Szilárd VAJDA's blog

Sorry for the French title ("I am [not] Charlie, - I am a human being"), however, it is more appropriate considering the shameful events happened last week in Paris, France. If the world was not aware of Charlie Hebdo, now they are, but the price to be payed was tremendous. 20 people died just because some 3 guys thought human life is worth nothing. 

We are living in the so-called "Western World", we are predominantly Christians, we built our societies around these values, and even though nowadays we tend to strongly deny these facts, our world is still ruled upon the laws of Moses. However, we were, and hopefully still are open minded, and we accepted other religions, other beliefs, we embraced them, and we tried to live in peace, harmony and respect above all the human. We consider ourselves equal,  and in democracy this is how things should be. We invented the concept of democracy (probably the Greeks will claim this privilege for themselves), but definitely the democracy what we are aware of was nurtured in countries like France, England, Germany or US.  None of these countries is perfect -I have to admit, but at least they tried [...], some harder than others.

Over the years, developing further the concept of democracy, we  reached unfortunately a point with no return. We created a chaotic set of rules, and we tried to enforce them, but we failed. We miserably failed. We concentrated more and more our efforts on the rules rather than on the concept. And we started loosing the grip. The whole concept of democracy is built around the human being, and the idea of being equal. Nothing less, nothing more.  And today some of us are more equal and more human than others. 

The freedom of expression is one of the greatest idea ever discovered in human history, and I am certainly sure, without this concept, we would not have the world as we see it nowadays. It is marvelous to know that anybody can share his/her ideas. We humans are equal, therefore, our ideas are also equal and valuable too, whoever the source would be. Me, you, somebody else. Anybody. And the cartoonists form Charlie Hebdo exercised this concept of free speech/expression, and created those cartoons, jokes in a non-conformist fashion, often creating tension in the French society. It was their right, and they did a good job. However, they missed something. Your freedom [of speech] stops when the freedom of the person next to you starts. If your freedom is not freedom anymore for the other, or your freedom is somehow limiting the freedom of your peer, in that case the concept of freedom is dead. And in my understanding something similar happened here. The cartoonist draw offensive (in the mindset of Muslim people) cartoons, and even though they were aware of the sensitive nature of these drawings, they did not stopped(!), but published more and more such cartoons. Who is wrong? Nobody! Who is right? Everybody!

The sad thing is, 20 people are not with us anymore, and the world realized that there is something wrong with the current concept of democracy. We should think it trough, and come up with a new concept, because this one just failed. We need freedom of speech, we need equal [human] rights, but we need also to respect the feelings, the beliefs, etc.  of our fellow humans.

So, I am [not] Charlie, I am just a simple human being, condemning all kind of killings, and respecting life above all.