Paul St-Pierre Plamondon has managed, over the past week, to put the question of wokism back at the heart of the news. But he would not have succeeded if his criticism did not reflect a deep discontent among the population, which he was able to express vigorously. How many have buried their heads in the sand for years before recognizing today that this movement, which I described in my book The racialist revolutionin 2021, of an ideological virus, devours the societies it contaminates, plunging them into a form of collective neurosis?
Let us define Wokism: Wokism is based on a paranoid vision of Western civilization, which it assimilates to a neocolonial complex of discriminatory systems (racism, sexism, heteropatriarchy, etc.) pushing for the repression of ethnic and sexual minorities through a series of of phobic hate speech, in the service of the heterosexual white man, who would be its foundation and exclusive beneficiary. This vision takes the form of a religious revelation unconscious of itself, convinced of embodying good, and above all convinced that those who oppose it are in absolute evil.
I spoke of a religious revelation. This is because Wokism, as its name says, is a doctrine of awakening, supposed to deliver us from our Westernist dogmatic sleep. Whoever frees himself from this illusion then discovers a world so horrible that he is often seized with tremors – and I don't mean that only in the pictorial sense, because we have all seen wokes, who we like to prick in calling them blue hair, falling into hysteria when they demonstrate against the coming of a speaker they don't like, or when they gather in packs to scream hatred of our world.
Wokism believes it presents itself as an awareness. Whoever opens his eyes, especially if he belongs to the majority, must enter into an endless penitential process, where he will have to deconstruct his privileges – but this is an atonement without redemption, because Western sin has left an indelible mark on him. He must therefore be in a situation of permanent vigilance so as not to fall back into his “hereditary” failings and do ever more to remain “awake” and become an ally of the “minorities”, whose demands become his moral and ideological compass. Anyone who does not immediately agree with these demands is accused of dehumanizing “minorities”.
Wokism, we will have understood, functions through censorship, because it calls “hate speech” any comments that do not exactly reflect the definition that “minorities” give of themselves (we will have understood that we are talking less of the real minorities here than of those who claim to speak in their name, with ever more hysterical demands). Thus, the slightest reservation expressed towards a man now taking himself for a woman in the name of his “gender feelings” is assimilated to hate speech. The reminder of the existence of a reality which does not dissolve into the fantasies of each person passes for hateful speech, characteristic of the “extreme right”. Anyone who is not woke is a reactionary, clinging to humanity before the revelation of diversity. It must therefore be treated as the dead wood of humanity.
Wokism takes over from communism in the history of the totalitarian left. I see some wanting to save wokism from the excesses that are attributed to it. This is not understanding that Wokism is itself a deviation, from its origins. Liberal society is perfectly capable of correcting itself the injustices that it inevitably generates, without falling into this ideology which pushes for integral social control, because it is considered necessary, for example, to combat “systemic racism”, which would be constitutive of the social order. This dream of total social control, politicizing to the point of intimacy, is at the center of the EDI doctrine (equity, diversity, inclusion), which is a managerial wokism, today hegemonic in companies, and particularly in the area of human resources. When we really want to fight wokism, we will have to dismantle everything related to EDI. It’s wokism with a tie. It is much more dangerous than that of blue hair.
I note one thing: Wokism is based on an absolutely simplistic sociology, detached from the complexity of real, empirical societies. We see this in his definition of supposed systemic racism, which is a stupid conspiracy theory. It works like this: it notes a statistical disparity between certain groups, identified by the diverse bureaucracy, and concludes that this disparity can only be explained by the existence of an implicit discriminatory system producing these “inequalities”. At the same time, it neglects much more fruitful sociological hypotheses to explain these disparities, which have nothing to do with racism. We see this in particular when it comes to the so-called “racial profiling” of which the police are guilty, which is immense stupidity.
I note another thing which is not without interest. For a long time, the left was proud to be woke. She often still is, explaining that from her point of view, wokism is nothing other than a commitment to social justice. But now, the label has turned against her, and this, for the first time in a long time. She doesn't really know what to do anymore. So after explaining to us that wokism was the summit of virtue, she now explains to us that it does not exist. This is the first time that the radical left has lost a rhetorical battle on an important issue. She is even sorry that a label is being put on her (which she claimed, I repeat) when the bulk of her theoretical work has long consisted of forging label concepts to disqualify her opponents.
It must be said that it still works like this. She explains to us that mass immigration does not exist while adding that it is formidable, necessary, and that without it, our societies would fall into intolerance and withdrawal. She explains to us that the excesses of feminism do not exist and at the same time, she justifies them by saying that our societies have been so dominated by patriarchy that these excesses are not only forgivable, but legitimate and necessary. She now explains to us that wokism does not exist, but that it is absolutely virtuous and that we should be ashamed of not being woke.
It is necessary to be anti-woke, as long as we sincerely want to be democratic, liberal, concerned about pluralism, also concerned about a balanced public life, respecting the diversity of points of view, and refusing to reduce politics to a fight of the good guys against the bad guys. I add, from a Quebec point of view, that it is fortunate that nationalists are taking up the criticism of wokism, because it finds an echo in popular consciousness. Wokism is a totalitarianism, and Quebec nationalism today is partly an anti-wokism (although it is not reduced to that, obviously, because collective life is not exhausted in this question). This battle must be fought, and PSPP is leading it well.
