The Threat of Politcal Correctness
A few years ago there was movie out called PCU which was supposed to mock the concept of Political Correctness. I went to see it with my hopes high, but they were quickly dashed. The movie literally showed the "Campus Republicans" goosestepping and quoting both Hitler and Reagan while Political Correctness was revealed as a Right Wing plot to get the good-hearted liberals on campus to fight each other instead of them. That movie stunned me with its outright lies and assumption of our stupidity. Fortunately it was bomb (U.S. Box Office: $4,346,237)
I understand Freedom of Speech and Freedom of the Press to mean that we have the right to tell the truth and state honestly held opinions. Sadly that is not the case in many situations anymore; there are whole segments of society that it is now taboo to offend.
The Gates of Vienna has a long and worthwhile article on PC and its relationship to Marxism and it is a very disturbing bit of writing. I encourage you to go and the read the article but I wish to point out and comment on a few things.
Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity.
The need to silence all criticism is needed to achieve their ends. By wrapping their intolerance in the language of tolerance they are now the tyrants they pretend to hate. One of this biggest lies is the idea that TOLERANCE = APPROVAL. That is perhaps their most successful lie because you don't need to tolerate something you approve of; you tolerate things you don't like.
The Left have become ideological orphans after the Cold War, or perhaps we should call them ideological mercenaries. Although the viable economic alternative to capitalism didn’t work out, their hatred for this system never subsided, it merely transformed into other forms. Multiculturalism is just a different word for “divide and conquer,” pitting various ethnic and cultural groups against each other and destroying the coherence of Western society from within.
Communism is supposedly dead, but like the Beast of Revelation 13, it seems to have a life beyond its mortal wound (and no I am not saying the Beast is Communism, I am just noting a similarity.)
This quote is also worth thinking about:
Much of the political Left is simply engaged in outing their opponents as evil, instead of rationally arguing against their ideas. Attaching labels such as “racist” or even “Fascist” to anyone criticizing massive immigration or Multiculturalism has become so common that Norwegian anti-Islamists have coined a new word for it: “Hitling,” which could be roughly translated to English as “to make like Hitler.” The logic behind “hitling” is a bit like this: “You have a beard. Adolf Hitler had facial hair, too, so you must be like Hitler. Adolf Hitler liked dogs. You have pets, too, you must be like Hitler. Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian. You like carrots, you are just like Hitler.”
Any “right-winger” can be slimed with such accusations. Curiously enough, the reverse is almost never true. Although Marxism may have killed 100 million people during the 20th century and failed in every single society in which it has ever been tried out, there seems to be little stigma attached to being a Leftist. The fact that Leftists can get away with this and claim to hold the moral high ground amply demonstrates that we didn’t win the Cold War. We let our guard down after the fall of the Berlin Wall and never properly denounced the ideology behind it. This is now coming back to haunt us.
Much of the criticism of the right is pointless name calling. We are not supposed to question them because they are the good guys, and we are not to ask what they mean by that. That is their whole way, to make us ashamed of what we believe without ever offering concrete reasons why other than it does not fit with their worldview.
I especially appreciated this quote:
Alain Finkielkraut stated: “In France, they would like very much to reduce these riots to their social dimension, to see them as a revolt of youths from the suburbs against their situation, against the discrimination they suffer from, against the unemployment. The problem is that most of these youths are blacks or Arabs, with a Muslim identity. Look, in France there are also other immigrants whose situation is difficult — Chinese, Vietnamese, Portuguese — and they’re not taking part in the riots. Therefore, it is clear that this is a revolt with an ethno-religious character. These people were treated like rebels, like revolutionaries. (…) They’re ‘interesting.’ They’re ‘the wretched of the earth.’ “Imagine for a moment that they were whites, like in Rostock in Germany. Right away, everyone would have said: ‘Fascism won’t be tolerated.’ When an Arab torches a school, it’s rebellion. When a white guy does it, it’s fascism. Evil is evil, no matter what color it is.”
The narrowness of Marxist thinking is quite evident. They wish to explain all of history as a "Class Struggle" and everything must be defined in those terms. In actuality history is a series of different struggles that are in some ways independent of each other and in some ways interelated. I see not only the "Class Struggle" (which is real but not the entire story), but also a Philosophical Struggle, a Theological Struggle, an Identity Struggle, Militancy vs Pacisfism etc. Marxists try to define the struggle of society as a simple line with socialism on one end and capitalism on the other, when in fact its a hyper-dimensional matrix of many struggles. The failure to understand this means that Marxists must define the Jihad in class struggle terms, for it is the only struggle they recognize as real. This blinds them to real intent of the Jihadists.
When I think of a Marxist proffesor I really wish I could think of those poor misguided Japanese soldiers who loyally soldiered on 20, 30 years after WWII ended. They fought a war that they knew was over and lost. Sadly the war with Marxism is not over and they have not lost, at least not in their minds. They are soldiers for a lost cause that they believe in so strongly that they are unwilling to surrender and hope to resurrect their dream. God help us if they ever succeed.
If I were to quote every worthwhile quote from the article I would plagarize it. Instead I urge you to read it.
