Charlie Hebdo
Is the satirical magazine going too far with its Meghan cover?
Duchess Meghan's Oprah interview inspired the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo to create a scandalous cover image.
© Admedia / ImageCollect.com
With his Meghan cover, Charlie Hebdo has once again created a shit storm with an announcement. But that has nothing to do with good satire.
How powerful a single, not even particularly pointed caricature can be was tragically demonstrated to all of us on January 7, 2015. Islamist terrorists stormed the editors of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris and shot a total of twelve people that day. Why? Because a caricature of the Prophet Mohammed was printed there.
Under the term "Je suis Charlie" ("I am Charlie"), millions of people around the world showed their solidarity with the victims of the attack. Meanwhile, the surviving employees promised, in memory of their dead colleagues, that they would not be silenced by the cowardly attack in the future either.
In the meantime, Charlie Hebdo caused quite a stir with sometimes rough covers. For example that of the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan (67) from 2020 as a lusty pig who gazes under the skirt of a veiled woman. For the latest excitement, the cartoonists used two historical moments: The murder of the African American George Floyd on May 25, 2020 and the TV interview by Duchess Meghan (39) with talk show host Oprah Winfrey (67, "What I have learned from life" ). A shit storm with an announcement.
"I can not breath"
But as is well known, satire is allowed to do anything, right? Yes. Good satire can do anything. Because the goal of good satire is to point out grievances, to address uncomfortable truths, to cause a rethink, to show the powerful of this world the limits they have lost sight of – and to enjoy peeing on their legs in the process. In the best case, without using the lese majesty paragraph 103 of the penal code, as was the case in 2016 in the case of Jan Böhmermann (40, "Followed by nobody you follow") and his "humiliating poem" against Erdogan.
But Charlie Hebdo does all of that not with this cover, which shows Meghan in the gruesome position in which George Floyd was killed almost a year ago. The tasteless comparison does not challenge one to deal with racism, it marginalizes the topic. And it's certainly not funny. Duchess Meghan stated in an interview with Oprah that she was supposedly silenced by the palace. George Floyd died de facto after an agonizing eight minutes of agony, murdered by a police officer, all of us "friend and helper."
There are also proponents of the cover
The aim of this cartoon, if Charlie Hebdo is also defended online, is clearly the British royal family and not Meghan or George Floyd. And that may also be true. After all, the cover shows a Queen (94) with blood-red eyes and a diabolical grin, while she takes Meghan's air to breathe – that is, to develop freely – with pure intent. At the end of the day, however, this criticism of the British crown will be carried out at the expense of someone murdered for racist reasons. So the person who is not even to be seen on the cover.
The picture is a hair-raising comparison. It is the painted equivalent of the lateral thinker Jana from Kassel, who claimed to be able to identify with the murdered Sophie Scholl because of a little headwind. Under the guise of satire, this supposed free ticket for everything, the number of copies is to be increased as sensationally as possible. For this, the bestial fate of a murder victim is instrumentalized.
Duchess Meghan and even more so Queen Elizabeth II can defend themselves against it. George Floyd no longer. And that doesn't make the cartoon satirical, it makes it pathetic. Je ne suis pas Charlie. Not today.