I want to immediately reassure those of my readers who suffer from mathieu-bock-side-phobia — yes, yes, I know you are there: I am not an unconditional admirer of the man we call MBC. But now I must sadden you by adding that I am a conditional admirer. Besides, he’s a friend.
I am a social democrat, he is a conservative. I loathe the penultimate pope, he reveres him. I am critical of all religions, he advocates Christianity. I applaud the equal access programs, he rejects the very principle. I’m worried about the warming, it doesn’t make him hot or cold. I consider it essential to reduce poverty, the subject bores him. I even sometimes defend the rights of Anglo-Quebecers; if he did so, I missed it. I am an independentist, too.
I just finished his latest book, Totalitarianism without the gulag (The city). He exaggerates. It’s well written. He handles the word with talent, leads his charge with momentum. We suspect he is happy to have found a clever formula to destroy a particular aspect of the diversified regime which he has made his personal enemy, then to imagine a second, then a third, even more biting, which he cannot help but tell us. to propose. We can clearly see that it is repeating itself, but we forgive it, because it is tasty. But how exaggerated he is!
If we follow his reasoning, we Westerners will soon live in a world where a bank will close our account simply because of disagreement with our political opinion, although it is legal. A world where demonstrations will be prohibited preventively, for fear that hateful remarks will be made. A world to use the wrong pronoun to designate a person’s gender will be a criminal act. Where one could be declared an outlaw for questioning the victimization narrative of a minority. A world where police officers can arrest us simply because we have a book in our home that could be considered offensive to a minority and we should have known that someone could use it to show it to part of the public and thus ‘incite hatred (My Kampf ? The Old Testament? The Koran ? Jesuit Relations ?).
A world where we can be accused of inciting hatred for comments made privately, in our living room. A world where employees of the State or large companies will be subjected to training instructing them on what they absolutely must think about the history of their country. And where expressing disagreement with a bizarre opinion — that racism is much worse in Canada than in the United States, for example — can earn you accusations of supremacism, plunge you into depression, lead you to suicide.
When I told you he was exaggerating. We would be in Orwell, whom he quotes extensively. Well, it’s true, a bank closed its account to British politician Nigel Farage for political reasons; faced with outcry, they reopened it. Well, it’s true, French prefects have banned demonstrations in advance, sometimes left-wing, sometimes anti-secular, sometimes ultra-right, sometimes also to prohibit banging pots and pans in the path of the presidential convoy. Is it so serious?
To think that misgendering is criminalized is crazy. Whatever is desired by a plurality of millennials in the United States. Ditto for the questioning of the Canadian indigenous cultural genocide. This is just an official recommendation, supported by the Canadian Minister of Justice, why be upset? And that odious book you have at home, only in Ireland could a law drag you to the ground for possessing it, not here. And only in Scotland could you be accused of hateful remarks made in private in front of a judge. It’s far away, Scotland.
As for mandatory training forcing us to believe that we are worse than the Americans, they are only imposed on federal employees, on those of large companies, not on SMEs. And, yes, to the Ontario school principals, one of whom dared to say it was inaccurate, was accused of being a white supremacist, and then committed suicide. But wasn’t he a little fragile?
Seriously, Bock-Côté paints a portrait of the worst that could happen to us, if all of the attacks recorded against freedom of expression and conscience were to consolidate and become generalized. Noting that there is a drug that appears to reduce racist views, noting that cybernetic implants are in development, he warns us not to dismiss the prospect of using these innovations to control our impulses and our thoughts. I would like to retort that the worst is not always certain. I hold back, because his previous works had often warned us of excesses that we could not believe would occur near us, but which, nevertheless, happened.
Obviously, if he is extremely worried about the excesses coming from the woke movement (a word he does not use, preferring to talk about a diverse regime), he is less forthcoming about the right-wing movements which ban readings, reform the programs so that we no longer talk about slavery in the United States, suppress freedom of the press in Eastern Europe. Part of the book is intended to prove that the political extreme right does not exist in itself (he does not deny the existence of small neofascist groups). That it is only a label used to marginalize the bearers of a disturbing discourse.
The demonstration goes for France, where the themes of immigration control and the fight against delinquency, formerly carried by the Le Pen clan, are now at the center of the action of a government which claims to be extreme center. Mathieu doesn’t talk about it, but the use by North American conservatives of the word “woke” to label all progressive and environmentalist positions, even moderate ones, is part of the same phenomenon and deserves the same disapproval.
And when he defends without naming it the thesis of the “Great Replacement” of historical peoples by minorities, we search in vain in his pages for the figures, the timetable, the moment of the tipping point, even if the transformation is visible in France and Europe in cities and neighborhoods.
There is therefore something to take and leave – and much to add – to the work that friend Bock-Côté is energetically constructing. I understand that the warnings he gives us can be annoying and disturbing. However, I believe that he is a fighter for free speech. And it is at our own risk that we refuse to hear it.