Charlie Hebdo Redux: Another Blog on Freedom of Speech

Charlie Hebdo Redux: Another Blog on Freedom of Speech

 

Introductory Note:  On January 9, 2015 I posted a blog entitled “Charlie Hebdo and Freedom of Speech,” which you can find here. http://rhodahassmann.blogspot.ca/2015/01/charlie-hebdo-and-freedom-of-speech.html. One of the readers of the blog, Pranoto Iskander, Editor of the Indonesian Journal of International and Comparative Law, then asked me to write an extended commentary on the Charlie Hebdo murders and freedom of speech for his journal. It was published on-line this week, and I am posting it here with Mr. Iskander’s permission. Warning: This is a much longer blog than usual; about 4500 words. If you want to cite this blog for any reason, please use the complete IJICW citation, i.e. Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann, “Commentary: The Charlie Hebdo Murders and Freedom of Speech,” Indonesian Journal of International and Comparative Law, vol. II, no. 2, (April 2015), pp. 467-80.

 

Commentary: The Charlie Hebdo Murders and Freedom of Speech

Background:

The murders of twelve people at the site of the French satiric publication, Charlie Hebdo, are the latest in a series of incidents that have rocked the Western liberal faith in the importance of freedom of speech. 

The first incident was the Salman Rushdie affair in 1988-89. Rushdie, a novelist and British citizen of Indian Muslim background, had already written several well-known novels, among them Midnight’s Children, set in India  (Rushdie, Salman 1981) and Shame, set in Pakistan (Rushdie, Salman 1983), both based on real political characters and events. In 1988 he published The Satanic Verses (Rushdie, Salman 1988).  Some Muslims believed that the Satanic Verses was blasphemous, and an international incident ensued. The leader of revolutionary Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa on 14 February 1989 ordering that Rushdie be killed; As a result, Rushdie was under guard for several years using the name Joseph Anton (see his memoir, Rushdie, Salman 2012). Several translators, publishers and other connected to the book around the world were killed or wounded, including a Japanese translator, Hitoshi Igarashi.

The second incident was what became known as the “Danish cartoons” affair, In 2005   Flemming Rose, the then culture editor of the newspaper Jullands-Posten, commissioned a dozen Danish cartoonists to draw cartoons about Islam or Islamism. The purpose was to test Danish fear of Islamist violence. Again, international controversy erupted, including massive demonstrations by Muslims and violent attacks on Danes. 139 people were killed worldwide as a result (Keane, David 2008, 857-61). The United Nations Rapporteur on racism believed that the cartoons were racist, while his counterpart, the UN Rapporteur on freedom of religion, disagreed (Keane, David 2008, 867-73). The issue was further complicated by the fact that Jullands-Posten had previously rejected cartoons lampooning the resurrection of Christ (Keane, David 2008, 869).

On January 7, 2015, two gunmen entered the offices of Charlie Hebdo. They killed 11 people there and one police officer outside, all men except one Jewish woman. Two of the victims, a copy-editor and the policeman, had Muslim names; both were French citizens of Algerian background. These murders were followed a few days later by an attack on a kosher grocery store in Paris in which four people were killed. The attacker in this case had apparently known one of the Charlie Hebdo murderers in prison.

After the attack on Charlie Hebdo there was a massive demonstration of one to two million people in Paris, with many French and other political leaders in attendance and many demonstrators carrying signs saying “Je suis Charlie” (I am Charlie).  This was not the first instance of danger to Charlie Hebdo. In  2011 it was firebombed after publishing its “Sharia Hebdo” issue, purporting to have the Prophet Muhammad as guest editor, with a cartoon of Muhammad saying “100 lashes if you don’t die laughing” (this cartoon is included in a set of Charlie Hebdo cartoons, published with explanations by the online magazine Vox http://www.vox.com/2015/1/7/7507883/charlie-hebdo-explained-covers) (Taub, Amanda 2015 January 7). Thus, Charlie Hebdo had been aware that its cartoons were likely to incite violence, but courageously kept on publishing them.

Should these cartoons be published?

Journalists, publishers, scholars and many others all over the world have debated whether Charlie Hebdo should have published its cartoons.  Often in these discussions, reference is made to what “moderate Muslims” would prefer. I dislike this term, as it implies that Muslims must always define themselves against the few fanatics who purport to share their religion. Christians, do not have to define themselves this way, stating that they are “moderates” as opposed to, for example, “white race” survivalist Christians.

Nevertheless, it is worthwhile considering whether one should cause offense to someone of a different religion, or whether good manners or “liberal civility” should prevail. I personally found some Charlie Hebdo cartoons (which I viewed on-line or as they were described in the media) to be gross, rude, tasteless and offensive (e.g. in the Economist 2015 January 17). My preference, then, is not to publish such cartoons. But this is only my personal preference.

Another reason not to publish such cartoons may be that they constitute incitement to violence. On January 9, 2015 I listened to a debate among three Canadian journalists on the Canadian Broadcasting Company about whether to publish the cartoons. One journalist (not perhaps incidentally from the French-speaking province of Quebec, which shares some of France’s republican traditions) argued that every newspaper in Canada should publish them. The two others disagreed, the journalist from the Toronto newspaper The Globe and Mail arguing that since it had not published the cartoons before the attack on Charlie Hebdo, there was no need to publish them afterwards (Canadian Broadcasting Company 2015 January 9). I found this argument specious; a newspaper would not say that it did not publish a murder victim’s picture before the murder, so why publish it afterwards. These journalists, it seemed to me, were using journalist ethics and responsibilities to readers as a justification for not publishing the cartoons, when in fact they were afraid to do so. It would have been better simply to have stated that this was the case.

In any event, it is not the cartoons that are the incitement to violence.  Rather, it is, as Flemming Rose said, the decision of someone else to react to free speech with violence (BBC 2015 January 13, 2015). This is “Hitler’s veto” as Rose put it, or “the assassin’s veto,” as Timothy Garton Ash put it. Ash suggested collective action, that all European  newspapers should republish the cartoons on the same day, to minimize the risk of further attack after, for example, the German newspaper the Hamburger Morgenpost was firebombed day after it printed the cartoons: (Ash, Timothy Garton 2015 February 19, 4).

The Right to Satirize

Some commentators on the Charlie Hebdo murders argue that its cartoons about Islam are part of a long-standing French satiric tradition against King and Pope (and now Islam), starting before the 1789 Revolution. Charlie Hebdo resolutely defends French secularism and likes to mock all kinds of pretentious authority. It supports a complete separation of church and state, a principle introduced during the Revolution. Before then blasphemy had been punishable by death; indeed,  laws prohibiting blasphemy were not finally scrapped until 1881, “as part of a bloody struggle against the Catholic church” (Economist 2015 January 24, 53). Laws in the 1800s still forbade the satire of kings, but eventually it was permitted. Much of it was grotesque, indeed scatological, and was deliberately meant to offend (Heet, Jeer 2015 January 10). As a result of this long struggle in France and other Western countries, Westerners now enjoy the freedom to criticize Christianity and cause offense to Christian religious authorities: Westerners are no longer subject to the Catholic Inquisition, with its torture, burning, and execution of heretics. Nor are Westerners in liberal democracies subject to the long history of libricide (literally, book-killing),of which the best-known historical examples are the Inquisition and Nazi book-burning (Knuth, Rebecca 2003).

