cancel culture
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"Exterminationism” is generally defined as genocide of an ethnic or religious group. Accordingly, I use the term political exterminationism to connote a wish or a course of action to destroy or exterminate one’s political enemies. This seldom involves actual murder, but is an attempt to so denounce your cultural enemies to deprive them of legal rights or human rights, that they become “beyond the pale” of polite company.

This festering cultural disease stems mainly from the cultural Marxism of the universities, and the way in which students (and most of their professors) in the arts and humanities and social sciences want to cancel opinions (and sometimes facts) that make them feel uncomfortable or unsafe.
These enemies might share an ideology or a political culture or simply common values that so bother, or are found so objectionable, to justify a full culture war to repudiate and cancel their very humanity.

This festering cultural disease stems mainly from the cultural Marxism of the universities, and the way in which students (and most of their professors) in the arts and humanities and social sciences want to cancel opinions (and sometimes facts) that make them feel uncomfortable or unsafe.

Cancel culture closes minds. Cancel culture causes formerly fair media that provided a diversity of opinions, to become shills in the widest sense for totalitarian control of what was once constitutionally-protected freedom of expression.

I have argued that the biggest threat to our liberal democracies come from what I term the leftist-Islamist-globalist alliance. All three of these groups, separately or working together use cancel culture. All three of them use cancel culture to such an extent that they go beyond removing what they see as objectionable opinion and so denounce, or incite against, their political enemies that they have become political exterminationists.

And so, the so-called Palestinians, other supremacist, Sharia-practicing Islamists, and their western leftist enablers all take actions and use words that seek a second Holocaust, this time of the more than 6 million Jews living in their ancestral homeland of Israel.

The tolerance of evil when it does not affect our own safety and the notion of cultural relativism and the decline in the West of strong adherence to Christian and Jewish religious values, together rob the West from its moral duty to promote Good over Evil. Instead both moral equivalency and what I have termed the excessive emphasis on toleration, in my book, Tolerism: The Ideology Revealed, have disarmed us from understanding the crisis in which we find ourselves.

Now, we turn to examples of cancel culture morphing into political exterminationism. The American Left, its entertainers, professors and media so hated Donald Trump that practically anything is tolerated in terms of denouncing his very legitimacy as president, politician or respectable leader of a great country.

We witness a political war by Democrats and the media, especially, to rob him of his humanity as well as his legitimacy. And so, we witnessed the Democrats in the basest and most dishonorable way possible, seek a two year investigation by a highly biased group which notwithstanding its bias could not find the alleged “Russian collusion”. When that didn’t work, we witnessed an impeachment proceeding weakly justified by some vague words in a phone call. This occupied American politicians who should have been oriented towards the coming pandemic and should have dug deeper into whether it was launched by the Chinese as bio-warfare.

The obscene bloody image of Trump’s severed head by entertainer Kathy Griffin was just one instance of an entertainment industry that became mentally unhinged by Trump. Was the fact that he had success in business, politics and entertainment what bothered them?

The so-called Deep State feared this President who pledged to attack the corruption and the “elites” in what he termed the “Swamp”. Middle America, which had been rendered powerless as American jobs were exported to China, watched helplessly as radical curricula were adopted by the public education system, and the media turned hard to the Left.

Any expression of concern about the immigration of Islamists (proponents of radical Islam seeking conversion or submission of American law and customs to Islam, rather than the traditional assimilation and melting pot) was said to be illegitimate as being racist, as was any concern about the open border which did not discriminate against criminals including child-traffickers.

The election of November 2020 was the tipping point. Never before had media totally censored important information from the electorate.

-They refused to cover the information from Hunter Biden’s laptop and from former partner Tony Bobolinsky.

-They refused to opine on the strategy of keeping Joe Biden in the basement and only answering friendly or “softball” questions, whereas Trump took the most hostile and inappropriate rants from an aggressive press corp.

-The press ignored Biden’s connections to a Communist regime in China that arguably is a hostile government perhaps even an enemy.

-The same press would not comment that Nancy Pelosi and Diane Feinstein also had husbands making their Insfortunes from China.

Instead, we had media refusing to cover a Trump speech right before the election.

We had big Tech, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google censoring at the same time as they pretended to be neutral platforms protected legislatively from liability as publishers.

