Your Danish Cartoons Hangover Update

* well, one of these is certainly necessary.

* start here for a summary. In fact, just sort of stay there. That'll get you up to speed and there's more time to a link-heavy appraisal in future days.

* basically, what seems to have happened is that the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo put out an edition with Muhammed-related cartoons just as the international community was reeling a bit from violence and political reprisals regarding the dissemination of an American-originated video with anti-Prophet elements.

* so, as might be expected, this move put French political authorities into a defensive crouch to maybe end all comics-related defensive crouches, suspending embassy operations and basically putting the entire country on reprisal alert. Other than threats on the lives of some of those involved -- which you can generate by being a web site thousands of miles removed from such actions, so it's hardly impressive but still scary -- I'm not sure we've seen anything substantial yet.

* it's also prompted a shit storm of debate about what many people see as a provocative and irresponsible decision on the magazine's part to engage with this issue, at this time, in that way. This has a different feel to it in France than it might over here. The internal politics in France are different than what passes for same in North America. There's a cultural landscape in regards to the mainstreaming of citizens that practice Islam that's distinct from what exists here. There are more stringent laws to be negotiated, even.

* I think a key in terms of my thinking about it is that Charlie Hebdo is a satirical magazine, and offense is what magazines like that might be expected to engage. There is also, for reasons both expected and sort of awful, a context for making such cartoons now that allow them to work as advocacy for a certain profession that doing a bunch out of left field didn't provide. I think these are clear distinctions from the original cartoons in Jyllands-Posten, which I thought was an odd and unnecessary thing for a newspaper to be doing at that point in time.

* one other small issue that I find sort of fascinating is that as the video part of this story hit I saw some television network attempts to place the violence caused into context, which included a sentence or two on the original Danish Cartoons Controversy. What was interesting to me is that in both cases the initial action was sort of conflated with Kurt Westergaard's various public travails and triumphs since that day.
 
posted 8:00 am PST | Permalink
 

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