But should this tradition of permitting blasphemy be extended to Islam, a minority religion with little power in France, especially given other “anti-Islamic” measures such as a ban on the wearing of religious symbols in public institutions such as schools? If satire is meant to ridicule the powerful, that does not appear to apply to the religion of Islam or to Muslims in France. On the other hand, we see what happens when routine state censorship denies any right to satirize. Much of this occurs in Muslim countries. Saudi Arabia recently sentenced the  secular blogger Raif al-Badawi to 10 years in prison and 1000 lashes for insulting Islam, leading to a proliferation of  “je suis raif” signs (Economist 2015 January 24, 54). This punishment of a supposed heretic should be called by its correct name, state terrorism. In my view, although French Muslims may have little power, Islam—as a spreading evangelical religion—is a powerful institution. It deserves to be satirized as much as Christianity was satirized in earlier centuries, before the power of the Roman Catholic and other churches was defused by the principle of state secularism. It is more important to be able to satirize such powerful institutions than to avoid offense against “ordinary” religious believers.

Limits of Freedom of Speech in Canada

This does not mean that there are no limits to freedom of speech in Western democracies.  Indeed, the 1966 International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, a United Nations treaty, specifically prohibits hate speech, stating in its Article 4, a that “[States Parties] shall declare an offense punishable by law all dissemination of ideas based on racial superiority or hatred…” (United Nations General Assembly 1966). Canada is a party to this convention.

In Canada, there are numerous laws that control speech. Canada has libel laws as well as recent laws prohibiting on-line bullying of minors and laws prohibiting the posting of intimate pictures of another person without their consent. Child pornography is also banned, although pornography depicting adults is not. In the 1970s and 80s there was a vigorous debate in Canada about pornography, with some feminists arguing that it should be banned as it degraded women while others argued it was a form of freedom of speech. The upshot of this debate, among other things, was an attempt by Canada Customs to prevent lesbian pornography from entering the country on the grounds that it was obscene.  In 2000 the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in a split decision that although the relevant customs legislation violated section 2, b of the 1982 Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (covering freedom of the press), the violation was justified under section 1 of the Charter, which states “The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.” The reasonable limit, in this case, was the necessity to prevent harm occasioned by the importation of obscene erotica (Mapleleafweb 2003 November 18).

This somewhat communitarian approach can also be found in Canada’s hate speech and  blasphemy laws. Canada prohibits hate speech, although it is extremely difficult to define what exactly constitutes it. It is illegal under section 318 of the Criminal Code to advocate or promote genocide. Under section 319 of the Criminal Code, it is illegal to incite hatred against an identifiable group (including a group distinguished by its sexual orientation), and under section 320 it is illegal to distribute hate propaganda. However, according to section 319, 3, b, one cannot be convicted “if, in good faith, the person expressed or attempted to establish by an argument an opinion on a religious subject or an opinion based on a belief in a religious text.”  This suggests that in Canada a publication like Charlie Hebdo could use the good faith provision against any accusation of hate speech, arguing that it used satire to express its opinion on a religious subject.

Canada also has a law that expressly addresses blasphemy. Under section 296, 1 of the Criminal Code, “Every one who publishes a blasphemous libel is guilty of an indictable offense.” However, under section 296, 3  “no person shall be convicted of an offense under this section for expressing in good faith and in decent language, or attempting to establish by argument used in good faith and conveyed in decent language, an opinion on a religious subject.”

At first glance, I thought that this was a good law. As a matter of courtesy or “liberal civility” I thought that anyone discussing religion should do so in good faith, using decent language. But then I thought of my own anger at the Catholic Church in Canada, the United States, Ireland and other countries for tolerating for so many decades priestly abuse of young boys and girls. I might wish to express this anger in ways that the Church hierarchy considered uncivil. An actual victim of this abuse might well wish to convey his anger in a public place in a matter considered uncivil; for example, he might wish to call the Catholic Church an organized criminal gang. It is often the marginalized or oppressed who most need the right to freedom of speech, including uncivil speech using indecent language. This might well apply to a Muslim criticizing her own religion, or a particular branch of Islam. I cannot think offhand of any cases in Canada in which an individual has been prosecuted under section 296, but I think it is probably a bad law that should be changed. 

The “Western Imperialism” Argument

That Canada has a blasphemy law puts the lie to the common perception in other parts of the world that “the West” is one large monolithic entity, whose values conflict with those of the “non-Western” world.  Nevertheless, it is common for “non-Western” critics of the West to refer to the international value of freedom of speech (enshrined in Article 19 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights [UDHR] as “freedom of opinion and expression”) as an example of cultural imperialism. For example, discussing the Charlie Hebdo murders, former Indonesian President Yudhoyono  referred to a “clash of values” between the West and the Islamic world, arguing that Muslim culture requires some limits of freedom of expression and that caricaturing the Prophet constituted defamation and blasphemy (Parameswaran, Prashanth 2015 January 15).  

A set of commentaries published by the on-line African news source Pambuzaka News in mid-January 2015 encapsulated many of the arguments made by scholars critical of liberal defense of freedom of speech. Indeed, one commentator referred to the Paris march after the murders as a “white power rally,” implying freedom of speech had no value for the non-white world (Baraka, Ajamu 2015 January 15). Another theme was the hypocrisy of the many dictatorial and/or fascist world leaders joining the march (Hamouchene, Hamza 2015 January 14). Indeed, the leaders of Indonesia and Malaysia condemned the attacks in France at the same time that the editor of the Jakarta Post was being investigated for blasphemy for publishing a cartoon with Islamic State flag in it, even though he retracted it, and a Malaysian cartoonist was facing sedition charges for satiric cartoons (Parameswaran, Prashanth 2015 January 13). These critics also mentioned Julian Assange (North, David 2015 January 13), who fears extradition to the United States for his Wikileaks release of secret US documents. The same charge of hypocrisy could be levelled at the US for its pursuit of Edward Snowden.

Critics also mentioned the failure to put what they perceived as Islamophobic Charlie Hebdo cartoons into context, and noted its particular preoccupation, or so it seemed, with Islam (Baraka, Ajamu 2015 January 15). They noted the failure to differentiate between lampooning the powerful, as in the French tradition of satire, and lampooning the powerless, in this case Muslims (North, David 2015 January 13), referring especially to the relative powerlessness of Muslim immigrants in the West (Baraka, Ajamu 2015 January 15). They contended that Charlie Hebdo’s constant cartooning of Islam fed into right-wing anti-Muslim politics (North, David 2015 January 13; Hamouchene, Hamza 2015 January 14). In a reference to a Charlie Hebdo cartoon depicting girl slaves of Boko Haram as French welfare mothers (a cartoon easily available at several websites), one commentator argued that the cartoon was “racist hate speech” (Kimberley, Margaret 2015 January 15). In general, one commentator summarized, “the seventeen people that were killed would still be alive had one-tenth of those who rallied in Paris last Sunday shouted down Charlie Hebdo and condemned the excesses of its editors over the years” (Magaji, Abdulrazaq 2015 January 14).

Critics also referred to “Western imperialism” all over the Islamic world as evidence of  the West’s anti-Islamic bias, and noted former Western financing of jihadist groups, as well as the fact that the West’s ally, Saudi Arabia, financed them (Hamouchene, Hamza 2015 January 14). They also asked why twelve dead people in Paris  were worth more than all those dead in Syria and Iraq (Fachrudin, Azis Anwar 2015 January 14). They asked why there was no similar march to protest the Boko Haram attacks in Nigeria that occurred at about the same time as the attack on Charlie Hebdo (Baraka, Ajamu 2015 January 15)  

The answer to this last question lies in part in the natural tendency of all people to have a concentric circle approach to concern, in which concern for family, friends and nation trumps concern for distant others.  But it also lies in the concern for the central liberal value of freedom of speech. Yet some laws, particularly laws against hate speech and Holocaust denial, suggest that freedom of speech is not absolute.    

