Different perspectives

Yesterday, it was the million person rally in Paris in support of the 'ideals of the republic', although the Interior Ministry, in a departure from standard police practice, said the numbers were 'uncountable' (or rather they declined in bothering to count).  Also, yesterday, it was the Golden Globes Awards, where celebrated were "the films North Korea was happy for us to see."  Freedom of expression seems increasingly under threat.
Although Sony may just about break even on The Interview - a stoners' comedy about killing Kim Jong-Un from the people behind Pineapple Express, so a kind of 'Pyongyang Express' - and people may queue round the block not just to enjoy the talents of Seth Rogen and James Franco but to show their commitment to free speech, the studios may become more 'safe' than they already are in who they offend - another 'green-lit' project about North Korea starring Steve Carrell has been cancelled.  Not quite requiring the oblique analysis of power that artists labouring under communism in Eastern Europe had to endure but a Finlandisation.  David Low never lowered the asperity of his cartoons though they were banned from circulation in first Germany, then Italy in the pre-war period.
The cartoons of Charlie Hebdo are said to capture the 'spirit of 1968' - while Britain had a summer of love that year, France had a summer of violent would-be revolution.  Vive la difference!  They attacked politicians and religions willy-nilly, yet a true contrarian would have held nothing sacred, except secularism and freedom of speech were and are holy cows for Charlie Hebdo and the crowds who marched in Paris.  One does not have to support totalitarianism and murder to ridicule the blinkers others, who believe themselves fearless, apply to themselves.  The French government is funding the million-edition print-run for a special version of Charlie Hebdo - so much for not being in the pockets of the establishment.
Something very far down the list of worthy news items after the deaths of 20 people in Paris is the massacre of 2,000 people in north-eastern Nigeria by the cancer that is Boko Haram.  You won't get scores of world leaders making a pilgrimage to this part of Africa to link arms with President Goodluck Jonathan.  Hey, even President Jonathan would probably not visit this area, even though he has begun a re-election bid.  Western journalists prefer the comforts and amenities of Paris and all want to have their say on what is an attack on their profession.  Like the apocryphal headline, "Earthquake in Chile.  Not many dead" other, less-developed regions are afforded just a few sentences.  Is it an implicit racism?  Perhaps for some and plain ignorance for many.  Each life lost in Nigeria is equal to those in France but the coverage is nowhere equivalent despite it being two-thirds of the fatalities of the total killed on 9/11.  There is talk of 9/1 for France but no-one has coined a similar epithet for Nigeria or Pakistan or the hundreds of thousands dead in Syria and accompanying carnage in Iraq.  Yet fundamentalists thrive here and feed back their radicalism in occasional, unpredictable attacks on the West.  Maybe if we cared more about these places, the blowback could be curtailed.