Friday, November 22, 2019

Conspiracy Theory and Cancel Culture

One of the things that is clear in the effort to get President Trump is that partisans believe the propaganda that their side is putting out. Did President Trump collude with the Russians in 2016? Or did President Obama direct the intelligence community to spy on the Trump campaign? Did the Obama administration put pressure on Ukraine to dismiss a prosecutor that was looking at natural gas company Burisma? Or did President Trump get Ukraine to look into corruption as a quid quo pro for getting military aid? Depends whose side you are on.

But right now at least both sides get to put out their propaganda without being canceled.

Then there are the things you are not allowed to say. Michelle Malkin is having a bit of a problem because her visits to college campi to discuss immigration keep getting canceled. And Conservatism Inc. is going after her and 21-year-old far right YouTuber Nick Fuentes.

Now that gay marriage is a thing you are not allowed to fund Christian organizations like the Salvation Army. Because homophobia.

Anyone that doubts the narrative of the Holocaust and 6 million Jews murdered in the camps gets their book shredded and their academic career ruined. And in 1940 a ton of Americans got canceled for opposing FDR's move towards war.

Interested in a canceled and pulped book? Ron Unz at unz.com has put a raft of canceled books online on his HTML Books feature. Also 88 books by G.A. Henty: and to think I only read three of them!

Here's my info on Jews and Nazis, obtained from Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius by Ray Monk. Wittgenstein the gay philosopher, author of Tractatus-Logico Philosophicus and Philosophical Investigations was Jewish from a very wealthy family in Vienna. He was in England in the 1930s, but his sisters were still in Vienna as the Nazis took over Europe. In 1938 they got fake Yugoslav passports and visas to go to Switzerland but were prosecuted by the Nazis. But, "All four were cleared of the charges brought against them." Then, it turned out that the Wittgenstein family had a lot of foreign currency. After lengthy negotiations -- that included Wittgenstein -- the sisters transferred a ton of Wittgenstein wealth from Switzerland to the Nazi Reichbank, and "Hermione and Helene were able to survive the war relatively untroubled." (p.400) So what's that all about?

We all know about the Overton Window, "range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time," the things that politicians are allowed to propose versus the crazy stuff that everyone agrees is beyong the Pale.

I suppose this suppression of radical ideas is a basic part of humans as social animals. For social cooperation to work everyone has to be on the same page, or nearly so.

But what makes Jewish groups so determined to cancel Holocaust Denial? Or gays so quick to cancel Christians? Or the climate community so quick to brand skeptics as "climate deniers?" Or Sen. McCarthy to winkle Commies out of the State Department? Or priests to winkle out heretics?

One thing I read recently, regarding Jews, is that when you are a small group, as Jews have tended to be, your survival depends on culture of innocence backed up by eternal watchfulness. Put it this way, for Jews to have survived as a tribe and a religion for the 2,000 years of Christianity is beyond remarkable. There must be something about Jewish culture and practice that maintains the Jewish identity through thick and thin.

Obviously, there must be something in humans as social animals that makes it beneficial to name and shame and cancel people that cause trouble. And it makes sense that people with crazy ideas could cause the demolition of the community in which they live.

But I just think it is sick and wrong for me to be named and shamed and canceled.

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