Nicolas de Pape is a journalist, novelist and essayist. He publishes
Everything must disappear
(Edilivre).
FIGAROVOX. - In your book, you discuss what constitutes
“
an unprecedented cultural revolution
” in your opinion
.
How do you define it and why is it unique?
Nicolas DE POPE. -
Today we are witnessing the advent of a sort of tyranny of minorities with a quasi-religious character, hysterizing political correctness and animated by believers whose goal, not always avowed, is to put an end to "the West". »Experienced as a systemically patriarchal, racist, post-colonial and discriminatory reminiscence of another age. This revolution is embodied in particular in what we call today the “wokes”, that is to say the “awakened” to discriminations, which would be in a way written in the genes of our civilization.
This is undoubtedly the first time in contemporary history that a revolution of this type has mobilized so many actors at the same time: what is wrongly called the “deep state”, in reality influential people who share the same ideology.
What makes this revolution also unprecedented is of course the digital revolution driven by the "Big Tech" (the famous GAFAM - Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft) which serve as an amplifier for wokism and whose leaders partially share the ideology.
Violence against women is a societal plague, but the word “feminicide” suggests that we live in a systemically patriarchal society.
Nicolas de Pape
The boss of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, invested hundreds of millions of dollars during the last American presidential campaign "for fair elections" but which clearly aimed to prevent the re-election of Donald Trump and allow that of Joe Biden. He clearly surfed on wokism, in particular by appointing a transgender minister. Recently, the press praised the courage of a whistleblower within Facebook, Frances Haugen. The paradox is that she is criticizing her former employer, not because he expects freedom of expression, but because he does not sufficiently censor anti-progress “reactionaries”.
In
The Game
, Italian journalist Alessandro Barrico explains that the “billionaire hippies” of Silicon Valley see themselves as revolutionaries whose digital inventions will forever prevent the resurgence of 20th century tyrannies.
Facebook's transformation into "Meta", a meta-world Mr. Zuckerberg hopes populated with avatars, brings to mind the anticipation film Matrix by the Wachowski sisters (both transsexuals by the way) in which humans live in jars. and believe they are living a dream existence that is purely digital.
We can see it: this percolating ideology, encouraged by the leisure industry, Hollywood and Netflix ...
What are the facts and realities that allow us to measure the extent of the phenomenon?
These neo-revolutionaries use the good old recipes of the theoretician Gramsci: “agit-prop” (agitation propaganda) via incessant demonstrations denouncing an “imaginary racism” (Pascal Bruckner);
use of mass media and youth mobilization, future generation in power, male chauvinist deconstruction class, etc.
To read also "The" wokism "thrives thanks to the faults of a mortified West"
Second, we see the appearance of a series of neologisms complacently used in a loop by the media, such as "feminicide".
Previously, we spoke of a crime of passion when a man killed his wife or partner.
Of course, violence against women is a societal plague, but this neofeminist word suggests that we would live in a systemically patriarchal society.
On the side of radical ecology that we can associate with this neo-revolution by virtue of the intersectionality of struggles - while announcing a climate cataclysm - she coined the terms of "climate justice" and "ecocide" ".
Think about including the latter in international criminal law ... In democracies too, language is a weapon of mass destruction.
See the Robert who introduced the pronoun "iel" in his last edition… The new believers use the salami technique: they advance in slices and never back down, insulting their opponents to intimidate them.
This movement is characterized in your opinion by an offensive against the father figure ...
When Agnès Buzyn, former Minister of Health, exclaims that a woman or even a grandmother can be a father, she contributes to the relativization of the status of the father. Everything is interchangeable! However, even in traditional families, the father is only the man whom the mother designates to the children as their father. Its status is very fragile. With the phenomenon of militant single mothers and homoparentality (for which I have no opposition in principle), children can be deprived of a father. For boys, it was then necessary to have the intelligence on the part of lesbian couples to add a strong virile figure around the family such as a godfather for example. But since the masculine and the feminine do not have so much importance today, is it really necessary?
You paint a portrait of Jordan Peterson, a Canadian psychologist who strives to deconstruct neo-feminist arguments. Do we have Jordan Petersons in France?
To my knowledge, the only intellectual resembling more or less Jordan Peterson in France is the sociologist Mathieu Bock-Côté who is… Canadian too.
