Originally Posted by
Sanlmar
If the Dixie Chicks made an assertion that the Iraq war was racist I’d like to see some evidence.
Admittedly, I am not a country fan and did not follow the story too closely.
I have skimmed several articles and can find nothing to support your claim.
They struck me as somewhat simple (dumb) musicians who were anti war. Nothing wrong with that
All I remember from the story was a general censorship vibe. Less country music was probably a good thing so that was acceptable to me.
Sorry, I combined two things which I learned over time.
Initially, it did just look like Natalie Maines was a simplistic, anti-war hippie musician, who was dumb enough to vocalize her stance while performing abroad.
However, the following year, when she unfairly attacked Toby Keith's song for being "racist" about the same group of people (Arabs), it became clear that she was against the Iraq War for those same foolish racism concerns. She never articulated any reasonable concern about the war, such as the usefulness of it, or the somewhat questionable justification.
In short, Natalie Maines' actions after the anti-war speech removed any benefit of the doubt that one might have had, regarding her line of thinking.
Also, this incident is often (incorrectly) cited as an example of right-wing cancellation. It's often thrown in conservatives' faces when they complain about the left-fueled cancellations of today.
However, it's not the same thing. The Dixie Chicks were not cancelled. They were just shunned by their own industry and own former fans. That's not cancellation. Similarly, if I were a left wing talk show host and suddenly started spouting right wing talking points, and my audience decided to boycott me, that also would not be cancellation.
Cancellation is when you are either fired or ostracized from an apolitical position, over your political or social views.
For example, if people were to call for the boycotting of films an actor appears in, in order to ruin his career, because of a political view he expressed, that's cancellation.
If I had a job at a corporation developing software, and I was fired because people complained of my right wing politics, that would again be cancellation.
It is not cancellation when you are an entertainer in a field where your fans are overwhelmingly on one political side, and you stupidly express opinions on the other side which piss off these fans. That's what happened to the Dixie Chicks. I didn't really feel they needed to be boycotted by country fans, but I didn't feel sorry for them, either. Natalie Maines knew what she was doing when she bashed the US government while performing in London.