cancelled

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The fear of expressing an opinion for fear of being embarrassed or humiliated curtails free speech, impoverishes debate and fosters a culture of intolerance. I don’t like digital bonfires, Twitter packs and the imposition of a single thought that limits the exchange of ideas and academic freedom

A few days ago I read a report asking about thirty people from culture and economics what are the things we do today that will seem embarrassing to us in the future. Reactions varied. Some funny, some very serious. Of all the deplorable things we practice in Western societies today, there is one mentioned in that report that also seems to me deplorable and I think will be a general embarrassment to us in the future. I mean cancel culture. This phenomenon, which originated in the United States but has spread throughout Europe, essentially consists of the exclusion or public humiliation of characters (dead or alive) because of conflicting ideological views or morally questionable behavior, usually drawn from different groups or parties in extremes. the ideological spectrum, but not always. And not because in many examples of recent years there was insufficient reason for social reproach, but because of the perverse consequences for freedom of expression. The fear of expressing an opinion, of being cut for deviating from the majority currents, drains many voices from society, ultimately reducing the plurality of opinions, impoverishing debates and fostering a culture of bigotry.

In accordance with a manifesto published in the United States, Mario Vargas Llosa, Adela Cortina and Fernando Savater, among other prominent representatives of Spanish culture, condemned this phenomenon in a letter published in 2020. “We join the movements fighting not only in the United States, but globally against societal scourges such as sexism, racism, or contempt for immigrants, but we also – the text says – express concern about the perverse use of righteous ends to harm people to stigmatize those who are not sexist or xenophobic or, more generally, to introduce censorship, cancel and reject free, independent thought and uncompromising political correctness». The letter served to focus the issue, but it is far from gone. Today it is still necessary to denounce xenophobic and sexist behaviour, but as then there is no justification for carrying out indiscriminate witch hunts, orchestrating Twitter hounds against everything and everyone, and imposing a single thought that curtails the exchange of ideas and academic freedom.

Indeed, the worst thing about canceling culture is not so much the stigmatization of those accused as the general setback in the right to publicly say what we think and express without fear of embarrassment or rejection. One even runs the serious risk of being expelled if he criticizes the cancel culture, a battleground where left and right get caught up in a loop. Some on the left deny the problem, saying everything is a smokescreen to continue allowing hate speech, while some on the right denounce it and adopt more extreme formulas of censorship, with rules that would prevent open discussion in classrooms on certain topics . .

Some cancellation practices seem to me especially aberrational when applied to those who can’t even defend themselves because they’re dead. I am not speaking, of course, of the totalitarian genocides and their accomplices, whose glorification must not prevent the dignity of the victims from being trampled under foot, but of public figures who are historically revisited and brought before swift and summary trials, ultimately convicted , at best, to oblivion. Sometimes for clearly horrific reasons, but sometimes with evidence that has not been sufficiently verified.

This historical revisionism, this presentist urge, causes shocking ups and downs in the reputation of figures who were once indisputable because they were valued for the facet that made them go down in history. It is happening today in Chile with the poet Pablo Neruda, atheist, communist and intellectual reference of the Latin American left. In recent years, the Nobel Prize in Literature has been brushed aside as a cultural icon as the feminist movement argues that Neruda abandoned his wife and daughter, who were disabled, and they point to an excerpt from his memoir in which he describes the rape of a maid, when he was a diplomat in ancient Ceylon. Now claimed in Chile is the poet Gabriela Mistral, also a Nobel laureate, who published eight poems in our literary supplement a hundred years ago. The Pinochet dictatorship usurped the figure of Mistral, manipulated the meaning of her work, which had its social burden, and her own life, hardly presenting her as a self-righteous spinster. Paradoxically, today it is the Chilean LGTBI movement that has made Gabriela Mistral a symbol, arguing that despite never disclosing her sexual orientation, she “deviates from the straight norm,” an activist told the New York Times. LGTBI. Neruda and Mistral, two immense poets, with their lights and shadows, used at ease.

I am still amazed at what is happening in Spain with the Murcian Juan de la Cierva, canceled for Corvera airport on the basis of a brief opinion requested on request that has not been subject to peer review, as is done in quality science, but that has been sufficient for ruthless and selective application of the law of democratic memory (here in Corvera, not in Getafe). It’s curious. While we view the shadows of his past here, in the US they illuminate his brightest facet, emphasizing that had he not died in an accident, he could have fulfilled the dream of the flying car. So it says in ‘The Future We Were Promised’, a recently published book that analyzes why the technological advancements in transportation that started with Juan de la Cierva have slowed down over time. The future was within reach, says the book’s author, researcher J. Storss Hall, but the opportunity was missed. Now it’s the past that’s out of control.

Someone once said that journalism produces the first version of History. There’s no time for more, but in the quest for “the best version of the truth,” as Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, the “Watergate” journalists, said, a story is never complete and it’s believable if, before it is published, the main character has not been questioned in person and his version is known. With Juan de la Cierva, who died in 1936, it is impossible. What is forbidden to journalists is allowed by historians, who tell stories with facts, even if the facts do not speak for themselves and cannot be compared to their protagonists. And as the historian Edward C. Carr rightly said, facts are “like fish in water swimming in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean; and what the historian catches will depend partly on chance, but mainly on the part of the ocean he chooses to fish in and the equipment he chooses to use.’ That’s it all, on my part.

Source: La Verdad

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