I understand Freedom of Speech and Freedom of the Press to mean that we have the right to tell the truth and state honestly held opinions. Sadly that is not the case in many situations anymore; there are whole segments of society that it is now taboo to offend.
The Gates of Vienna has a long and worthwhile article on PC and its relationship to Marxism and it is a very disturbing bit of writing. I encourage you to go and the read the article but I wish to point out and comment on a few things.
Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity.
The need to silence all criticism is needed to achieve their ends. By wrapping their intolerance in the language of tolerance they are now the tyrants they pretend to hate. One of this biggest lies is the idea that TOLERANCE = APPROVAL. That is perhaps their most successful lie because you don't need to tolerate something you approve of; you tolerate things you don't like.
The Left have become ideological orphans after the Cold War, or perhaps we should call them ideological mercenaries. Although the viable economic alternative to capitalism didn’t work out, their hatred for this system never subsided, it merely transformed into other forms. Multiculturalism is just a different word for “divide and conquer,” pitting various ethnic and cultural groups against each other and destroying the coherence of Western society from within.
Communism is supposedly dead, but like the Beast of Revelation 13, it seems to have a life beyond its mortal wound (and no I am not saying the Beast is Communism, I am just noting a similarity.)
This quote is also worth thinking about:
Much of the political Left is simply engaged in outing their opponents as evil, instead of rationally arguing against their ideas. Attaching labels such as “racist” or even “Fascist” to anyone criticizing massive immigration or Multiculturalism has become so common that Norwegian anti-Islamists have coined a new word for it: “Hitling,” which could be roughly translated to English as “to make like Hitler.” The logic behind “hitling” is a bit like this: “You have a beard. Adolf Hitler had facial hair, too, so you must be like Hitler. Adolf Hitler liked dogs. You have pets, too, you must be like Hitler. Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian. You like carrots, you are just like Hitler.”
Any “right-winger” can be slimed with such accusations. Curiously enough, the reverse is almost never true. Although Marxism may have killed 100 million people during the 20th century and failed in every single society in which it has ever been tried out, there seems to be little stigma attached to being a Leftist. The fact that Leftists can get away with this and claim to hold the moral high ground amply demonstrates that we didn’t win the Cold War. We let our guard down after the fall of the Berlin Wall and never properly denounced the ideology behind it. This is now coming back to haunt us.
Much of the criticism of the right is pointless name calling. We are not supposed to question them because they are the good guys, and we are not to ask what they mean by that. That is their whole way, to make us ashamed of what we believe without ever offering concrete reasons why other than it does not fit with their worldview.
I especially appreciated this quote:
Alain Finkielkraut stated: “In France, they would like very much to reduce these riots to their social dimension, to see them as a revolt of youths from the suburbs against their situation, against the discrimination they suffer from, against the unemployment. The problem is that most of these youths are blacks or Arabs, with a Muslim identity. Look, in France there are also other immigrants whose situation is difficult — Chinese, Vietnamese, Portuguese — and they’re not taking part in the riots. Therefore, it is clear that this is a revolt with an ethno-religious character. These people were treated like rebels, like revolutionaries. (…) They’re ‘interesting.’ They’re ‘the wretched of the earth.’ “Imagine for a moment that they were whites, like in Rostock in Germany. Right away, everyone would have said: ‘Fascism won’t be tolerated.’ When an Arab torches a school, it’s rebellion. When a white guy does it, it’s fascism. Evil is evil, no matter what color it is.”
The narrowness of Marxist thinking is quite evident. They wish to explain all of history as a "Class Struggle" and everything must be defined in those terms. In actuality history is a series of different struggles that are in some ways independent of each other and in some ways interelated. I see not only the "Class Struggle" (which is real but not the entire story), but also a Philosophical Struggle, a Theological Struggle, an Identity Struggle, Militancy vs Pacisfism etc. Marxists try to define the struggle of society as a simple line with socialism on one end and capitalism on the other, when in fact its a hyper-dimensional matrix of many struggles. The failure to understand this means that Marxists must define the Jihad in class struggle terms, for it is the only struggle they recognize as real. This blinds them to real intent of the Jihadists.
When I think of a Marxist proffesor I really wish I could think of those poor misguided Japanese soldiers who loyally soldiered on 20, 30 years after WWII ended. They fought a war that they knew was over and lost. Sadly the war with Marxism is not over and they have not lost, at least not in their minds. They are soldiers for a lost cause that they believe in so strongly that they are unwilling to surrender and hope to resurrect their dream. God help us if they ever succeed.
If I were to quote every worthwhile quote from the article I would plagarize it. Instead I urge you to read it.
posted by shoprat at 7:45 PM
2 Comments:
At the start, political correctness seemed absurd; however with tenacity, the left has honed it into an effective tool. Fortunately there are still enough of us old Politically Incorrect folks around to counter the onslaught. We must be just as relentless as the left and we must not compromise the slightest.
Great post; very thought provoking.
You know I'm not a religious person but, when it comes to commie deception, I sometimes think they are evil incarnate out to destroy everything that is noble and wonderful about the human race. It was created by a madman whose daughter and maid (with whom he was cheating on his wife) killed themselves. He lied worse than Michael Moore or Mohamed. Marxism is pure evil - just like Islam. It's no wonder that the western commies have allied themselves with the Muslims.
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