It’s not panic, it’s not even fear. It’s about rejection, about boredom. Portugal and the rest of the Western world, it seems to me, are fed up, very fed up, with the childishness and exaggerations of Wokism.
A few years ago, when their ideology and political action began to be identified and called Wokism, the first instinct of woke people was to say that Wokism did not exist, that it was just an invention and malevolent designation of the extreme right, or in other words. In other words, of a ghost that the extreme right had invented to better combat the “progressive forces” (whatever that was) that opposed it. The columnist António Guerreiro even stated, among other theses, that no one assumed that they were awake, an erroneous statement that I refuted at the time, and that even if it were true it would not prove what the columnist wanted to prove because many times the human being The groups that share a certain conviction – let us think, for example, of heretics – are designated not by themselves, but from outside.
In any case, what is important to highlight is that in a second moment, after this first phase of denial and dissimulation, and together with those who, like Miguel Vale de Almeida or Paulo Baldaia, for example, continued and continue to deny the evidence and reject the name and existence of Wokism, those who wore the shirt emerged, as they say in the world of football, and were assumed, on social networks, clearly as awakened. They did so by adopting express statements, both in French, “I woke up and scared” – case of Kitty Furtado, for example – as in the English version “Say it out loud. I’m awake and I’m proud!”- as happened with Mamadou Ba.
There are, therefore, two types of wake, the open ones and the camouflaged ones, but in both groups the discomfort caused by Kamala Harris’s defeat has been very evident. The need to counterattack and, above all, to justify oneself has also been evident. It is clear that, in itself, the discomfort results from Trump’s victory, with all the parade of dangers and real or imaginary evils associated with it, but there is also, or above all, a great discomfort because this victory represents, in theory , the defeat of Wokism and, more than that, an accusation, a condemnatory finger pointed directly by certain sectors of the left at this current of opinion and its promoters.
This is what created great enthusiasm among national awakening groups, both those who were openly and those who were camouflaged. From Miguel Vale de Almeida to Isabel Moreira, from Mamadou Ba to Luísa Semedo and many others (the list would be exhaustive), these people went to social networks or newspapers to respond to the condemnatory finger, and try to refute the thesis that Trump also won. because I woke up As Congresswoman Isabel Moreira says, with bitterness and concern, in a recent article in Expresso, “it has been an intellectual challenge to see so many people conclude that Trump’s victory was the defeat of ‘wokism.’ Basically, he won thanks to the woke left.”
It should be said that the reaction of the Portuguese Woke has followed several lines. Some try to satirize and caricature, counterattacking those who, like João Marques de Almeida, for example, claim that “the woke ideology is destroying the left.” To carry out the counterattack, an image circulated on social networks that represented Wokism as a tender and harmless black rabbit and those who fear or antagonize it, that is, those who in their terminology they call “llamas” and “moderates”, as two white and blonde children unjustifiably terrified and huddled in a corner (see image).
Not long ago, one of the awakened people who spread this image, Professor Luísa Semedo, came to complement it with an article about Public which he titled “The Panic of the Awakening” and in which he sought to explain the (supposedly fair) objectives of Wokism, explaining that it was based on a healthy questioning of the ideas formulated and seeking to reconnect with the “moderates”, showing I tell them no There is reason to panic about what the ideology proposes. But there is a basic misunderstanding here. It’s not panic, it’s not even fear. It’s about rejection, about boredom. Portugal and the rest of the Western world, it seems to me, are fed up, very fed up, with the childishness and exaggerations of Wokism.
Others try to pretend that the issue does not exist, trying to convey the idea that Wokism has nothing new or recent, being, in essence, nothing more than the defense of human rights (Isabel Moreira also calls them “fundamental rights”). . but it is clear that this is not the case, since wokism has a very strong, Orwellian, persecutory and canceling component, even, with regard to linguistic control, the implementation of surveillance, even police, on those who do not follow its primer. As a millennial ideology that it is, wokism does what millennialism did in the Middle Ages: to accelerate the arrival of the (supposed) good and the desired social justice, it does not shy away from running over some people who cross its path and silencing others. those who cross it do not agree. Is it to make the human rights defender want or demand that I be removed from the media and that newspapers stop publishing what I write, like many woke people, apparently unaware of what Article 19 of the Universal Declaration says? of Human Rights, no. Do you get tired of asking? It seems evident that Wokism goes far beyond the mere defense of people’s rights and is dedicated, or dedicated to, to persecuting other people and reducing or nullifying their right to disagree in a well-founded way with the program of action of the awakening as colonial history or identities.
Everyone knows what the woke people want in these two areas, and obviously this has little to do with human rights. They want, for example, to judge (and condemn) the past with the eyes, that is, with the moral concepts and judgments, of the present; they want official apologies for past colonial injustices and violence; they want material reparations for the participation of Western countries (only Western countries, it should be noted) in slavery two, three, four centuries ago; They want – or wanted – to encourage a great public debate, giving the false idea that the issue had never been debated before, to try to impose their version of the events; they want to change the teaching of the subject of History according to this version; they want the decolonization of public space, that is, the demolition or removal of statues and representations, in some way linked to or evocative of a colonial past; etc And they want, in another area, for there to no longer be a clear distinction between feminine and masculine; that the color blue is not assigned or reserved for boys and pink for girls; that bathrooms are, or can be, common; that sex change is facilitated or accelerated; that former men who now identify as women can compete in women’s sporting events; that the language be changed so that the word “woman” is replaced by “person who menstruates”; etc And we could, if we wanted to go into the aspect of linguistic control, mention that they also want to correct – or rather, censor – books and films, change the subtitles of museum pieces, etc.
This is something that most Portuguese people reject, and apparently so do the American people, and it was partly because of this agenda that Kamala Harris lost so badly. As Maureen Dowd wrote in New York Times“woke up is broken”. Or, as one Democratic voter put it in a letter to the editor of the same newspaper, the woke rhetoric was “alienating and counterproductive”. Of course, this is just an interpretation. This is an interpretation I support, admitting that it may be erroneous. But the important question is the following: why did this interpretation – which, I repeat, could be erroneous – arouse so irritated, so agitated, the nationals who, with the exception of those who live in the United States, did not even vote? Because, although they do not lack intelligence, many of them have a problem of bad conscience or bad conscience that arises from having the perception – even if they deny it – that the ideology they hold and propagate was instrumental in Trump’s victory and corresponding defeat. of Harris. No matter how many times you turn to the text, you can’t help but notice that there was some connection between Wokism and the victory of the Republicans. In their proselytizing in favor of good and present or retroactive social justice, they ended up giving impetus and encouragement to those they classify as retrograde and evil forces. And realizing this, realizing that a substantial portion of the left (the so-called “moderates” in the image above) sees the American awakening and the corresponding radical agenda as to blame for the Democrats’ electoral disaster, they become They hurry to come. and shake that water off your coat. His writings are not for people like me, nor for Chega supporters, nor, of course, for those who live in the United States; They are for the moderates of the PS and certain margins or fractions of the PSD; They are an attempt at exculpation and a desperate search for a good excuse or a scapegoat.
Source: Observadora