The Holocaust Denial Debate

Critics of the “Western” attitude to hate speech often refer to what appears to be a double standard, in which there is far more outrage against anti-Jewish expression in the West than against anti-Muslim expression. One commentator in Pambuzaka News, for example, noted that in 2008 Charlie Hebdo fired cartoonist Siné (Maurine Sinet) for an “writing an allegedly anti-Semitic article” (Santos, Boaventura de Sousa 2015 January 14). (For a discussion of this incident, which had to do with a cartoon lampooning the apparent privileges of then-President Nicolas Sarkozy’s son, see (Erlanger, Steven 2008 August 5)).

Indeed, there is a long-standing debate among Jews and others about freedom of speech versus hate speech, with particular reference to anti-Semitic cartoons, especially blood libel cartoons that refer to the myth that Jews eat Christian babies at Passover. Anti-Semitic cartoons are very popular in Arab world. (For a selection of these cartoons, with commentary by Joel Kotek, go to http://jcpa.org/article/major-anti-semitic-motifs-in-arab-cartoons/) (Kotek, Joel 2004 June 1).

After the Charlie Hebdo murders, the Canadian Jewish News published a debate about whether denial of the Holocaust constituted hate speech and should therefore be banned. Marni Soupcoff argued that bad speech ought to be fought with good speech: bad speech should not be banned but refuted. “It is a truism that distasteful, unpleasant or highly controversial speech is usually the only kind of speech that really needs defending…If questioning the Holocaust… becomes a crime...then the truth of the Holocaust’s horror is no longer something that must be thought about actively and defended passionately,” she argued (Soupcoff, Marni 2015 January 29, 8, 33).

Opposing her view, David Matas argued that there was a difference between blasphemy and hate speech. Shortly after the Charlie Hebdo murders, the Senegalese-French comedian Dieudonné,  known for his tendency to promote anti-Semitism, was arrested and charged with  “apology for terrorism” for apparently sympathizing with the attacks, a crime that carried a penalty of seven years’ imprisonment (Economist 2015 January 24, 53). Matas argued that Charlie Hebdo should be free to satirize Islam but Dieudonné should not be permitted to make anti-Semitic jokes. Incitement to hatred, as in anti-Semitism, had no truth-seeking purpose, Matas argued, while blasphemy did: thus, Matas supported Holocaust denial laws (Matas, David 2015 January 29, 33).

This debate has more than local resonance. Critics of Western “hypocrisy” often cite the laws in Germany and Austria that criminalize denial of the Holocaust, asking why this particular form of speech, pertaining to Jews, should be outlawed whereas blasphemy against Islam is permitted.  The answer lies in the particularity of German and Austrian history: Germany was responsible for the Holocaust, while Austria participated in it. Moreover, the Holocaust denial laws do not prohibit criticism of or blasphemy against Judaism as a religion: they outlaw denial of the fact that Jews were murdered. Nevertheless, seventy years after the Holocaust it is, in my view, time to end these laws, and let “good” speech outweigh bad when any public figure denies that the Holocaust occurred, as Soupcoff suggests. But Matas is also correct, that blasphemy can be a form of speech that seeks the truth in religious doctrine, while hate speech promotes hatred of and violence against a particular group of people. The question is, when does blasphemy turn into hatred.

In Defense of Freedom of Speech

The value of freedom of speech is not part of a “hegemonic Western discourse” that is irrelevant to non-Western countries or societies. It is not, unfortunately, hegemonic at all (Howard-Hassmann, Rhoda E. 2013, 180), but it is a discourse with much appeal to oppressed people everywhere, including those oppressed by extremist forms of Islam or by so-called “Islamic” governments that cannot tolerate criticism.

The clash is not one of the “the West” versus “the Rest.” Statements such as “The West must learn to respect the views of others,” made by the head of Indonesia’s largest Muslim organization (Jakarta Post 2015 January 15), homogenize and caricature both the West and non-Western societies. The clash is actually between liberalism and illiberalism, between an open society in which people are permitted to say what they think, however offensive it may be to the those in power, and closed societies in which people are forced to keep their thoughts to themselves.

This is not the place to discuss extensively the role of freedom of speech in the development of the prosperous, relative rights-protecting societies that exist in most of the West today. But one should remember the role that freedom of speech—including the right to blaspheme--played in enabling Westerners to achieve all the rights they now enjoy. Without freedom of speech, African-Americans, women, indigenous peoples, and minority groups of various kinds (including gays and lesbians) would not have attained the rights they now have.

Indeed, if I could choose one only human right that everyone should enjoy, it would be freedom of speech. Freedom of speech would allow dissident Russians to challenge the hegemony not only of Putin’s state, but also of the Orthodox Catholic Church. Freedom of speech would assist Christians, Muslims, and Falun Gong to practice their religion in China. Freedom of speech helps minority Muslims in Western countries to assert their rights to equal treatment, but also helps minorities within that minority, such as Ahmadi or Ismaeli Muslims. This is why a private Russian proposal to review the UDHR, especially article 19 protecting freedom of opinion and expression, is so dangerous (Rapsinews 2015 February 12). So is all state censorship, such as the  Turkish announcement that it will prosecute the newspaper Cumhuriyet for republishing some of the CH cartoons (Ash, Timothy Garton 2015 February 19, 6).

            At the current juncture, we have more to fear than the state censorship I’ve noted above. We now have to fear non-state censorship, indeed lynch censorship, as well. Fanatical Muslim extremists are trying to stop all portrayals of Islam that they consider offensive, and we should be just as critical of these groups as we are of states. In March 2015, for example, secular Bangladeshi-American blogger Avijit Roy was lynched when he went to Bangladesh for a visit (Laughland, Oliver and Hammadi, Saad 2015 March 7). Raif al-Sadawi was still in jail in Saudi Arabia when I wrote this commentary, a victim of state censorship, but Roy, a victim of non-state lynch censorship, was dead.

As I noted at the beginning of this article, I found some of Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons (or the descriptions of some of them) offensive, gross, childish and disgusting. I would not want to show them to any Muslim I know, except in the context of a discussion of freedom of speech. Nevertheless, I have to defend Charlie Hebdo’s right to freedom of expression. The alternative is too dangerous. 

Acknowledgements

I am most grateful to the faculty and students of the Human Rights and Human Diversity Program, Wilfrid Laurier University, Brantford campus, for their comments on a lecture I delivered based on this article on March 11, 2015.  I am particularly grateful to Dr. Andrew Robinson for his discussion of my argument.

References

Ash, T. G. (2015 February 19). "Defying the Assassin's Veto." New York Review of Books 62(3): 4, 6.

Baraka, A. (2015 January 15). The Charlie Hebdo white power rally in Paris. Pambuzaka News.

BBC (2015 January 13, 2015). Hardtalk.

Canadian Broadcasting Company (2015 January 9). The Current.

Economist (2015 January 17). Mightier than the sword. Economist: 90.

Economist (2015 January 24). The Sound of Silence. Economist: 53-54.

