When
I was growing up around my grandfather, also more colloquially known as
Papa, would sometimes quip about other people, “Boy, sometimes you just
have to call a spade a spade.”
Marjorie
Kinnan Rawlings does this in her book when she refers to a bunch of
African Americans picking oranges out of her groves. The first reference
to the orange pickers goes, “A flock of chattering monkeys is suddenly
in the orange trees.” The second a few sentences later, “Preacher is a
wizened little chimpanzee of a Negro, his hands swift as the claws of a
hawk among the oranges.”
Before
you begin thinking Rawlings or I’m a racist Southerner, please hear me
out. What Rawlings does is call a spade a spade, not out of meanness or
hatred, but out of shear directness and creativity. If you think
Rawlings or me are racists, how many of you took offense to her
referring to Preacher’s hands as hawk claws? None of you, probably. In
fact, Rawlings paid her black help better than anyone in the community
The
idea Rawlings has brought to mind is that political correctness has
limited our ability to be direct and creative. We tip toe around so many
subjects we’ve lost our connection to what things, places, and idea
really remind us of.
Maybe
using Rawlings as a defense against political correctness tarnishes her
name, but I don’t think she’d be griping if she were a part of this
conversation. Other contemporaries of her, like John Steinbeck, Ernest
Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, and Robert Frost did not hold back their
thoughts, but let them flow making them, arguably, the best group of
American writers of our time. I just wonder if we can learn something
from Rawlings and her compatriots in speaking our mind. Do you think
we’re too politically correct? Or, should our mouth be tempered?
I recently ran across an old Internet joke that attempts to define the term “political correctness.” The joke reads: “Political
correctness is a doctrine – fostered by a delusional, illogical
minority and rapidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media –
which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick
up a piece of shit by the clean end.” It’s as funny as it is nakedly true. It started me thinking about how political correctness affects us.
I know it does not help us – because as a nation we have come far through fundamental honesty with each other. I am passionate that our success as a nation stems in large part from the brilliance of our founders starting with the freedom embodied in the First Amendment. This freedom has been complemented by a culture which, until recently, encourages and rewards the type of Will Rodgers honesty, entrepreneurial challenge to the status quo, and an immigrant-inspired push for something better. The precise antithesis of political correctness.
Political correctness is the enemy of honest communication. We saw it last year with the firing of Juan Williams from NPR after he said: “I’m not a bigot … But when I get on a plane, I’ve got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they’re identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.”
What’s troubling about this episode is that Williams was attempting to begin an honest discussion and got canned for it. As one who has spoken and written about civil rights, he was clearly doing some introspection and contrasting his feelings against what he had knew was the “correct” feeling. All Williams’ firing did was reinforce the concept that we should not have honest discussions about tough issues like religion and ethnicity.
But it’s not just in the political-pundit realm that political correctness has shut down the First Amendment. Take the laws protecting anyone in a “suspect class” from hiring, promotion or firing discrimination. As any lawyer, HR manager or employer knows, this means that an employer incurs more legal risk in hiring or firing anyone who is not a white male under 40. That means it is safer and less risky to hire a white male under 40. Given what these laws are trying to accomplish, does that make any sense at all?
Political correctness does not allow us to have a discussion on the harmful impact these laws may be having on hiring of females, minorities, disabled and those who are older. Many employers have encountered an employee who doesn’t work out, hires a lawyer and extorts a settlement from the employer. We hired an employee who was over 60 and insisted on a nap every day. When terminated for poor performance she hired an attorney who said we were discriminating against her on the basis of her age.
Political correctness prevents the type of honest discussion we need to solve our biggest problems. Our nation is in trouble. We are struggling largely because we are not being honest with each other. We are selecting politicians who promise easy solutions and avoid tough discussions.
We cannot expect to recover our economic prosperity when we pillory any politician, pundit or organization that dares to touch the third-rail. We should reward the Juan Williamses of the world for asking the tough questions. The difference between a culture of honesty, respect and diversity is different from a legal and elite mandate of a code of silence that precludes discussion of the toughest issues.
