Paris Games: "Wokism is first and foremost a cultural war"

Political scientist Jean-François Caron sees it as a form of cultural and diplomatic provocation.

Interview by Jérôme Blanchet-Gravel for libre-media.com

Original article : https://libre-media.com/articles/jeux-de-paris-le-wokisme-est-dabord-une-guerre-culturelle

#Shameful, #Foul, #Satanic: there is no shortage of words on X to denounce certain scenes from the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympic Games. Political scientist Jean-François Caron sees it as a form of cultural and diplomatic provocation.

A masterful success for some, a terrible failure for others, the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympic Games has sparked passionate reactions on the Web.

A professor of political science at Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan, Jean-François Caron denounces the promotion of wokism through this kick-off, a choice considered by several countries as an attack on their fundamental values.

Jérôme Blanchet-Gravel: Yesterday in Paris, the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games was marked by scenes between wokism and paganism that many remember more than Celine Dion's luminous performance. How do you interpret these sequences, to which millions of Internet users around the world react negatively?

Jean-François Caron: The host countries of the Olympic Games generally use the opening ceremony to highlight their great heroes, their values, their “great” culture and their popular culture. In 2012, at the London Games, we will remember Rowan Atkinson’s (Mr. Bean) number as well as the staging between agent 007 and Queen Elizabeth, as well as the historical tableaux.

But sometimes, this opening ceremony is an opportunity for a host country to promote an ideology, as in Berlin in 1936, when the Hitler regime decided to promote its ideology, a story that was however undermined by the four gold medals of the African-American athlete Jessie Owens.

This was the case yesterday – on a lesser scale of course – with France. The people on the organizing committee have chosen to give a significant place to woke “culture,” which is perceived very negatively elsewhere in the world.

What we also notice – and we should be happy about it – is the negative reaction that this is also causing in the West. Tongues are slowly but surely starting to loosen, and its corollary is the rise of conservative political forces that promise to put a stop to the grotesque and dangerous excesses of this destructive ideology that divides societies.

Seeing the rug slowly but surely being pulled out from under their feet, this is why left-wing politicians who defend wokeism are on the defensive and are increasingly shouting about the “fascist” danger in the face of this counter-reaction.

The ceremony was described as a “massive failure” by Vladimir Putin’s Russia, while Viktor Orban’s Hungary sees it as “the weakness and disintegration of the West.” How was the show perceived in Kazakhstan, where you are?

Jean-François Caron: Here, the people who saw these images could not understand them. They could not grasp how they embodied the uniqueness of France, which remains in their minds the country of great achievements and whose culture still has a very strong force of attraction.

The words "horror", "circus", "decadence" and "carnival" were on their lips. For people who make a point of honor of celebrating their culture, the images of bearded men wearing robes seriously damaged the respect they could have for France and, to a greater extent, for the West.

The wokeness of recent years had begun to sow in their minds the seeds of this great Western decadence. If, in the past, they looked at the West with envy, many are now wondering if the West still has something positive to offer the world.

The ceremony did contain some very beautiful paintings dedicated to the history of France, but not enough according to many. Has France replaced its national novel with woke revisionism?

Jean-François Caron: A significant part of the opening ceremony clearly abdicated the promotion of the great and magnificent French national novel in favor of promoting wokeism, which is an ideology that wipes the slate clean of the past and anything that can be assimilated, near or far, to everything that the woke reject.

The celebration of the great events that made a nation great is no longer possible when it has sunk into nihilism by choosing to embrace the ethics of the minority.

In doing so, a society that enters into this dynamic ends up losing any common foundation that allows a people to exist. Rather, it is succeeded by a communitarian spirit where groups define themselves in opposition to others ("your group has oppressed my group", "your group has different values ​​from my group", etc.).

In this context, characters who made France glorious can no longer unite, but have instead become sources of deep divisions.

From this madness can only emerge delusions and where the "dominator" of yesterday has now become a circus beast. The white man no longer appears (when he is not outright canceled) except in grotesque forms: the bearded woman wearing a dress; naked, painted blue with garlands as a loincloth; in BDSM leather underwear and so on. Public humiliation is his punishment.

The same goes for symbols and other institutions of the past, such as the Christian religion which was mocked yesterday by a 2.0 incarnation of the Last Supper. For those who still doubted it, wokeness is first and foremost a cultural war: a war that attacks the most important symbols of non-Western societies, which is why they are so skeptical of wokeness.

An overwhelming security system has been installed in Paris to host these Games. As a political scientist who fears the normalization of the state of emergency, do you see this as a new security drift?

Jean-François Caron: The “JOvids”: that’s how the Games have been described on the internet. Parisians feel like they are reliving the dark days of the pandemic with the 44,000 security barriers deployed everywhere, which give the impression of being in East Berlin in 1961, as well as the obligation to have QR codes to move around in several sectors.

Unsurprisingly, many Parisians, including several shopkeepers, have brought forward their summer vacations.

Societies no longer accept subjecting their citizens to the slightest risk, which explains this security orgy. This drift is no longer perceived as such, but as something that goes without saying. It is the new normal in order to guarantee zero risk, this new societal paradigm. Leaders no longer see the exaggerated nature of these measures.