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Studying Japanese at Langues O' (and Indonesian in my spare time). Future owner of a car with a diplomatic licence plate. Currently fond of... loads of stuff. CAROL ☆ CORPS 21 years old girl, born and raise in Paris but currently living in Tôkyô. I'm an...

[wondergenie]

OH MY GOD RIGHT SO THE NORWEGIAN COMMENTATOR WAS JUST LIKE

“A millennium or so ago the British empire dominated a large part of the worlds countries, but now the only dominating they do is the bottom of the Eurovision score list.”

daMN.

[zevranai-deactivated20210407]

“building bridges between countries” yeah sure wait till it’s voting time

[missprg-deactivated20150723]

Europe at the moment:

[lourher]

France : has like 6 neighbors but 0 friend

[toddsfall]

the reason why europe is never in any dystopian novels, is bc we already got a solid system to work out our problems

[10mb]

People going like “Why is Australia in Eurovision it is EUROvision” guys who cares as long as we exclude America we cool

[godwound]

                                why

          why                                             why

why          slow songs at eurovision             why

         why                                            why

                               why

[angelik0w]

« Because of one cartoon some people disliked,  some are starting to say « yeah but… ». There is no « but » alright. Charlie Hebdo was on all antiracist fronts. And those people trying to tell us that Charlie was a racist paper, that’s scandalous.  It’s an insult to the memory and to the struggle of those people we just lost. Stop offending the dead and the living. Because when you start insulting and being hateful, launching an angry mob on journalists, this is what happens. » Dominique Sopo, President of SOS Racisme, the most prominent anti-racist association in France. (Watch the whole thing here.)

[angelik0w]

Thanks to queenfosse for creating the original post and to holydoodly for translating.

[shinhye]

[dammitperseus]

Tout à l’heure je prenais une douche et puis j’ai commencé à penser un peu et

oh

oh

#impliedVallande

[nofuckingfucksgiven-deactivated]

SERIEUX FAUT QUE T’ARRETE L’ALCOOL

[lourher]

i was gone for like 2 days, WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON??????

[les-cartons]

[hermionejgldn-deactivated201501]

and you don't think that a lot of these Muslims are doing so because they feel pressured by other French citizens and the French government to do so?? and that friday prayers have been dedicated to the victims because they don't want their mosque attacked with grenades? if they don't come and speak out then everyone will think they are terrorist sympathisers and they will end up victims of abuse that others have already suffered since the shootings.

Given that :

-there has not been pressure on muslim people by french government after the attack. In fact, all french politicians and the media repeatedly said that muslims should not be associated with terrorism and that all french people should stay united. Many, many people have also shared solidarity towards french muslims. Wanna know the only place where I heard things like “no one is talking about the muslim cop”, “no one is talking about the threat to muslims”? TUMBLR. We are talking about these things in France. Even fucking facebook is talking about these things. The immediate reaction to the attack in France was NOT blaming the muslims, it was “je suis Charlie” : everyone united in the mourning, regardless of our religion.

- islamophobic people who attack on mosques are stupid, uneducated shitheads who will not care about the fact that immams dedicated prayers to the cartoonists. If they dont already know that islam is a religion of peace, honestly, nothing will make them change their stupid mind. And I’m sure that immams are aware of that.

no, I dont think muslims are supporting Charlie Hebdo because they feel pressured to. Islamophobia is a problem and the attack is certainly not helping that. But I’m 100% sure that muslims are supporting Charlie Hebdo because they are french citizens, the vast majority of them are born in France, therefore the notion of freedom of speech and satire is part of their cultural identity. They are not just “muslims”. They are FRENCH muslims.

[hermionejgldn-deactivated201501]

And by the way, do you know who said, in 2011, that muslim people should NOT be asked to denounce terrorism and to say they are not terrorists ? Stéphane Charbonnier, aka Charb. One of the cartoonists killed. (He also said he did not feared to be killed by an integrist because “there are very little integrists in France! French muslims are peaceful people.”) So no, I dont think muslim are pressured to mourn him. I think they are willfully mourning a kind man.

[stirringwinds]

Confession: The moment I first realised how full of shit the “social justice” here can be was a while back, when a post about WW2 Japanese imperialism had people saying, ” WELL, but the US forced Japan to open up!!! Not to mention the Japanese got ideas about world domination from European imperialists!”

It really highlighted to me how big parts of tumblr social justice never ever really truly sees people like me (I’m ethnically a Han Chinese) as real, complex human beings. We are just convenient props for them to show how progressive they are, but they will throw us under the bus immediately if they want to oversimplify global oppression into a “white vs POC” dichotomy. By refusing to assign the Japanese moral culpability for their crimes, they also ironically dehumanise us Asians (and other “POC”) by treating us like babies- like children- who can never ever have the consciousness and moral agency to be evil. Instead of us being complex and real, just like how everyone admires the cultural sophistication of the Romans and Greeks but knows about their mad emperors and practice of slavery.

