Branding the acceptable: battling cancel culture at Adelaide Writers' Week

Specifically regarding Zelenskyy, his sins lay in "taking actions and provocations that would lead to foreseeable, even predictable, war, which has not only wrecked Ukraine and her people, but led to global insecurity and fuel shortages, affecting the most vulnerable among us."

Her views are not unusual, or astonishing. They are also echoed through the Global South, where the brands of the noble Ukrainian victim and the remorseless Russian monster have lesser currency. One can understand the dynamics, and sad perversions of power, without justifying their brutal manifestations. Abulhawa references John Mearsheimer's warnings about US provocations against Russia, using Ukraine as a base and pretext. The Ukraine conflict, to that end, is not isolated or regional. It is a "global proxy war, the outcome of which may well determine the world order for generations to come."

Abulhawa would have also been well within her rights to cite the very figure who gave birth to the doctrine of Soviet containment at the start of the Cold War. The late diplomat and historian George Frost Kennan, eyeing the expansionist drive of NATO and US power eastwards towards the Russian border, could only issue this warning in 1997: "Such a decision may be expected to inflame nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking."

To her estimable credit, Adler remained adamant and defiant in permitting the writers to attend their events. "Our business," she told the ABC, "is to operate an open space, not a safe space, in which ideas that may be confronting, disturbing, provocative, are debated with civility, that's the agenda." Writers, she also explained to The Age, were not sought out "via their Twitter feeds. I do not think the social media space for a nuanced or reasoned analysis and discussion." It never was such a place, but to the cancel culture footsoldiers, that is exactly where they feel most comfortable.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com