Muslim relations. It represents rights discourse as a bludgeon. The oft repeated assertion that Charlie Hebdo ‘attacked all equally’ evokes the egalitarianism of Robespierre’s Terror: ‘the despotism of liberty against tyranny’. The disciplining of illiberal subjects is oft defined as the despotism of liberty, and always enforced through arms. These pencils are sharper than they appear at first glance.
This is how the attacks on Charlie Hebdo are readily framed by Al Qaeda as not merely defensive but proportionate. The figure of the cartoonist is not simply drawing, but is on the attack.
The only way to render comprehensible the terrible killing of people whose job drawing pictures appears so banal, is to understand it as a product of a larger violence, a violence already present in ‘le Coran, c’est de la merde, ça n’arrête pas les balles’. Speech, be it dehumanising language or dehumanising images, have historically had a violence all of their own. As these deaths are used as kindling for a new debate around freedom of speech in Australia, we do well to remember that.
Chaos and Miscellany 
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