Joe Hildebrand: The list of offences within cancel culture continues to grow

From popular musicals to British critics of Hitler, everyone is a potential cancellation target. So who or what will be cancelled next, asks Joe Hildebrand.

If the warriors of wokeness have achieved anything on this earth – and that is a very big if – it is their ability to make reality look like satire.

So petty are their outrages, so ridiculous their claims, that your first instinct is to assume they are joking – until of course you realise that that would require a sense of humour.

And yet proponents of cancel culture claim that it doesn’t exist, that claims of such absurdities are all part of an elaborate conspiracy – like, say, the election of Donald Trump.

“Give examples!” they demand. “Name names!”

Well one name is Andrew Graham-Dixon, an art historian who somehow managed to get cancelled by England’s Cambridge Union last week for criticising Adolf Hitler.

Graham-Dixon was arguing that there was such a thing as good and bad taste and did the Hitler impersonation explicitly for the purpose of mocking the Nazi leader for having the worst possible taste.

An art historian was recently cancelled for criticising Adolf Hitler

And yet somehow even mimicking Hitler as the ultimate exemplar of bad taste was apparently itself in such bad taste that Graham-Dixon got literally black-listed by the Union.

Are we at satire yet? Oh, we’re only at the beginning.

Because when I say “literally black-listed” I mean “literally black-listed”.

“We will create a blacklist of speakers never to be invited back, and we will share it with other unions too. Andrew will be on that list,” Cambridge Union president Keir Bradwell wrote in an email to members.

Now gosh, I’m just a simple boy from the suburbs, but that looks a lot like cancel culture to me.

In a statement posted on Twitter – where else? — Bradwell also said he was sorry not to have cut Graham-Dixon off and added: “I only wish we could have foreseen the remarks that he made and chosen someone else.”

And so not only did the Union president cancel Graham-Dixon after his speech, he apologised for not cancelling him during his speech and – my personal favourite – regretted that he wasn’t able to predict the future and cancel him in anticipation.

He was blacklisted at Cambridge University.

So surely we are at full-blown mind-bending time-shifting satire now, right? Sadly not quite.

The Cambridge Union, you see, is a debating society. A debating society whose president wishes he could eliminate countervailing views in the past, present and future.

And, for what it’s worth, Graham-Dixon actually won the debate on the night.

That, dear friends, is how you do satire. The only downside is it actually happened.

Which brings us to another cancellation that happened last week in the city of Perth, a place a lot like England but with more English people in it.

And this time it appears that the cancellers have finally achieved their long sought-after mastery over the space-time continuum.

In 2018 I wrote a satirical column about the high school musical Grease, demonstrating that by applying the lens of 21st century outrage to even the most benign family-friendly movie you could accuse it of every ideological thought crime under the sun.

“So there you have it,” I wrote. “The most sexist, racist, homophobic, homoerotic, slut-shaming, virgin-shaming, disempowering and discriminatory movie ever made. And in Australia it’s rated PG.”

Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta in Grease.

The satire, I thought was self-evident, but of course we are dealing with people for whom irony, humour and nuance are foreign languages – apologies for the latent xenophobia.

And so, just to be extra extra careful, I immediately spelt out my point as simply as I could in the very next paragraph.

“That, dear reader, is how easy it is to expel every last drop of creativity out of art by smashing it with an ideological meat mallet. And unfortunately that hammer is coming for us all.”

Of course I was talking about countless other complaints and cancellations. Even I didn’t think they would actually cancel Grease.

But … well, they cancelled Grease.

The world outrage police are out to cancel everything from Hitler to innocent musical parody films like Grease.

“Two prestigious Perth colleges have decided to call off a co-production of the musical Grease after students declared it inappropriate in modern times,” the Perth website 6PR.com.au reported on Friday.

“The production by Presbyterian Ladies College and Scotch College was called off last week after PLC students raised their concerns.”

Such “concerns” were not spelt out in the report, just a joint statement saying that Scotch College “listened respectfully” to them.

Now Grease is the word that dare not speak its name.

And so we have reached the point where cancel culture is not just indistinguishable from satire, it is actually imitating it.

The only question is whether its proponents will ever even know.

[e-mail]