All over the Western world, governments and social institutions face the demands of LGBTQ activists. These people claim to be fighting for social justice when, in fact, the most far-reaching dictates are being considered.  Opposition to these social justice warriors (SJW) is also growing, inspired by French philosopher Michel Foucault.

By Martin Harlaar
Until now, it has been mostly among advocates of conservative or traditional values, but fortunately, it is increasingly among my leftist brothers and sisters.

Foucault has immensely influenced the ideology that inspires contemporary Social Justice Warriors. In this contribution, I focus on a side of Michel Foucault's life that Social Justice Warriors would rather not see highlighted.

The Social Justice Warriors are a seemingly loose collection of large and small movements that advocate for the oppressed, vulnerable, and marginalised. However, as different as these movements are, their vocabulary betrays the fact that they are somehow connected.

My lifelong interest in biology provided me with a new insight. Quite by chance, I came across a TED Talk by Suzanne Simard on the Internet. She teaches in Canada at the University of British Colombia in the Faculty of Forestry.

The title of this TED Talk was: ‘How trees talk to each other,’. Initially, I feared it would be woolly talk, but that did not happen. Simard spoke about the underground ecosystem in a forest. At first glance, all those mushrooms and trees have little to do with each other, but that's only appearance. Nutrients are exchanged, and through the underground fungal network, mature trees ("hub trees" or "mother trees") feed their seedlings.

The mishmash of SJW movements resembles this: one extensive underground ecosystem with a wide variety of above-ground life forms.

Foucault is, without any doubt, one of the leading "mother trees." He was born in Poitiers in 1926 and grew up in a well-to-do environment. His mother was the daughter of a surgeon, and his father, himself a surgeon, took over his father-in-law's practice.

Foucault struggled with his homosexuality for a long time. In 1977, he signed a petition calling on the French parliament to stop criminalising voluntary sex with children under 15. Foucault fell for young boys and further favoured sadomasochism.

He was white and came from a privileged background. That he could nevertheless become a hero of the SJWs may be called a miracle. Possibly, his homosexuality and early death saved him.

In early 2021, a media interview with French-American philosopher Guy Sorman (b. 1944), a friend of Foucault's, caused attention. Sorman said that in the late 1960s, when he was a visiting professor in Tunis, Foucault had fondled young boys.

Guy Sorman had visited him in Tunis. "There, children of eight, nine, ten years old were walking around shouting 'Take me, take me!' to which Foucault tossed them money and said 'Come to the fixed place at 10 o'clock.' There, on the tombstones, he had sex with those kids. The question of whether they wanted it was not asked."

His years in Tunisia were necessary for Foucault's thinking; I understood from the summary of the article Foucault in Tunisia: The Encounter with Intolerable Power that I came across on the Internet. It was written by sociologist Kathryn Medien and published in 2019. Here is the original summary of the article:

’In September 1966, 10 years after Tunisia officially gained independence from French colonial rule, Foucault took up a three-year secondment, teaching philosophy at the University of Tunis. During his time in Tunisia, he documented his involvement in the anti-imperial, anti-authoritarian struggles that were taking place and detailed his organisation against the carceral Tunisian state. Through this account, it is argued that Foucault's entrance into political activism and his associated work in developing a new analytic of power was fundamentally motivated by his encounter with the neocolonial operatives of power that he witnessed and resisted while in Tunisia.
This article traced the anti-colonial and anti-imperial struggles concurrent to Foucault's development of his analytic power, albeit struggles that are shown not to take centre stage in his subsequent works. It concludes by suggesting that taking the scholar-activist archive presented thoughtfully may offer us a set of radical Foucauldian tools for resistance.

His stay in Tunisia introduced him to political activism and influenced his analysis of the phenomenon of "power". Foucault witnessed neocolonial power and resisted it. Foucault, the white Frenchman from a well-to-do family, threw money at young boys born shortly after Tunisia's independence and had sex with them in the cemetery at night. The man who, several years later, advocated the abolition of "voluntary" sex with children under 15. That made him the mother tree of the Social Justice Movement.

Initially a Marxist, Foucault was concerned with the struggles of the working class, but in time, he also became concerned with feminism, gay emancipation and other marginalised groups. 'Power' was the central theme in Foucault's thinking.

According to him, knowledge was in the service of power; it ensured that power relations were maintained. Furthermore, he rejected morality and saw it as a power exercise to maintain the status quo. Foucault rejected morality and wanted to be able to have sex with young boys with impunity. I wonder how the Social Justice Warriors would react if confronted with Foucault's victims.

Mother Tree Foucault, meanwhile, has already nurtured - directly and indirectly - several generations of academic seedlings with his ideas about power. Where once the exploited proletariat took to the streets to protest the capitalist rulers, now mostly privileged students revolt because they know or imagine themselves to be victims because of their skin colour, sexual preference, ethnic background, the socioeconomic position of their parents, physical disability, or you name it.

Together, these victims are fighting against their perceived injustice, not with the slogan from the Age of Enlightenment Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, but with the modern credo Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI).

In universities (but also in business), the banner bearing the initials of the Holy Trinity proudly flies DEI. The management of several universities (especially in the USA), without offering significant resistance, lowered the flag with the motto "Sapere aude" ("Dare to know") and has been kneeling humbly before the banner of the Holy Trinity ever since.

Rapidly, in recent years, Chief Diversity Officers and Diversity and Inclusion Managers have been appointed everywhere. They listen carefully to students and do everything they can to protect them from faculty who still believe in the Free Word and the Scientific Method.

In 1984, Michel Foucault, then 57, died of AIDS. He lies under a heavy tombstone in Vendeuvre du Poitou (Poitiers arrondissement), along with his mother, Anne Malapert-Foucault (1900-1987), and a certain Pierre Giraudeau (1800-1848). Foucault's ideas continue to spread like underground fungal threads.

Dutch historian Martin Harlaar works with the Humanist Association to get to the heart of important social themes. He is the author of various books: 'The Tamed Man' Where (do you think) our morality comes from?' (2021), 'Am I woke enough?' The gender experiment was published in January 2024.