a quick run-down of what’s an actually racist/offensive cartoon
since it looks like a lot of people still don’t get that they’re accusing the Charlie Hebdo people of being EXACTLY THE SAME KIND OF PEOPLE THOSE CARTOONISTS LOATHED, translated in those people were left-wing socialists/atheists and not racist/Islamophobic pieces of right-wing trash and you still think that it doesn’t matter in the end because those cartoons are offensive anyway and so they knew the risk of drawing them (???? NO ONE SHOULD DIE FOR A COMIC), I’m taking the liberty of showing you some choice cartoons/comics from actual racist right-wing Italian magazines/newspapers and comparing them with the Charlie Hebdo comics, and if you still think that there’s no difference whatsoever I don’t know what else to tell you.
Warning before going in: I’m tagging this post with a racism warning because it actually has real racist content - the Italian strips. I’m not tagging it racism for the French ones.
Okay, let’s start and let’s hope I don’t feel like I have to take fifteen showers after I’m done.
First instance: let’s see a bit about Mario Balotelli. I don’t have an opinion on the guy regardless because I don’t care for football, but he always gets his fair share of racist vignettes when he apparently does a game wrong. Let’s see:
This is from a sports newspaper from 2011. If I have to explain you, he’s depicted the way King Kong was in the 30s movie when he got up the Empire State Building. ACTUAL BLACK PERSON BEING EQUATED TO A MONKEY, and to King Kong for that matter.
Meanwhile, as everyone has explained you until this point, when Charlie Hebdo depicted Christiane Taubira like this:
They were poking fun at the FRONT NATIONAL PEOPLE WHO SAY THAT KIND OF THING. And I read ‘you can’t know they’re making fun of something because there’s the red and blue flame in the bottom, you still see a black woman depicted like a monkey’. Sorry, but I’m not French, I’m not exactly that well-versed into French politics because I had to look up who this was, but I got instantly that they were poking fun at the Front National because the neofascists groups in Italy have exactly the same symbol, it’s just red and green and not red and blue. Sucks to be you if you don’t get it, but any European halfway familiar with recent history would have gotten it, because the flame drawn like that is a pretty popular symbol for neo-fascist parties/political organizations. So no. If you don’t understand it too bad for you, but the title says GROUPING OF BLUE RACISTS LITERALLY, did they have to spell it more clearly? If you know the context, it’s clear as rain. If you don’t too bad, but like if now I go read an American magazine making fun like that of Republican politicians I don’t know about and I don’t get it because I don’t know the context, do I have the right to say that humor is gross/stupid/harmful? No, because I don’t get it.
ACTUALLY WAIT A MOMENT I HAD FORGOTTEN! The newspaper Libero, which is the one I’m going to quote most in this post, once made a comic about Cecile Kyenge, our former black minister, who was the first black woman being a minister in Italy and who they hated along with the people from our local xenophobic party Lega Nord because uuuhm she was black. Pretty much.
The dude she’s throwing bananas at is Roberto Maroni, former chief of the aforementioned Lega Nord party. I’d like to inform you that at some point supporters from Lega Nord really threw bananas at her - I don’t remember if it was before or after this was published. Anyway, the comment above is from a guy from the left party (…) who says that it’s a very fun cartoon. WOW.
Anyway, let’s go on. Always Balotelli, this was on a right-wing newspaper after Italy got thrown out of the World Cup this year - the guy in the pot is the Italian goalkeeper Buffon who argued with Balotelli after the defeat and said something like ‘young people in this team didn’t do the work and we only won one game because of the old guard’:
The headline says Balotelli: nig***s are better than the Italians. He’s wrong, but people who praised him need to shut up. The red title over the headline says treated him like he was made of glass and then dumped.
Now let’s move on from Balotelli and let’s go through a few other comics from the same newspaper as the amazing above vignette. So, ex-PM Silvio Berlusconi once said that he’d never fuck Angela Merkel because she’s a fat-ass. Then I suppose she went on a diet or something later, and they published this using the same fat-ass comment as SB:
Also, once she said that she feared Berlusconi coming back to power because he was bad business. How did they answer?
The guy kicking her behind is obviously Italian looking a the colors of the shoes.
Also, these people were all in favor of going to war with the US when Bush was in charge, BUT what do they have to say about Obama?
Do I have to explain this one to you?
