Sami Biasoni is a lecturer at ESSEC, doctoral student in philosophy at the École normale supérieure. Author, member of the editorial staff of the magazine
Causeur
, he published in February 2020
French despite them
(with Anne-Sophie Nogaret) dealing with the theme of racialism in France.
Walt Disney regretted in his day that
"the real problem with the world [was] that too many people are growing up".
We must believe that many children of yesteryear have become adults to such an extent that they no longer manage to think outside of the problematic categories that are the basis of the new utopias of race, gender and speciesism.
We thus learn that on the video on demand platform Disney + certain old classics of the animated repertoire have become so open to criticism that it is necessary to accompany them with a written warning, prior to viewing, specifying that they understand
“Dated representations and / or negative treatment of people or cultures”
.
It is also a question of
"misplaced"
stereotypes
which would have a
"harmful influence"
on the viewer and of redemption through a repeated promise of relentless veneration of the totems of "inclusiveness" and
"diversity"
.
In fact, we incriminate the film
Peter Pan
because of its representation considered caricature and worn out of Native American culture, the
Aristocats
for presenting Siamese cats handling chopsticks and speaking with an overly pronounced Asian accent, and
Dumbo
on the grounds that the one of the crows singing the blues is called Jim Crow (crow designating the bird in English), this name echoing the laws of racial segregation promulgated from 1877 in the United States.
These cartoons are now marked with the seal of an anachronistic moral condemnation.
Although they are currently agitating public opinion, it should be recognized that the aforementioned precautions are in fact not new since they seem to have been put in place since last October.
They are also accompanied by the ban of the incriminated programs which are now inaccessible from the “child” profiles - officially in order to adapt the content offer to the youngest, while other categories are deployed on the platform.
However, some saw it as an additional attempt to distance itself from a cinematographic material that is certainly still accessible, but necessarily subject to parental intermediation.
Peter Pan was
thought to be
a timeless ode to the liberating power of the imagination, the
Aristocats
a hymn to overcoming the social condition of each person through love, courage and music,
Dumbo
a praise of achievement and acceptance of oneself beyond appearances.
If the fundamental purpose does not change, it is now marked with the seal of an anachronistic moral condemnation, by virtue of a convenient process which consists in judging the facts of the past according to certain moral criteria of our time, in order to activate the cogs of a constrained contrition relating to the errors of bygone days:
"the fathers have eaten green grapes and the sons have annoyed teeth"
, already said the biblical prophets about the atonement for faults committed by the deceased.
We have gradually paved the way for the drifts of suspicious surveillance of culture, of history.
Although the culture of precaution is not new across the Atlantic, we cannot bring ourselves to normalize it, especially in terms of artistic expression.
It is nothing other than a gentle propaedeutic to the manifestation of a blind censorship articulated according to the implacable modalities of erasure.
The Tartuffes of postmodernity no longer content themselves with exhorting others to cover the breast they could not see, they must claim why their sight is oppressive, publicly admonish their observers and impose on all their contemporaries - accomplices in spite of themselves - the conditions of their redemption.
By obediently accepting that Monsieur Hulot's pipe was for a time blurred in the name of public health, that Lucky Luke abjured his smoking in favor of a blade of grass for the same reasons, that it was normal not to publish the works of a genius author because of his political past, whether it was excusable to mutilate centuries-old statues of glorious French people excommunicated from our heritage without any foundation other than that of the victimhood subjectivity of a few militants, or whether it was admissible to distort the subtle balances of syntax on the uncertain basis of speculations asserting that gender equality would necessarily derive from the arrangement or form of words, we have gradually paved the way for the excesses of suspicious surveillance of culture , history and the best ordered relationships between men.
Driven by the best educational intentions, the Duke of Montausier undertook in his time to make accessible as much as acceptable a collection of classical Latin and Greek texts to the young Dauphin still adolescent Louis of France, son of King Louis XIV. Thus each original work was accompanied by a rewriting (
interpretatio
) generally simplifying and prudish, to which an explanation (
annotatio
) was added as much intended to clarify the text and its rewriting, as to "orient" its reading favorably. But we must believe that the moral preceptors of our time have ceased to train kings; they now educate crowds by defining the permissible perimeter of their imagination.
