What we saw a week ago at the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympiad did not just come out of the blue. The meticulous cancellation of the Western culture that the French organisers presented to the world is the result of many decades of cultural preparation.
Wokeness did not just appear out of thin air. Rather it is the outcome of cultural Marxism, which sprang from Europe and took over the United States through the so-called Frankfurt School, before returning to the Old Continent via France.
Leftist intellectuals, who fled from wartime Europe to the United States and nested in Ivy League universities, began their campaign of undermining and dismantling Western values in the first post-war decades.
And while the United States have been at the forefront of this global movement, its European hub has undoubtedly been France. In fact, after the first generation of mostly German-born intellectuals laid the foundations, it was French thinkers who picked up and cemented the campaign of Western deconstruction.
Theorists like Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin and Jürgen Habermas passed the baton to thinkers like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, Roland Barthes, or Félix Guattari.
The word is postmodernism and it succeeds the so-called critical theory. Also known as post-structuralism, it has created a cultural environment where anything goes, nothing stands, no authority is to be respected anymore.
Its repercussions are actually to be found everywhere. Linguists will say that language is but an arbitrary field, where nothing can be safely signified. Philosophers will claim that formal logic does not hold water anymore. Architects and artists will challenge traditional norms and notions of beauty and harmony only to replace them with brutality and shock value.
Classical ethics and aesthetics are therefore revisited in order to be cancelled. This is the prevalent ideology of a world where there is no good and bad, no right and wrong, male or female, no genders or nations and of course, no Christian God. What Friedrich Nietzsche first suggested in the context of farce and folly has now become the norm.
Present day multiculturalism, demographic substitution, erosion of the nuclear family, LGBTQ cult frenzy and the woke movement as a whole would not have been possible without the post-structural movement. And the post-structural movement would not have been possible without the French.
Under this light, let us now take another look at last week’s Paris Olympics opening ceremony. We shall understand that the monstrosity unveiled before our eyes was no circumstantial phenomenon. The French did not just manifest, but also celebrated and showed off what they have been doing to us all for about half a century.
So do we just say c’est la vie and move on? For the time being it looks like the French way has taken over on a global systemic level. But in order to battle this overall degeneration, we first need to properly understand what it is, and where it comes from.
Interestingly enough conservatism as a movement has been founded exactly on the opposition of Edmund Burke to the French revolution. In his 1790 pamphlet Reflections on the Revolution in France, the Irish-born British intellectual foresaw and predicted the bloodbath and consequent European war that would come out of the violent toppling of the French monarchy.
Almost two and a half centuries later, it is conservatism once again that offers a realistic perspective of what is happening in today’s world, and presents the only set of values and principles which give an alternative to the destruction of our world. The Marathon of our generation has begun.
