There are those who openly dream of beating up people they disagree with. There are those who order them to close their eyes. But there are also those who take these curses at face value and put their money where their mouth is. The activists who attacked the Mollat bookstore in Bordeaux last week were among those.
On the night of April 20 to 21, the windows of the largest independent bookstore in France were covered with cupboards. It read “176 pages of misogynistic handjob” and “You have a rapist speech”. The guest that evening, however, was neither Harvey Weinstein nor Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Simply the always lighthearted and facetious best-selling author Frédéric Beigbeder.
We had rarely seen in France a signing session of a writer under police protection. Everything was going almost normally when in the middle of this unpretentious talk, a dozen activists scattered in the room got up. As if they had suddenly seen the ghost of Goebbels at the back of the room, they began to shout “Victim, we believe you!” Rapist, we see you! as the security guards pushed them back out.
The matter is all the more ironic since Frédéric Beigbeder’s latest book was born of a similar experience. On a beautiful morning in 2018, the former advertiser recycled in literature discovered his tagged house and car under the eyes of his children. Confessions of a Slightly Overwhelmed Heterosexual (Albin Michel) tries to answer only one question, which is also the first sentence of the book: “Dad, why did they do that? »
prototype of theHomo festivus discovering with amazement around fifty that his adolescence has just ended, Beigbeder suddenly realizes that we have changed worlds. You’re wasting your breath. The dandy on the return will be able to show his credentials by explaining that not only has he never raped anyone, but that he has denounced sexual assault long before #MeToo. It will be nice to confess his immoderate love of women and his drug addiction at the slightest blink of an eye. It will be nice to dream of being “decolonial and deconstructed” and praise the most radical feminists. Nothing will do. For a bit this cheerful schoolboy always ready to mess around would have almost lost his sense of humor.
For having refused to participate in public vindictiveness and for having kept away from the media lynchings and the Moscow trials that have become the ordinary of our media, Beigbeder is designated as “the new man to be killed by French feminism […] Improbable and ubiquitous victory of the new censors of our time”, will write the writer and columnist Tristane Banon. Poor naïve person who had the weakness to believe that for these people literature still existed. However, for these new fanatics, there is no half rallying, critical support or half-hearted reflection. Simply an unwavering adherence to the new dogma in the manner of the Red Guards of another era.
Tagging a bookstore, forcing the police to intervene, interrupting a peaceful assembly, this is what some confuse with the democratic expression of an opinion. Yet it is indeed a form of censorship, a quiet burning. The most effective censorship, by the way! This is why it is spreading so quickly in universities. No need to tag hundreds of bookstores, to interrupt dozens of conferences, or even to break windows and even less to attempt the life of an author. It is enough to cast opprobrium on a few to arouse the self-censorship of the greatest number. This is the true objective of this terrorism soft. Encourage all those who are likely to express a small disagreement, a nuance or a reservation to kick in touch and discourage anyone from inviting these authors. No one dreams of being designated as the male to be shot, the service reactor or the bastard to be lynched.
Simple skid, you say? That’s why it works! It suffices to look around to hear the deafening silence imposed among the elites and in the media world by this new totalitarianism which, not content with wanting to reinvent the language, banish sexual difference and make race the absolute criterion, mixes to rewrite the books as formerly one removed the faces of the dissidents on the photographs of news. “We will never know what the fear of not appearing sufficiently to the left will have caused cowardice to be committed”, said Péguy.
Is it because there has never been a Nuremberg trial of communism that the extremist left still enjoys such impunity? Brief companion of Marxism, right in the middle of the Cold War, Jean-François Revel was one of the quickest to bring to light the mechanisms of what he so aptly called “the totalitarian temptation”.
“Neither intelligence nor the intention to do well preserve us from evil,” he said. The only barrier to murderous fanaticism is to live in a pluralistic society where the institutional counterweight of other doctrines and other powers always prevents us from going to the end of our own. »
There is no other recipe against those who dream of kicking ass and silencing dissent.