Laurent “Riss” Sourisseau has been a cartoonist and author for the French satirical weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo since 1992. In the interview below he talks about his new book.
Riss, like the rest of the staff at Charlie Hebdo, is a denizen of the Left. Nevertheless, he chastises his fellow progressives for refusing to take on the totalitarian ideology that is Islam.
Many thanks to MissPiggy for the translation, and to Vlad Tepes for the subtitling:
Video transcript:
| 00:00 | You are very severe with the notion of Islamophobia. You say it’s Stalinist. | |
| 00:05 | It’s a word thrown in people’s faces to silence them. | |
| 00:10 | Because obviously, we don’t want to… it’s not very flattering to be called Islamophobic. | |
| 00:14 | So it’s kind of a curse. It’s done to silence someone right at the beginning… | |
| 00:20 | it’s not even a challenge to have critical thinking. You mustn’t let yourself be impressed by that. | |
| 00:27 | That said, it is true that it’s not very obvious either. We see it today with the rise of | |
| 00:30 | xenophobia in Europe, we even see it in France in regard to [Eric] Zemmour. | |
| 00:35 | We must also be careful how we talk about this. Both republican and secular people need to | |
| 00:40 | take care not to sink into xenophobia and stigmatization. | |
| 00:44 | And you are also hard, Riss, in the book (One minute forty-nine seconds) | |
| 00:48 | with those you call “the collaborators”, those who are more or less complicit with | |
| 00:52 | Islamist fundamentalism, to be precise. That is, five years later, do you have the feeling | |
| 00:56 | that we haven’t learned from what has happened? —I think that when we are confronted | |
| 01:00 | with a new form of totalitarianism, there are two positions: we can oppose it, and then | |
| 01:05 | there are the people who live with it. Those who can live with it, it doesn’t mean that they | |
| 01:09 | adhere to it, but do it for intellectual comfort and later out of fear… | |
| 01:12 | And those who are looking the other way too? —Yes, it’s a bit like [Michel] Houellebecq in | |
| 01:15 | “Submission”: “Finally…” “Nevertheless…” “However…” In the end, it’s easier, it’s less painful | |
| 01:19 | to accommodate than to oppose, because if you yourself oppose, it’s the beginning of trouble, | |
| 01:24 | threats, and you’ll no longer have intellectual comfort, that is. So there you have it, that’s it. |
Probably another interview with regard to his promoting his book, “One minute forty nine seconds”.
Going through what he went through, certainly focuses the mind, and yet he stays true, with some interesting “takes”.
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A bit more about the Charlie Hebdo magazine, and the stresses, strains, costs of keeping going.
https://www.pri.org/stories/2018-01-09/three-years-after-being-attacked-charlie-hebdo-questions-their-survival
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