Economist (2015 January 24). Victim of hypocrites. Economist: 54.

Erlanger, S. (2008 August 5). A Scooter, a Sarkozy, and Rancor Collide. New York Times.

Fachrudin, A. A. (2015 January 14). Revisiting Religious Blasphemy after 'Charlie Hebdo' Killings. Jakarta Post.

Hamouchene, H. (2015 January 14). Paris attacks: Let's talk about the 'War on Terror'. Pambuzaka News.

Heet, J. (2015 January 10). A Shocking Tradition. Globe and Mail. Toronto: F1, F3.

Howard-Hassmann, R. E. (2013). Historical Amnesia, Genocide, and the Rejection of Universal Human Rights. Human Rights at the Crossroads. M. Goodale. New York, Oxford University Press: 172-82.

Jakarta Post (2015 January 15). NU criticizes 'Charlie Hebdo'. Jakarta Post

Keane, D. (2008). "Cartoon Violence and Freedom of Expression." Human Rights Quarterly 30(4): 845-75.

Kimberley, M. (2015 January 15). Charlie Hebdo: "Je Suis White People". Pambuzaka News.

Knuth, R. (2003). Libricide: the Regime-Sponsored Destruction of Books and Libraries in the Twentieth Century. Westport, Connecticut, Praeger.

Kotek, J. (2004 June 1). "Major Anti-Semitic Motifs in Arab Cartoons  ", from http://jcpa.org/article/major-anti-semitic-motfis-in-arab-cartoons/

Laughland, O. and S. Hammadi (2015 March 7). Atheist Blogger Avijit Roy 'was not just a person...he was a movement'. The Guardian.

Magaji, A. (2015 January 14). Charle Hebdo: Unending Muslim anger at the West. Pambuzaka News.

Mapleleafweb (2003 November 18). Case summary: Little Sisters Book and Art Emporium v. Canada (Minister of Justice) [2000]

Matas, D. (2015 January 29). Incitement to hatred is different than blasphemy. Canadian Jewish News: 8, 33.

North, D. (2015 January 13). 'Free Speech' hypocrisy in the aftermath of the attack on Charlie Hebdo. Pambuzaka News

Parameswaran, P. (2015 January 13). Charlie Hebdo Exposes Southeast Asia's Hypocrisy. The Diplomat.

Parameswaran, P. (2015 January 15). Charlie Hebdo a "Clash of Values," Says Indonesia's Former President. The Diplomat.

Rapsinews (2015 February 12). Russia proposes reviewing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights-report. http://rapsinews.com.

Rushdie, S. (1981). Midnight's Children. United Kingdom, Jonathan Cape.

Rushdie, S. (1983). Shame. United Kingdom, Jonathan Cape.

Rushdie, S. (1988). The Satanic Verses. New York, Viking Penguin.

Rushdie, S. (2012). Joseph Anton: A Memoir. New York, Random House.

Santos, B. d. S. (2015 January 14). Charlie Hebdo: Some tough quandaries.

Soupcoff, M. (2015 January 29). Offensive opinions benefit from being aired, not muzzled. Canadian Jewish News: 8, 33.

Taub, A. (2015 January 7). "Charlie Hebdo and its biting satire, explained in 9 of its most iconic covers." Vox.

United Nations General Assembly (1966). International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. New York, United Nations.

 

Book Note: Country Girl: A Memoir by Edna O'Brien

Book Note: Country Girl: A Memoir by Edna O’Brien, Little, Brown and Co, 2014

On May 7, 2013 I posted a blog entitled “Forced Labor by the Irish Catholic Church (or was it Slavery?). It was about an apology by the Prime Minister of Ireland to women who had been imprisoned by the Church in so called “laundries,” run by nuns, where they were forced to labor long hours and in which some had to stay for many years. They were “fallen women” who had had sex before marriage, or were judged likely to, or had had children out of wedlock, as it was called in those days. You can find that blog here: http://rhodahassmann.blogspot.ca/2013/05/the-magdalene-laundries-forced-labor-by.html .

I thought about this blog a couple of weeks ago as I was reading the memoir of the Irish writer, Edna O’Brien. O’Brien was born in 1930 into a conservative rural Catholic world in which the behavior of women was closely monitored, not only by their families but also by the Church.  The monitors were the priests, who despite being celibate (supposedly) claimed to be authorities on proper sexual behavior. (Just like today’s “liberal” Pope Francis who a while ago criticized a woman who had had seven caesarian births and was expecting her eighth child, saying “that is an irresponsibility.” Never mind the irresponsibility of the Church for continuing, in 2015, to oppose birth control) (see Catherine Harmon, “Someone is getting lost in all this talk about Francis and rabbits”. The Catholic World Report, January 20, 2015, https://www.google.ca/?gws_rd=ssl#q=Someone+is+getting+lost+in+all+this+talk+about+Francis+and+rabbits .   

O’Brien was a “good” Catholic girl who moved to the big city—Dublin--where she trained to become a pharmacist.  She was also very beautiful. On the day after her first sexual encounter, she went to confession. The priest just about called her a whore, referring to her “loathsome sin”  (p. 111).

Some years later, O’Brien started a sexual relationship with a married man, Ernest Gébler, whose his wife had run off to the United States with their son. One day at work, O’Brien overheard her boss and his wife talking about how her family was going to come and get her and have her “put away” because of her relationship with this man. O’Brien assumed this meant the lunatic asylum, but I wondered whether her family intended to have her incarcerated in one of the Magdalene Laundries, from which, given it was the 1950s, she might never have been released. She ran to Gebler’s house, and he then spirited her away to a friend’s house on the Isle of Man. Somehow, her family found out where she was and came to get her, with police assistance. Her brother strong-armed her into a car but she managed to escape.

This sounds like a happy story with Gébler as the romantic rescuer. But it isn’t. O’Brien and Gébler eventually married and had two sons in the 1950s (one, Carlo Gébler, is now a writer as well, though I haven’t read anything by him yet). O’Brien also started her writing career at the same time. Gébler, also a writer but one whose career was flagging, became jealous of her and forced her to sign over all her checks to him. One day, she received a check for almost £4,000, an enormous amount in those days, for film rights to one of her stories. She did not sign the check over to her husband right away, and he found it.  He took her up to their bedroom and started choking her, until she agreed to sign over the check. She went downstairs, signed the check, and walked out. She also went to the policed but did not file a charge.

She managed to get her children out of the house and took them to various places for safe-keeping, but through a mutual friend her husband contacted her and persuaded her to bring the children back to the house for the time being. But apparently he had sought legal advice, while she hadn’t. As soon as she handed over her children to her husband’s temporary (she thought) custody, he said to her “Thank you, Edna, you have just legally deserted them” (p.164) and closed the door.

Eventually this all got sorted out, in part, it seems, because O’Brien was now well known enough to obtain excellent legal advice, and she obtained custody of her sons. But the story goes to show how recently women have achieved their rights, even of access to their children. And how vulnerable still women are to physical abuse.

I have friend who is the same age as I am. She had a child “out of wedlock” in 1966. The father would not marry her, and as a consequence neither set of parents would help her, and there was no welfare for unwed mothers in those days. She had the baby in an unpleasant home for unwed mothers and gave it up for adoption. Later, she married the father and they had another child. She put up with him beating her but when she realized he would probably start beating the child, she decided to leave him. The day she left, he broke her arm.