Google is no longer a neutral platform but a highly partisan player. All Americans should be incensed that Twitter gave the President a lifetime ban from its service, especially as that was the format the President used (and therefore gave publicity to) to communicate with the American people.

Censoring his communications, showing a pretend severed head, constantly insulting him, never showing his elegant wife on the cover of fashion magazines where Michele Obama was given that honor many times, all were ways to dehumanize him and delegitimize him.

Trump hatred has become an obsession among Democrats and their supporters. The attempt to impeach him or have him removed for supposed mental instability or have him barred from office in the future, when he has a week or so left in his term, is not something rational or proper.

The riots by Democrat supported groups like BLM were part of a really racist group called BLM, Black Lives Matter. Part of their mandate, it seems, is to object and cancel any voices stating that All lives matter. And so, a professor who innocently stated that was fired.

The new way to politically exterminate your opponent is to call him/her/it a “racist”. (Falsely accused) racists are the new Jews. Anything is justified against them.

Assaulting a Trump supporter is supposedly understandable in our new morality.

According to Rick Klein, an executive with ABC News Trump supporters must be cleansed from America.” Am I the only one who sees the political exterminationism and similarity to Nazi pronouncements?

The Big Lie” is a concept that says that historically, the bigger the lie the more likely it is to be accepted by the people. Hitler convinced the German people that Jews were devils and each and every Jew, including children, had to be murdered in both public executions and gas chambers.

Promoting lies against politicians helps prepare the way for promoting lies against Jews. Those who hate America will also hate the Jews because America was founded with a Judeo-Christian ethic, emphasizing liberty and justice and personal responsibility.

Dry Bones is an Israeli political cartoon strip by Yaakov Kirschen published in the Jerusalem Post since 1973 and whose cartoons now appear on Arutz Sheva. One of my favorites has a man asking a woman why the whole world wants to pressure Israel and use a double standard against it. The woman replies that it is “simple”: “We gave the world the Bible, the Ten Commandments and the concept of Good and Evil”. And she concludes, “And they have never forgiven us for it.”

The Democrats in their attempt to take down President Trump have resorted to calling him a racist and some have gone so far as to call him a Nazi. Anyone who convinces himself that Trump is a Nazi serves to justify any course of conduct against the President.

Similarly, we have Islamists and anti-Israel leftists calling Israel a racist, genocidal and apartheid nation, which again is an attempt to justify all means of persecution from BDS to hateful U.N. resolutions to support of Iran which has pledged to destroy Israel.

Media worldwide told the story of January 6th as one involving Trump supporters breaking into the Capitol, when the truth was that entry was led by Antifa members and 99% of pro-Trump demonstrators were peaceful. There are lies of commission and lies of omission. But the totalitarians are clever.
In my essay in Israel National News on this past November 20th, “The Abuse of the Truth and the Abuse of Jews”, I argued that once the truth of a matter becomes irrelevant, the deniers of truth become totalitarian in their methods of shunning that truth.

The failure of the mainstream media to advocate for truth rather than political power, will be a sad commentary on America in 2020. All truth is made relative to one’s narrative or one’s culture or color. If one can say publicly that Black Lives Matter but are not allowed to say that All Lives Matter, then that is the first step in the abuse of morality in saying Jewish Lives Don’t Matter.

As young Americans go about destroying statues with no criminal charges, how long will it be before they burn books that they don’t like?

Most people don’t know that at aTrump rally in Washington DC, (November 14, 2020) BLM and Antifa supporters viciously attacked people who were simply walking home or to their cars and other transportation.

Cody Flecker, a German-American Jewish commentator, and Vietnam veteran, with a large following on Facebook, wrote about this as follows: “Attacking Senior Citizens along with attacks on younger people carrying children goes beyond the pale of an honest counter demonstration... After viewing these videos I was reminded of movie clips taken by the Germans of them attacking Jews in pre-war Nazi Germany. The people and time has changed, but the actions of the mob has not.”

And how many in the mainstream media even covered this story? Yet the media worldwide told the story of January 6th as one involving Trump supporters breaking into the Capitol, when the truth was that entry was led by Antifa members and 99% of pro-Trump demonstrators were peaceful. There are lies of commission and lies of omission.

