In a few centuries, from a distant galaxy, a historian will look back on earthly cultural life at the beginning of the 21st century and analyze the fall of the West under the pressure of Wokistan, this moral state within the political state, acting on behalf inclusion and tolerance. As a cultural historian, he will bring together sensitive readers of the Sparrows sect, an ultra-religious group in search of unattainable purity that rages in the series Game Of Thrones. What will surprise our historian of the future the most will be the rewriting of literary works or the censorship of films or paintings in the name of a refusal to offend a minority, or the prohibition of representing evil in all these forms, but also Beauty in the name of respect for the ugly.
Our historian will begin his introduction with a reminder of the function of the theater in Greek Antiquity, how comedy and tragedy worked, under the guise of sad or joyful entertainment, to awaken introspection in the spectator by confronting him with forbidden desires, morbid, to the inevitable suffering that punctuates all human life. Our historian will mischievously note how the catharsis“purification” in Greek, in other words the separation of good and evil, has been transformed more than twenty centuries later, to become purification of human emotions by prohibition and no longer by representation.
He will take the opportunity to list the book burnings, which began in Canada, this laboratory of Wokistan, because of its proximity to the United States and its inferiority complex vis-à-vis it. Books that misrepresented the natives, either by caricaturing them or by recounting an unglamorous reality, such as the harmful effects of alcoholism on these populations, were burned there in the playgrounds, in front of the assembled students, with a proclaimed goal of purification. , then their ashes used to plant trees, symbols of renewal.
The Great Ignorance
The tipping point for this country was the ban around 2023-2024 (the Canadians stopped the calendar so as not to offend the month of February which is shorter than the others) of a children’s show, The Incredible Secret of Blackbeard, which had been playing since 2009, by Franck Sylvestre, a dark-skinned artist, who had created his caricature as a puppet for the purposes of the tale. He was then considered racist, and any caricature of ethnic, religious and sexual minorities prohibited. Canada, by dint of cultural drying up, fell into what historians will call the Great Ignorance, during which illiteracy for all was voted after the prohibition of all forms of culture, which always offended someone.
The historian from another galaxy will take a long look at the heyday before the fall that was the rewriting of the children’s books of Roald Dahl, a notorious bastard, anti-Semite and misanthrope, but who knew his subject: literature and children. It was necessary to redact Charlie and the chocolate factory, Matilda, James and the big peach, holy witches words “fat”, “ugly”, “black”, “white” and even “crazy”, rectify the professions in which witches hide on earth, in this case cashier and secretary, so as not to devalue women. This will particularly offend our historian, whose mother was an intergalactic cashier who read Dahl’s original versions to him with pride. Censor Kipling and his jungle book to replace him with Jane Austen, to eliminate Joseph Conrad, all this mind-numbing machinery ends up leading the West to its downfall.
Cruel playground reality
Two centuries later, the books were republished in their original versions, because the creation of the new man always ends badly; child psychiatrists constantly alerted the authorities to the abyss between the cruel reality of the playground and the hygienist books which were no longer read because they were no longer of any use in understanding life. Thus, the West inexorably declined towards the era of deculturation which engulfed the knowledge of past centuries, until the Resistance fighters, guardians of forbidden works nicknamed the Rushdians in reference to the last courageous author, Salman Rushdie, relearned to the men to read and evolve in human ambiguity.