מומחים: השורשים של ההתנהלות הרדיקלית באוניברסיטאות במערב נעוצים ב"תיאוריה הצרפתית" ובקומוניזם

It's been one month since the deadly death of Charlie Kirk. While President Trump takes aim at Antifa, some conservative circles are pondering how to confront the spread of radical ideology on campus. In France, some experts are reflecting on how certain communist ideas reshaped social and cultural studies in the late 20th century, eventually giving rise to more radical forms of Our international correspondent David Vez reports from Paris. The dust has settled since the commemoration for Charlie Kirk in France two weeks ago. The tribute sparked a debate about the presence of radical ideology in universities. Some experts said the radical ideas promoted by Antifa groups or other movements follow a long-lasting intellectual trend that began in France decades ago and later spread worldwide. It reached its peak in the 1970s and 1980s under what became known as French theory. The president of France's student association Lacroix-Cardin says French theory laid the foundation for cultural Marxism on French campuses before it was exported abroad. It's very sad for me to say this but French university is a bit the root of all evil. If you look at it, some of the worst dictators like Paul Potts, he was a student in France, he was a communist in France. A lot of people, of intellectuals, of dictators, of left-wing extremists went to France to learn the ideas of the French theory of the cultural Marxism and then went to other countries to infuse those ideas. After Marxism fell out of favor due to examples like Stalin, a new generation sought different ideological models. French theory gained a notable popularity in American humanities departments during the 1980s, helping shape the rise of cultural studies, gender studies, and post-colonial studies. According to a US government document released in 2018, the CIA investigated the influence of French philosophers in universities during the 1980s and their impact on political circles. Jeremy Stubbs, deputy editor of Coseur magazine, recalled his student years at Oxford University in UK in the 1980s. In one of his articles, he described French theory as another reign of terror, in reference to the French Revolution. That is in a way, I think, the great attraction for what was called theory. It enables people in human sciences to distance themselves from science, even to criticize science, but also to put themselves above the idea of empirical criticism. Stubbs said the theory gave teachers and students a sense of entitlement to reject or criticize other forms of knowledge within universities. The theory came as an extent to some communist thought with this culture of struggling and dividing people against each other. Is that an incarnation of communism to some extent? Yes. Already after the Second World War, there was a broad tendency among university lecturers to be on the left. These are really the pioneers of what we would call the woke approach today. And there is a difference. The French theorists, they prepared the ground and in a sense they softened up the brains of thinking people in universities and higher education establishments. They softened their brains up. And what came next was, in a sense, intellectually a lot less impressive, even on the level of rhetoric, a lot more simplified, a lot more directly militant. Stubbs says while the French theory declined in the late 1990s, it carried out on US campuses with other forms of ideology, including the creation of wokeism. Stubbs said eventually the theory did not last and had its fatigue moment. And so the same could be happening with other form of radical ideology that develops in the US, but also in other universities across the West. When we see, for example, in the assassination of Charlie Kirk, whatever one may think of his ideas, even somebody on the left who was opposed to his ideas would have to accept that here was a man willing to debate in universities. And one can only hope that this will spark a reaction of people in universities and that they will say, OK, let's stop this fanaticism. David Duves, NTD News, Paris.