French '68ers posting their Ls
When the ultimate conclusion was to liberate children from consent.
Rod Dreher is currently a guest of Hungary, and he’s coming under heat from his readers as he tries to make sense of our country’s government, our people’s attitude.
In his recent post, EU: Every Knee Shall Bow To The Pride Flag, he tried to defend the inflammatory Hungarian anti-LMBTQ/pedophile laws that are enraging West Europe’s political and media elite at the time of this article.
I can easily dismiss his misses during his struggle to interpret this new environment by reminding myself that he’s an American, so how could he know any better? In the article above however he managed to get something wrong that upon further investigation might be educational even to Europeans and Hungarians:
This is really extraordinary. A country that has been part of Europe for a thousand years is now regarded by other European leaders as unfit for their company because it bans a kind of sexualized material aimed at children — a ban that probably would have been supported by majorities in every European country forty or fifty years ago.1
Dreher assumes that 40-50 years ago opposition to this would have been a no-brainer in Europe. He writes about “majorities”, so I assume he means the electorate.
Getting the opinion of the everyday people from half a century ago is just as hard as it is to get it today (the honest one that is), so I can’t give him a source to support or refute his claim.
Fortunately, what the electorate wants is one thing, what the elites, especially the intellectual elites pursue is another, and they, thanks to they prominence, have a record. A permanent record.
Enter France in the 1970s:
An introduction to Daniel-Cohn Bendit
Fidesz — its current regime, 11 years and counting — came to power in 2010, with a supermajority and little domestic opposition from the recently self-immolated, demoralized Hungarian Left.
In their second2 infancy, with close to unlimited power by democratic standards, inheriting an almost insolvent State, the Hungarian electorate — whether being pro-Orban or not — begrudgingly accepted their own near-term fate as residents in a possible Greece 2.0, save for a miracle. The promise of this unlikely miracle gave Fidesz universal legitimacy to take drastic actions. It was a time of national crisis, and Orban’s government acted upon it.
In their quasi-revolutionary — that is compared to the neoliberal status quo that had Hungary in its indifferent, cruel vice grip — reform process they understandably ruffled some feathers in the international arena, first and foremost in the EU, that viewed such an overwhelming, sometimes radical, but in its essence conservative ascendancy in our remote, tiny backwater with worry. (If only they had knew how it would turn out by the end of the decade.)
One of the first, and arguably most prominent opponents of Orban’s then-new regime was a French member of the European Parliament: Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who cried wolf seeing this reactionary upheaval. Justly so, I might add with hindsight.
Fidesz, understandably, began to dig up dirt on him, and with him being an active politician on the radical European Left for the past 40 years, there was plenty to find. However, as it happens so often in politics, one man’s dirt is another man’s badge of honor.
Him being a 68er, his stance on most issues was what you would expect from the radical Left, easy to condemn from a conservative standpoint, but unremarkable for a general outrage.
They did find something however that was universally shocking from the early 2010s perspective, for the whole Hungarian political spectrum:
Cohn-Bendit worked in the Karl-Marx-Buchhandlung bookshop in Frankfurt and ran an anti-authoritarian kindergarten. In his 1975 book Le Grand Bazar3, he described himself as engaging in sexual activities with very young children at the kindergarten. In 1978, an edition of Pflasterstrand, an alternative magazine Cohn-Bendit edited, described being seduced by a 6-year-old girl as one of the most beautiful experiences the author had ever had4
This went on to the early 80s5, and gradually fizzled out as the zeitgeist slowly changed.
A quarter of a century later he kind of apologized6, and he hasn’t been cancelled ever since. He is a 68er after all, and Europe, today, is still their regime.
Fidesz played this revelation to the maximum back in the day, but never really ventured further than calling him a dirty pedo to discredit him. I felt that there’s more to this story.
His ultimate non-cancellation in the West was my first clue that something bigger is in play, that it would lead to rocking a boat that has more people on board than just him. People who matter.
The other other clue was his seemingly bizarre honesty and eagerness to be forthcoming on such a controversial issue: I assumed that he was not a lone actor who just couldn’t keep himself from posting his Ls, but he was acting in an intellectual bubble where this topic, back in the day, was considered well within the Overton-window.
Enter the 1977 French petition against age of consent laws:
Ultimate Liberation
[…] France’s May 68 movement, the social revolution started in 1968 by students and unions against France’s old order.