So when we read about the treatment of women in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East today, we should remember how recently we ourselves, in Canada and the West, obtained our rights. Wife-beating and other abuses of women are still problems in contemporary Western society, but there are now laws to protect us, police are trained to be more sensitive, and there are shelters (though never enough) for abused women and their children. These changes are the result of the feminist movement of the 1960s and beyond. When you hear a young woman saying proudly that she is “not a feminist,” remind her of where she would be without my generation of feminists having fought for the rights she takes for granted today.

Book Note: Joachim Fest, Not I: Memoirs of a German Childhood

Book Note: Joachim Fest, Not I: Memoirs of a German Childhood

Joachim Fest (1926-2006) was a German historian, journalist and public intellectual. He is perhaps best known outside Germany for his position in the Historikerstreit, or historians’ debate, about whether the Holocaust was unique: Fest argued for its comparability to other mass atrocities such as the Soviet gulag and the Cambodian genocide. Recently I read his autobiography, Not I, translated into English by Martin Chalmers and published by Other Press in New York in 2012. 

Joachim Fest

It is a strange autobiography, almost dreamlike in places. Although from the ages of seven to nineteen he lived under Nazi rule, Fest seems more interested in the books he read, the authors he encountered, and the music and art to which he was exposed as he grew up, than in the actual life he lived with his parents. Nevertheless, we learn something of his background, and especially of his father.

His father, Johannes Fest, was a school principal in Berlin. A devout Catholic, he was disgusted by the Nazis. Because he refused to submit to their authority, he lost his job in 1933. Thereafter he remained at home, but took part in some clandestine political meetings. In the late 1930s he was given a chance to work again, but because he again refused to swear allegiance to the Nazis the chance was withdrawn. He managed to prevent his sons from joining the Hitler Youth, once shouting down a couple of large recruiters who came to their door. And he taught his three sons the Latin maxim, Etiam si omnes-ego non (Even if all other do--not I), from which Fest drew his title.

Johannes Fest disapproved of the increasing isolation of German Jews. As early as 1933 he urged his Jewish friends to leave Germany so vehemently that he was accused of having the same aim as the Nazis, wanting Germany to be “Judenrein” or free of Jews. In the late 1930s he sent Joachim and his older brother, Wolfgang, to go on weekly shopping trips for Jewish friends who were no longer allowed on the streets. During the war Johannes was very upset to learn after clandestinely listening to BBC broadcasts that the Nazis were engaging in mass killings of Jews in the East. 

As for Joachim, in 1939 he and his two brothers were expelled from an elite secondary school because he had been drawing caricatures of Hitler. At the new Catholic bearding school to which they were sent, they were eventually forced to join the Hitler Youth. By the end of the war Joachim and his older brother Wolfgang were recruited into the military. Joachim volunteered for the air force, telling his mother that he could thus avoid recruitment into the SS. He seems to have spent his entire military service in Germany and later France, where he was captured by the Americans. Despite a privileged position in the American POW camp (continuing until 1947) he attempted to escape. Meantime, Wolfgang died from an illness contracted at the front, and Johannes was also drafted, although he was in his 50s. He spent 18 months in Soviet captivity, returning home much diminished.

Fest brushes over very lightly the fate of those members of his family who were conquered by the Russians. His disabled aunt was torn from her wheelchair, raped multiple times, and then thrown down a stairwell, where she died.  His farmer uncle was shot in cold blood when he protested the way Russian soldiers were abusing his wife and daughters.  (For more on the Russian rapes, see Anonymous, A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City, New York, Metropolitan Books, 2005).  

There’s a lot that is missing from the book. Fest does not explain how his family was able to survive through his father’s unemployment, though it seems his mother came from quite a wealthy family. Nevertheless, she found the burden of caring for a family of five growing children without a regular income very difficult.  She would hint to her husband that for the sake of the family he should give in and join the Nazi party, but he would become infuriated by the suggestion. After the war, says Fest, she mentioned how hard it had been to run the household with very little money while her husband occupied himself with politics.

Nor does Fest explain precisely who his father was and what his activities were during the war.  Johannes Fest was important enough after the war, though, that when Joachim returned to Germany from his prison camp in France he flew on an American plane. Johannes was also a judge in a de-Nazification court after the war. But he expressed his disgust at the way these courts could be used by people who simply had grudges against each other (a problem nowadays in, for example, the Rwandan gacaca courts that are supposed to effect reconciliation between former génocidaires and their victims).

It would be good to read a proper biography of Fest and his family. Meantime, the book causes us to question the facile distinction between victims, perpetrators and bystanders that characterized much of the late 20^th century academic literature in comparative genocide studies. Fest’s father was not an active resister of the Nazis, as far as we can tell from this book. But he gave up his livelihood, attempted to assist his Jewish friends, and continued as long as he could to attend political meetings of those opposed to Hitler. Certainly he did not profit from the expulsion of the Jews: he wasn’t one of those Germans who gleefully took over Jews’ businesses, residences, and personal possessions. Was he, then, a mere bystander?

And what would all of us who have led privileged lives in the democratic West do in a similar situation?  If confronted with an evil as great as the Nazis, would we have the courage to renounce our livelihoods and impoverish our families?  I doubt that I would.

Guest Blog: Full Freedom of Association Wins Canadian Charter Protection

Guest Blog: Full Freedom of Association Wins Canadian Charter Protection

 

Note: The blog below is by my friend and colleague, Roy J. Adams, Sallows Human Rights Chair Emeritus, University of Saskatchewan and Professor Emeritus, McMaster University. Roy started working on human rights when he joined the now defunct Theme School on Human Rights and International Justice (which I directed from 1993 to 1999) at McMaster University to teach labour rights. Since then he has become a noted international expert in the field and is the author of the entry on Labor Rights in David P. Forsythe, ed. Encyclopedia of Human Rights (Oxford University Press, 2009), vol. 3, pp. 384-94. In its most recent decisions his work has been cited by the Supreme Court of Canada more frequently than that of any other author.

 

 

On January 31, 2015, the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) “constitutionalized” the right to strike, providing protection under Canada’s 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms to the last of the three key elements of freedom of association at work.

 

Under international labour/human rights law, freedom of association at work has three major components: the right of working people to organize themselves into unions, the right of working people’s associations freely to negotiate conditions of work with relevant employers, and the right of employees to strike (without putting their jobs in jeopardy or otherwise being ‘punished’) if those negotiations fail.

 

Those general principles have been elaborated over the past century by the International Labour Organization (ILO), the UN agency primarily responsible for global labour standards. The ILO, of which Canada is a member, has evolved a rich jurisprudence regarding the three basic rights. Despite being bound by ILO standards, with increasing frequency and heedlessness over the past seven decades Canada has offended them. Indeed the bulk of the ILO’s jurisprudence regarding the strike rights of public sector workers has been developed in response to complaints by Canadian public sector unions. Shamefully, that body of decisions is known around the world as the Canadian Jurisprudence.

 

Acceding to the argument that effective labour relations require expertise that it does not possess, the SCC decided in the 1980s that, when it came to collective bargaining and striking, it would defer to legislatures. Until early in the 21^st century, Canadian courts tolerated the growing delinquency of legislative branch of government.

