"Julian Reichelt is dethroned."  So cheered the Berliner Zeitung a few days ago after it was revealed that Bild, Europe's largest newspaper, had been forced to sack its editor — and one of Germany's most popular journalists — following allegations made in a Ben Smith New York Times article of affairs with junior colleagues.  The piece also suggested that Axel Springer SE, the German publishing giant that owns Bild, is out of touch with today's woke and #metoo values.  Moreover, a few weeks earlier, Springer announced it was going to purchase Politico, the U.S. politics website, for about $1B — the German publisher's largest-ever investment.  One more reason to adopt the new values that now dominate American capitalist culture.  After all, as Ben Smith put it, an American manager would have been fired for as little as five percent of the allegations Reichelt faces.

All in all, we can say Springer has sacrificed at the altar of woke capitalism an excellent newspaper editor — or, in Springer boss Mathias Döpfner's words, "the last and only journalist in Germany who still courageously rebels against the new GDR authoritarian state."

Meanwhile, the debate is raging throughout the country about gender-neutral and inclusive language.  Unfortunately, the whole matter is made more and more complicated by German grammar.

In France, the discussion is even more heated.  Prominent French quarterly magazine Le Spectacle du Monde ran a few weeks ago a cover story titled "The Suicide of America."  It blamed the U.S. retreat from Afghanistan on "a woke dictatorship" and questioned whether the American "empire was collapsing."  In the same issue, an article faulted American universities as islands of extremism, where even students' Halloween costumes are policed, citing Yale University as a place where "offensive" costume-wearers are punished.

Emmanuel Macron's government, in turn, is making the fight against woke theories a cornerstone of its electoral strategy — the French presidential election will be held in April 2022.  "Our country has become a target of the woke movement," said Pierre Valentin, an expert at the new think-tank Le Laboratoire de la République, headed by French education minister Jean-Michel Blanquer.  "If there was a vaccine against the woke virus, it would be French and the leaders of the movement know that."  Le Laboratoire de la République is tasked with combating what the minister calls U.S.-imported wokeism.  "The [French] Republic is completely contrary to wokeism," Blanquer said in an interview with Le Monde.  "In the United States, this ideology provoked a reaction and led to the rise of Donald Trump."  He added: "France and its youth have to escape that."

Needless to say, the initiative has sparked controversy.  "It's McCarthyism," said Rim-Sarah Alouane, from Toulouse Capitole University.  "A minister is using a private entity to block discussions on these themes.  He's saying 'this is my responsibility and I'm going to impose the state's vision on these topics.'"  In an interview with Elle magazine last summer, President Macron himself complained that U.S.-imported "woke culture" is "racializing" France and creating more division among minorities.  He was obviously criticized by progressives, but several members of his government, such as the delegate minister for gender equality and diversity, Elisabeth Moreno, a Black woman, have also shared anti-woke views.  "The 'woke' culture is something very dangerous, and we shouldn't bring it to France," she said in an interview with Bloomberg News early this year.