America can and should do better. We can begin by discussing and recognizing that political correctness is neither healthy nor helpful in the type of honest discussion we need to solve the big problems we face. This does not mean we need to change laws or start discriminating. It means we need to stop the censors and confront our divisive issues. Americans have turned on each other, and political correctness is the weapon of choice in ensuring we stay divided.
Here's a statistical finding that may confirm what many of us had been thinking in recent years without really realizing it:
A majority of Americans, who are globally famous for candidly saying what they think, now say they believe that their country has become too politically correct.
A new Rasmussen Reports survey finds that nearly six in 10 respondents (57%) say they think we've gotten too hung up on too many sensibilities. Can we even talk about this with the other 43%?
The subject of political correctness burst into the news again Wednesday night when NPR fired commentator Juan Williams for saying he gets nervous on planes when he sees Muslims on planes "identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims." And before that CNN fired Rick Sanchez for his comments.
But here's an interesting result from the Rasmussen research: Nearly three out of four Americans say they think that political correctness is a problem.
So, wait a minute: More people think PC is a problem than think there's too much of it. So, how then is it a problem?
Of course, we respect the right of some people to hold nonsensical views like that. Such thoughtful minorities are an important part of the diverse American identity.
Rasmussen also finds that 13% say they disagree with the 74% and think PC is not a problem. And another 13% are wishy-washy can't-decides who should probably move to Canada.
There is, of course, a serious application to PC-ness in a society that prides itself on freedom of speech, if not civility. It is, first of all, an ill-defined social regimen. One person's statement of fact is another's outrageously incorrect assertion. Witness last week Fox News talker Bill O'Reilly plugging a new book on "The View" and telling the women, "Muslims killed us on 9/11."
Factually accurate but politically incorrect to the ears of Joy Behar and Whoopi Goldberg, who walked off with the impression he cast aspersions on all Muslims. When O'Reilly said he meant "extremist Muslims," they returned.
And a poll last year found that 63% of respondents said they believed that political correctness prevented military authorities from confronting a Muslim, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, before he killed 13 people and wounded many others at Ft. Hood, Texas.
But here's a final chilling factoid from the new Rasmussen survey: Eleven percent of the respondents adopt the Goldilocks approach, that is, the balance of political correctness and incorrectness in America today is just about right. Goody-goodies all of them in clean white socks.
However, nearly one in four of our countrymen (23%) think the country isn't sufficiently politically correct. We need to be even more careful about what we say to each other, lest someone gasp.
And, strangely enough, every one of those humorless prudes lives in Massachusetts.
I worry that our society has gotten to the point of insanity because we take offense to things way too easily. We are so focused on what other people think that we guard our speech to a point that our speech becomes meaningless.
If I told you the real reason I am writing this post I’m sure that I’d have plenty of people think that I am racist because the reason I am writing this post is not politically correct.
I’ve gotten to the point that I just want to be who I am and if others take offense at what I say then it has to be on them. I can’t make everyone happy.
The slang form means someone who is stupid, obtuse or ineffective. We’ve allowed the derogatory connotation of a word allow us to fear using it.
In 1953 the NARC or National Association for Retarded Children was founded and later changed to National Association for Retarded Citizens then the Association for Retarded Citizens of the United States. In 1992, the name changed to simply The Arc of the United States. Their website now suggests that the “r-word” shouldn’t be used… even in the medical community.
I recognize that when times change, we have to change with them but I believe that we’ve allowed idiots to hijack our language and, as a result, we guard our tongue but often don’t know what we are supposed to say.
What’s next? Are we going to have to change the way music is played because we can no longer retard the tempo?
There are a significant number of even greater inconsistencies here that I won’t go into for fear of being called a bigot. See, even in this post, I have to be careful because I don’t know who I will offend.
As a result of this inconsistency, people don’t know what to say. We end up sounding racist because we don’t know how to respond. We simply don’t know what to say.
My brother-in-law is a very dark skinned fellow (like that PC term?). I found myself after a few years of knowing him saying an odd phrase when talking about him. I would say something like, “André is an African-American, but he’s a great guy.”