With the slogan, “It’s forbidden to forbid,” the movement rebelled against authority and fought against imperialism, capitalism, racism, sexism and homophobia. Some also argued for abolishing age-of-consent laws, saying that doing so would liberate children from the domination of their parents and allow them to be full, sexual beings.7
It’s a no-brainer, you see.
In 1977, a petition was addressed to the French parliament calling for the abrogation of several articles of the age of consent law and the decriminalization of all consensual relations between adults and minors below the age of fifteen (the age of consent in France). A number of French intellectuals – including such prominent names as Louis Aragon, Michel Foucault, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Simone de Beauvoir, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Michel Leiris, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Philippe Sollers, Jacques Rancière, Jean-François Lyotard, Francis Ponge, Bernard Besret and various prominent doctors and psychologists – signed the petition.
Quite a dream team of post-WWII French though.
Names you should be familiar in the right circles. An impressive list of thinkers that are just as prestigious today that they were in the 1970s. Their fashionable nonsense is part of the foundation of modern Leftist thought, a must know, even if you don’t actually read them. It’s fine, their outspoken fans don’t bother with it either.
You’re a higher status individual if you claim to read Sartre8 than not.
By the middle of the 1970s, all these bedrocks of progressive thinking reached a consensus within their revolutionary thought bubble that it’s time to openly push for child sex:
Michel Foucault argued that children are able to give consent to sexual relations, saying that assuming “that a child is incapable of explaining what happened and was incapable of giving his consent are two abuses that are intolerable, quite unacceptable.” Foucault, Sartre, and newspapers such as Libération and Le Monde each defended the idea of child-adult sexual relationships.
Michel Foucault stated that the petition was signed by himself, by the novelist/gay activist Guy Hocquenghem, the actor/play-writer/jurist Jean Danet, pediatrician and child psychoanalyst Françoise Dolto and also by people belonging to a wide range of political positions.9
Just a reminder: psychology is not science. As you can see the child psychoanalyst highlighted above, experts can make unfalsifiable claims that are either accepted or rejected by the community, depending on the claimant’s authority or what’s in vogue at the time. Whatever psychology stated about humans 50 or a 100 years ago was not disproven by later generations, it merely fell out of favour due to fashion and politics, unlike actual scientific claims like the age of Earth, aether theory or plate tectonics, psychology has plenty of room for consensus-driven sophistry, so its intermingling with postmodern philosophy should not surprise anyone10.
In this 1970s case, it was used to for child sexualization, and it can be used again and again, if the zeitgeist permits it.
“No matter what parts I steal from the factory, I can only assemble a tank” - concluded a Hungarian socialist-era joke. In a similar fashion, no matter which way the post-1968 French radical Leftist revolutionary thinkers pushed their ideas of ultimate liberation, it always concluded with child sex.11
While all this philosophical progress made by the middle of the 1970s regarding the concept of individual liberty was rolled back for a while - or from the elite’s perspective, put on the back burner until the waters can be tested again -, in the 2010s and 2020s we’re finding ourselves at a time when the incremental push for increased libertinism is meeting its ultimate limit, again.
It’s not just France now, it’s the West. It’s not just elite thinkers in their weird bubble, but the broader soft power that claims to represent public consensus. All those 1970s thinkers and activist above are still worshipped in the panteon of the radical Left, today.
The first time Orban and Fidesz was in power was between 1998 and 2002, but that was a whole different era and a coalition government with much less power and zero experience at the start. Might as well be discounted as a learning experience.
ISBN 13: 9782714430106
Sixties hero revealed as kindergarten sex author - The Guardian (28 Jan 2001)
A Victim’s Account Fuels a Reckoning Over Abuse of Children in France
A French author wrote for years about his predilection for children and continued to win acclaim. Now one of them has spoken out.
“I am a Citizen of the World. I went to film camp. I've read Sartre. I've read Thomas Pynchon. I've read Ayn Rand. I've been to Italy. I've been to France. I speak French. I've been to Spain.” - Words of Wisdom by Charls Carroll
French petition against age of consent laws (When I visited the archive.md page, it told me that the article was archived by someone 2 weeks ago, so I’m not the only one who has doubts about the longevity of such content on Wikipedia. As of now the original is available).
Social sciences also ride on the back of unfalsifiable claims, just to name another field that can bend to meet a desired end.
The left and pedophilia, a monstrous story
After May 68, part of the libertarian intelligentsia defended the worst excesses of the sexual revolution. In theory and in practice. The Matzneff affair.