Patrick Moreau is a professor of literature in Montreal, editor-in-chief of the journal Argument and essayist. He notably published These words that think for us (Liber, 2017) and contributed to the collective work edited by R. Antonius and N. Baillargeon, Identity, “race”, freedom of expressionwhich has just been published by PUL.
There is something a little surreal in reading or listening to the slogans or statements of anti-sanitary measures protesters in Ottawa, Windsor or elsewhere for three weeks. To hear them, they would lead, in favor of all Canadians, and also of future generations, a heroic fight against an odious and draconian dictatorship.
I want as proof of this the words of one of these protesters who recently reported The duty “People in the past have fought and died for their freedom, the freedom of their people and the things they believed in. And if coming here to defend my freedom is all about standing up, drinking coffee and talking, then that’s the only thing that matters. »
These demonstrations thus mobilize a whole rhetoric (“Canada, get up!”, “Stand up”, “Let’s resist” and, of course, the very name of “Freedom Convoy”) which would undoubtedly be more in place in a struggle waged against a coup d’etat which has just abolished, as recently in Myanmar, a semblance of democracy, either within the framework of passive or armed resistance to a foreign occupation, or even during a war of independence, when a people rise up and collectively claim the right to become masters of their destiny.
“Live free or die,” proclaimed another of these slogans the day after the government’s decision to use the Emergencies Act, while an inscription on a cardboard panel denounced the “communism” which threatened Canada. Such rhetoric contrasts sharply with the real issue of these demonstrations, namely the lifting of the health measures taken to try to limit the impact of the COVID pandemic. Whatever our level of tolerance for the constraints that these measures impose on our freedoms, we must all the same recognize that they are relatively minor and that Canada did not transform itself overnight into a dictatorship where the where opponents are arbitrarily arrested and where a system of terror silences all dissenting voices. So where does the dramatic and bombastic tone of these slogans come from? The question is all the more intriguing because those who say it sincerely seem to believe it.
Virtual places
In the dock, we must undoubtedly convene these Internet forums, where people only exchange with people who share the same ideas and the same feelings. These multiple blogs, Facebook pages or Twitter and other accounts lead increasingly large sections of the population to no longer be put in contact with a diversity of points of view and to think only in isolation.
These virtual places also serve as an echo chamber for the least nuanced opinions, according to the principle that to distinguish oneself within a group of peers, it is often necessary to add more. The people who frequent them therefore turn each other’s heads and end up believing hard as iron in the truth of often extremist theories. The speeches then become more and more radical, to the point of using words and rhetorical devices that no longer have much relation to reality.
This intellectual and linguistic drift is a sign of the times. It is unfortunately not the prerogative of the only conspiratorial fringe of the conservative right. The so-called progressives who speak of “white supremacy” or “patriarchy” reigning supreme, in 2022, in Canada (which would therefore be a kind of equivalent of South Africa from the time of apartheid and Afghanistan under the Taliban) fall into exactly the same excesses of language; the same is true when they claim to believe in the omnipresence of “violence” (I put quotation marks, because it is above all a question of symbolic violence, the famous micro-aggressions) of which minorities are victims. Much like “communism,” which some far-right activists see in their soup when they apparently don’t know what this political doctrine is, or the denunciation of Trudeau as a “dictator,” all of these words are slogans. militants who no longer make it possible to understand social reality or to analyze it in a relevant way. They even no doubt end up going beyond, or at the very least, blurring the thoughts of those who pronounce them.
But unfortunately that does not mean that these big words are harmless. The main danger of these rhetorical exaggerations is that we end up believing them. Students at a posh university end up feeling “oppressed” by their professor; bearded Albertans in checkered shirts see themselves as victims of a “dictatorship” against which they have the right to revolt. One of the current problems is that, by agreeing with the former last year and resorting today against the latter to the Emergency Measures Act, Justin Trudeau , instead of appealing to common reason and denouncing those who gargle big words in this way, comforting them in their excesses and throwing oil on the fire, as if he too took on all these somewhat hysterical slogans seriously.