The Duncan affair could be dismissed as a case of personal mythomania, were it not that there are already many similar cases.
Amélie Wen Zhao was ready with the novel "Blood Heir," a fantasy saga for teenagers, and had already sold it to Random House Children's Books with a half-million dollar contract. But some critics, who had read the drafts, dismissed the novel as "racist," so Zhao withdrew the book. Zhao had the audacity to talk about a world in which not only blacks are slaves, there are slaves and that's it.
Keira Drake in "The Continent" centered the plot on a white girl who saves everyone. An unlikely heroine in times of “white privilege.” So, accused of “racial paternalism,” Drake withdrew the book.
The publication of the novel "When We Were Fierce" by E. E. Charlton-Trujillo, author of the award-winning "Fat Angie," has been postponed by the author and publisher following criticism. The author apologized for "racial insensitivity."
Kosoko Jackson, an African American and Lgbt writer, was about to come out with “A Place for Wolves,” the story of two homosexuals in the former Yugoslavia. After allegations of "cultural insensitivity," Jackson also asked the publisher, Sourcebooks, to cancel the release.
One of the writers who signed the letter in Harper's Magazine against “cancel culture”, Salman Rushdie, was overwhelmed thirty years ago by an Iranian fatwa that ordered the cancellation of the "Satanic Verses" under penalty of physical cancellation of the author himself. Rushdie was left alone by many European publishers who shivered in fear, from the French Christian Bourgois to the German Kiepenheuer.
Today it is the writers themselves, and not a few publishers, who cancel themselves in the name of another type of fear.
We are in the plot of “A too noisy solitude” by Bohumil Hrabal, the writer in disgrace for a long time and under forced oblivion in the former Communist Czechoslovakia, which tells of a man who for thirty-five years worked on the shredding of banned books, pressing them in parallelepipeds of paper.
When cancelling someone was decreed by dictatorships, not idiotic democracies, courage, not today's abject cowardice, abounded.
Giulio Meotti, an Italian journalist with Il Foglio, writes a twice-weekly column for Arutz Sheva. He is the author of the books (in English) "A New Shoah", that researched the personal stories of Israel's terror victims, published by Encounter and of "J'Accuse: the Vatican Against Israel" published by Mantua Books.. His writing has appeared in publications, such as the Wall Street Journal, Gatestone, Frontpage and Commentary.