For a while I have been wondering who the cancelers are. I mean who are these people who jump out of the woodwork demanding blood when someone is incautious enough to say something they find offensive? I thought we lived in a time in which everything is relative, right? To be serious, however, does anyone reading this perchance know such a person? I know lots of people who foam at the mouth at the mention of the name of Donald Trump, but they are not cancelers. So who belongs to this invisible crowd?
It just hit me the other day that our current cancel culture works like the Stasi. For those who don't remember East Germany, the Stasi was the State Security Service, which, according to Wikipedia, "has been described as one of the most effective and repressive intelligence and secret police agencies ever to have existed." It's worth looking at the Wikipedia article, just to see the complexity of its resources. Alongside tens of thousands of official employees, the Stasi also relied on almost 200,000 "civilian informants, in other words almost 2.5 percent of the population between the ages of 18 and 60. The purpose of which, lest we forget, and this is why the Stasi reminds me of cancel culture, was "to root out the class enemy." Cancel culture is rooting out deviant ideas.
Isn't that exactly what is going in the United States now? A very small percentage of people have a large majority of people scared to open their mouth to offer an opinion. Like the "civilian informers" in East Germany, the cancelers are ordinary people. And invisible, hiding behind the anonymous nature of the internet.
Image: LifestyleInquirer