They reduce us to colonial caricatures of the Noble Savage because they persistently erase how we had a history long before European colonialism, how many things we did were not a result of European manipulation. They do this when they situate us as perpetually being the martyred victim of the white man, either oppressed by him or too helpless, silly and foolish that everything wrong we did was because of his manipulation

Now, that’s dehumanising.

[hannibalsmusic]

Arrivée en 2011 à « Charlie Hebdo », la journaliste Zineb El Rhazoui raconte la vie de la rédaction, avant, pendant et après l’attentat.

Here’s an article about Charlie Hebdo, written by one of its “middle-aged white racist man” journalists, named Zineb El Rhazoui. I’m translating it for you non-french speakers :

“At Charlie, we sometimes told our love for each other. Just like that, to sign a professional e-mail, after the readying of the paper, we told our collegues ‘I Love you’. Not very serious, but true. Cruelly true today.

Few exchanges were serious at Charlie, not even those of the works council, supposedly made to defend the interests of the employees against the employers, personified by Charb, namely the urgent replacement of the damned, always out of order coffee maker. First to arrive, last to leave, and always the most prompt to cut his salary so Charlie could live, he didn’t want to hear about it because he prefered tea.

Mustapha is dead. He had just acquired French citizenship a few weeks before. With his Kabyle accent and rolling his r’s, he was always the one correcting our french. On mondays, days of wrapping up, he only left his desk to lean over the shoulder of a journalist and ask in a hushed voice : ‘What did you mean exactly ?’. Some difficulty with language ? Mustapha always knew the grammar rule or the slight difference of a synonym. That wednesday, Mustapha came to fix the last special issue. It cost him his life.

Simon survived. It was a gift of destiny in this never-ending wednesday, because it was a close call for our “little” webmaster. In a deep coma, with a pierced lung -just as he had managed to stop smoking-, the spinal cord affected, he will slowly come back to life, but he will. We are hoping. Distinguished expert on aluminium and Corsican police, Simon had all it takes to incorporate the team : a rock solid sense of humor, and all the tact, patience and love to face the almost daily shit storms on social networking. The polite and funny answers to death threats, the Facebook status with million likes, it was him.

That’s how it was at Charlie, some come from aluminium, others are railway workers, emergency workers, legal experts, therapists, economists… But all came on wednesday ‘to see what to do in the next issue’. This information, unfortunately, the terrorists had it.

And there’s all the others, friends of the editorial board, who came by from time to time. A homeless man with an inexpressible look, a former convict who corresponded with Charb during his detention, dropouts and all kinds of entertainers. They were part of Charlie too. The mess that was our headquarters was a prerequisite for anybody who landed in France without a dime, bloggers or activists escaping a war or a death sentence. They all came to tell their story, Tignous put it in drawings, then, behind the scenes, we thought of ways to help them. “I’ll see if we can find them political asylum and a job”, Charb told me one day about a couple of Tunisians activists. The two fugitives, without papers, were freezed to notice the gun of Franck, the officer protecting Charb, a regular of our premises. When they understood the context of permanent threat in which we were working, they felt in friendly territory. Franck died wednesday too, “the gun in hand, trying to defend the team”, as his superior officer told me.

Tragically funny

I entered in Charlie by my engagement, not because of my journalist resumé or a well-written cover letter. In 2011, during the Arab Spring, Sylvie, a former board member, asked me to tell her my Moroccan battles. Two days later, I was having lunch with Charb and Riss, who proposed me to join the wednesday meetings. In order to hire me, Luz offered to lower his salary, so ‘it would hold in the budget’. Since then, Riss was in the habit of asking me : ‘what angers you the most this week ?’ to see what I have to write. That’s what Charlie is, an irritated newspaper that never took itself seriously. Riss surived. Harmed, but « he can still move his finger », confirmed a colleague. Luz is alive too, but he didn’t feel like he could draw, until he sent us the cover of the next issue, tragically funny. It’s the first time Charlie has its cover as soon as a thursday evening. Charlie never was a paper like any other, and ineluctably it will never be so.

Our team was slaughtered with kalashnikovs, because we dared making a mockery of Islam. Before our meeting room, a place used to jokes and laughter with walls decorated with drawings, was turned into a bloodbath, we had been threatened to be killed a thousand of times. Everybody knew, but we were still hated, shouted down. It took twelve bodies for Charlie to be finally understood. With Wolinski, Honoré and Cabu, three symbols of French culture are gone. As for Bernard Maris and Elsa Cayat, therapist and columnist, they never drew anyone and never took care of Muhammad or the Pope.

As for Charb, he made of Charlie his priesthood and his cross, he lived only so the paper could live. Charb desperately knocked on all doors, up to François Hollande, to draw attention at the inexorable disappearance of Charlie by financial suffocation. ‘I feel like I’m working the streets’, he told me a month ago as we were having lunch. Charb lived in dread of seeing the journal die and didn’t care about his own death. He was under police protection since 2012.

If only you were here, my Charb, if only you saw the Place de la République, absolutely crammed, people in tears holding your picture, in a monastic silence. If only you could see that. If only you could see the day when offers of help came from everywhere, so the paper can live, at all cost.