Really, that’s what I said? As if I didn’t include that ‘he’s a great guy’ everyone would have assumed otherwise. I realized what I was doing and, more importantly, I realized that I was doing it because I felt uncomfortable talking since I knew I had to guard my language. Now, he’s just André. He’s my brother-in-law and a friend.
One example: If I use the phase, “That person is such a niggard!” The immediate assumption is that I am using a term regarding race. However, a niggard is someone who is a stingy or ungenerous.
We lose richness in our language because people become offended when a word sounds like it might be derogatory even when the two meanings couldn’t be more divergent.
If this offends you then get over it.
History Of
Where does all this stuff that you’ve heard about come from – the victim feminism, the gay rights movement, the invented statistics, the rewritten history, the lies, the demands, all the rest of it – where does it come from? For the first time in our history, Americans have to be fearful of what they say, of what they write, and of what they think. They have to be afraid of using the wrong word, a word denounced as offensive or insensitive, or racist, sexist, or homophobic.
We have seen other countries, particularly in this century, where this has been the case. And we have always regarded them with a mixture of pity, and to be truthful, some amusement, because it has struck us as so strange that people would allow a situation to develop where they would be afraid of what words they used. But we now have this situation in this country. We have it primarily on college campuses, but it is spreading throughout the whole society. Were does it come from? What is it?
We call it “Political Correctness.” The name originated as something of a joke, literally in a comic strip, and we tend still to think of it as only half-serious. In fact, it’s deadly serious. It is the great disease of our century, the disease that has left tens of millions of people dead in Europe, in Russia, in China, indeed around the world. It is the disease of ideology. PC is not funny. PC is deadly serious.
If we look at it analytically, if we look at it historically, we quickly find out exactly what it is. Political Correctness is cultural Marxism. It is Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms. It is an effort that goes back not to the 1960s and the hippies and the peace movement, but back to World War I. If we compare the basic tenets of Political Correctness with classical Marxism the parallels are very obvious.
First of all, both are totalitarian ideologies. The totalitarian nature of Political Correctness is revealed nowhere more clearly than on college campuses, many of which at this point are small ivy covered North Koreas, where the student or faculty member who dares to cross any of the lines set up by the gender feminist or the homosexual-rights activists, or the local black or Hispanic group, or any of the other sainted “victims” groups that PC revolves around, quickly find themselves in judicial trouble. Within the small legal system of the college, they face formal charges – some star-chamber proceeding – and punishment. That is a little look into the future that Political Correctness intends for the nation as a whole.
Indeed, all ideologies are totalitarian because the essence of an ideology (I would note that conservatism correctly understood is not an ideology) is to take some philosophy and say on the basis of this philosophy certain things must be true – such as the whole of the history of our culture is the history of the oppression of women. Since reality contradicts that, reality must be forbidden. It must become forbidden to acknowledge the reality of our history. People must be forced to live a lie, and since people are naturally reluctant to live a lie, they naturally use their ears and eyes to look out and say, “Wait a minute. This isn’t true. I can see it isn’t true,” the power of the state must be put behind the demand to live a lie. That is why ideology invariably creates a totalitarian state.
Second, the cultural Marxism of Political Correctness, like economic Marxism, has a single factor explanation of history. Economic Marxism says that all of history is determined by ownership of means of production. Cultural Marxism, or Political Correctness, says that all history is determined by power, by which groups defined in terms of race, sex, etc., have power over which other groups. Nothing else matters. All literature, indeed, is about that. Everything in the past is about that one thing.
Third, just as in classical economic Marxism certain groups, i.e. workers and peasants, are a priori good, and other groups, i.e., the bourgeoisie and capital owners, are evil. In the cultural Marxism of Political Correctness certain groups are good – feminist women, (only feminist women, non-feminist women are deemed not to exist) blacks, Hispanics, homosexuals. These groups are determined to be “victims,” and therefore automatically good regardless of what any of them do. Similarly, white males are determined automatically to be evil, thereby becoming the equivalent of the bourgeoisie in economic Marxism.
