Cancel Culture: Its Origins and Implications for America

Article author: 
Scott S. Powell
Article publisher: 
Epoch Times
Article date: 
27 February 2021
Article category: 
Our American Future
Medium
Article Body: 
... 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?....
 
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....
 
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....
 
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..... Cancel culture is regressive, not progressive....

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....
 
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....

North Korea and Cambodia

In smaller communist countries such as North Korea and Cambodia the implementation of cancel culture was both more complete and more devastating....