Thorburn the latest sacrifice to cancel culture
The example of Andrew Thorburn, the recently appointed and departed chief executive of the Essendon AFL football club, being made to step down because of his Christian views and his links with the City on a Hill church should not surprise.
Thorburn joins a long list of those cancelled by the cultural left, including Geoffrey Blainey, Fred Hollows, Israel Folau, Margaret Court, Barry Humphries, Germaine Greer and JK Rowling, because of their failure to conform to neo-Marxist-inspired groupthink and mind control.
Especially targeted are those who express or are associated with Christian teachings that run counter to the prevailing woke ideology – an ideology committed to radical gender and sexuality theories and intent on undermining the nuclear family.
Much like George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, where Big Brother and the Thought Police stifle independent thought and freedom of expression, we live in a time when conformity is enforced and anyone who questions the prevailing orthodoxy is vilified and attacked.
As American non-binary feminist Camille Paglia has argued, “We are plunged once again into an ethical chaos where intolerance masquerades as tolerance and where individual liberty is crushed by the tyranny of the group.”
Woke cancel culture is a relatively recent phenomenon, but it is possible to trace its origins to the Communist Manifesto, written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and published in 1848, and before that to the French Revolution, beginning in 1789. Under France’s Reign of Terror, those who questioned the ruling clique, including leading revolutionaries such as Georges Jacques Danton, were put to death.
The Communist Manifesto argues that such is the oppressive nature of capitalism, any action, no matter how violent or cruel, is justified. As Vladimir Lenin said, “Morality is whatever brings about the success of the proletarian revolution.”
The amoral and Machiavellian nature of Marxism is exposed in the writings of 20th-century Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noce: “Every kind of violence, every ruse, every illegal action, every dissimulation, and every deception become licit if they are deemed to be necessary to reach the goal.”
The origins of cancel culture also can be traced to the Frankfurt School established in Germany in the 1920s. The Marxist academics involved, who were disillusioned with Joseph Stalin, concluded workers in the West would never rebel and take to the barricades.
As British conservative politician Michael Gove noted in his book Celsius 7/7, “The thinkers of the Frankfurt School revised Marxism as primarily a cultural rather than an economic movement. Instead of traditional capitalism, scorn was directed at the reigning values of the West.”
Such was the extreme nature of the philosophy underpinning the Frankfurt School that Del Noce wrote: “Liberation becomes the criteria for truth (where) the disappearance of authority must be viewed as the end point of progressive thought.”
One academic associated with the Frankfurt School, and the person most responsible for today’s climate of cancelling free speech, is Herbert Marcuse, whose essay Repressive Tolerance argues there is no room for independent thought and free and open debate.
According to Marcuse and his disciples, tolerance, instead of being an inherent good, is condemned as a critical part of the ideological state apparatus employed by the capitalist class to enforce the status quo and oppress and marginalise “the other”.
Marcuse argues the existence of tolerance “strengthens the tyranny of the majority” and, as a result, “The conclusion reached is that the realisation of the objective of tolerance would call for intolerance toward prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions.”
As Jennifer Oriel writes in her chapter in my book of essays Cancel Culture and the Left’s Long March, “Marcuse argues it was acceptable to use ‘undemocratic means’ including ‘the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly’ from groups that dissented from left-wing politics.” During the cultural revolution of the late 1960s and early 70s, a time of anti-Vietnam moratoriums, youth rebellion, Woodstock and the pill, the neo-Marxist critique of capitalism and Western societies morphed into a rainbow alliance of centre-left theories.
Radical theories including postmodernism, deconstructionism and postcolonial, gender and sexuality theories, while often in disagreement, all embrace Marcuse’s argument that tolerance requires intolerance.
We now live in a society – although not as violent or oppressive as that of Nineteen Eighty-Four or communism under Stalin – where free and open debate is replaced by groupthink and where any who fail to conform, like Thorburn, are cancelled.
Reason and rationality no longer apply as such concepts are binary and Eurocentric. As Christopher Lasch noted: “Once knowledge is equated with ideology, it is no longer necessary to argue with opponents on intellectual grounds … it is enough to dismiss them as Eurocentric, racist, sexist, homophobic – in other words, as politically suspect.”
Kevin Donnelly is a conservative author and commentator, and author of The Dictionary of Woke (kevindonnelly.com.au).
