Taliban at Cornell: Cancelling Lincoln

By Reginald Johnson 

    Commentary

  One of the things I am getting increasingly tired of is “Cancel Culture.”

   This is the trend in recent years of blotting out, erasing or cancelling the legacy of some great person in history due to concern about some moral shortcomings or some specific thing they did wrong or possibly some comments, now deemed inappropriate, they might have made.

  The whole thing is really out of hand. We’re in danger of  “Talibanizing” this nation. The living and the dead must hold the correct views --- or else.

 There’s a totalitarian ring to this and it’s deeply troubling.

 You recall the Taliban, the Islamic extremists who run Afghanistan. In 2001, they decided to blow up the ancient Buddhist sculptures at Bamiyan, because, they said, the monuments represented “idols” to the wrong religion. Heresy will not be tolerated.

  In a few seconds, one of the great works of art in world history was destroyed.

  The attacks on heresy are strong in this country also, particularly at universities. Our greatest leaders are being denounced to the point where demands are being made that names be removed from buildings and statues taken down.

  Even Abraham Lincoln, probably our greatest president --- a man who kept the union together through a brutal civil war and ended slavery in the process --- is being attacked.

  At Cornell University, officials recently decided to remove a bust of Lincoln and a plaque of the immortal Gettysburg Address from the library. It’s not entirely clear why this happened --- university officials are being evasive --- but the action was taken after “a complaint was made.” 

  So that’s all it takes today.  Some unnamed person makes a “complaint” and weakling university officials --- apparently scared of being cancelled themselves --- cave in and remove whatever is deemed “inappropriate.”

   Shame on Cornell. Not only was Lincoln a great president but the Gettysburg Address is one of the great speeches of all time. Lincoln made the speech after the decisive battle of Gettysburg in Pennsylvania in which thousands of men died. He honored those who “gave their lives that the nation might live.”

   Lincoln then said: “It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us --- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain --- that this nation under God, shall have a new birth of freedom --- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”