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Academy
Extraordinary testimony that the one given by Klaus Kintzer, professor at the IEP of Grenoble, during a debate on BFM TV on Wednesday March 10! He tells how the director of the IEP, Madame Saurugger, is overwhelmed by the controversy. But what shocks him the most is that at a meeting of the professors, he was told that his “conservative moralism” was just as reprehensible as the behavior of the students who threw his name into public opinion. .
—Faculties of human and social sciences cut off from reality
I would like to focus on this element of the testimony because it tells about the whole crisis in the world of human and social science faculties currently in France. And elsewhere in the Western world, of course; but let us focus on France because the 300 dead victims of Islamism, and in particular the beheading of Samuel Paty, have obviously not yet awakened a certain number of academics from their dogmatic slumber. This is indeed the first lesson of events at IEP Grenoble. We live in a country where, despite the barbaric assassination of a high school teacher, academics may not call for sanctions against students who encourage hatred and violence; and who do it like banal Red Guards of a neo-Maoist cultural revolution. And where does this lack of sense of things come from? Where does the total lack of relation to reality come from on the part of highly educated individuals responsible for transmitting knowledge? The denunciation of “conservative moralism” puts us on the track.
Help, “moral order” returns.
“Conservative moralism”. We would not be in a tragic and very dangerous context for the two professors concerned – Klaus Kinzler has confirmed that he was under police protection! – it would take a huge burst of laughter. Conservative moralism, did you say? Personally, I would take it as a compliment to be called a “conservative”; but I do not have the feeling that Klaus Kinzler can be classified ”under this heading. Rather, it gives me the impression of belonging to a moderate left overtaken by the new ambient totalitarianism. The most important, however, is elsewhere. Where are the denunciators of “conservative moralism” talking about – to use a horrifying phrase they often utter? In the Manichean spirit of these highly educated, evil is “the right”, “the past”, “the nation”, “the borders”, “the capitalism which destroys the environment” but it is also “Morality”, “moral order”! So put “moralism” and “conservatism” together, you have one of those monsters worth slaying, one of the incarnations of the “foul beast”! Besides, as Klaus Kinzler says very well, no one among his colleagues stood up to say to the others: but Klaus is not a fascist!
We never tire of the good old Stalinist recipe
Here we are plunged into the heart of the imposture that has lasted since the 1930s, since communism wanted to make people forget that it was in essence totalitarian and of the same family as fascism and stuck it a right-wing label! But fascism is on the left, historically! Mussolini was the Lenin of the Italian left before 1914. He understood before the Soviet regime how powerful the national framework was to achieve revolutionary totalitarianism. Stalin followed in Mussolini’s footsteps while forging propaganda denouncing fascism, which was to stick like an infamous label to conservatives and capitalists. It was for him a “right-wing deviationism” like any other. This is why the term Islamo-leftism, coined by Pierre-André Taguieff, is particularly well found. He tells us, three generations later, the same story. Leftist internationalism needs, at some point, to ally itself with a feeling of identity, with a community, which gives it borders, a framework, a form in which to deploy. It is because the term is effective that it elicits such reactions. And, in response, the good old propaganda machine sets off to cry out for fascism, to denounce racism, anti-Semitism. It does not matter that anti-Semitism is today almost exclusively on the left, among all anti-Zionists, Islamists and leftists (bringing anti-Semitism back to its anti-capitalist origins). It does not matter that racism today is almost exclusively the act of indigenists, decolonialists, Black Lives Matter – largely the product of the thought of the Nazi Heidegger recycled by the French left after 1945, exported to the USA in the form of the “French theory”, and which comes back to us like a boomerang. The front line must be clearly drawn: down with fascism and the extreme right. As it is difficult to openly call Klaus Kintzer a “fascist”, he is called a “conservative moralist”. Stalin has long denounced the Social Democrats as “social traitors”!
The new “Route de la Servitude”.
Here we are on a new “road of servitude”, very similar to that identified by the great Friedrich Hayek in 1944, when he showed that fascism and communism belonged to the same family of “national socialisms” and warned against the growing state ownership of societies during the two world wars. Here we are again confronted with this “gnostic” mentality that Eric Voegelin was the first to identify in the interwar period: The totalitarianism with which we are confronted is indeed a metamorphosis of the great religious current which clings to Christianity as ivy to the tree and threatens to sterilize it. Like all Gnostic currents, the new university left lives outside reality. She exalts individualism but hates human beings. She cares little that Islamist militants might attack colleagues like one of them killed Samuel Paty. No, it is about fighting for the purity of a cause and regardless of the number of victims. The latter are victims of their refusal to adhere to “the truth”.
Because such is the very deep crisis in the world of the French human and social sciences where individuals are covered with state diplomas (since the public university has a monopoly on degrees): if you do not adhere to the dominant ideology, you are on the side of darkness. If you are on the right, you will be tagged fascist. If you are on the left, you will be called a “conservative moralist”. Either way, you deserve to be vilified, denounced, symbolically lynched.
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