The advantage of Jordan Peterson is that he is a clinical psychologist.
He can therefore dismantle, with clinical examples, the theory of gender.
But hope in France comes from women, notably with the philosopher and journalist Peggy Sastre who officiates at
Point
and
Causeur
and who offers a biological and evolutionary reading of sexual and gender issues.
Journalists like Elisabeth Lévy and Natacha Polony do not allow themselves to be told.
Belgium is ideologically cut in two, between a Flanders far to the right and a Wallonia far to the left.
Nicolas de Pape
In Belgium, we have the honorary professor of the Free University of Brussels, historian Anne Morelli, a leftist woman and historical feminist who often deconstructs the arguments of neo-feminists. She also signed the Tribune du Monde with Catherine Deneuve on "the freedom to annoy, essential to sexual freedom". For her, it has become "fashionable" to be a feminist. In the United States, wokes are held in check by the TERF (Trans-exclusionary radical feminist), almost equally radical “binary” feminist women who believe that transgender people “invisible” the real fight for women's rights. TERF rightly believe that allowing trans-turned-female athletes to compete in sport with biological women is an injustice.Imagine that Rafael Nadal competes for women… He would win 13 more Roland-Garros!
How is Belgium, your country, reacting to this cultural revolution?
Belgium is ideologically cut in two, between a Flanders far to the right and a Wallonia far to the left.
The only “right-wing” Walloon party, the Reform Movement, is more or less the equivalent of the Republic on the move.
In Wallonia, a “cordon sanitaire” created in the past against genuine neofascists now applies to all those who are to the right of the center-right.
The political Right being extremely discreet there, the Establishment and the press evolve between leniency towards Wokism (which they confuse with progressivism) or cautious neutrality.
In Wallonia, there is no
Figaro
or CNEWS… For example, a Walloon Eric Zemmour would be banned from television by virtue of this cordon sanitaire.
But this would also apply to Éric Ciotti, Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, Marion Maréchal, Philippe de Villiers… The French are complaining but France is still the land of Voltaire!
Alerting to the threat of a cultural revolution that is brewing and threatening our civilizations is a process that the left has often used, speaking of a fascist or reactionary threat. Don't you think you are falling into the pitfall of hysterizing the debate and overestimating the real scale of the woke threat?
I don't like the outrageous things you describe, but prevention is better than cure.
The great revolutions which devoured their children for the most part began with a handful of agitators meeting in a tavern (during the storming of the Bastille, Louis XVI indicates in his diary: "nothing").
Today, it is insidious:
woke
ideas
percolate everywhere, including within the Human Resources of companies, some of which already offer employees inclusive writing courses or awareness of "white privilege".
To read also Christophe de Voogd: "The ideology" woke ": a culture of resentment which undermines the possibility of forming society"
In my country, the director of the National Bank was treated as a chauvinist by a team of neo-feminist journalists (“The Grenades”) because he had pointed out “charm” as the main asset of women. Anecdotal next to the many French celebrities wrongly accused of rape, think of Luc Besson for example. In the era of #BalanceTonPorc, all men are presumed guilty, see Nicolas Hulot.
The problem is, wokism doesn't have a structured opposition yet. France, inventor of the French Theory, today receives its own medicine in full face. We see it with Rama Yade, former minister of Nicolas Sarkozy, returned from three years of “woke immersion” in Washington and who claims to undergo a “micro-aggression” when she looks at the statue of Colbert. And at the university, temple of knowledge, it is already war, if one believes Nathalie Heinich [1]. Professors are said to be
"obsessed with gender, race and the rhetoric of domination."
According to certain members of the Observatory of decolonialism and identity ideologies [2]
, “the university is today the theater ofan ideological confrontation led by the supporters of deconstruction against the Institution itself ”.
Everything must disappear
, Nicolas de Pape, Edilivre, 266 p., € 20.
Edilivre
[1] "What activism does in research", Gallimard tract.
[2] https://www.lepoint.fr/politique/exclusif-le-rapport-qui-secoue-l-universite-les-extraits-16-06-2021-2431333_20.php#xtmc=theses-de-doctorat -woke & xtnp = 1 & xtcr = 1