Cancel Culture disarms the West of its values in the challenge to authoritarian systems

18 March 20222 years ago babelfish

Cancel culture is the Orwellian Big Brother of "1984" . A deleterious phenomenon, in continuous expansion, capable of reducing the representations of the history of humanity to the simple choice between true or false, compliant or non-compliant, pure or impure, ethical or unethical, moral or amoral. A form of social control that reduces freedom to an abstract concept, a newspeak tinged with conformity, a "sweet censorship".

In 2020, more than 150 American monuments were demolished: from George Washington to Andrew Jackson, via FD Roosevelt, up to Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses Grant. The Winston Churchill statue in Parliament Square was covered up by the authorities to prevent it from being fouled by protesters; while that of Christopher Columbus shot down by Black Lives Matter protesters in Baltimore. Damaged, however, that of Gandhi, guilty of not using violence in the struggle for Indian independence against the British Empire.

As reported by a September 7, 2021 article by the National Post , more than 4,700 books were burned in more than thirty Ontario schools as an "act of reconciliation with the indigenous"; a campaign is underway in Edinburgh to tear down the statue of economist Adam Smith; Dutch publisher Blossom Books has decided to remove the character of Mohammed from Canto XXVIII of the Divine Comedy .

Cancel culture continues to spread like wildfire in Western democracies. While the entire Atlantic bloc and the Ukrainian people are fighting, one economically and the other militarily, against the Putin regime, the protagonist of the imprisonment of dissidents, inconvenient journalists and opponents for more than twenty years, the West seems to have lost the weapons that guaranteed it victory in the Cold War and that distinguish it from authoritarian systems: deterrence, democracy and, above all, affirmation of the freedom of the individual.

Culture, pluralism, diversity are progressively erased at every level and latitude. From Shakespeare to Plato, from Thomas Jefferson to Indro Montanelli, culture is annihilated, extinct, limited. By now, we speak exclusively of "culture of cancellation" and not of "cancellation of culture", precisely to denote the existence of a current that imposes limitation, censorship and illiberality as social and political references. Finally, as reported by Luigi Mascheroni in il Giornale , the wording "Italo Balbo" was removed "from the cockpit of one of the Airbuses of the state fleet, those used by premier and ministers for their flights and for public utility missions ".

The words are overturned in Orwellian fashion and are transformed into paradoxes. Literature is reduced to the present and becomes a "blank page", as Mao Tse Tung said. Rewriting the great culture of the "rulers", re-adapting it to our age and judging it according to the moral canons of our present time, has become the necessary precondition for the birth of the new hegemonic cancellation. Ultimately, the politically correct has managed to modernize the Freudian principle "Wo Es war, soll Ich werden" (where they were, we must become). On the one hand the winners of history, on the other the losers; the unclean on the one hand, the pure on the other. And it is time for the former to make room for the latter.

For cancel culture , there must no longer be any fixed points other than our own; history must be interpreted objectively, according to the canons decided by some "anti-discrimination" committee or directly by autarchic or totalitarian states. The sharing of politically opposed free spaces translates into a hatred that has the unique consequences of disqualification and, sometimes, even physical violence against the opponent.

Yesterday, Gramsci spoke of a "form of control"; today, politically correct imposes a new control under the guise of the "culture of cancellation". The West is losing its roots, its values, its millenary traditions. In the name of culture, sacrifice culture itself; in the name of fake guardianship, sacrifice freedom of speech.

Antonio Gurrado, in the columns of Il Foglio , recalled how the war against Putin "cannot be won with symbolic boycotts"; it can only be won with the exaltation of democracy against authoritarianism, of traditionalism against radicalism, of pluralism against unanimity. In short, one can only triumph if one returns to being the West.

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This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL https://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/la-cancel-culture-disarma-loccidente-dei-suoi-valori-nella-sfida-ai-sistemi-autoritari/ on Fri, 18 Mar 2022 03:50:00 +0000.