 

But beginning with a case regarding farmworkers (Dunmore) – to whom the government of the province of Ontario had refused to give any legal protection to organize, bargain or strike – the SCC in 2001 began to change its tune. It ordered Ontario to effectively protect agricultural workers’ rights. In its 2007 Health Services Decision regarding the bargaining rights of health care workers in British Columbia, Canada’s highest court found unconstitutional government interference with collective bargaining. It gave a ringing endorsement to collective bargaining as a critical pillar of “human dignity, equality, liberty, respect for the autonomy of the person and the enhancement of democracy.” (see Health Services and Support-Facilities Subsector Bargaining Assn. v. British Columbia, 2007 SCC 27, paragraph 81).

 

In both of those cases, the Supreme Court relied heavily on international labour/human rights law. But that law was out of sync with Canadian labour policy, and Canadian governments regarded those decisions as aberrations. In response to the Dunmore decision, the Ontario government came up with a clever scheme to deal with farmworkers that just barely conformed with international standards but proved to be of little value to unions in the agricultural industry that had grown used to bargaining in a familiar statutorily-imposed format that provided for a legally protected right to strike should bargaining reach impasse. The Ontario government’s response to Dunmore, known as the Agricultural Employees Protection Act, provided for neither a right to strike nor an effective alternative such as binding arbitration and so went unused.

 

Even though the SCC continued to rely on international law, governments went on willfully offending that jurisprudence and in the process pressured the court to abandon its new course and reinstate the status quo. In two recent decisions, the court met that challenge.

 

Under international law all workers are supposed to be able to associate to pursue their employment interests, but throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century the federal government refused to allow the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Canada’s national police force, to do that. On Jan 16, the SCC said that the government must end that ban (see commentary, including mine, at lawofwork.ca ). International law permits governments to make an exception with regard to police, but in Canada nearly all police forces except for the Mounties are already organized, and the SCC found the Federal Government’s arguments against an exception to be unconvincing.

 

On January 31, 2015, in a case concerning a Saskatchewan statute that, contrary to international standards, forbade public sector workers from striking under specified circumstances, the SCC declared that the right to strike was protected under the Charter’s freedom of association clause (for more commentary, including mine, see lawofwork.ca).

 

The question now is: how much difference will these court decisions make? The SCC has strongly indicated that it will continue to rely on international law. It said in Health Service and repeated in its SFL (right to strike) decision: “the Charter should be presumed to provide at least as great a level of protection as is found in the international human rights documents that Canada has ratified” (Saskatchewan Federation of Labour v. Saskatchewan, 2015 SCC 4 at paragraph 64). With regard to freedom of association, the ILO constitution is a human rights document and that organization’s jurisprudence is the roadmap to effective protection and promotion of that right. So, the germane and correct thing for Canadian governments to do is to begin the process of bringing their statutes and policies in line with international law. If they do that, the human rights of Canadian workers will be progressively and rightfully protected. If they continue to struggle against that standard we will likely have a series of constitutional crises and the neglect of workers’ rights will persist.

 

I have been promoting compliance with international freedom of association standards in Canada for more than two decades and have met with a generally lethargic response. The unstated view seems to be that freedom of association is not really that important because employment laws and policies insure that Canadians are well enough paid and otherwise treated by their employers. The Satanic mines and mills are gone; the less-well-off have a government and charitable safety net to fall back on.

 

That view fails to take into consideration that approximately 70% of Canadian working people have no union representation and are being daily indoctrinated to tolerate and  adjust to non-democratic governance. And since there is no generally available scheme for fairly settling individual disputes, workers have no option other than to accept decisions of their superiors, even those that they regard to be unfair and unjust. Their other option is to quit their job, putting their economic wellbeing in jeopardy.

 

Under such conditions worker dignity and freedom and autonomy are compromised. To survive, too many must kow-tow to the boss no matter how arbitrary that person may be. Nor is such a system good for those in charge who come to think that they have a right to command and that democratic values are unimportant.

 

Too few seem to realize that freedom of association is a fundamental building block on which rests our entire human rights superstructure.

 

.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

African Union Chooses Dictator Mugabe as New Chair

African Union chooses Dictator Mugabe as New Chair

At the end of January 2015 Robert Mugabe was appointed Chair of the African Union (AU). Mugabe has been President of Zimbabwe since its independence in 1980. Although the honorary position of AU Chair normally rotates among the heads of state of host countries of AU summits, there is a precedent not to abide by this rotation, as in 2005 when international concern over gross human rights violations in Darfur influenced the AU not to allocate the Chair to Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir.

Zimbabwe is one of the case studies in my current book project on State Food Crimes, so I have following politics there over the last few years. Mugabe is a brutal dictator who since 2000 has wreaked enormous havoc on his country. Zimbabwe does have elections and there is an opposition party, but Mugabe and his political party pretty much run the show. There’s been massive political violence, torture, rape and murder since 2000, the worst during the 2008 elections. 

Robert Mugabe, Wiki Commons

Mugabe has seriously undermined Zimbabwe’s food supply. White farmers—many Zimbabwean citizens—used to produce much of Zimbabwe’s food, but Mugabe decided in 2000 to forcibly evict them from their land. This caused a massive drop in food production, as well as a loss of export earnings, as Zimbabwe used to be the “breadbasket” for other countries in East Africa.  The forcible closings of these farms meant that about 150,000 to 200,000 farm workers lost their jobs; if you add their dependents, about 1.5 to 2 million people were without support. The purpose of redistributing the land was supposed to be to resettle landless peasants, but Mugabe gave many of the farms to his relatives and cronies. 

Also, in order to stop urban residents from voting for the opposition party, in 20

05 Mugabe authorized “operation drive out trash” in which about 700,000 urban residents were driven out of their homes. Some of these people then migrated to newly discovered diamond fields, but Mugabe and his cronies took over the diamonds, expelling some of the small, independent diamond diggers and enslaving others.

Mugabe’s fellow heads of state in the AU know all this, but most of them don’t care. Naming Mugabe its Chair is the latest is a series of AU acts defending Mugabe. In 2005, the AU resisted calls from the US and Britain to criticize Operation Drive Out Trash. In 2006, it refused to make public a report critical of Zimbabwe’s human rights record, which had been prepared two years earlier by the AU Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights.

In May 2007, the African bloc at the UN successfully nominated Zimbabwe’s Environment Minister to chair the UN Commission on Sustainable Development, despite allegations that he had ruined a previously successful white-owned farm that had been given to him during land redistribution. In 2011 Zimbabwe assumed its turn as chair of the AU’s Peace and Security Council.

demonstartion  against Mugabe infront of the Zimbabwan embassy in London, 2006
Wiki Commons

The uncritical attitude of the AU to Mugabe reflected other African leaders’ respect for his leadership in the anti-colonial struggle in Zimbabwe from 1965 to 1980, along with his support for the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. He was considered one of the “grand old men” of the African liberation movement. In 2002, then President of South Africa Thabo Mbeki claimed that attempts in the British Commonwealth (an organization of English-speaking states, many of which are former British colonies) to ostracize Mugabe were “inspired by notions of white supremacy.” In 2005, South African Foreign Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zulu argued that there was an “element of racism” against Mugabe, and that “the hullaballoo is about black people taking land from white people.”

Mugabe himself regularly attributed attempts to force him to change his policies to “white,” “Western,” or “imperialist” interference. At the UN World Food Summit in Rome in November 2009, he accused “certain countries whose interests stand opposed to our quest for the equity and justice of our land reforms,” claiming that these countries were neo-colonial powers who had imposed unilateral sanctions in order to undermine Zimbabwe’s land reforms and make it dependent on food imports.

