Is it this languorous summer that stretches out that makes the news so evanescent? One day, we learn that the world is collapsing. The next day, life resumes its course as if nothing had happened. As if she was still the strongest. Unless the summer makes us impervious to the most terrible news.
Thus the census data confirmed to us two weeks ago that French was regressing in Canada as in Quebec. Yet the finest observers have been warning us for 20 years. Yours truly had himself told in these pages how one summer, a good fifteen years ago, he had been expelled from a pharmacy in downtown Montreal because he had refused to be served in English. But the article only provoked shrugs. Like the cries of alarm of our best demographers. After two decades of denial and dozens of studies, no one can deny the reality of the slow but flagrant decline of French in this beautiful country.
It is true that it has been going on for 250 years and that nothing announces the end of it. As if our disappearance was inscribed in the DNA of Canada.
How not to think of the tragic words of Étienne Parent pronounced the day after the rebellions of 1837-1838. “Assimilation, under the new state of things, will take place gradually and without shock, and will be all the more prompt that it will be left to its natural course, and that the French Canadians will be led there by their own interest, without let their self-respect be too hurt,” he said. Nearly a century later, no one has yet managed to make the man who was one of our most brilliant journalists lie.
However, at the start of the electoral campaign, the country is humming. Rare are the peoples who watch themselves decline with such unwavering phlegm. Perhaps this is our true commonality with the indigenous peoples, who we are more like than we think. The very ones that the pope came to cajole this summer.
As a good head of the Church, the Holy Father delivered impeccable homilies. Finesse of the sentence, intelligence of the quotes, impeccable choice of music. But, like a good politician, he saved the contentious subject of the so-called indigenous “genocide” for last. This word, which contradicts many serious historical analyses, was only uttered at the very last minute, on the plane taking him back to Rome. An old political technique sometimes used by the French President, Emmanuel Macron, which consists in saving his most questionable statements for the end. By slipping them furtively to journalists, often in off », He thus spares himself a precious margin of blur.
Because this “genocide” would be the only one in history for which we would have taken the trouble to build boarding schools run by mostly devoted religious, some of whom even taught indigenous languages, as historian Henri Goulet recalls. in his History of Catholic Indian Residential Schools in Quebec. The Determining Role of Oblate Fathers (Press of the University of Montreal).
We hadn’t taken this trouble either at Auschwitz, or in Cambodia, or in Rwanda. When will the trial of the Oblates for genocide be held? It should be remembered that these residential schools — which some describe practically as extermination camps — lasted well after the 1950s and that some of those who taught there are still alive.
In this way of using disproportionate words without their having real consequences, it is difficult not to see as a new form of contempt for the indigenous peoples.
As soon as arrived, soon forgotten. The big drama of the summer was not the fires in France, but the attempted assassination of Salman Rushdie in New York State. Once the procrastination, the calls for freedom of speech and the denunciation of fanaticism are over, what remains? There remains a single man who, 33 years after his death sentence by Ayatollah Khomeini, is still as little listened to.
It is fascinating to see how many of his flatterers avoid quoting him like the plague. Because what does this heretic say if not that, if Islamism is different from Islam, it is nonetheless the symptom of a real “regression” of the latter? And above all that it represents “a new totalitarianism” which has no equivalent in the world?
“The Islam I grew up in was open, influenced by Sufism and Hinduism, it’s not the one that’s spreading at full speed,” he said in September 2020. It’s a tragedy for me that this culture is regressing to such an extent, like a self-inflicted wound. »
In his autobiographical account Joseph Anthony. An autobiography (Plon), the writer compares Islamism to the famous film The Birds by Alfred Hitchcock. Gradually, without our noticing, birds gather on a wire. At first, this is nothing to worry about. Until they finally darken the whole sky. “There is a limit beyond which you can no longer blame the West,” says Rushdie. Especially not by taking refuge behind accusations of “Islamophobia”. A new word, he says, which “was invented to allow the blind to remain blind”!
All that passed this summer like a dream. It will take a few days of rain and autumn to realize that we unfortunately did not dream.