Tribune. One can be annoyed, worried, even hostile to the thought known as “woke”, to the theories of the genre applied to all the sauces, to radical deconstructivism… One can prefer the scientific arguments to the only force of indignation. One can refuse to be reduced to a dominant identity in the same way as one refuses to reduce others to a dominated identity. We can think that intersectionality is a sociological truism erected in new critical thought. One might think that criticism of Islam is not necessarily racist any more than that of Catholicism.
In short, we can have good scientific and moral reasons not to adhere to a whole set of theories and ideologies, without for all that pretending if this set were a coherent, homogeneous and caricatural block, united by the cancel culture, Islamo-leftism, decolonialism or “wokism” …
But when an official colloquium is held in the Sorbonne on January 7 and 8 under the aegis of theObservatory of decolonialism, opened by [le ministre de l’éducation nationale] Jean-Michel Blanquer and closed by the president of the High Council for the evaluation of research and higher education, Thierry Coulhon, there is cause for concern. It is a question, neither more nor less, of fabricating an internal enemy, a disparate enemy, masked but coherent, which would aim to destroy, at the same time, the reason and the republican values.
Ethical fault and political error
This is a soft McCarthyism aimed at designating the enemies of the interior, their accomplices, their fellow travelers and their victims. This colloquium, all that is official, mobilized colleagues honorably known and often recognized for the quality of their work, in which speakers such as Mathieu Bock-Côté were involved, whose diatribes bordering on racism. flood CNews and far-right networks every day. We can bet that if Eric Zemmour had not been taken by the presidential election, he would have been part of the party in the name of his work as a historian!
How can a President of the Republic announced as liberal encourage this McCarthyist staging? How can we think that it is up to the State to say which currents of thought are acceptable and which are not? How can we not have enough confidence in the academic and scientific world to let a minister of education lead a prosecution against the ideas and research that disturb him?
This soft McCarthyism is not only reprehensible and disturbing; he is also stupid. According to the old law of creative prediction, this trial brings about the adversary he fights. He transforms a motley nebula of currents of thought and disparate work into a more or less organized plot against science and against the Republic.
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