As we reported over the weekend, there have been ongoing messages of support from the media and others forced to cancel appearances in the wake of terrorist attacks in Paris (and Beirut, and Baghdad) that left more than a hundred people dead and many more injured. Most of these responses have been appropriately somber and measured, consisting largely of expressions of sympathy and solidarity with the victims of these assaults. And so, after several days of this, John Oliver has decided that the array of thoughtful and elegiac responses could do with a different sort of expression accompanying them, one that being on HBO affords him. And so, providing a “moment of premium cable profanity,” Oliver offers a view that, despite likely being shared by the overwhelming majority of people on this planet, has thus far not been said in a mainstream media outlet:
As of now, we know this attack was carried out by gigantic fucking assholes. Unconscionable flaming assholes, possibly, possibly working with other fucking assholes, definitely working in service of an ideology of pure assholery . Second, and this goes almost without saying, fuck these assholes. Fuck them—if I may say—sideways. And third, it is important to remember that nothing about what these assholes are trying to do is going to work.
He evidence for the failure of the terrorists’ mission is simple: Don’t try to start a culture war with France, because the culture that brought the world Jean-Paul Sartre, Marcel Proust, and the greatest pastries this little blue planet has ever seen is not going to be impressed. To continue the pastry references, if France is playing a Bach cantata on the piano that is world culture, the rest of us are basically plinking out “Hot Cross Buns.” “If you’re in a war of culture and lifestyle with France,” Oliver reminds us, “good fucking luck.” Watch his full argument in the video below, and indeed: Fuck these assholes.