2023-12-12 02:30:00
The latest book by Mathieu Bock-Côté, Totalitarianism without the gulagenjoyed considerable success in France, but he was greeted here with sepulchral silence.
Only the naive will see this as an oversight or negligence.
In Quebec, we only talk about the most notable intellectual of his generation here if someone writes a pamphlet to speak ill of him or to single him out in three words in a column.
Believe
I don’t have enough space to properly summarize this book. I just want to pique your curiosity.
It was once believed, explains Mathieu, that the end of communism marked the definitive triumph of liberal values, at the forefront of which was freedom of expression.
The last totalitarianism to fear was Islamism.
However, people from the Soviet world – Solzhenitsyn, Zinoviev, Kundera – said they saw the rise of an ideological conformism in the West which reminded them of what they had known.
Obviously, it was a “soft” totalitarianism, an “atmospheric totalitarianism” (dixit Nathalie Heinich): no imprisonment, no exile in Siberia, no torture.
The common point was this concern to impose a well-defined ideological perimeter. The only intellectual dissent permitted was to be harmless.
We did not listen to these whistleblowers from the East.
Until recently, what we have come to call wokism was blamed on angry students on campus.
These were only the most visible and audible, the canaries in the mine.
Listen to Joseph Facal’s column via QUB radio :
We see today that this rectitude has gradually taken hold in power in business, the civil service, the administration of universities, the majority of the media, both in the directives coming from above and in the mental categories and the vocabulary used spontaneously by young people.
Examples? Hiring quotas, recruitment formalizing segregation, reprogramming of employees based on EDI software, inclusive writing, trivialization of censorship, refusal of authentic science, all-out complacency towards minorities, etc.
In short, this new virtuous orthodoxy has taken over places of power.
Nothing illustrates this better than the astonishing testimony, last week, of the presidents of Harvard, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania, for whom the judgment to be made on a call to genocide is a matter of “context” .
In short, our society is becoming a sort of re-education camp, the aim of which is the control of minds.
The way to achieve this is through religions.
Religions label those who reject them as heretics or infidels. The new orthodoxy calls the disbeliever “extreme right”.
Photo provided by Éditions La Cité
Grille
The additional Quebecois subtlety, possible in small companies, is to ignore you completely.
However, historically, the extreme right, the real one, is the refusal of democracy and the belief in a natural hierarchy of humans.
We will also accredit the lie by relativizing the biological basis of sexuality, the racism of minorities, their often higher rates of crime, etc.
You will find in this book a fantastic framework for understanding the excesses of our societies.
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