A Brief, Corrective History of “Cancel Culture”

Who signifies “cancel culture” as “cancel culture”? It does, of course. A culture that has been canceling other cultures for centuries is well-practiced not only at such cancellations but — like Keyser Söze, the self-mythologizing antagonist of the 1995 film The Usual Suspects — it is also adept at cancelling all evidence of its past and continued perpetrations. I’m calling out the supremacy of the West at the one thing it does not claim ownership over — its cancel culture. Instead, Western “cancel culture” and its contemporary right-wing media machinery attempts to redirect the discourse of who is “cancel culture” and who is cancelled. The sheer pretense of the original “cancel culture” and its power to cancel is in its constant erasure of responsibility for its own historical litany of cancellations — while loudly indicting any resistant culture or individual that dares in response to boycott, or cancel, or “take a knee” in opposition to its prevailing cultural norms. In every facet of society that reproduces it, Western “cancel culture” behaves as if it ALONE is destined to be that which supersedes or subsumes all “Others” — other nations, other achievements, other natural resources, other values — in order to situate itself at the center of the known universe. Wherever Western civilization or its most successful descendant, American exceptionalism, is trumpeted as the “one ring to…