War in Ukraine? I admit I didn’t believe it until the last minute.
But that a tyrant invades his neighbor is not particularly a novelty.
For me, the most disturbing, strangest, most insidious event of the past year has been the continuation and deepening of censorship in our Western societies.
Storm
Instead of braking, it seems to me to have accelerated.
Lexicons of now banned words are produced.
TV shows are banned for hearing “offensive” words.
Artists guilty of being white are removed from museums.
Books disappear from reading lists submitted to students.
Even yours truly had his picture taken down from a wall in my old CEGEP and only put back because people started asking questions.
Obviously, censorship is nothing new, but who expected such a comeback?
I’m not sure that today’s young people, many of whom have become so embedded in the software of self-censorship that they don’t realize it, realize that they can say less than you and me in the year 2000 or 1990.
Have them watch a sketch by Yvon Deschamps or RBO and see their bewildered reactions.
We are experiencing a perfect storm, that is, the meeting of elements that combine to produce maximum effect.
You have, on the one hand, a properly religious thought, which divides the world into good and bad, which has an answer to everything and which never doubts.
You have, on the other side, cowardly administrators, who bend before the slightest protest, no matter how outlandish, and who will justify their cowardice in the name of “respect” due to the “feelings” of a handful renamed “the community”.
However, I qualify immediately.
As people retire and are replaced by younger people indoctrinated with Wokism, who rise to positions of influence in newsrooms, on campuses, in human resources departments, etc., censorship is no longer just the work of people who are afraid, but of executives who are on the same wavelength as the protesters.
It is, moreover, fascinating to see the extent to which wokism, now well established in power, persists in presenting itself as the struggle of the “dominated”, as the legitimate struggle of those below against the oppressive power of capitalist society. and liberal.
Combat
It is equally fascinating to see their instrumentalization of the meaning of words.
These people only hear the words “listening”, “dialogue” and “openness” in their mouths.
But for them, “listening” means agreeing with them.
“To dialogue” means to impose their monologue.
The “opening” is one-way. Have you recently heard of a censor who acted out of conviction and not out of fear to admit that he was wrong?
The fight, I fear, will be long, as the struggles against religious obscurantism have always been.