Today’s revolutionaries aren’t very good students of history, to say the least. They are full of zeal, have the requisite urge to destroy, the obligatory faith in their ability to remake humankind, the belief that widespread property destruction is good PR, and so on. What they lack is pacing.
You want to say: Slow down, young’uns! First you seize power and send all your class enemies to the camps or the grave. Then you turn on your own to purge the ideologically wobbly or those who are insufficiently zealous.
But these idiots are eating their own before they have power. Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling? Off to the gulag for believing in biological sex. The New York Times editorial-page editor earned defenestration for believing in free speech. Day after day on Twitter there’s a frenzy of witch-burning and heretic-stoning; the entire platform is like a self-lubricating guillotine.
Then again, it might be seen as a new, efficient model. After you’ve overthrown the tyrants and set up the People’s Committee, you have a new world to build. Even if you devote the morning to inventing a postcapitalist paradigm and spend the afternoon figuring out how to get fresh water and sanitation to your typhus-infested camp, that means you have to spend the evening drawing up proscription lists. Purging is necessary, but who has the time?
So they’re getting it out of the way now, purging the culture and the Twitter lists of people and things that need to be extirpated for the good of all.
Perhaps this is what happens when people who have been bingeing on TV shows for three months with no place to go decide to have a revolution. Instead of watching the shows once a week and pacing themselves, it’s a whole season in one day.
James Lileks, “Twinkling’s Canceled, Little Star”, National Review, 2020-07-06.
October 14, 2020
QotD: The frenetic pace of cancel culture
Comments Off on QotD: The frenetic pace of cancel culture
No Comments
No comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
