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A Russian protesting the draft is arrested in St. Petersburg, Russia, on Sept. 24. (EPA/Yonhap)

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One of the most reliable measures of ethical progress is the rise of a certain kind of dogmatism. In a normal country, there is no debate on if or when rape and torture are tolerable; the public “dogmatically” accepts that they are out of the question. A clear sign of ethical decay is that we begin to debate rape (are there “legitimate” rapes?), or that torture is not only silently tolerated but publicly displayed. Things that were previously unimaginable gradually become possible.

Here is the latest case: On Nov. 13, Putin’s close ally Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of the Wagner private military group, was responding to an unverified video distributed on Telegram that showed a man identified Nuzhin, a former Wagner mercenary, being executed after admitting that he had changed sides in September to “fight against the Russians.”

Nuzhin said he was abducted in Kyiv on Oct. 11 and came to in a cellar. As he said those words, an unidentified man loitering in combat clothing behind him smashed a sledgehammer into the side of his head and neck.

Asked to comment on the execution video, Prigozhin said in remarks released by his spokeswoman that the video should be called “A dog receives a dog's death.”

It is no wonder this event was commented on by the media as “Putin’s Private Army Goes Full ISIS,” referring to the ISIS executions of prisoners by way of publicly making them confess and then cutting their throats, with video recordings of the murder released on the web. And no wonder Iran is now a close ally of Russia: Both countries are moving in the same direction.

Among those arrested and executed for participating in Iranian protests are hundreds of young girls: “Iran is one of the world's last countries to execute ‘juvenile offenders’, with nine the age of criminal responsibility for girls, compared to 15 for boys. But under Iranian law, you can't execute a minor if they're a virgin. That roadblock has been solved in the past by marrying the girls off to prison guards to be raped the night before their murders,” to quote one report.

Israel, which proudly presents itself as a democratic country, is growing closer and closer to a fundamentalist-religious country. The latest proof is that Itamar Ben-Gvir will be part of the new Netanyahu’s government. Before entering politics, Itamar Ben-Gvir was known to have a portrait in his living room of Israeli-American terrorist Baruch Goldstein, who in 1994, massacred 29 Palestinian Muslim worshipers and wounded 125 others in Hebron, in what became known as the Cave of the Patriarchs massacre.

Moreover, Netanyahu recently called for “a fight against rising Muslim and left-wing anti-Semitism in Europe, hours after the government published a report that said the far-right posed the greatest threat to Jews on the continent.” Why does Netanyahu ignore the far-right anti-Semitism? Because he relies on it. The Western new right is anti-Semitic in their own country, but staunchly supports the state of Israel as a barrier against Muslim invasion. Zionist anti-Semitism is a fact today.

Unfortunately, all this is just one side of the story. On the opposite side, the politically correct liberal left preaches permissiveness to all forms of sexual and ethnic identity; however, in its endeavor to guarantee this tolerance, it needs more and more rules of canceling and regulating which introduce constant anxiety and tension in this happy permissive universe.

These limitations, in some sense much stronger than the paternal prohibition which solicits the desire to transgress it, return with a vengeance in the politically correct “woke” or “cancel culture.”

Duane Rouselle’s characterization of “woke” as “racism in the time of the many without the One” may appear problematic, but it hits the mark: in an almost exact opposite to the traditional racism which fights against a foreign intruder posing a threat to the unity of the One (say, immigrants and Jews), woke reacts to those who are suspected not to truly abandon old forms of the One (“patriots,” proponents of patriarchal values).

With all its declared opposition to the new forms of barbarism, the “woke left” fully participates in it, promoting and practicing a flat discourse without irony. Although it advocates pluralism and promotes differences, its subjective position of enunciation — the place from which it speaks — is extremely authoritarian, allowing no debates and imposing exclusions that are often based on arbitrary premises.

However, in all this mess, we should always bear in mind that wokeism and cancel culture are de facto limited to the narrow world of academia, while society at large moves in the opposite direction.

Cancel culture, with its implicit paranoia, is a desperate and obviously inefficient attempt to compensate for the actual troubles and tragedies of LGBT+ individuals, the violence and exclusion to which they are permanently submitted. Cancel culture and wokeism are a retreat into a cultural fortress, a pseudo-“safe space” whose discursive fanaticism leaves intact and even strengthens the resistance of the majority to it.

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]