Alain Policar's latest book, Wokism does not exist (2024), offers a fine example of applied sophistry. The argument is not put at the service of truth but of an opinion, which is the title of the book, and reveals the blindness and duplicity of its author, prototype of the opportunist who seeks to have his cake and eat it, the respectability of wokeness and the safeguards of anti-wokeness. Here is the postulate that he wants to give credence to: wokeness is a term created by the enemies of the woke to unfairly discredit them; these wicked people denounce under this term excesses that are indeed reprehensible but which they pass off as the very content of the woke doxa, called wokeness, when this movement would only be a legitimate continuation of the ancestral fight against discrimination. But then why are so many people protesting against wokeness if that's all it is? If being woke really meant fighting against discrimination, then we would all be woke.

The author himself shows, however, that his distinction is nothing more than a crude sleight of hand, because, on each concept or theme addressed by the woke, he cites "excesses" which are clearly, by their centrality or their magnitude, at the heart of wokeness to the point of making it impossible to distinguish it from wokeness. Anthology: Islamophobia is an operative concept, but "let us clarify that it is obviously unacceptable" to brandish Islamophobia against those who "fight the aims of political Islam" (pp. 22-23). ​​It is an "aberration" to invoke a specifically Muslim anti-Semitism, or to speak of "lost territories of the Republic", but "we must not hide this reality" (p. 35) that sometimes, "anti-Semitism hides under the mask of anti-Zionism". Intersectionality is a "key to understanding the compatibility of struggles for emancipation" (p. 64), but "it is nevertheless permissible to regret that intersectionality has paid too much attention to questions of gender and race" (p. 64): it would not exist without them! Anti-white racism is an absurdity, but "it must be recognized that the idea of ​​hereditary white guilt is sometimes stated," which would be "to admit the essentialization that anti-racism rejects" (p. 79). The same denial of the victim matrix of wokeism: "Certainly, the victim's point of view cannot claim to be the only legitimate one" and we must not give excessive space to "feelings" (p. 88). Finally, Policar acknowledges the attacks on freedom of expression and creation: "We cannot ignore, it must be recognized, cases where the right to freedom of expression is called into question" (p. 91). These cases exist but constitute a "fantasized danger"; and besides, those who have been canceled, in France, "do not suffer from being so" – did he ask their opinion? The height of doublespeak and confusion, the last chapter, "The Ruts of Wokeness", is entirely devoted to depicting the "dark side of wokeness" – which does not exist, let us remember: inverted essentialism (or reverse racism); absolute relativism, which disqualifies the notions of knowledge, fact and reason; the fluidity of identities, which one could freely embrace and abandon.

The first flaw of wokeism is that it exaggerates discrimination and inequality to the point of making them the defining features of a civilization that has eliminated the main forms of discrimination and inequality like no other. It accuses it, while reality demands, on the contrary, that we praise it for the progress it has made, while continuing on its path.

The second flaw is to attribute false causes to the discriminations noted by making the West, and more specifically the white man, the scapegoat responsible for all the remaining inequalities. The process is easy: one simply ignores the occurrence in other areas of civilization of the harms denounced – the unequal treatment inflicted on women, slavery or racism. Our sophists deduce from this willful blindness that there would be "systemic" sexism, racism and Islamophobia in Western societies.

In short, this movement is much more than just a continuation of the fight against inequality: it is a desire to destroy Western civilization, to completely wipe out everything. Indeed, at the end of the evolution prophesied by Tocqueville, the desire for equality turns into its opposite (destroying meritocracy, it reinforces the privileges of the bourgeois elite, increasing tenfold the resentment of the disadvantaged) and the fight against discrimination generates new discrimination (thus Asian students are seriously harmed by positive discrimination on US campuses, and female athletes are heavily penalized by competition from transgender people).

For Alain Policar, anti-wokeism constitutes "a threat to democracy." Systematically practicing accusatory inversion, he accuses those who doubt the benefits of wokeism of "preventing debate." One searches in vain for which conference they disrupted, which book they censored, which opponent they refused to speak to. On the other hand, blinded wokes such as decolonial feminists stubbornly refuse to debate with their adversaries because they know that their theories stand up neither to reasoned criticism nor to the test of reality. With even greater bad faith, Policar accuses his opponents of practicing denial, of obscuring history, and of excluding from reality what is disturbing. Yet everyone knows what happened to Olivier Grenouilleau for having brought to light a disturbing historical reality: the existence of the African and Arab-Muslim slave trades. Finally, our sophist denounces a "hijacking of fear": anti-woke people would prefer to frighten with what is not really threatening (wokeism) rather than with the danger of the extreme right – a term never defined, any more than the words "reactionary" and "moral panic."

So, ladies and gentlemen, the most pressing danger threatening our country is Islamophobia and the reactionary plot of the anti-woke… As Simon Leys said of the book by an enlightened Maoist, “the most charitable thing one can say” about such a statement is that it is utterly stupid; because if one did not accuse it of being stupid, [one would have to say] that it is a scam.”

We must reject the term "Islamophobia" not only because it "seriously harms thought," as Rémi Brague writes, but because it is the rhetorical tool favored by the Muslim Brotherhood to stigmatize any criticism and advance its pawns in Europe. Our blindness is all the more unforgivable given that this strategy of conquest is explicit and assumed, as the report recently released by the Ministry of the Interior reminds us. Islamists are now using decolonial and progressive language to infiltrate European institutions: calls for the decolonization of school curricula, racial equity, identity demands. The Muslim Brotherhood is adopting identity and victimization phraseology to promote a strong Islamic identity. The Fondapol report on The Rise of Woke Islamism in the Western World (Lorenzo Vidino) gives striking examples: Al Jazeera talks about "social justice", feminism, LGBT, inclusive writing; FEMYSO (European Forum of Muslim Youth and Student Organizations), led by the Muslim Brotherhood, has received significant funding from the European Union to fight "gender-based Islamophobia", "intersectional discrimination suffered by Muslim women and girls, based on ethnicity, religion and gender" - so the oppression of Muslim women is the work of "white men", just like forced excision and marriage?

Finally, on secularism, our weather vane denounces the transformation of the 1905 law into a "security ideology." He blames the public authorities for the growing presence of religious symbols (whose definition is said to be purely "subjective") in public spaces because they have allegedly inflamed tensions. He also denies cultural insecurity, which would, of course, be a far-right fantasy, and does not hesitate to assert that we live in an "order based on racial hierarchy" (p. 99). He who formerly, in The Unsettling Familiarity of Race (2020) castigated racialism because it "grants the prism of race an exorbitant privilege" and defended universalism against Anglo-Saxon communitarianism, now promotes multiculturalism without seeing that it is contrary to French republicanism, that it breaks the political community and that this model is bankrupt in the countries that promoted it, Great Britain in the lead. In a multi-ethnic society, secularism appears to be the only bulwark against direct confrontation.

The denial of reality is nothing new. After the war, intellectuals ignored Soviet totalitarianism; in the 60s, they blinded themselves to Maoist delusions and its tens of millions of deaths; in the 70s, they briefly celebrated the Khmer Rouge; in the 80s, they enthralled the Iranian mullahs. Today, they defend an ideology that undermines our civilization, ruins the Common Good, and encourages war of all against all. Reviving the Manichaeism of the number 2, they equate anti-Wokism with Trumpism and see in it only "moral panic" and "reactionary offensive." When the wise man points at the moon, the fool looks at the finger.