Fourth, both economic and cultural Marxism rely on expropriation. When the classical Marxists, the communists, took over a country like Russia, they expropriated the bourgeoisie, they took away their property. Similarly, when the cultural Marxists take over a university campus, they expropriate through things like quotas for admissions. When a white student with superior qualifications is denied admittance to a college in favor of a black or Hispanic who isn’t as well qualified, the white student is expropriated. And indeed, affirmative action, in our whole society today, is a system of expropriation. White owned companies don’t get a contract because the contract is reserved for a company owned by, say, Hispanics or women. So expropriation is a principle tool for both forms of Marxism.
And finally, both have a method of analysis that automatically gives the answers they want. For the classical Marxist, it’s Marxist economics. For the cultural Marxist, it’s deconstruction. Deconstruction essentially takes any text, removes all meaning from it and re-inserts any meaning desired. So we find, for example, that all of Shakespeare is about the suppression of women, or the Bible is really about race and gender. All of these texts simply become grist for the mill, which proves that “all history is about which groups have power over which other groups.” So the parallels are very evident between the classical Marxism that we’re familiar with in the old Soviet Union and the cultural Marxism that we see today as Political Correctness.
But the parallels are not accidents. The parallels did not come from nothing. The fact of the matter is that Political Correctness has a history, a history that is much longer than many people are aware of outside a small group of academics who have studied this. And the history goes back, as I said, to World War I, as do so many of the pathologies that are today bringing our society, and indeed our culture, down.
Marxist theory said that when the general European war came (as it did come in Europe in 1914), the working class throughout Europe would rise up and overthrow their governments – the bourgeois governments – because the workers had more in common with each other across the national boundaries than they had in common with the bourgeoisie and the ruling class in their own country. Well, 1914 came and it didn’t happen. Throughout Europe, workers rallied to their flag and happily marched off to fight each other. The Kaiser shook hands with the leaders of the Marxist Social Democratic Party in Germany and said there are no parties now, there are only Germans. And this happened in every country in Europe. So something was wrong.
Marxists knew by definition it couldn’t be the theory. In 1917, they finally got a Marxist coup in Russia and it looked like the theory was working, but it stalled again. It didn’t spread and when attempts were made to spread immediately after the war, with the Spartacist uprising in Berlin, with the Bela Kun government in Hungary, with the Munich Soviet, the workers didn’t support them.
So the Marxists’ had a problem. And two Marxist theorists went to work on it: Antonio Gramsci in Italy and Georg Lukacs in Hungary. Gramsci said the workers will never see their true class interests, as defined by Marxism, until they are freed from Western culture, and particularly from the Christian religion – that they are blinded by culture and religion to their true class interests. Lukacs, who was considered the most brilliant Marxist theorist since Marx himself, said in 1919, “Who will save us from Western Civilization?” He also theorized that the great obstacle to the creation of a Marxist paradise was the culture: Western civilization itself.
Lukacs gets a chance to put his ideas into practice, because when the home grown Bolshevik Bela Kun government is established in Hungary in 1919, he becomes deputy commissar for culture, and the first thing he did was introduce sex education into the Hungarian schools. This ensured that the workers would not support the Bela Kun government, because the Hungarian people looked at this aghast, workers as well as everyone else. But he had already made the connection that today many of us are still surprised by, that we would consider the “latest thing.”
In 1923 in Germany, a think-tank is established that takes on the role of translating Marxism from economic into cultural terms, that creates Political Correctness as we know it today, and essentially it has created the basis for it by the end of the 1930s. This comes about because the very wealthy young son of a millionaire German trader by the name of Felix Weil has become a Marxist and has lots of money to spend. He is disturbed by the divisions among the Marxists, so he sponsors something called the First Marxist Work Week, where he brings Lukacs and many of the key German thinkers together for a week, working on the differences of Marxism.
