Nester99
Member
Interesting article about Cancel Culture.
Barbara Kay: Douglas Murray is a writer who says what the rest of us would like to
He is right, this is becoming a new relgion and righteousness is dependent on your place in oppression stack.
The Crusades will return, but did you think it be you they are cursading against?
Murray writes: “The interpretation of the world through the lens of ‘social justice,’ ‘identity group politics’ and ‘intersectionalism’ is probably the most audacious and comprehensive effort since the Cold War at creating a new ideology.” Christianity has been spurned, but the religious impulse is inherent and abhors a vacuum. The “religion” of social justice, Murray observes, poured itself into the handy campus vessel of Marxism with remarkable speed.
One of the hallmarks of Marxism – not a bug, but a feature – is its ruthlessness. I was particularly struck by Murray’s quite poignant chapter, “On Forgiveness.” Normal religions offer redemption to sinners. But there is no forgiveness or statute of limitations for thoughtcrimes in the religion of social justice. A mural of Rudyard Kipling’s “If” – voted Britain’s favourite poem – was painted over at the University of Manchester in retroactive punishment for Kipling’s now politically incorrect views on empire. The past, Murray says, is “hostage — like everything else — to any archeologist with a vendetta.”
This new religion gives permission to those of “oppressed” status — women, people of colour, indigenous peoples, LGBTQ — to hate their oppressors: heterosexual white men, racists, transphobics. (Gay himself, Murray refuses to play the LGBTQ card as the sole, or even most important marker of his humanity.) For many unlucky people, a silly joke tweeted, an incorrect opinion on Facebook or an inadvertently touched knee can be the kiss of death to career and reputation. Murray provides plenty of examples of good people cut down without mercy — indeed with unseemly relish — by relentlessly vigilant activists.
Toby Young, for example, once divided his time between journalism and the New Schools Network, where he worked to help disadvantaged children get a better education. Long story short, a few naughty references to “boobs” on Twitter, excavated by the usual suspects, lost him a government appointment and all his writing gigs in a fusillade of opprobrium. Too good a mind to waste, Young is now the U.K. editor of Quillette magazine, “a platform for heterodox ideas,” ironically one of several excellent magazines that have sprung up in a polemical resistance movement to cancel culture.
Barbara Kay: Douglas Murray is a writer who says what the rest of us would like to
He is right, this is becoming a new relgion and righteousness is dependent on your place in oppression stack.
The Crusades will return, but did you think it be you they are cursading against?