There’s lots of talk these days about Cancel Culture. Not sure exactly what that means when spoken by folks who are railing about “true history cancelling their culture”. But when I put my mind to it I can interpret it this way:
Some “official” bodies, (read: government), long time ago (3 or 4 hundred years ago or more?), who wanted to secure land for themselves and their kind, went about “cancelling the culture” of the peoples who occupied the lands they wanted…of course they said “nothing was there”…it was “discovered”…so there was no problem with “cancelling” anyone’s culture, huh? And in fact not only did they cancel the culture, but in so many instances, they cancelled the people themselves, by force, war and disease. And then, later, when some of ‘those’ people (yep, same ones) got in the way of some of the “official” folks obtaining more land for ‘their’ folks, these same “official” people started rounding up ‘those’ people’s children and shipping them off to their “official” schools, to force the ‘wildness’ out of them and make them more like the “official folks”; thus, once more, again, ‘cancelling their culture’ … (in the long run, it didn’t work, but it wasn’t because they didn’t try).
In the meantime, some of these “official” folks, those who owned plantations and needed ‘free’ labor to work the plantations, got involved in the business of importing some free, black labor from across the world; once they got here, in the US that is, these “free-laborers, who hadn’t been freed”, were separated from their countrymen, their wives, their siblings, their children, their relatives and their culture and sold on the auction block to the highest bidder, (you know, those who had the money to afford that)..and once again, somebody else’s “culture was cancelled” ; and would you believe it, some of these “official” folks (or their descendants) once again tried to take some of these black and brown children and send them to special schools, so they could learn the “official” culture…Oops, was that cancelling their culture, also?
(To be fair, I have to point out that some of the people whose cultures were cancelled, actually wanted some of their children to attend these schools, so their children could learn the “majority” ways, in order to function in this “official” culture.)
And, guess what? Check out your history and you’ll find that “cancelling cultures” was nothing new. Among others, even Christians had/have been “cancelling cultures” for a long time, in order to convert everyone to Christianity; for example during the Crusades against the “others”, and during the “Doctrine of Discovery” against the indigenous peoples wherever Spain and Portugal found them. In fact, just name a place where “official” US has been and see if there wasn’t also some “culture cancelling” going on there as well.
I’ve heard rumors, well actually not “rumors”, but “real” folks explaining their “real” ideas about what they think should exist in this country from now on…a country of ONE religion…a ONE RELIGION COUNTRY! That’s what I heard on November 13, 2021, said by Michael Flynn: “If we are to have one nation under God, which we must, we have to have one religion under God. One nation under God and one religion under God.” …. So … would … anybody … call this “Cancel Culture” … or not?
And would one think that by burning books that deal with subjects that the proponents of “book burning” don’t agree with, might be classified as cancelling someone’s culture?
Now that I think about it, what was this “Melting Pot” idea all about, except the blending of all the population into a homogenous mixture by “cancelling the cultures” of the diverse beings who were already here?
Can you who are reading this acknowledge that while you may not have been one who was involved in this “cancelling-of- cultures-process”, that some of your predecessors may have been? After all, most of those people whose cultures have been cancelled were never in charge of setting policy or precedent in this country. Wouldn’t want you to feel guilty about any of this; only want to share the truth and ask you to get to know the truth, by reading what the “official folks” wrote in their records, as they set about creating or trying to create a country that they wanted to look and think like them. If folks now are digging out these truths, from the textbooks, history books, historical documents (that were knowingly hidden from public view or just ignored), don’t call them trying to “cancel somebody’s culture”…they just want to tell it like it REALLY was…and IS.
Ima Phool: Just expressing my point of view!