by Citizen Dolly » Thu Mar 11, 2021 10:25 pm
Lazy re-post of old FB rant:
Anyone throwing around the term "cancel culture" is, consciously or not, peddling conservative propaganda. The phenomenon it represents is simply good old fashioned protest and boycott and is as old as civilisation itself, and is ubiquitous across the political spectrum. There is *no* difference whatsoever between students trying to stop fascists being invited to speak on university campus' and Christian conservatives trying to get "Life Of Brian" banned from cinemas, or the Sex Pistols banned from playing gigs. That is obvious with a moment's thought. The point of re-branding it as "cancel culture" is to try and depict it as something peculiar to the modern liberal-left, symptomatic of alleged intolerance and "snowflakiness". By demonizing it and making it an issue in the press all of a sudden, it allows the Right to marginalise and de-legitimise left-wing ideas and perspectives. That's its purpose.
Much the same is also true of "political correctness", which really has no meaning whatsoever outside of intra-Left discourse. When leftists criticise others on the Left for saying and doing things (generally racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic things) which contradict their professed egalitarian beliefs, then *that* is political correctness - and it is entirely legitimate too, I'd say. When leftists try to make those arguments to people outside of the Left, then that's just propaganda (also legitimate); in the vanishingly rare instances where leftists have sufficient power to *force* their ideas on people outside of the Left, that's just politics, and its legitimacy varies. The only difference here between the Left and Right is that, arguably, the Right has no moral dimension and so it really has no purpose in trying to encourage people to live up to their ideals, and consequently, the first instance (actual political correctness) is absent. The propaganda and political instances are very much the same though. Again, the purpose of the Right picking up and deploying the phrase is to de-legitimise the Left by presenting it as totalitarian and puritanical.
In summary, I think a large part of why we're getting so brutally fucked over here, and why the Left is unable to do anything about it, is that we're allowing the Right to frame the narrative and control the discourse. While leftist ideas are continually undermined, misrepresented and marginalised, right-wing ideas are allowed to pass unexamined, given a gloss of being "just common sense" as distinct from the high-flown and hare-brained notions of the Left. And key to this is the Right's weaponisation of language: buzz-phrases like "political correctness" and "cancel culture" are being systematically used to derail any opposition to this capitalist-fascist hellscape that we're sliding into. And I really don't know what to do about it.
Lazy re-post of old FB rant:
[quote]Anyone throwing around the term "cancel culture" is, consciously or not, peddling conservative propaganda. The phenomenon it represents is simply good old fashioned protest and boycott and is as old as civilisation itself, and is ubiquitous across the political spectrum. There is *no* difference whatsoever between students trying to stop fascists being invited to speak on university campus' and Christian conservatives trying to get "Life Of Brian" banned from cinemas, or the Sex Pistols banned from playing gigs. That is obvious with a moment's thought. The point of re-branding it as "cancel culture" is to try and depict it as something peculiar to the modern liberal-left, symptomatic of alleged intolerance and "snowflakiness". By demonizing it and making it an issue in the press all of a sudden, it allows the Right to marginalise and de-legitimise left-wing ideas and perspectives. That's its purpose.
Much the same is also true of "political correctness", which really has no meaning whatsoever outside of intra-Left discourse. When leftists criticise others on the Left for saying and doing things (generally racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic things) which contradict their professed egalitarian beliefs, then *that* is political correctness - and it is entirely legitimate too, I'd say. When leftists try to make those arguments to people outside of the Left, then that's just propaganda (also legitimate); in the vanishingly rare instances where leftists have sufficient power to *force* their ideas on people outside of the Left, that's just politics, and its legitimacy varies. The only difference here between the Left and Right is that, arguably, the Right has no moral dimension and so it really has no purpose in trying to encourage people to live up to their ideals, and consequently, the first instance (actual political correctness) is absent. The propaganda and political instances are very much the same though. Again, the purpose of the Right picking up and deploying the phrase is to de-legitimise the Left by presenting it as totalitarian and puritanical.
In summary, I think a large part of why we're getting so brutally fucked over here, and why the Left is unable to do anything about it, is that we're allowing the Right to frame the narrative and control the discourse. While leftist ideas are continually undermined, misrepresented and marginalised, right-wing ideas are allowed to pass unexamined, given a gloss of being "just common sense" as distinct from the high-flown and hare-brained notions of the Left. And key to this is the Right's weaponisation of language: buzz-phrases like "political correctness" and "cancel culture" are being systematically used to derail any opposition to this capitalist-fascist hellscape that we're sliding into. And I really don't know what to do about it. ☹️[/quote]