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But widespread protests across the US immediately spread to similar outbreaks in different countries with very different histories.

This is just part of a globalisation phenomenon supercharged by social media and the self-serving desire for instant gratification.

It quickly and inevitably has become caught up in constant culture wars underpinned by an infinity of claims to moral superiority and denunciations of any alternative.

That can easily lead straight to farce in a brutalist model of enlightenment that rejects any concept of free speech, strongly disapproves of different views and cannot countenance even the more valuable lessons of hard experience.

Protesters outside Flinders Station in Melbourne during a Black Lives Matter rally.AAP

Cancel culture has plenty of its own historic roots although mostly not recognised by those averse to anything but their preferred versions of history.

But the modern adaptation is particularly absolutist in part because its perceived enemies are so numerous, usually impossible to define or limit but easy to decry.

That means no end to the ability to be offended and therefore to demand the offence be stopped, sometimes violently, sometimes by instant condemnation in an online brand aware world with no hard borders except for those of China.

From withdrawing Gone With the Wind from HBO Max or the series by Australian humorist Chris Lilley from screens; from defacing a statue of Captain Cook in Sydney or Winston Churchill in the UK or beheading one of Christopher Columbus in the US, the urge to succumb to the authoritarian impetus of a vengeful mob is much the same. No shades of grey, no sense of nuance and certainly no sense of humour allowed.

At least the BBCs streaming service realised it had gone too far in pulling a classic Fawlty Towers episode. It will return it to the platform, with "extra guidance and warnings... to highlight potentially offensive content and language". Of course.

Beneath the absurdities theres a much broader cultural battle confronting and convulsing the West.

The centre ground is deliberately hollowed out in favour of extreme partisanship or, even worse, extreme censorship. Cancel culture is the eager inheritor of this intolerance.

This has certainly gone mainstream and well beyond the confines of scared university leadership redefining the meaning of liberalism for students and lecturers alike. The derisory term "snowflake" has developed for good reason but it's not confined to one generation.

The notion of The New York Times firing its opinion page editor for running a column by a Republican senator, for example, is as deeply flawed as the bile from many commentators on Fox.

The centre ground is deliberately hollowed out in favour of extreme partisanship or, even worse, extreme censorship.

Cancel culture is the eager inheritor of this intolerance. The translation allows no acceptance of social advances also engendered by an often brutal past nor the difficulties of reversing past injustices. Just as it dismisses societys ability to learn from history and to reform itself rather than attempt to recast the past.

Australia is certainly not immune from this sort of pandemic even if Scott Morrison maintains he doesnt want to get involved in the history wars.

He is understandably confident he has the support of most Australians when he says his focus is the need to get people back into jobs on what needs to be built up rather than what should be torn down.

But he also knows sensitivities have to be managed in a political climate prone to sudden storms of destruction and always looking for easy answers and figures of blame.

So the Prime Minister quickly apologised for any offence created by his remark last week that there was no slavery in Australia, in order to head off the outrage about Australias history of kidnapping Pacific Islanders and the effective slavery of many Aborigines.

I acknowledge there have been all sorts of hideous practices that have taken place, he said on Friday. And so I'm not denying any of that, OK? I'm not denying any of that. And I don't think it's helpful to go into an endless history wars discussion about this. It's all recorded.

His emphasis remains on the crucial but stubbornly elusive challenge of practical reconciliation despite all the money and good intentions and policy efforts devoted to it in recent decades.

The challenges of Indigenous incarceration go across so many different areas of public policy, he said. Its health policy, its youth policy, it's suicide policy, its employment policy, its welfare policy, this is an incredibly complicated area and not all Indigenous experiences are the same.

All true. The larger question is whether these arguments can ever emerge from the dead end of repeated failures or be diverted once again into simplistic accusations of racism.

The answer wont be found on Twitter.

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Culture wars cancel the past and present - The Australian Financial Review