Article 3, g of the Constitutive Act of the AU states that its objectives include “democratic principles and institutions, popular participation and good governance.” This doesn’t seem to be what’s going on right now. Rather, African heads of state are rallying around Mugabe in a protective move. Many other heads of state in Africa are dictators who want to protect their own interests. Others are more concerned with scoring point against the West than protecting the human rights of ordinary Africans.

Many years ago I wrote a book about human rights in Africa.  In it, I referred to the then Organization of African Unity (OAU), which preceded the formation of the AU, as an “organization for the protection of rights of heads of state” in Africa (Rhoda E. Howard, Human Rights in Commonwealth Africa, Rowman and Littlefield, 1986, p. 4). The principal purpose of the OAU seemed to be to preserve the power, wealth and privileges of the “big men” who had made it to the top in then newly independent Africa.  Nearly 30 years later, it seems that is also the purpose of the AU.

Solitary Confinement: A Barbaric Canadian Practice

Solitary Confinement: A Barbaric Canadian Practice

On August 2, 2012 I posted a blog called, “Torture in American Prisons,” which you can find here. https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6700283514603333187#editor/target=post;postID=2920370963420447024;onPublishedMenu=posts;onClosedMenu=posts;postNum=63;src=postname. Among other things, this post discusses solitary confinement as a form of torture.  

Ashley Smith, wiki commons

Lately there’s been a lot of press in Canada about solitary confinement because of two cases.  The first was of Ashley Smith, who had originally been convicted at the age of 14 of throwing crabapples (a kind of fruit) at a mailman. Unable to control her behavior while she was in juvenile detention, as soon as she turned 18 (the age of adulthood in Canada) authorities transferred her from one prison to another, all over Canada, until finally she took her own life on October 19, 2007.  She was in solitary confinement and choked herself to death while guards watched from outside her cell. These guards had been ordered not to interfere unless they thought her life was in danger. Which it was.

The second case was of Edward Snowshoe, a young Aboriginal man also in solitary confinement. After 162 days, unable to bear it any longer, he killed himself (this was in 2010). Snowshoe had been convicted of shooting and injuring a taxi driver during a robbery in Inuvik, in Canada’s far north. This was a serious crime, but we are not supposed to sentence people to death in Canada.

Edward Snowshoe, top right. Wiki Commons

Snowshoe’s case is yet another travesty of Aboriginal life. Disproportionately high numbers of Aboriginal people in Canada are incarcerated (when they aren’t actually being murdered, as four times as many Aboriginal than non-Aboriginal women are, but that’s a topic for another blog). Corrections authorities and criminologists have tried for several decades to ameliorate Aboriginal prisoners’ conditions, but they haven’t succeeded yet.

At the same time as this discussion of solitary confinement has been going on, the Canadian Government has introduced new legislation called the Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Act. This legally unnecessary act (legally unnecessary because the “barbaric” practices it prohibits are already covered by other laws) targets forced marriages. I agree that forced marriages should be banned, but so should other far more barbaric acts. The widespread use of solitary confinement in Canadian prisons is one of them.

I must admit that I sometimes have the name knee-jerk reaction to violent criminals that Canada’s ruling Conservative Party seems to have. I wrote about the Conservative Party’s crime creation agenda in my October 19, 2012 post “Canada’s Crime Creation Policy”, which you can access here http://rhodahassmann.blogspot.ca/2012_10_01_archive.html.

Wazim Ganesh and his mon. Wiki Commons 

This morning (January 23, 2014) as I was thinking about writing this post, I saw an article in my local paper, The Hamilton Spectator, (pp. A1 and A4) entitled “Beating victim’s mom says jails unsafe.” Wazim Ganesh was a 21-year old prisoner in Hamilton’s Barton Street jail, who had been convicted of assault, including sexual assault. Another prisoner, Jordan McPhee, allegedly beat him up, with the result that Ganesh is now seriously brain damaged, unable to speak or walk on his own. McPhee had already been charged for beating a cellmate at another penal institution. There is a very affecting picture of Ganesh and his mother in his hospital room. When I read the article and saw the picture, my reaction was “lock him (McPhee) up and throw away the key”.

But there are so many things wrong here that we ignore. I know there’s a jail a ten-minutes’ drive from where I live, but I’ve never seriously thought about what that means, even though I once had a private tour of part of it, when I served from 1991 to 1996 as a member of the (Hamilton) Mayor’s Committee against Racism and Discrimination.) But that jail, like probably every other one in Canada, is overcrowded and underfunded. Too many prisoners in one cell, too many violent prisoners, too many prisoners with mental illness, and too many Aboriginal prisoners. 

Juan Mendez, UN website

Mental illness is a special problem. Like many other Western jurisdictions, a few decades ago Canada stopped “warehousing” its mental patients in hospitals and released them “into the community.” But despite the best intentions of many Canadian volunteers, such as those who run the John Howard Society (for male prisoners) and the Elizabeth Fry Society (for female prisoners) there’s hardly any support for these mentally ill people. So now we warehouse the ones we convict of crimes in prisons instead of hospitals.  And when we really can’t control them, we throw them in solitary confinement.

Juan Méndez, the United Nations Rapporteur (reporter) on torture condemned solitary confinement in October 2011. He defined it as isolation for at least 22 hours a day without any human contact except for prison guards, and said solitary confinement for more than 15 days should be absolutely prohibited.  He says any more than 15 days of solitary could amount to torture.  And he says solitary confinement of juveniles and the mentally ill should be absolutely prohibited.

So it’s official: Canada has the distinction of being a torture state.

Book Note: Condoleezza Rice's Extraordinary, Ordinary People

Book Note: Condoleezza Rice’s Extraordinary, Ordinary People

People who read this blog will know that I don’t generally like U.S. Republicans, nor do I like people who support the American gun lobby. Nevertheless, I have just finished reading Condoleezza Rice’s 2010 memoir, Extraordinary, Ordinary People.  A cumbersome title, referring to her parents, whom she adored. I wanted to read this memoir because Rice was the first black woman ever to be a presidential National Security Advisor, and then to be Secretary of State (the equivalent of a Foreign Minister) under George W. Bush.

Condoleezza Rice was born in 1954 in Birmingham, Alabama, where she grew up. Birmingham, she tells us, was the most segregated city in the US South.  Her parents were educated professionals, her father a Presbyterian minister and her mother a teacher. At one point in her early childhood they tried to register to vote.  At that time, it was still permitted to “test” voters (usually black) to see if they were fit to vote; the Voting Rights Act was still to come in 1965. Her mother was light-skinned and the registrar gave her an easy “test”: who was the first American President. But there was a jar of beans on the registrar’s desk, and her darker-skinned father was asked how many beans were in the jar. Obviously, he couldn’t answer correctly, so he was denied the vote.

At the time, however, Alabama was dominated by segregationist Southern Democrats.  Republicans were trying to get more votes, and an acquaintance told Rice’s father that there was a Republican registrar who would let blacks register to vote. So her father went to that registrar, was registered as a voter, and always after than voted Republican. 

wiki commons

Rice also remembers the first time her family went out to dinner in a “white” restaurant, just after the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Years later in the White House, colleagues were suggesting that they not celebrate the 40^th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act and instead celebrate the 40^th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act the next year. She hit the roof, saying the Civil Rights Act was what had permitted her and her parents to eat in a newly desegregated restaurant.

But what hit me most in her memoir was her explanation of why she supports the Second Amendment to the US Constitution, the one that gives individual citizens the right to bear arms. She takes seriously the right of citizens to protect themselves against their government.

