Open Post with Cats for March 1, 2022

[kimberlysteele]

Please refrain from using profanity -- I won't publish it! Otherwise, anything goes!

Comments

Cancel culture

[(Anonymous)]

One of the oddities of the last few years has been the rise of the term cancel culture and its being treated as something new. I say oddity because when I look back at some of the translations I have done over the past decade, I find that a number of them had cancel culture as a major theme. The thing is that these were translations of novels written in Imperial Germany between about 1895 and 1914. One of the more amusing ones to me was a novel which anticipated Fukuyama's end of history thesis with a main character who is a professor who gets cancelled for writing a book arguing that democracy was the new religion and would do what Christianity had failed to do in ending all wars (Georg Engel's The Standard Bearer). Another covering the period around 1848 and afterwards indicates that the equivalent slur to 'Nazi' back then was 'Social Democrat' (yes, really).

A non-fiction work I've been translating (from around 1919) also discussed the intolerance of the period of the Protestant Reformation and the Counter Reformation. It all makes me wonder if there ever was a time when cancel culture didn't have a major place in society (of course, your position in society may affect your exposure to it, and so is my increased awareness of it just a reflection of where I stand?).

Re: Cancel culture

[kimberlysteele]

Good points. I suppose the old cancel culture took the form of witch trials. If you wanted to cancel someone, accusing them of witchcraft like the nuns of Loudon did to Urban Grandier would not have been a bad idea.