by Yana Grinshpun
In the Soviet Union, it was a question of conforming to the spirit of the system which postulated respect for communist dogma. The latter presented itself as an emancipatory, progressive and humanist project which implied the creation of the New Man. This New Man was supposed to embody the societal ideal of profoundly new political, social and above all human relations. All equal and all happy in an egalitarian society, without discrimination of class, sex and race. Nice, huh? We recognize the utopian refrain with which we are bombarded from morning to night. Except that the reality of this utopia which had as a facade beautiful egalitarian speeches was hideous and intolerant.
A joke illustrates the ideology of the Soviets:
In 1917, an old aristocrat hears gunfire in the street. She sends her butler to find out. He comes back and tells her: "It's the revolution, Madame." She continues to question him: "And what do these people want?" The butler answers: "They want there to be no more rich people." Then the old lady answers: "How strange, I thought that revolution is when you want there to be no more poor people!"
Well, the former USSR no longer exists, but its 16th Soviet Republic of France (that's what the KGB jokingly called this beautiful country that became mine) is in the process of adopting an ideology as dangerous, coercive, moralizing and punitive as the one we fled thirty years ago.
Anyone who has known the Marxist-Leninist wooden language, the moralizing sloganeering, the unbridled egalitarianism that has created generations of poor people, ignorant of history, of their past that the Soviets wanted to wipe the slate clean, immediately recognizes the discursive clichés in the militant prose of our deco-feminist-antiracists who claim to save humanity from the inegalitarian debacle. With the same slogans, and the same methods. And the same pretensions of scientificity that make anyone laugh.
As an example, I propose an exercise. Let us take a definition taken from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia
"Marxism-Leninism is a scientific system of philosophical, economic and socio-political views that make up the world outlook of the working class; the science about knowledge and revolutionary transformation of the world, about the laws of development of society, nature and human thought, about the laws of the revolutionary struggle of the working class for the overthrow of capitalism, about the creative activity of the working people in building a socialist and communist society."
You put in place of Marxism-Leninism any word that designates post-modern ideologies "gender", "race", "anti-racism", "neo-feminism", which are obviously "scientific" [1] Here is an illustration:
“Gender/race/antiracism is a scientific system of philosophical, economic and socio-political views that make up the worldview of the progressive social class; the science about knowledge and revolutionary transformation of the world, about the laws of development of society, nature and human thought, about the laws of revolutionary struggle of the progressive social class for the overthrow of capitalism, about the creative activity of workers in the construction of a parity, racial and decolonial society.”
In the former USSR, people pretended to believe these slogans, because by challenging them, they could risk their lives. (They risk it here too, by criticizing Islam, that nice religion of peace, but that's another subject). Here, in the West, the essential problem is the sincere and naive belief of a large part of the youth to whom the race and gender commissars address themselves in the calls to demasculinize the world dominated by "patriarchal" and "capitalist" injustices, to beat one's breast for colonization until the end of one's existence, to blame the civilized West for all the crimes of the planet, to purge society of too much whiteness, etc. Here, many university colleagues, especially young ones, are afraid of being badly seen, badly judged, badly identified if they criticize this neo-Marxist doxa seasoned with the sauce of the philosophy of deconstruction and delusional inclusivism. Like the Soviets at the time of the great reforms, the ideologues of revolutionary emancipation claim to defend a good cause, a just cause, that of the "oppressed", the "dominated". And they create a religious mythology that they teach in Universities as science. By presenting themselves as victims of the evil "McCarthyists", yet another term that functions as a synonym for "enemy of progress".
Marxism-Leninism was a mythology that claimed to found the new world "scientifically" and that "composed the worldview of the working class". We passed our exams in the history of the Party by learning by heart the definition of this "science on the knowledge and revolutionary transformation of the world, on the laws for the overthrow of capitalism". The actions of contemporary emancipators are based on the same methods. They declare that they are fighting for societal justice. But, very quickly, under the progressive mask, the hideous face of intolerance appears. They exclude and condemn those who do not comply with the ukases, put them on trial on social networks and in the media in the name of the new religion where the Woman, the Transsexual, the "Racialized", the Palestinian, the Muslim, the Black as "oppressed minorities" become new figures of the Proletarian or Christ. This is therefore a moral and intellectual fraud and a breach of trust by those who are manipulated by these speeches, a fraud of the same nature as Marxism-Leninism in its time. When myths based on beliefs and vindictive resentments are introduced into the supposedly scientific teaching, the educational pact is broken by rigging the teaching of literature, language, philosophy and history. In the complete works of Lenin, one must read volume 41 which is devoted to education: "the essential thing in any school is the political and ideological orientation of teaching". Lenin explains there that the ideological orientation is determined entirely by the composition of the teaching body. I note that this precept has been taken very seriously by modern ideologues who do not hesitate to transform teaching into indoctrination. This is how I read in my students' linguistics papers that they live in a world dominated by "patriarchy", "sexism", "oppression of women and minorities". And this within the institution where women occupy positions of prestige, power and management, where the vast majority of teachers are female and where students have Maghrebi, Asian, Slavic, African, Indian names and so on. I clearly see the emergence of new totalitarian myths that have a very old structure.
