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Re: Forum gossip thread by Prof Emeritus at Fawk U
CANCELLED .... The "Cancel Culture" we are now in
Started by cc, January 14, 2021, 09:30:39 PM
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As Americans we have had it good for so long that we often take important things for granted until they are about to be taken away. As recently as five or six years ago, who would have thought that America's dominant social media platforms, such as Facebook, Google-You Tube, or Twitter would assault its host country's First Amendment rights by engaging in the silencing of a huge number of its users through censorship, cancellation, and deplatforming?
Of all the impediments to America's progress on every front, censorship and the cancel culture probably rank right at the top. Many of the younger generation accept cancel culture as being part of depersonalized relationships that social media has fostered. It seems many have gotten used to cyberbullying and the flippant cancellation of people, ideas and relationships—all facilitated with just a few clicks.
The older generations appreciate that protection of free speech, free association, and a presumption of innocence have always been a core principles in America not only because of the Constitution's First, Fifth, Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments, but also because of the importance of civility and the wide recognition that tolerance is a necessary virtue in a pluralistic society and that no one has a monopoly on the best ideas. From the beginning of the American constitutional republic, it's been axiomatic that progress in every field and endeavor is contingent on competition of ideas, policies, and products.
Who Benefits
So why does cancel culture, which is so demonstrably limiting, harmful and antisocial—exacerbating intolerance and hatred, continue to be on the rise in America? That is best answered by simply identifying who benefits. Clearly external enemies of the United States benefit, particularly those who want to remake the world like the Chinese Communist Party and elites associated with Klaus Schwab's World Economic Forum, famous for its annual meetings in Davos and its push to bring about the "Great Reset."
These external hostile forces have domestic allies among the elites in the United States, in political parties, government bureaucracies, academia and in the corporate world, but also with groups such as Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Antifa. The elites use these latter groups in similar ways that Hitler used the Brownshirts. BLM and Antifa are essentially the elites' footsoldiers used to foment internal fear and division, and to destroy society's connection with its past, and even precipitate civil war—all of which facilitates the end game of subordinating the United States to the global elite's new world order.
Much of the cancel culture may not realize that in tearing down and desecrating historical monuments and rewriting history they are unwittingly serving the elites at the top. But by destroying the current and next generation's respect for the symbols and knowledge of the history and virtue of the American past—from its founding figures and ideals, drafting of a unique constitution based on those ideals, and its redemptive course culminating in the racial equality achieved by the civil rights movement—America can fall like ripe fruit into the hands of its enemies. Cancelling and destroying American heritage is necessary to accomplish this end.
Cancel culture is regressive, not progressive—and we can project where it will take us by understanding the past and what has happened to other societies and nations that adopted such practices. And that is of course why the main project of the cancel culture is to disconnect present society from its past.
George Orwell's depiction of a dystopian future, presented in his novel "1984," published in the year that marked the beginning of Mao Zedong's communist rule in China in 1949, has proven prescient across time, culture, and geography. Orwell didn't use the term cancel culture but he described how it works in his dictum that "he who controls the past controls the future [and] he who controls the present controls the past."
French Revolution, Russia, China
Cancel culture has its roots in intolerance dating back to the French Revolution (1789-1794), when Robespierre's Reign of Terror resulted in some 30,000 deaths—a period accompanied by a concerted effort to erase and destroy Christianity and its traditions and institutions. The culmination of that phase of the French Revolution was marked by the regimes's installation of a prostitute as head of the Notre Dame Cathedral. With that affront to decency and elimination of God, Robespierre and his successors thought they could rule without moral constraints.
Marxism took the cancellation of culture to a new level. Although that ideology was formulated by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the first half of the 1800s, it wasn't implemented until Vladimir Lenin's Bolshevik revolution in Russia in 1917. One of Lenin's first projects was to cancel the past by tearing down the tsarist statues and symbols of Russian history in the form of statues, emblems, coats of arms, double-headed eagles—all destroyed in the name of the revolution and creation of the new man—the "Soviet Man."
The vast majority of people in the Russian Empire were, at the time of the revolution, religious believers. Lenin ordered his communist vanguard lieutenants to destroy religious institutions and replace religious belief with atheism. In the first year after the revolution, the state expropriated all church property, and in the period from 1922 to 1926, 28 Russian Orthodox bishops and more than 1,200 priests were killed. Many more were persecuted.
Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky were close both ideologically and personally during the early years. As the head of Red Army, Trotsky was instrumental in securing the communist revolution for Lenin, and for his successor Stalin after the former died in 1924. But by 1927, Stalin purged Trotsky from the Communist Party and Soviet politics, and expelled him from the country in 1929. Stalin then put a team together to erase all photographs and references to Trotsky in every historical record. By the time the order went out to have him assassinated some years later, there was hardly an official record or photograph remaining that Trotsky ever even existed.