And he says, “What we need is a think-tank.” Washington is full of think tanks and we think of them as very modern. In fact they go back quite a ways. He endows an institute, associated with Frankfurt University, established in 1923, that was originally supposed to be known as the Institute for Marxism. But the people behind it decided at the beginning that it was not to their advantage to be openly identified as Marxist. The last thing Political Correctness wants is for people to figure out it’s a form of Marxism. So instead they decide to name it the Institute for Social Research.
Weil is very clear about his goals. In 1971, he wrote to Martin Jay the author of a principle book on the Frankfurt School, as the Institute for Social Research soon becomes known informally, and he said, “I wanted the institute to become known, perhaps famous, due to its contributions to Marxism.” Well, he was successful. The first director of the Institute, Carl Grunberg, an Austrian economist, concluded his opening address, according to Martin Jay, “by clearly stating his personal allegiance to Marxism as a scientific methodology.” Marxism, he said, would be the ruling principle at the Institute, and that never changed.
The initial work at the Institute was rather conventional, but in 1930 it acquired a new director named Max Horkheimer, and Horkheimer’s views were very different. He was very much a Marxist renegade. The people who create and form the Frankfurt School are renegade Marxists. They’re still very much Marxist in their thinking, but they’re effectively run out of the party. Moscow looks at what they are doing and says, “Hey, this isn’t us, and we’re not going to bless this.”
Horkheimer’s initial heresy is that he is very interested in Freud, and the key to making the translation of Marxism from economic into cultural terms is essentially that he combined it with Freudism. Again, Martin Jay writes, “If it can be said that in the early years of its history, the Institute concerned itself primarily with an analysis of bourgeois society’s socio-economic sub-structure,” – and I point out that Jay is very sympathetic to the Frankfurt School, I’m not reading from a critic here – “in the years after 1930 its primary interests lay in its cultural superstructure. Indeed the traditional Marxist formula regarding the relationship between the two was brought into question by Critical Theory.”
The stuff we’ve been hearing about this morning – the radical feminism, the women’s studies departments, the gay studies departments, the black studies departments – all these things are branches of Critical Theory. What the Frankfurt School essentially does is draw on both Marx and Freud in the 1930s to create this theory called Critical Theory. The term is ingenious because you’re tempted to ask, “What is the theory?” The theory is to criticize. The theory is that the way to bring down Western culture and the capitalist order is not to lay down an alternative. They explicitly refuse to do that. They say it can’t be done, that we can’t imagine what a free society would look like (their definition of a free society). As long as we’re living under repression – the repression of a capitalistic economic order which creates (in their theory) the Freudian condition, the conditions that Freud describes in individuals of repression – we can’t even imagine it. What Critical Theory is about is simply criticizing. It calls for the most destructive criticism possible, in every possible way, designed to bring the current order down. And, of course, when we hear from the feminists that the whole of society is just out to get women and so on, that kind of criticism is a derivative of Critical Theory. It is all coming from the 1930s, not the 1960s.
Other key members who join up around this time are Theodore Adorno, and, most importantly, Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse. Fromm and Marcuse introduce an element which is central to Political Correctness, and that’s the sexual element. And particularly Marcuse, who in his own writings calls for a society of “polymorphous perversity,” that is his definition of the future of the world that they want to create. Marcuse in particular by the 1930s is writing some very extreme stuff on the need for sexual liberation, but this runs through the whole Institute. So do most of the themes we see in Political Correctness, again in the early 30s. In Fromm’s view, masculinity and femininity were not reflections of ‘essential’ sexual differences, as the Romantics had thought. They were derived instead from differences in life functions, which were in part socially determined.” Sex is a construct; sexual differences are a construct.
Another example is the emphasis we now see on environmentalism. “Materialism as far back as Hobbes had led to a manipulative dominating attitude toward nature.” That was Horkhemier writing in 1933 in Materialismus und Moral. “The theme of man’s domination of nature,” according to Jay, ” was to become a central concern of the Frankfurt School in subsequent years.” “Horkheimer’s antagonism to the fetishization of labor, (here’s were they’re obviously departing from Marxist orthodoxy) expressed another dimension of his materialism, the demand for human, sensual happiness.” In one of his most trenchant essays, Egoism and the Movement for Emancipation, written in 1936, Horkeimer “discussed the hostility to personal gratification inherent in bourgeois culture.” And he specifically referred to the Marquis de Sade, favorably, for his “protest…against asceticism in the name of a higher morality.”