[nofuckingfucksgiven-deactivated]

Zineb El Rhazoui de « Charlie Hebdo » : « Il arrivait que l’on dise aux collègues : “Je vous aime” »

[nofuckingfucksgiven-deactivated]

dear US followers

(and other non-french followers who either don’t understand the situation now in France, don’t want to understand it or give their opinion on the subject without grasping it)

On Wednesday morning in Paris, two armed men irrupted in the premises of the satirical journal Charlie Hebdo and killed 12 people, injuring 4 others. Among the victims were journalists, caricaturists, employees of the journal and policemen. Today the two culprit are still on the run, and they took employees of another firm hostages in the northern suburbs of Paris. 

That is for the facts. Now, and that’s probably the point you’ll stop reading, I would like to explain a few things, about charlie Hebdo and about how things work in my country. It might feel insulting, but unless you are fascinated with french culture, have especially studied it or lived some time in France, you don’t know us. You don’t know our history, our politics, even our geography. That’s fine, I myself have a pretty sketchy knowledge of all these stuffs for many countries in the world. 

Not knowing is fine. Spreading false informations, or giving your opinion about things you don’t know, is not. 

You have no idea how much the french community on tumblr is feeling betrayed. We stood by your side many times in the recent weeks, we educated ourselves about the situation in the US, we read, we learnt. Now, our country is suffering and I read everywhere that Charlie Hebdo was a racist journal, that they had it coming. 

1. It was not. NO ONE, I repeat literally NO ONE in France ever considered Charlie Hebdo as racist. We might have considered the drawings tasteless, but NOT racists. For the very simple reason that WE FUCKING KNOW OUR POLITICS. So, when you see the covers of the journal out of context and without understanding french, you’re seeing maybe 10% of what there’s to see. I’m not going to explain them one by one to you, because other posts on tumblr do that very well, but just for the sake of example : 

You see a black woman’s head on a monkey body. RACISM ! Except that every french person will recognize our french justice minister, Christiane Taubira, and the blue-white-red flame on the left. This is the logo of the Front National, the far-right party in France. And every french person knows that the Front National was under attack for having compared Christiane Taubira to a monkey in this : 

"At 18 months - Now"

And, if you still haven’t got it, the title of the comic by Charb is “Rassemblement Bleu Raciste” which literally means “Blue Racist Gathering” and is a pun on the slogan of the Front National “Rassemblement Bleu Marine” (Navy Blue Gathering, in French the name of the Front National leader is Marine Le Pen, and Marine means Navy). So, this comic is actually an attack mocking the Front National and their bullshit. Is it tasteless ? Maybe. Is it racist ? No.

Which takes me to my SECOND point, now that I have established that Charlie Hebdo was not a racist newspaper.

2. FRANCE DOES NOT WORK LIKE THE US. NO OTHER COUNTRY IN THE WORLD DOES. Is it so hard to understand ? 

Which means that our view on religion are not the same. Atheism is deeply rooted in France, religion is separated from the state in every possible way. Because the French Revolution was not only about cutting heads of royals, it was a profound change in the way we think that still has consequences today. Secularity is a system of laws intended to prevent any religious organization to interfere with the political life of the country. It means that everyone is free to practise their religion, as long as it does not interfere with other people’s life (be they of a different faith, or atheists) and the country’s. Blasphemy is legal. Drawing the Prophet is legal.

Most people in France think that it is not only legal, but a positive thing, to be able to make fun of every religion, every authority figure (and do your google research, Charlie Hebdo made fun of everyone and the pope was not spared) :

"Pedophile bishops - "Make movies, like Polanski !""

But, as much as we do love make fun and ridicule everyone, including our very secular politicians, we do have laws, and very strict ones, against hate speech. The Front National elected representative who posted the two pictures of Taubira and a monkey was prosecuted. Charlie Hebdo wasn’t, because they were not attacking Taubira, but the racist bullshit of the FN.

To conclude, in France even the people who think these cartoons are vulgar and tasteless think that they have a right to be drawn and published. 

We prefer an equilibrium of mockery, rather than an equilibrium of terror and censorship. 

[lourher]

Tumblr: *Never heard of Charlie Hebdo before*

Tumblr: *don't know anything about french culture or politics*

Tumblr: *don't dare search the contexts of the pictures*

Tumblr: Charlie Hebdo is racist :)

French person: No, it's not, let me explain the...

Tumblr: Charlie Hebdo is racist :)

French person: Wait! It...

Tumblr: Charlie Hebdo is racist :)

[mathoubaby]

I WISH tumblr would know about le canard, les guignols, le petit journal or even catherine et liliane, i fucking WISH theyd know about Gaspard Proust and De Caunes and Garcia back in the 80s, I WISH they had watched OSS117 when The Artist came out, just so we could hear more about all that “theres no satire, only racism” bullshit

[a-room-of-my-own]

Tumblr would tell you “I don’t need to know those things to recognize racism. You’re a disgusting human being, seriously, get out and #educateyourself”