True Left

Contrary to what rightists claim, Cancel Culture is not a product of postmodernism:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/ancient-cancel-cultures-defacement-statues-121956370.html

Since at least the third millennium B.C., economically, socially and politically marginalized people have questioned authority by mutilating public images of rulers. And those in power have destroyed monuments to reinforce their authority and erase the names and accomplishments of their predecessors.

As art historian Erin L. Thompson recently explained, “destruction is the norm and preservation is the rare exception.”

Akkadians, who lived in Mesopotamia between about 2300 and 2150 B.C., created a bronze likeness of one of their living rulers. This portrait probably represents King Sargon of Akkad, known for conquering nearby Sumerian city-states. Although the likeness initially glorified the king, it was later purposefully mutilated. Akkadians cut off its ears, broke its nose and gouged out one of its eyes.

Importantly, Akkadians chose to mar rather than obliterate this monument to Sargon. Their goal was not to erase history but to show in dramatic fashion the downfall and ultimate humiliation of a once powerful leader.

Thousands of years later, Mesoamericans engaged in a similar practice. The Olmec, who lived in the lowlands of the Gulf of Mexico between approximately 1400 B.C. and A.D. 400, purposefully disfigured colossal heads.

These portraits of rulers’ faces were carved from basalt boulders. The largest weighs about 40 tons and measures over 10 feet high. Many have had pieces of their noses or lips broken off. Others have gouges carved into their surfaces or pox marks ground into their faces. Many were also buried.
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Many details about the Olmec colossal heads remain unknown. Elsewhere in Mesoamerica, however, the circumstances are more clear. In some instances, commoners purposefully destroyed and reused portraits of rulers.
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Ancestral Chatinos occupied coastal Oaxaca prior to the arrival of the Mixtecs around A.D. 1100. At Río Viejo in Oaxaca, archaeologist Arthur Joyce and colleagues excavated the ruins of an ancestral Chatino residence dating to approximately A.D. 800-1100.

At that residence, Joyce found a piece of a carved stone monument depicting the face of a ruler. In a politically motivated move, the peasants chose to reuse the monument fragment, a powerful symbol of authority, as a metate – a stone for grinding grain and seeds.