Joining the conversation for beginners: Jan Kuitenbrouwer writes the dictionary of the verbal civil war that we call the ‘public debate’. This week again under the w of woke, which was used improperly by Leo Lucassen.
The term —> politically correct was invented by Lenin. Lenin was obsessed with ideological purity. Everything had to be ‘politically correct’, down to the decimal point. When neoconservative Republicans perceived a similar fixation among left-wing activists in the 1990s, they borrowed Lenin’s term: political correctness. It was an invective, a swear word.
Of —> woke something similar is happening now. The pioneers of the black civil rights movement saw it as their mission to wake people up – get woke, stay woke – and recovered about ten years ago Black Lives Matter the term in honor. But it is no longer the woker, the better; woke became a disqualification. Many people now associate woke with fanaticism, bigotry and zealottery.
The left is trying to save the term.
Saturday was May 1, Labor Day. That day could not have been ‘celebrated’ better than with the penetrating undercover report by Jeroen van Bergeijk in de Volkskrant, about his work as a suitcase thrower at Schiphol. Unhealthy dog work for 10 euros per hour, thanks to ‘state company’ Schiphol. Leo Lucassen, director of the International Institute of Social History (IISH), tweeted: ‘May 1. Without woke ancestors there would have been no 8-hour workday, prohibition of child labor and the welfare state.”
The question is whether this semantic recalibration of woke has much of a chance. To put it mildly, the reactions to Lucassen’s attempt were unencouraging. Most commenters also see that the † social justice warriors from now on, set the alarm before going to sleep, just like the strike leaders of then, but that’s where the similarity pretty much ends, they think. A few examples:
‘Woke were my ancestors,’ someone writes, ‘woke up early, then a long hard working day, only off on Sundays and then back to bed early for the next day of hard work. And early dead. With your woke.’
Especially the divisive nature of woke identity politics versus the inclusive nature of the labor movement is mentioned as a crucial difference.
‘If our ancestors had been woke, it would have been big business diversity officers appointed and let the workers fight an identity struggle among themselves.’
‘Left is different from woke. My ancestors were not concerned with —> pronouns and with drag queens telling stories to primary school students.’
Someone suggested that Lucassen mixed up May 1 and April 1.
His position was remarkable, because he was not so long ago wrote that ‘woke is not an ideology’, just a ‘stamp’ to ‘make suspicious and delegitimize’ social criticism.
For example, the left reacts more often when its terminology is hacked: deny first. Political correctness: an evil invention of the right. —> Cancellation: there is no cancel culture at all. Woke does not exist. (Well, actually it’s just the socialism of our ancestors.)
According to the “Five Stages of Grieving” (Kubler-Ross) is ‘denial’ followed by ‘negotiation’. Leo Lucassen is apparently at that stage now.
The right usually reacts a bit more stoically —> slang theft. Just look on Google. ‘Proud to be wappie’ is considerably more common than ‘Proud to be wokie’.