Western universities are beginning to seriously worry. The development of wokeism and its derivatives, with their share of delusions, censorship and hatred, had already raised the alarm. But after the events in the Middle East, a milestone has been reached.
On campuses, the Palestinian cause is met with a passion that goes far beyond legitimate compassion for civilian victims. Hamas enjoys a strange understanding, even outright support. The pogroms of October 7 should horrify: they provoke calls for understanding for their perpetrators; they should shock consciences: they lead to a denunciation and a reinforced detestation of Israel.
The demonstration against anti-Semitism on November 12th brought together mainly gray hair. Where are the young people? In universities, it is clear that students are more likely to wear the keffiyeh than the yarmulke. In a recent forum, published on Mediapart and complacently relayed by social science mailing lists, academics complain about seeing censorship emerging in universities that would prohibit criticism of Israel. Gee, it's hard to believe that pro-Israeli fervor is so stifling.
If you think about it, this problem is not new. Totalitarian movements have always fascinated. They have always received support from young people and students. In the 1960s and 1970s, there was a passion for Chinese Maoism and the Cambodian Khmer Rouge. The Mao collar or the proletarian cap were de rigueur. Between the two wars, it was Italian fascism and German National Socialism that aroused the enthusiasm of young people, as the Bolshevik revolution had done before.
It has been claimed that in totalitarian regimes, youth were indoctrinated by youth associations. True, but we should not forget that young people are not simply victims: they have also actively contributed to the advent of these regimes, perceived in their time as "modern" and "progressive".
There are certainly a thousand reasons for this attraction to totalitarian madness: pleasure in protest, taste for radicalism, fascination with violence, relativization of death, quest for ideals, disdain for liberal democracy, thirst for recognition, conformism, etc.
The question remains: why does this appeal continue to be so powerful in Western countries? How can we not see this as a failure of the European project itself, since Europe claimed to build itself on the ruins of totalitarianism with the hope of definitively turning the page on the dark hours of our history?
It must be said that Europe itself is not without ambiguity. It has been careful not to delegitimize the revolutionary logic carried by communism with the same vigor that it rejected fascism. And, even today, the EU and the Member States prove themselves incapable, by calculation or ideology, of designating Islamism as an enemy. Emmanuel Macron's proposal to create a coalition against terrorism has met with polite silence in European capitals.
The result is there. While the past experience of totalitarian regimes was supposed to have definitively immunized European youth against this kind of peril, everything seems to have to be redone. The return of totalitarian ideologies on campuses should terrify political and academic authorities and encourage them to find solutions to urgently break these deadly logics before they escape all control.
