Further Musings on Political Correctness and Cancel Culture

It is remarkable, though not surprising, how easy it is for demagogues to manipulate the masses and even the chattering class of right-wing intellectuals these days. The reasons for this are not hard to discern. Both are largely historically illiterate, and both prefer what "history" they do know to be largely of the mythic and political, and I would add ideological, correct variety and ahistorical. 

In reality, of course, and contrary to those who have contracted ideologically based historical amnesia, both political and ideological correctness and cancel culture have long histories stretching back centuries.  For example, Alkibiades and his circle's supposed desecration of the statues of Hermes in Athens in the fifth century BCE was an act of what we would today call political incorrectness though others might call it a lack of patriotism, an act of vandalism, or an act of heresy, whether he and they actually "desecrated" the statues or not. The Spanish Inquisition and other inquisitions like it before and after aimed at Christian "heretics" and Jews was an act of political and ideological correctness and cancel culture, sometimes very deadly cancel culture. The deportation of anarchist Emma Goldman by the United States government in the years after the Bolshevik Revolution was an act of "true" red, white, and blue political and ideological correctness and "all American" cancel culture. The banning of the Communist Party in the United States during the Cold War was an act of "true" red, white, and blue political and ideological correctness and "all American" cancel culture. The blacklisting of hundreds in the United States during the Cold War, such as scholars like Moses Finley, was an act of "true" red, white, and blue political and ideological correctness and "all American" cancel culture. 

What is, of course, remarkable, is that the historically illiterate and those whose minds have been colonised by right wing historical myths, manichean fantasies, and negations think and argue, despite all the empirical evidence to the contrary, that political and ideological correctness, is novel and that it is the product of a liberal or left-wing conspiracy to take over American educational institutions, America itself, and the world. I recently, for example, saw a comment from someone who attributed the fact that Timothy Hutton wasn't in the recent iteration of the TV show Leverage, Leverage: Redemption on IMDb TV, to liberal and left wing cancel culture. Needless to say, such an "argument", if I can call it that, has to ignore the fact that the accusations against Hutton, as I discovered very quickly during a search online, have been corroborated by someone who knew the person who was allegedly raped, and was told by that person that she had been raped at the time. It also ignores the reality that in the world of consumer capitalism corporations, like those that produce media product, these corporations are constantly conscious of their brand and, in a world where public relations is a fact of corporate (including educational corporations) and increasingly everyday life, of their reputation and that having someone with accusations of rape hanging over him star in a television show might not be good for their brand or for viewership numbers and hence the possible financial gains that come from commercials that run during each episode of the show and on which the show depends for its continuation. What, in sum, the nattering nabobs of the right don't see, in other words, is the mote in their own eye, their political correctness, which they fetishise or transcendentalise, their own involvement in cancel culture both past and present, and empirical reality. All of those, of course, are impressive examples of how ideology creates a rather perverted "reality".