In 1963, at the height of the US Civil Rights Movement, Birmingham erupted in violence and fear. Rice remembers hearing bombs explode in her neighborhood. She remembers the deaths of four African-American girls at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, and attending their funerals.  She used to play dolls with one of the girls, and the others were all known to members of her tight-knit black middle-class community.

 In response to the violence, she remembers when her father sat on the porch the entire long night, a gun on his lap. The men of her neighborhood organized patrols to protect the two entrances to their community from the Ku Klux Klan (a powerful white racist organization formed in 1866 and supported by many powerful whites, including members of governments).  As she put it, if black men in Birmingham had had to register their guns, “Bull” Connor, the cruelly segregationist mayor who ran Birmingham, would have known who had guns and confiscated them.  

Rice tells us that she really admired President John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert, both assassinated, in 1963 and 1968 respectively. At one point she was a registered Democrat. But became a Soviet specialist after studying at the University of Denver with the former Czech diplomat Josef Korbel (father of her predecessor Madeleine Albright, the first woman Secretary of State). She was disappointed with the Democrat President Jimmy Carter’s lack of knowledge of Russia, and she particularly disapproved of his decision to boycott the 1980 Moscow Olympics because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. By contrast, she thought that Ronald Reagan had a better understanding of the Soviets, so she became a Republican.

Condoleezza Rice had a strong sense of what it means to be African-American. She was raised on the principle that to get ahead, she had to be twice as good as any white person. Her parents also discouraged her from feeling like a victim, instead encouraging her to work very hard to make the best of the circumstances she was in. She is a supporter of affirmative action programs but believes they should be implemented by spotting talented people and giving them mentoring and financial assistance, not by lowering standards.

So I guess what this tells us is that you shouldn’t make assumptions about people based on their politics. I never thought I would encounter a reasonable argument on the right to bear arms, but Condoleezza Rice has given me something to think about, as has her account of growing up African-American.

Update: A friend of mine has complained to me about this blog. He considers Condoleezza Rice to be a war criminal because, he says, she signed off on the US use of torture during the G.W.Bush administration. “What’s next,” he asked me, “a favourable review of a book about Stalin’s childhood?”  I think he has a valid point, although I would have to check the facts about Rice’s exact role in authorizing torture.  So I want to make clear that if Rice publishes a second memoir about her role in the Bush II administration, I will be critical of it.  It is an interesting question though: should we be interested in the early lives of public figures and if so, should that interest only pertain to their later illegal or evil acts?

Extra

Charlie Hebdo and Freedom of Speech

Charlie Hebdo and Freedom of Speech

As everyone reading this blog knows, two days ago (January 7, 2015) the offices of a French satirical magazine called Charlie Hebdo were attacked in Paris by Muslim extremists a

reporters and police outside the Charlie Hebdo offices after the shooting,
8 January 2015, wiki commons

nd twelve people were killed. Two of them, a copy-editor and a policeman, had Muslim names.

This morning (January 9, 2015) on The Current, a radio program of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), there was a debate among journalists about whether the cartoons that Charlie Hebdo published should be re-published in Canada.  A Quebec journalist argued that every media outlet in North America should publish them. The spokesperson from the CBC argued that the CBC hadn’t published the cartoons before the attack, so why should it publish them afterwards. That’s like saying that if the CBC hadn’t published a picture of a Canadian before she was murdered, why it should publish the picture afterwards?  It seems that some journalists are frightened to publish these cartoons and are trying to find rationales for not doing so within the framework of journalistic ethics and responsibility to viewers or readers.

the cover of the Charlie Hebdo renamed Charia Hebdo,
the bubble says: 100 lashes if you do not die of laughter, wiki commons

It was particularly ridiculous this morning to listen to a trio of (presumably) non-Muslim Canadians argue about what “moderate” Muslim Canadians might find offensive. Personally, I find the term “moderate Muslim” itself offensive. It implies that my fellow citizens who are Muslims must constantly defend themselves against the charge that they might be religious fanatics. Canadian Christians don’t have to go around all the time saying, “I’m Christian, but I’m not a fanatic” as if they were all members of extremist white, self-styled Christian groups unless proved otherwise.

I asked myself if I would be willing to publish Charlie Hebdo cartoons.  There isn’t a complete set of particular cartoons, as there was during the 2006 “Danish cartoon” controversy; Charlie Hebdo was targeted because of its supposed irreverence to Islam  over the years.  I found a set of their cartoons, with translation and explanations, here. http://www.vox.com/2015/1/7/7507883/charlie-hebdo-explained-covers. Some of the cartoons are about Islam but others are about Christianity or politics. As the authors of the piece explain,  Charlie Hebdo was (is?) a journal that resolutely defended French secularism and liked to mock all kinds of pretentious authority. I particularly liked the cartoon of Mohamed returning to earth and being beheaded by an Islamic State-type fanatic, even though he identifies himself.

Freedom of speech is a core human right, usually identified as a political right. In the international academic debates on human rights, there are those who claim that civil/political rights  are “Western,”  “imperialist,” and irrelevant to the rest of the world.  I find these arguments facile. They tend to emanate from people who either do not investigate Western history to see how important freedom of speech has been in the evolution and protection of Western democracies, and/or from people who think that the history of the West has nothing to teach other societies that are not democracies or, perhaps, don’t wish to become democratic, rights-protective societies (See my chapter, ”Historical Amnesia, Genocide, and the Rejection of Universal Human Rights,” pages 172-82 in

Mark Goodale, ed. Human Rights at the Crossroads, Oxford University Press, 2013).     

Yet dictatorial, authoritarian or totalitarian governments all impose controls on freedom of speech, from North Korea to China to Russia to Iran to numerous African dictatorships.  Some people might argue that you can live comfortable lives without this right, as in China. But in China today, even as the rich get richer the poor are left behind, rural to urban migrants are treated as if they do not exist, the state or its corporate cronies can expropriate your property and force you out of your home--- and the list goes on. And those who criticize these policies are jailed or tortured or forced into exile.

Now we have a new kind of non-state censorship. Fanatical Muslim extremists are trying to stop all portrayals of Islam that they consider offensive. Some well-meaning non-Muslim Westerners, like the journalist I heard today, seem to assume that these fanatics also represent the views of “moderate” Muslims, whom non-Muslims should not “offend” by publishing cartoons about Islam, or Mohammad, or the burqa. Muslim Westerners, it seems, are very thin-skinned, lack a sense of humor, and are incapable of exercising their religion if their fellow citizens publish cartoons about Islam. I don’t think this is the case. Most of the Muslims I know in Canada are as attached as I am to freedom of speech.

If we only have one human right, it should be freedom of speech. From freedom of speech flows freedom of the press and freedom of association. These rights make it possible to criticize governments, which in turn sometimes persuades them (in democracies, at least) to change their policies. Just as we can criticize governments, so we should be able to criticize religions. Without freedom of speech and the press, for example, the Roman Catholic Church would probably still be burying its head in the sand about widespread abuse of children by priests. I know a lot of practicing Catholics (family and friends) and I’ve yet to hear one claim to be “offended” by such criticism of their church.

I am exercising my right to freedom of speech as I write this blog. I don’t know how much courage I have (not very much, I suspect); certainly, I don’t  have as much courage as all the journalists and cartoonists who wrote and drew for Charlie Hebdo. They are martyrs to a centuries-long battle for freedom.