Paul Melun is a strategy advisor and essayist. He recently published, with Jérémie Cornet,
Les enfants de la déconstruction.
Portrait of a youth in rupture
(ed. Marie B., 2019).
FIGAROVOX.
- This morning on Europe 1, the president of UNEF, Mélanie Luce, admitted that her union was organizing meetings forbidden to whites.
As former president of UNEF at Science Po Bordeaux, from 2014 to 2016, were you aware of these practices?
Paul MELUN.
-
During my engagement with the IEP of Bordeaux, I noticed the ideological shift of the union.
From a traditional left, anxious to defend the most disadvantaged, UNEF has become a proxy for activists in the fight against "anti-discrimination" and "minorities", concepts straight out of American campuses.
In its centralizing and undemocratic tradition, the national leadership has gradually ordered a new political orientation of the local sections in this direction.
UNEF's methods are simple and amount to dividing the world into two categories: the victims and their torturers.
To my surprise, the concepts of “single sex” meetings have emerged.
I was then asked to organize meetings forbidden to men, cataloged as hereditary oppressors.
I naturally refused to allow such things to happen under my presidency.
My positioning was then marginalized and I suffered a campaign of intimidation to make me bend.
I pursued a management of UNEF at Sciences Po Bordeaux different from the
national
doxa
which no longer suited me.
I believe that many students of the time were able to observe, like me, the OPA of neofeminist or racialist struggles on the republican left.
Their methods are simple and amount to dividing the world into two categories: the victims and their torturers.
Born a white man, I naturally belong to the second according to them.
According to you, does this drift testify to ideological convergences between the left and Islamism?
Islamo-leftism, like all intersectional struggles, remains in the minority among the people of the left.
Although very weakened, supporters of the left remain attached to French values and bear the brunt of the Francophobia of their elites.
Unable to respond to the economic, diplomatic or social challenges of the country, the
left
intelligentsia
abandoned this people in favor of hypothetical minorities.
This is how the feminist left finds itself defending the veil, or the anti-racist left finds itself advocating the exclusion of whites from meetings or demonstrations.
Islam exerts a certain fascination on part of the left.
The marks of the left collapsed one after the other.
The Berlin Wall fell, deindustrialisation sounded the death knell for workers' struggles and the social democracy in power disappointed.
Today, I believe that Islam exerts a certain fascination on part of the left.
For them, Muslims are not French people who must integrate, but the newly damned of the earth, the victims of structural racism and the eternal oppression of France.
This left, without culture or spirit, is reluctant to condemn rapes if they are committed by Muslims and accepts without batting an eyelid that Sharia is imposed on the freedom to caricature, to dress or to express oneself.
By seeing political Islam as the ideology of a new proletariat, the left is making a serious mistake.
This renunciation is also felt in the ballot box.
The left is historically weak and painfully represents 25% of the total vote if it meets.
A sign that left-wing voters do not adhere to the “pro-minorities” turn of this new left without ideas.
Should we,
as François-Xavier Bellamy suggests
, dissolve UNEF?
I don't think we should dissolve UNEF.
No more than other political or militant organizations which are or have been the subject of recent dissolution.
The UNEF must be able to exist and defend its ideas and we must have the right to challenge them without being treated as fascists by their leaders.
I am sorry to see that today there are so many forbidden subjects, concepts that cannot be disputed under penalty of being dragged in the mud, like the theories of gender, decolonialism or "Islamophobia".
I'm not going to call for more censorship at a time when far too much is already being prevented from thinking freely for my liking.
Faced with the nonsense of UNEF we must ideologically reconquer the ground.
Universities have become the hotbed of Islamo-leftism and gender theories, an intellectual counterattack is imperative, especially on the left.
I advocate a completely free and barrier-free debate of ideas.
This is also my difference with the UNEF which often prefers to ban the conferences of its opponents or exclude them because of their skin color.