Ah wait, some more with Obama, let’s take a break from Libero. So, after Obama was elected the first time, Silvio Berlusconi goes like ‘oh it’s nice, now they have a young and tanned president!!’. At which someone pointed out that maybe it was a tad racist, and he goes like ‘if people think I’m racist then they need a degree in being dicks’. Anyway, what happens after that? A guy who made satirical comics for what’s the most sold newspaper in the country does this:
The caption is ‘you wretch, you betrayed me with the nig**r butler’. That’s the n-word right there. On the first page of Italy’s most sold and widely-distributed newspaper. By the way, everyone said it was disgusting the day after it was published. Just for curiosity, I went to see if there was a Charlie Hebdo comic about American election results concerning Obama. The only cover I found was actually about Romney:
It says, for a white house, a real white house!, while the two people with the banner behind him which I can’t recognize rn but
I suppose they’re republicanscorrection thanks to summer-librarian they’re actually from the French right wing, are saying something like we say no to votes of immigrants. WOW SO RACIST SO BACKWARD SO HORRIBLE? They’re poking fun at fucking Mitt Romney. The only other cover I found with Obama was poking fun at the current French president actually and I don’t know enough about the context/what Hollande was saying to do an analysis - it’s here by the way - but from what I gather it was about a Socialist party congress in 2008 and I suppose it was about the municipal elections that year? Idk but certainly they were being a lot more classy than we were.ETA: context by summer-librarian again thanks, the basics was that Obama made people dream and the socialist French party was still kinda pathetic even if they had won the municipal elections (I gather), thanks again. :D
AND WAIT, LET’S GO ABOUT ALL MUSLIMS ARE TERRORISTS/ISLAMOPHOBIA! This is about Beppe Grillo, who’s a certified idiot but is also not allied with Silvio Berlusconi aka the guy these idiots support:
Guy is depicted as Osama Bin Laden. And I mean, he’s a piece of crap, but he hasn’t organized terrorist attacks on the US yet and he’s not the head of a terrorist organization. How does that not generalize things and how is this not really offensive/islamophobic/racist since it’s assuming that a jerk running against them in the election is as bad as Bin Laden? Ah but wait, let’s see one of those horrible Charlie Hebdo comics as well -
There’s Muhammad literally saying he doesn’t want to be worshipped by assholes. It’s as if they depicted Jesus Christ in front of a bunch of Westboro Baptist Church supporters saying it’s hard to be loved by these assholes. If they did that, does that mean they hate Jesus? No, THEY HATE THE ASSHOLES DOING SHITTY THINGS IN THE NAME OF JESUS, same as these people are hatting on assholes doing shitty things in the name of Allah/the Prophet. And if you go saying they’re still committing blasphemy guess what, in France it’s not a capital offense and they’re atheists. They have the freedom to say what they want. Sorry, but that’s how it fucking works. (And if you say ‘but Christians never prohibited depictions of God’, go look what iconoclasm was on Wikipedia - now they don’t, at some point they did, it’s a cultural difference but it’s a debate that’s happened in both Islam, Judaism and Christianity, it’s not something exclusive.) Being offended doesn’t give you the right to kill people anyway. People who, as others have pointed out, made fun of every religion under the sun. I can assure you that if my grandmother saw their covers about Pope Francis or Pope Benedict that I’m going to link you here, she’d flip out and say she was greatly offended, and she’d be, but it’s not like she’d go grab a gun and a plane to Paris to shoot at the cartoonists. Anyway, the covers:
(caption: the Pope in Rio! Ready to do everything to gain some clients or something like that)
(caption: the resigning Pope - finally free!)
If anyone needs context, the person the Pope is snuggling up to is a Swiss guard and there’s been jokes about Benedict’s supposed sexual preferences for a while around here, but anyway, does any of the above comics say all Catholics are shit? No, they’re criticizing the Catholic Church as a whole. Now, that shit cracked me up when I saw it. I suppose it wouldn’t crack up many Catholics equally, but you do see that their target isn’t just offending blindly but making fun of specific people/institutions while making a point? The other comics I linked above are just gross and make no point whatsoever other than showing how dumb is their position, these ones actually are making a bigger point. Now you can dislike the humor as much as you like, it’s hardly refined British dry wit, but these people, as much as you’d like to believe the contrary, were not racist, were not anything-phobic and by saying that they are you are equating them with the people they criticized. Think about that one moment.
And now I feel literally dirty because I had to go on Libero’s website to get a few of those strips.
I really, really hope you can see the difference.
The two men in the background in the Mitt Romney cover are actually members of the UMP (french right wing) :)
And the cover Obama/Hollande just meant that Obama made people dream etc, and that our Socialist Party was a bit pathetic.
Thank you for this anyways!No problem and I edited the post with your corrections :D I sorta had grasped the general meaning of the Obama/Hollande cover because that’s how I feel about the left party here but I figured I wouldn’t draw conclusions XD
While I personally lean more right fiscally I do consider myself a moderate I think it’s important to understand Charlie Hebdo’s point and understand where they are coming from. They are not racist and nobody deserves such brutality.
(via socialjusticefail)