{"id":14872,"date":"2015-01-14T18:40:23","date_gmt":"2015-01-14T23:40:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/?p=14872"},"modified":"2015-01-14T19:54:53","modified_gmt":"2015-01-15T00:54:53","slug":"about-that-remarkable-surge-for-charlie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/2015\/01\/about-that-remarkable-surge-for-charlie.html","title":{"rendered":"About That Remarkable Surge for Charlie"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve noticed that the “Je suis Charlie” phenomenon has come in for rightwing contempt. The argument goes that it’s self-righteous to claim you stand with the cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo when all you do is gather in the street and carry signs. There’s some truth to that, especially when it comes to politicians. But I’ve ignored the argument precisely because of where it’s coming from, yet wondered how to accomodate the jeers. Well, here’s how. See this for a very useful point about the “mawkishness” of so many Charlies from an unimpeachable source:<\/p>\n

Late for His Own Murder<\/strong><\/font><\/center>
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Image by Elena Caldera<\/font><\/p><\/div><\/p>\n

I used to know a Dutch cartoonist called Willem in Amsterdam when I was working there in the offices of an underground magazine, \u2018Aloha!\u2019 and later I saw something of him in Paris when he moved there. He was friends with Roland Topor the great cartoonist of \u2018les evenements\u2019 in Paris in 1968.<\/p>\n

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Bernard Willem Holtrop<\/p><\/div>Willem\u2019s full name was, and it still is, Bernard Willem Holtrop. He made erotic jigsaw puzzles and other quirky things. I lost touch with him over the years but then in January, 2015 I suddenly thought I caught his name on the radio.<\/p>\n

The reason for his name being mentioned was that, fortunately for him, as a result of his “finding meetings boring” he\u2019d turned up late for the weekly meeting at Charlie Hebdo only to find that its offices were cordoned off by the police as a murder scene. Willem had missed the massacre of his fellow cartoonists and their police guards by an hour.<\/p>\n

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Cartoon by Bernard Willem Holtrop<\/font><\/p><\/div>There was an interview with Willem on the BBC\u2019s World At One in which the journalist Mark Mardell asked Willem if he\u2019d ever feared for his life. Willem said \u201cno\u201d, rather coolly, but then added as an afterthought that \u201cthe day before yesterday\u201d he had had heard a knock on his door \u201cat 3 am that got louder and louder.\u201d When he got up to answer it, still in his pajamas, Willem saw four burly men there who said that they were policemen and they offered him their services. They\u00a0wondered if he wanted police protection? \t<\/p>\n

Willem spurned their kind offer by saying that \u201cpolice protection hasn’t proved to have been of very much use lately.\u201d<\/p>\n

I learned too that, rather than be caught up in the wave of ‘I am Charlie’ mawkishness, Willem\u00a0had told the Dutch newspaper Volkskrant: \u201cWe vomit on all these people who suddenly say they are our friends,\u201d and he added that most of the support has come from people who have \u201cnever seen Charlie Hebdo. A few years ago, thousands of people took to the streets in Pakistan to demonstrate against Charlie Hebdo. They didn’t know what it was. Now it’s the opposite.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Cartoon by Bernard Willem Holtrop<\/font><\/p><\/div>Despite a great surge of global support for Charlie Hebdo with two million people pouring onto the streets of Paris, many with banners reading \u2018Je suis Charlie,\u2019 Willem was suspicious of the way that \u2018Charlie\u2019 as in \u2018Je Suis Charlie\u2019 was suddenly being morphed into a symbol of Western democratic values. It was anarchist and iconoclastic.<\/p>\n

He declined to join the line-ups of statesmen now availing themselves of a mega photo-op: statesmen from Russia and Turkey (notorious for punishing and jailing journalists); statesmen from Israel (which jails Palestinian cartoonists); and statesmen from Saudi Arabia (who, as Jon Stewart acidly pointed out, were \u201da little out of breath from flogging a blogger\u201d).<\/p>\n

Hollywood air-heads would proclaim, \u2018I am Charlie\u2019 while they disported badges in the shape of pencils just as their own President wages war against some seven Muslim countries and permanently deprives Muslims of freedom of speech, thanks to his drone attacks (a man who physically bows down to oil-bearing Saudi princelings and cravenly kow-tows to them while they\u2019re sentencing women to 50 lashes for driving and does the oil-cringe as they chop off the heads of those with whom they disagree).<\/p>\n

France\u2019s President Hollande capitalizes on the global attention being paid to his country and fatuously declares that \u201cParis is the capital of the world.\u201d In the interests of free speech he shortly afterwards has the comedian Dieudonn\u00e9 M\u2019bala M\u2019bala arrested for poking fun at the self importance of those participating. Dieudonn\u00e9 had written on his Facebook page: \u201cAfter this historic, no legendary, march … a magic moment equal to the Big Bang which created the Universe … or in a smaller (more local) way comparable to the crowning of the (ancient Gaullish king)\u00a0 Vercing\u00e9torix, I am going home. Let me say that this evening, as far as I am concerned, I feel I am Charlie Coulibaly.\u201d For saying this Dieudonn\u00e9 was placed under lock and key. <\/p>\n

The genocidal Israeli president proudly proclaims the now meaningless shibboleth, \u2018I am Charlie,\u2019 and beams at the cameras while, in the interests of free speech, Israel says it longs for peace with Palestine and yet refuses to speak to Palestine\u2019s elected representatives.<\/p>\n

Willem said that he found the publication’s new-found fame and its unexpected ‘new friends’ including the Pope, Queen Elizabeth, Vladimir Putin and the far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders \u201claughable.\u201d As far as he was concerned they were all unwanted \u201cCharlies.\u201d A cool customer.<\/p>\n

Heathcote Williams<\/em><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve noticed that the “Je suis Charlie” phenomenon has come in for rightwing contempt. The argument goes that it’s self-righteous to claim you stand with the cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo when all you do is gather in the street and carry signs. There’s some truth to that, especially when it comes to politicians. But I’ve […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":14886,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[19,20,23,17],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-14872","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-art","8":"category-media","9":"category-news","10":"category-political-culture","11":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/Willem-Hold-Over-elenas-picture560.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbvgEs-3RS","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14872","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14872"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14872\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14899,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14872\/revisions\/14899"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14886"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14872"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14872"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14872"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}