Friday, January 9, 2015

Fribourg est Charlie


©BZ/Ingo Schneider
By chance Red Baron was in town yesterday at 11:30 - the time of the Paris massacre the day before - and assisted at a solidarity demonstration: Nous sommes Charlie.

All streetcars stopped at Bertoldsbrunnen (©BZ/Ingo Schneider)
Freiburg raises its pencils as a sign of protest (©Thomas Muffler)
When I returned home, I reread my blog yesterday and became more uneasy about my quotation of the law of retaliation. Looking for some consolation on the Internet, I came across the paradox of freedom by Karl Popper. He wrote in 1945 under the experience of the Second World War in his book The Open Society and Its Enemies:

  Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them ... We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.

It is an irony of fate that the last edition of Charlie Hebdo on January 7, showed the following cartoon:

Still no assassination in France ...
wait, we still have time until the end of January
 to convey our wishes (©Charlie Hebdo)
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