THE vitriolic, personal attacks on the tennis great Margaret Court provide the most recent example of the poisonous impact of cancel culture as does the perennial complaint by black activists that the First Fleet’s arrival celebrated on Australia Day heralds the beginning of Aboriginal genocide.
Even “It’s your ABC” has gone to the dark side describing the nation’s birth as invasion day.
- Even the ABC has gone to the dark side describing the nation’s birth as an invasion.
- The Left knocks the West while happily taking money from communist China to establish Confucian Centres.
- Those best positioned to defend what is precious lack courage to take up the fight.
Defacing and destroying statues, trashing the nation’s history, indoctrinating students with radical gender ideology that denies being female or male is a biological imperative and corrupting the English language by erasing gender specific pronouns also illustrate the dominance of cancel culture.
In his poem The Second Coming the Irish poet William Butler Yeats writes “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity”. While written just after the horrific First World War and the violent struggle for Irish independence the lines from Yeats’ poem are just as relevant today.
Ours is a time when cancel culture ideologues seek to undermine and destroy what is best in Western civilisation and Australian society and where those in the best position to defend what is most precious lack the courage to take up the fight.
DECOLONISE
The fact that some 150 academics at the University of Sydney knocked back the million dollar Ramsay bequest to establish a centre for Western civilisation while happily taking money from communist China to establish a Confucian Centre provides yet another example.
Worse still, the mindless neo-Marxist inspired group think is not restricted to Australia. In order to “decolonise” the curriculum and erase “white supremacism” the UK’s University of Leicester has banned the medieval poet Geoffrey Chaucer as well as the classic Norse fable Beowulf. Both long considered central to the West’s literary heritage.
Even Shakespeare, considered one of the world’s most enduring and profound playwrights, is no longer immune with students being made to deconstruct and critique plays like Hamlet and Othello in terms of socialist Left, critical theory. A theory arguing that capitalist societies are riven with structural classism, sexism, transphobia and racism where identity politics and victimhood prevail.
Science is also targeted with academics at the University of Sheffield arguing Western science must be erased as it “is inherently white” and a “fundamental contributor to European imperialism and a major benefactor of its injustices”.
Ignored is that Western science and medicine are responsible for penicillin, open heart surgery, putting a man on the moon, splitting the atom and dramatically raising the living standards of billions living in underdeveloped, third world countries in Asia and Africa.
VILIFIED
The American Congress is now controlled by the woke, centre-left Democratic Party and the decision to ban gender specific pronouns like he and she and nouns like father, mother, son, daughter, brother, sister, uncle and aunt, while incredulous, provides additional evidence of how cancel culture reigns supreme.
One of the most insidious and dangerous aspects of cancel culture is its doctrinaire nature and the fact that anyone who fails to conform is either attacked and vilified or silenced by being no-platformed.
While preaching diversity and difference and the right to be heard, the irony is woke activists are the first to deny free speech and to impose politically correct group think. Examples include the move to strip Margaret Court of her Order of Australia award for condemning same-sex marriage and Bettina Arndt her AO award for championing men’s rights.
Not surprisingly, according to a recent survey by Mark McCrindle and Mainstream Insights, 65 per cent of Australians feel adversely affected by cancel culture.
Young people, in particular, feel most threatened with 77 per cent saying they feel pressured to hide their true opinions about controversial topics like racial equality, Black Lives Matter protests and gay conversion therapy.
The way language is corrupted and used as a weapon to crush dissent and to stifle free and open debate represents another aspect of cancel culture being imposed on society. Question whether a man can ever truly be a woman and you are condemned as heteronormative and transphobic.
ELITIST
Argue, despite its flaws and faults, Western, liberal democracies like Australia are worth celebrating and you are attacked as racist, Eurocentric and guilty of whiteness. To dare suggest arguments should be rational and based on sound research instead of emotion and you are dismissed as imposing male dominated, elitist, binary logic.
As argued by the late British cultural critic Roger Scruton, the dystopian novel 1984 by George Orwell and published in 1949 sums up the oppressive, totalitarian nature of cancel culture. An ideology that enforces group think and mind control by policing language, controlling the past and silencing any guilty of failing to conform.PC
Dr Kevin Donnelly is a senior research fellow at the Australian Catholic University and the author of How Political Correctness Is Still Destroying Australia available to purchase at kevindonnelly.com.au
If university culture was true to its brief to allow freedom of speech and expression then Sydney Uni would no more knock back the offer to establish an institute that provided independence of thought than it would abolish the need for students to attend lectures, try and push lower ranked students to the line rather than fail them as it used to do or lower its general academic standards to bow to the almighty dollar of overseas, fee-paying students and so discouraging disgusted alumni from bequeathing donations. Oops sorry – that’s what it’s already doing.
The university Chancellery needs a re-set.
Great article Professor Donnelly and unfortunately completely true!
Many city-dwellers are now so twisted and moronic, that they can find nothing constructive, active, fun, challenging or benevolent with which to fill their spare time. Negative denigration has become their chosen ‘sport’ and they fill their hate-fuelled time with spewing drivel.
I’m almost tempted to join a farcical ‘platform’ to give them all a good dose of solid English pronouns and stridently proclaim, what they would call, my white ‘privilege’.
But NO – as years ago, I easily deduced that these ‘platforms’ were, on the whole, the rubbish dumps of real twits!
The stupid class are throwing their kids into front line culture wars. They are beyond extreme and totally undeserving of children.