Vilma Fuentes: Wokism, the new censor?

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In principle, censorship does not exist in France. It is exceptional for the publication of a book or the screening of a film to be prohibited. Truly exceptional conditions must be met for this fateful extreme to occur. The crudest pornographic scenes may be shown in certain cinemas, although they are prohibited on mainstream television channels. Images of unprecedented violence are also excluded from the news at certain times, but may be shown later if the public is warned.

Political criticism has no limits other than insult, and satire allows us to laugh even at different religions... although it can sometimes be expensive to laugh and make others laugh at other people's beliefs, as happened to the journalists at Charlie Hebdo, Journal Satirique, whose offices were the scene of the attack that claimed the lives of 12 people on January 7, 2015.

However, despite the prevailing freedom of expression in this country, the publishing house Presses Universitaires de France (PUF) was on the verge of giving in to the multiple pressures against the publication of a volume entitled Face à l'obscurantisme woke (Facing Woke Obscurantism). Vilified before its appearance, the book's mere title sparked a campaign of attacks that made PUF director Paul Garapon doubt the appearance of this 460-page work, written by 26 renowned university researchers. Thus, the suspension of its publication was announced on social media. "One step away from Trumpizing itself by publishing an anti-woke pamphlet, PUF editions are backtracking," was reported in the renowned left-wing magazine Le Nouvel Obs. But perhaps the fear of facing a censor, greater than that of being accused of being a Trumpist, was what led the publisher to publish the controversial volume.

In the cultural battle currently raging in France between woke and anti-wokes, this much-maligned book could mark a real turning point. For starters, it demonstrates the intellectual weakness of wokeism: "What characterizes the woke movement is its ignorance and the abysmal poverty of the reasoning it proposes; it is not a constructed, structured ideology, as Marxism or Maoism might be."

Wokism also suffers from obvious inconsistencies: “it constantly claims women’s rights while at the same time asserting that women do not exist…” In a video, a political science professor explains that “the motto Liberty, Equality, Fraternity cannot be preserved, because the word fraternity (formed from the root frère, brother) excludes women,” notes literary expert Emmanuelle Henin, who concludes: we are not facing an ideological delirium, but more profoundly a scientific counterrevolution .

For its authors, Wokism constitutes an incredible regression of rationality within the temple of reason and knowledge that the university should be. A new form of obscurantism that inaugurates an age of stupidity . Pseudo-intellectual gibberish founded on keywords like heteropatriarchy , systematic racism , rape culture . The grotesque nature of fashionable topics that attract public funding: Wokism might deny other realities, but never the material reality of money.

Could transforming the victim, simply because it is a victim, into a heroic ideal and a vocation of the human species be an objective of Wokism? It is an ideology that perceives Western societies as governed by power structures and hierarchies of domination, whose goal is to inferiorize minorities.

Woke aspirations and activism that benefit some researchers financially, but which, insidiously, serve ideologies such as political Islam: women belong to a discriminated minority, and veiled women are doubly discriminated against. Thus, the veiled woman becomes a cause. Is this yet another manipulation that leads to the mirage of utopias?

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