But the totalitarians are clever.

In 1943, my father’s then 8 year old little sister was loaded onto a cattle car with her parents and then after arrival in Auschwitz she and her parents (my grandparents) were murdered in the gas chambers. What was the point of murdering this 8 year old? The point was simply to show that Jews were so evil that every single Jew needed to be murdered and thus shown to be in the clearest form possible, to be evil and deserving of their fate. The Nazis were so dedicated to this “Final Solution” that it was a priority even when they started losing the War and needed the personnel on the front lines.

On November 9th, 1938, the Germans in Kristallnacht, attacked Jewish owned stores, then proceeded to have Jewish government workers, even physicians, fired and ghettoized. I don’t have to repeat the facts here, except that by virtue of a corrupted education system and an inappropriate immigration system, we now have students who know little of the history of the Holocaust.

NBC News reported in September 2020 on a nationwide survey among adults under 40, showing that over 1 in 10 respondents did not recall ever having heard the word "Holocaust” before. The survey, showed that sixty-three percent of those surveyed did not know that 6 million Jews were murdered and over half of those thought the death toll was fewer than 2 million. Over 40,000 concentration camps and ghettos were established during World War II, but nearly half of U.S. respondents could not name a single one.

In the United Kingdom, with a proportionately higher number of Muslim students, the results were even worse, according to a 2016 study of English Secondary Schools by the Centre for Holocaust Education:

“Although the majority of students knew Jews were the primary victims of the Holocaust, most had little understanding of why they were persecuted and murdered. With 68 per cent of students unaware of what ‘antisemitism’ meant, their explanations often rested on misconceptions about who the Jews were and overlooked the distinctive racial dimensions of Nazi antisemitism. Many students held the erroneous belief that Jews constituted a significant proportion of the German population during the 1930s. For example, whereas only 8.8 per cent correctly identified the pre-war Jewish population to be less than 1 per cent, 73.9 per cent of students grossly overestimated this population by 15 to 30 times. A third massively underestimated the scale of the murder of Jewish people, with 10.3 per cent appearing to believe that no more than 100,000 lives were lost

“More than half (56.1 per cent) of younger students (Years 7 to 9) appeared to believe the Holocaust was solely attributable to Adolf Hitler. With age, students increasingly appreciated that the Nazis played a significant role in the Holocaust; however, most students saw the Nazis as an elite group loyal to Hitler rather than a political party that enjoyed significant, broad-based support across all sectors of the German population. Only a small number of students (fewer than 10 per cent) suggested that the German people were complicit in, or responsible for, the persecution and mass murder of Jews and other victims groups. Very few students appeared to know about the role played in the Holocaust by collaborating regimes (such as the Vichy government), Axis allies or local populations across Europe.”

When Islamists and others don’t believe the history that 6 million Jews were murdered, we must face a terrible prospect in this age of political exterminationism: young leftists and Islamists and their supporters who believe that it didn’t happen or didn’t happen to that extent, look on Jews as a people so evil as to make up such a story for some kind of gain in politics or finances.

Cancelling our opinions, our facts, and our history will inevitably lead to political exterminationism aided by compliant media and universities. The scary question is how long before political exterminationism becomes physical.

We conclude with words from a song entitled “The Future” by Leonard Cohen:

You don't know me from the wind
You never will, you never did
I'm the little Jew
Who wrote the Bible
I've seen the nations rise and fall
I've heard their stories, heard them all
But love's the only engine of survival
Your servant here, he has been told
To say it clear, to say it cold
It's over, it ain't going
Any further
And now the wheels of heaven stop
You feel the devil's riding crop
Get ready for the future
It is murder”

- Leonard Cohen, “The Future”

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Howard Rotberg is a retired lawyer and the author of four books on ideologies and values: The Second Catastrophe: A Novel about a Book and its Author; Exploring Vancouverism: The Political Culture of Canada’s Lotus Land; Tolerism: The Ideology Revealed; and The Ideological Path to Submission... and what we can do about it. He writes also for various magazines such as Frontpage Magazine, New English Review, and Israel National News. He is the president of Canada’s sole conservative values and pro-Israel publishing house, Mantua Books, www.mantuabooks.com and lives in Hamilton, Ontario Canada.