He titled the piece “Social justice warriors are waging a dangerous ‘Cancel Cultural Revolution’.” In the wake of the “Harper’s letter,” National Review contributor Jonathan S. Williamson published an unstructured litany of conservative clichés in the New York Post, with everything from clueless references to Animal Farm and 1984’s “2 minutes hate” to vague allusions to life under the German Democratic Republic. A month prior to Trump’s speech, Kevin D. This analogy is becoming increasingly commonplace in conservative media. Now, cancel culture has come to mean any censuring or even criticism done by the “left.” Cancelling has come be seen as the worst aspect of the “left” even by elements of the left itself. Initially an outgrowth of the #MeToo movement, “cancelling” was meant to hold powerful men accountable. In a recent piece for praxis on positions politics, Aminda Smith meditated on the abundance of unthinking comparisons between Maoism and Trumpism and found that those making such comparisons share one thing in common: an elitist allergy to popular politics. In a similar vein, this piece confronts how recent writing critical of the last year’s protest movement draws on imagery from the Cultural Revolution, focusing in particular on the analogy with “cancel culture.” The analogy between the Cultural Revolution and cancel culture came to be because, for many in the West, both are synonymous with far-left politics. These red guards are imagined as a faceless mob setting fire to the Ming tombs and subjecting their elders to untold abuse. It conjures up images of thronging masses of young students dressed in military garb waving little red books and chanting slogans. The Cultural Revolution occupies a special place in the Western reactionary imaginary. Not to be outdone, the Trump administration ratcheted up its own Sinophobia.Īgainst this, and against the backdrop of the nationwide protests after to the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers last May, Trump’s invocation of China’s “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” on July 4 th drew worldwide media attention. Adding to the din, a Biden campaign ad accused Trump of having “rolled over for the Chinese” in his catastrophic mishandling of Covid-19. Since his election in 2016, American news outlets have repeatedly accused Trump of “kowtowing” to Beijing on everything from trade to human rights. Following the grand failure of the first impeachment attempt, now president-elect Joe Biden competed against Trump on his anti-Beijing credentials instead. With the defeat of the Bernie Sanders primary campaign, the “Russiagate” conspiracy theory became the Democratic Party’s electoral identity above and beyond any policies offered by its renegade progressive caucus. This was yet another instance of the sort of red baiting mixed with orientalism that has taken over in Washington. Not gonna happen to us!”ĭelivering his speech uninvited on native lands, play-acting as a stalwart defender of American history against the iconoclasm of “leftists,” he proclaimed, “Make no mistake, this left-wing cultural revolution is designed to overthrow the American revolution.” “If you do not speak its language, perform its rituals, recite its mantras, and follow its commandments then you will be censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted, and punished. On July 4 th, 2020, in the midst of the twin crises of a nationwide uprising against racial injustice and a global pandemic, Donald Trump stood before Mount Rushmore to tell the people of the United States that the greatest threat to its liberty and security was “cancel culture.” He defined it thus:
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |