Rita Panahi: How latest cultural purge is rewriting our history
With comedian Chris Lilley’s work the latest to be cancelled it is time the mainstream in the west took a stand against the Orwellian thought police who want to dictate what we choose to listen to, read or watch, writes Rita Panahi.
Rita Panahi
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The Black Lives Matters protests from the US to the UK to Australia have nothing to do with racism or true equality.
If you haven’t figured that out yet you haven’t been paying attention.
Whether they’re tearing down statues, vandalising monuments, looting stores or attacking police, there’s nothing peaceful nor righteous about race-baiters fanning division with lies and half-truths.
In another triumph for the racist “anti-racist” protesters a college professor in the US has been suspended for refusing to cancel an exam for black students or give them inflated marks based on the colour of their skin.
University of California professor Gordon Klein is not only suspended but needs police protection for the grievous sin of treating all students equally and refusing to submit to mob rule.
He also quoted Martin Luther King in his response to students seeking special treatment for black students. Now, there is a petition to permanently remove Klein from the teaching staff because of his “extremely insensitive, dismissive, and woefully racist response to his students’ request for empathy and compassion during a time of civil unrest.”
We live in a remarkably stupid age when quoting Martin Luther King and committing to treating everyone equally is deemed “racist”.
The latest targets of the race-obsessed history rewriters are movies and TV programs ranging from classics like Gone With The Wind to sketch comedy programs.
Australian comic Chris Lilley didn’t escape the purge with four of his funniest works, Angry Boys, Summer Heights High, We Can Be Heroes and Jonah From Tonga, removed from Netflix. British comedy programs, Little Britain and Come Fly With Me, have also been removed from a number of streaming services including Netflix, BritBox and BBC iPlayer.
Sorry, folks you can’t have a laugh at a comedy anymore if it’s not sufficiently “progressive’’ and inclusive. How The Wog Boy and Acropolis Now have escaped censure is anybody’s guess.
As Mel Brooks warned years ago society becoming “stupidly politically correct” would lead to the “death of comedy”. Can you imagine Blazing Saddles being made in the current environment of hysteria and victimhood?
Even children’s program Paw Patrol is copping backlash for pushing “good cop archetypes”.
The animated series includes a dog that is a police officer and that apparently is triggering to the crazies that society is currently pandering to. If cartoon cops are “problematic” then real cops are intolerable. So it’s little wonder Paramount has dropped the long-running and hugely successful reality series Cops after 32 seasons.
Academy Award winner Gone With The Wind has been pulled from streaming service HBO Max for supposedly glorifying slavery and the South during the Civil War. “These racist depictions were wrong then and are wrong today, and we felt that to keep this title up without an explanation and a denouncement of those depictions would be irresponsible,” HBO Max said.
The movie will return only after “historical context” is added that denounces depictions that are too offensive for the snowflake generation to witness. Funnily enough, after the movie was removed by HBO it quickly shot up the Amazon bestseller list.
Where will it stop? Sitcoms such as Seinfeld and Friends are already under the spotlight for their lack of diversity and insensitive jokes.
In Australia we’ve had comedy icon Barry Humphries’ name removed from an award at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival because painfully unfunny comics deemed him “transphobic”.
And, of course it won’t stop with just movies and TV programs.
There are already calls for people to “decolonise their bookshelves” and read less of the classics penned typically by white men.
This cultural revisionism is dangerous and deeply idiotic. It seeks to erase history rather than learn from it.
In the US and Britain statues of historical figures have been pulled down by violent, mindless iconoclasts of the far Left or as much of the media refers to them, “peaceful protesters”.
Multiple statues of explorer Christopher Columbus have been toppled or beheaded and even the great defeater of fascism, Winston Churchill, has had his statue defaced with Black Lives Matter graffiti marking him as a “racist’’.
It’s the sort of backward antics you’d expect from thugs under totalitarian regimes.
Islamic State was also a fan of smashing statues. The terror group released video of its fighters using sledgehammers to destroy statues in Iraq. The Taliban, too, had a penchant for destroying monuments. Islamist groups have also banned music and TV programs they deem haram.
It’s time the mainstream in the West took a stand against the Orwellian thought police who want to dictate what we choose to listen to, read or watch. No longer can it be dismissed as trivial nonsense that only occurs on college campuses or the craziest recesses of Twitter.
IN SHORT
Victorians have suffered the harshest coronavirus restrictions in the country and copped more fines than any other state.
But thousands of protesters who broke restrictions, including one now diagnosed with coronavirus, haven’t been fined.
STATUE FURORE SPREADS TO MELBOURNE IN PUSH TO AXE COOK
BUCKLEY'S BID TO HEAL LUMUMBA RACISM RIFT
— Rita Panahi is a Herald Sun columnist