Even though there was a concerted effort to hide the wholesale crime committed, it came to be known by the 1960s that Bolshevik and Soviet communist totalitarian rule had resulted in death tolls of more than 20 million and likely upwards of 30 million people.
Like Lenin and Stalin's communist rule in Russia, Mao Zedong's communist revolution in China was based on historical determinism—a fundamental tenet of Marxism which required the cancellation of past history and the subordination of its citizens to the collective identity of the communist state.
During the Cultural Revolution between 1966 and 1976 Mao directed his Red Guards to mobilize the population to cancel and rid itself of the "Four Olds": Old customs, Old culture, Old habits and Old ideas. The result was devastating, with Chinese people turning on each other, with brainwashed youth even betraying their own siblings and parents.
In the end Mao's Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution were responsible for some 40-60 million deaths, which include those for which Mao was directly responsible and deaths that resulted from disastrous policies he refused to change.
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One school committee member called the statistics 'disturbing'
Boston Public Schools officials said that a program with advanced learning classes would be cancelled over concerns that the classes served disproportionate racial groups.
The program known as Advanced Work Classes was intended to serve high-performing students in the fourth, fifth and sixth grade. Students are encouraged to study their subjects in a deeper and non-traditional manner.
School officials became concerned when a report showed that the program was disproportionately serving white students, and underserving black and Hispanic students.
The district analysis found that more than 70% of the students in the program were white or Asian, while nearly 80% of the students in the district are Hispanic or black.
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Bill Maher mocks social justice warriors, warns cancel culture is 'real, insane, and coming to a neighborhood near you'
'Memo to social justice warriors: When what you're doing sounds like an Onion headline, stop'
Bill Maher began his monologue by saying, "Liberals need a Stand Your Ground law ... for cancel culture. So that when the woke mob comes after you for some ridiculous offense, you'll stand your ground, stop apologizing. Because I can't keep up with who's on the s*** list."
"Cancel culture is real, it's insane, it's growing exponentially, and it's coming to a neighborhood near you," he cautioned. "If you think it's just for celebrities – no. In an era when everyone is online, everyone is a public figure."
Maher referenced the unfortunate situation of Emmanuel Cafferty, a Hispanic man who was fired from his job at San Diego Gas and Electric in May after a photo of him went viral online. Cafferty had his hands out of a work truck in the "OK" sign position, which some argue is a hallmark of white supremacy and the Anti-Defamation League declared to be a "symbol of hate."
Cafferty said he was simply cracking his knuckles, and there was "no racist intent behind it." Maher joked, "He wasn't making a hand gesture; he was probably flicking a booger."
Maher asked, "Is this really who we want to become? A society of phony, clenched a******* avatars walking on eggshells, always looking over your shoulder about getting ratted out for something that actually has nothing to do with your character or morals?"
The HBO host questioned, "Think about everything you've ever texted, emailed, searched for, tweeted, blogged, or said in passing. Or now even just witnessed. 'Someone had a Confederate flag in their dorm room in 1990 and you didn't do anything?' 'You laughed at a Woody Allen movie?'"
Maher amended the renowned quote credited to Andy Warhol from "everyone will have 15 minutes of fame" to "everyone will have 15 minutes of shame."
He then cited a Cato Institute/YouGov national poll from July that found 62% of Americans say the current political climate prevents them from voicing their political opinions because "others might find them offensive." Republicans were the group most likely to practice self-censorship, while "strong liberals" were the only ideological group in the country who held a majority in feeling they could freely express their convictions without fear of retribution.
"Everybody hates it but nobody stands up to it," Maher said of cancel culture. "Because it's always the safe thing to swallow what you really think and just join the mob."
Maher brought up recent attempts to cancel pop culture figures such as Justin Timberlake, "The Bachelor" host Chris Harrison, and former "The Mandalorian" star Gina Carano who was fired by Disney for comparing censorship of conservatives to the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany.
"She made some Nazi analogy. Who doesn't these days?" Maher quipped. "'You're like the Nazis' is the new 'I don't like you.' 'It's always OK when Trump's the Nazi.'"
"By the way, you can't work in Hollywood if you don't believe what we believe? Yeah, in the 1950s, that's exactly what the left complained they were being told," he added.
Maher attempted to counsel "woke" progressives, "Mature people understand humans are continually evolving as opposed to Wokeville, where they're always shocked we didn't emerge enlightened from the primordial ooze."
Maher ridiculed the campaign to erase the names of Presidents George Washington and Abraham Lincoln from school buildings in San Francisco by education officials, as well as an effort to remove statues of Lincoln in Chicago because they are allegedly problematic.
"The land of Lincoln might cancel Lincoln," Maher said of the president who signed the Emancipation Proclamation.
"Memo to social justice warriors: When what you're doing sounds like an Onion headline, stop," Maher concluded.
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