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Cardinal Müller discusses cancel culture, ‘Great Reset,’ ‘gender language’ as part of totalitarian rule

‘Cancel culture is just another word for the brainwashing that the communists in China and the Soviet Union developed to the highest perfection.’Tue Jun 29, 2021 – 11:18 am EST

June 29, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) — Cardinal Gerhard Müller has granted an interview to Lothar Rilinger, a German lawyer and book author. LifeSite is honored to publish a pertinent excerpt here (see full text below). The larger interview deals with aspects and foundations of free speech, and in the selection published here, Cardinal Müller strongly criticizes the totalitarian tendencies of our time, including the Great Reset, the Black Lives Matter movement, LGBT “fanatics,” as well as the Communist cancel culture.

In defense of a free academic discussion, the German prelate rejects the idea of police or public institutions controlling such a discussion, commenting: “That’s just decadence, when professors are invited or thrown out by the intellectual measure of gender activists, Black Lives Matter zealots and LGBT fanatics.” The former head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith goes on to say that there is an attempt “on a grand scale” to codify into law what is politically correct.

Here, Cardinal Müller sees that American billionaires and the pharmaceutical industry go along with the Chinese communists in the implementation of a so-called Great Reset: “The American super billionaires, big tech giants and the pharmaceutical industry are trying to impose their poor view of humanity and their economically limited world view in combination with the CP [Communist Party]-Chinese model on the whole world via their foundations and the opportunities for the Great Reset after the Corona crisis.”With unambiguous words, the German prelate condemns attempts at dictating to people what to think and how to speak. This includes so-called cancel culture, which rejects parts of a nation’s heritage, as well as the imposition of “gender language,” a way of writing and saying German words by using an asterisk that includes men and women, as well as any other possible gender identity.Cardinal Müller calls such attempts “simply barbarism, intellectual vandalism,” as well as an “imitation of the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century in the style of Orwell’s nightmares.” He proposes to describe this cancel culture with words such as “cancel vulture, the vulture culture, or of political respectlessness.”“Cancel culture,” the German cardinal goes on to say, “is just another word for the brainwashing that the communists in China and the Soviet Union developed to the highest perfection.” SUBSCRIBE to LifeSite’s daily headlinesSUBSCRIBEU.S. Canada World CatholicMore specifically with regard to “gender language,” Müller calls it an “instrument of domination” used by people with “block warden mentality.”“The vast majority of Germans,” he concludes, “flatly reject the misuse of their language to mentally terrorize people.”

This is not the first time that Cardinal Müller has sharply criticized the current international political development which is fostered in a close collaboration between American high finance and big tech, as well as the Chinese Communists. In a May 2021 interview with Mr. Rilinger, he described this new collaboration – which he calls neo-Marxist socialism of capital – with the following words:

In China we have a mixture of capitalism in the economy and communism in ideology, in a way that both systems become means of absolute dominion. In the West, during the crisis of the coronavirus, the ten richest men in the world have been able to increase the value of their fortunes by 550 billion dollars, while millions of people have lost their work or slipped below the poverty line. At the same time, the large media corporations are in their hands. Thus they hold a monopoly on the interpretation of world events, and the common people are regarded as a newborn to be cared for. This is a new form of mixing capitalism with Marxist control and domination of the masses. Why do you think that interested circles in the West admire the Chinese system of surveillance and control?

“The prevailing aligned thought today,” Müller also explained, “is hostile to the spirit. From the point of view of faith we cannot negotiate with totalitarian ideologies, but we ought to remove the mask from their faces.”

Below is the text of the new Cardinal Müller interview:

R.: Do you consider the right to express opinions to be the core content of an intellectual debate?
M.: Spirit and freedom cannot be separated. I can’t imagine that the police and the public prosecutor’s office are the mainstays of academic discussion. That’s just decadence, when professors are invited and thrown out by the intellectual measure of gender activists, Black Lives Matter zealots and LGBT fanatics. After all, Socrates was sentenced to death by mediocre power politicians, and Aristotle shunned democracy, which had degenerated into mob rule, “so as not to give the Athenians a second opportunity to sin against philosophy.”

R.: The state can determine the limits of freedom of expression. Can you imagine an ideological elite determining what may be considered politically correct, and thus applied, without those standards being either codified in law or established by judicial decisions?
M.: That is being attempted on a grand scale. The American super billionaires, big tech giants and the pharmaceutical industry are trying to impose their poor view of humanity and their economically limited world view in combination with the CP [Communist Party]-Chinese model on the whole world via their foundations and the opportunities for the Great Reset after the Corona crisis. It is so nice to belong to a community where everyone is the same, thinks the same, feels the same, and is homogeneous in outrage at the dissenters and full of admiration for the brave heroes in the sense of the powerful.

R.: Do you think it is justified to purge works of world literature in the context of the phenomenon of cancel culture, if an ideological elite thinks that certain passages do not conform to political correctness?
M.: This is simply barbarism, intellectual vandalism, the imitation of the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century in the style of Orwell’s nightmares. One should rather speak of cancel vulture, the vulture culture, or of political respectlessness. Cancel culture is just another word for the brainwashing that the communists in China and the Soviet Union developed to the highest perfection. How did those end up who threw the books of renowned writers into the fire because of “un-German” passages? Instead of purification of thoughts, these violent people should start thinking themselves for once and not underestimate the ability of others to criticize. I don’t need Fouché, Goebbels, and Lenin to read works of world literature without danger for my mental hygiene.

R.: As an emeritus dogmatist and dogma historian as well as honorary professor of the University of Munich, do you consider it justifiable that criteria such as political correctness or the use of non-official gender language are used to judge the value of scientific work?
M.: Gender language [a way of writing or saying a German word that includes men and women, as well as any other gender identity] is not a scientific criterion, but an instrument of domination by mediocrities, the intellectually inferior, and authoritarian leaders with a block warden mentality. The vast majority of Germans flatly reject the misuse of their language to mentally terrorize people.

R.: Do you see the danger that through the ideological restriction of freedom of speech the relationship of people to each other as well as the freedom of science will be impaired and the intellectual debate will suffer?
M.: It is the eternal debate between the spirit of freedom and the bigotry of power, between individuality and forced lockstep.