Dhe “Cancel Culture” has famous role models in futuristic clearing. Walter Benjamin considered the permanent loss of cultural assets to be a lesser evil than their misuse. It is therefore a “function of political utopia” to “illuminate the sector of what is deserving of destruction”. Destruction as a prelude to salvation. The current “Cancel Culture” is based on “historical justice”. It was not the historical discipline that coined this catchphrase. Its origin is extra-scientific. Therapists, theologians, activists and lawyers took care of its discourse value. It derives its value from the media from its appellative power to blame the past and to make demands on the present. Nothing describes the intellectual state of the historical sciences more clearly than their capitulation to this battlefield concept.
If you look at this discourse, then three features catch your eye: First, it aims at the “reparation” of “historical injustice” by the descendants of the “perpetrators”. Second, dealing with the Shoah served as a model. In 1992, for example, the Organization of African Unity (OAU) commissioned a “group of eminent persons” to “explore the modalities and strategies for an African campaign for restitution, similar to the compensation Germany paid to Israel and the survivors of the Nazi Holocaust has paid”. Third, Western advocates strive for the brotherhood of humanity gained from the “redemption of the past.” This idea of Hermann Lotze had been pseudo-religiously enriched in the apocalyptic extremism of the German interwar period, for example with Heidegger and Benjamin, and served to reperspective the history of mankind in order to set Dostoyevsky’s “universal reconciliation” as a goal.
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