Well, I guess nous sommes Charlie Hebdo now. At least for a while.

The barbaric assault on the French satirical publication truly is an attack on everyone who thinks and writes and, yes, snarks for a living. CH is a French institution -- albeit one that went out of business for a flat decade a while back. It made a meal of anyone and everyone. Thanks to the BBC -- which possesses an attention span surpassing that of the average flea, as opposed to most of our American media, which already is rounding into Eek, Monsters! mode -- we learn that CH took nothing seriously, and treated every institution in French society as scabrously as an angry drunk in an alley full of bricks.

Drawing on France's strong tradition of bandes dessinees (comic strips), cartoons and caricatures are Charlie Hebdo's defining feature. Over the years, it has printed examples which make its representations of Muhammad look like mild illustrations from a children's book. Police would be shown holding the dripping heads of immigrants; there would be masturbating nuns; popes wearing condoms - anything to make a point. As a newspaper, Charlie Hebdo suffers from constant comparison with its better-known and more successful rival, Le Canard Enchaine. Both are animated by the same urge to challenge the powers-that-be. But if Le Canard is all about scoops and unreported secrets, Charlie is both cruder and crueller - deploying a mix of cartoons and an often vicious polemical wit.

This is a publication that took a shot at Charles deGaulle the day the guy died.

In 1970 came the famous moment of Charlie's creation. Two dramatic events were dominating the news: a terrible fire at a discotheque which killed more than 100 people; and the death of former President Gen Charles de Gaulle. Hara-Kiri led its edition with a headline mocking the General's death: "Bal tragique a Colombey - un mort", meaning "Tragic dance at Colombey [de Gaulle's home] - one dead." The subsequent scandal led to Hara-Kiri being banned. To which its journalists promptly responded by setting up a new weekly - Charlie Hebdo.

I think we can all imagine in the abstract the reaction of the American right to a French (eek!) publication that ran cartoons of masturbating nuns and of the pope sporting a condom. However, the 12 people who were slaughtered there were killed by the right people, so the masturbating nuns are long forgotten, and the dead likely now are conscripted into involuntary martyrdom by our professional keyboard warriors and green-room commandos, people whom the murdered cartoonists would have drawn with condoms on their heads, had they lives. Steve M has the gory instant reaction from FoxWorld, which is baptizing itself in borrowed blood again. (I especially like the way Elisabeth Hasselbeck hangs this on...wait for it...Bill de Blasio. Unless NYPD officers are allowed to strangle people in broad daylight, the terrorists in France will kill us all in our beds. To borrow once again from the great Dan Jenkins -- if Elisabeth had a brain, she'd be outside playing with it.) I think it's important to point out that we don't know what any of these murderers actually look like yet. We know what they yelled, and we are entitled to suspect that CH's lampooning of Islam was the cause of this butchery, since it seems to have inspired someone on a previous occasion to firebomb the publication's offices. But we don't know yet what they look like -- they were wearing ski masks -- so we don't know yet what "political correctness" has to do with anything. Unless it has to do with masturbating nuns.

Nevertheless, and despite the fact that the witnesses make the murderers sound like Bond villains straight from central casting, this was unquestionably an assault on the right of free expression, probably committed in the name of religious fanaticism. It was an act of medieval, anti-Enlightenment barbarism, and the fact that a lot of people who aren't usually so tender toward France and its leftists -- or towards the Enlightenment itself, for that matter -- have attached themselves to the horror in order to proclaim their righteousness atop a pile of corpses ought not to obscure the truth of it. There are genuine values -- honored only in the breach by some, but no less genuine for that -- under armed assault here. Charlie Hebdo's staff was murdered to stifle the publication's voice, no less thanElijah Lovejoy was murdered to stifle his. This is the mass, unbridled, brainless Id of the barbarian at war with modernity in all its expressions. This is where anti-science leads, where a contempt for education leads, where the suppression of women leads, where marrying political fanaticism to religious fervor almost always leads. This is where theocracy brings us, over and over again.In 1572, in Paris, on St. Bartholomew's Day, 3000 French Huguenot Protestants were butchered by Catholic mobs. (The death toll throughout France is thought to have been over 70,000.) None of this is new. It rises from the same foul ground it always has. This is why Mr. Madison believed that the adoption of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire by Constantine to be one of the worst things that ever happened to both religion and government. Official religions end in blood, always. That's why we don't have one here. Nous sommes Charlie, I guess, but, deep in us all, in that part of us that reeks of stale incense and the smell of old and guttering candles, nous sommes des barbares, aussi. And "political correctness," that empty, impotent phrase, is inadequate to account for the monsters that lurk in the shadows there.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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