How does all of this stuff flood in here? How does it flood into our universities, and indeed into our lives today? The members of the Frankfurt School are Marxist, they are also, to a man, Jewish. In 1933 the Nazis came to power in Germany, and not surprisingly they shut down the Institute for Social Research. And its members fled. They fled to New York City, and the Institute was reestablished there in 1933 with help from Columbia University. And the members of the Institute, gradually through the 1930s, though many of them remained writing in German, shift their focus from Critical Theory about German society, destructive criticism about every aspect of that society, to Critical Theory directed toward American society. There is another very important transition when the war comes. Some of them go to work for the government, including Herbert Marcuse, who became a key figure in the OSS (the predecessor to the CIA), and some, including Horkheimer and Adorno, move to Hollywood.
These origins of Political Correctness would probably not mean too much to us today except for two subsequent events. The first was the student rebellion in the mid-1960s, which was driven largely by resistance to the draft and the Vietnam War. But the student rebels needed theory of some sort. They couldn’t just get out there and say, “Hell no we won’t go,” they had to have some theoretical explanation behind it. Very few of them were interested in wading through Das Kapital. Classical, economic Marxism is not light, and most of the radicals of the 60s were not deep. Fortunately for them, and unfortunately for our country today, and not just in the university, Herbert Marcuse remained in America when the Frankfurt School relocated back to Frankfurt after the war. And whereas Mr. Adorno in Germany is appalled by the student rebellion when it breaks out there – when the student rebels come into Adorno’s classroom, he calls the police and has them arrested – Herbert Marcuse, who remained here, saw the 60s student rebellion as the great chance. He saw the opportunity to take the work of the Frankfurt School and make it the theory of the New Left in the United States.
One of Marcuse’s books was the key book. It virtually became the bible of the SDS and the student rebels of the 60s. That book was Eros and Civilization. Marcuse argues that under a capitalistic order (he downplays the Marxism very strongly here, it is subtitled, A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, but the framework is Marxist), repression is the essence of that order and that gives us the person Freud describes – the person with all the hang-ups, the neuroses, because his sexual instincts are repressed. We can envision a future, if we can only destroy this existing oppressive order, in which we liberate eros, we liberate libido, in which we have a world of “polymorphous perversity,” in which you can “do you own thing.” And by the way, in that world there will no longer be work, only play. What a wonderful message for the radicals of the mid-60s! They’re students, they’re baby-boomers, and they’ve grown up never having to worry about anything except eventually having to get a job. And here is a guy writing in a way they can easily follow. He doesn’t require them to read a lot of heavy Marxism and tells them everything they want to hear which is essentially, “Do your own thing,” “If it feels good do it,” and “You never have to go to work.” By the way, Marcuse is also the man who creates the phrase, “Make love, not war.” Coming back to the situation people face on campus, Marcuse defines “liberating tolerance” as intolerance for anything coming from the Right and tolerance for anything coming from the Left. Marcuse joined the Frankfurt School, in 1932 (if I remember right). So, all of this goes back to the 1930s.
In conclusion, America today is in the throes of the greatest and direst transformation in its history. We are becoming an ideological state, a country with an official state ideology enforced by the power of the state. In “hate crimes” we now have people serving jail sentences for political thoughts. And the Congress is now moving to expand that category ever further. Affirmative action is part of it. The terror against anyone who dissents from Political Correctness on campus is part of it. It’s exactly what we have seen happen in Russia, in Germany, in Italy, in China, and now it’s coming here. And we don’t recognize it because we call it Political Correctness and laugh it off. My message today is that it’s not funny, it’s here, it’s growing and it will eventually destroy, as it seeks to destroy, everything that we have ever defined as our freedom and our culture.
We have all seen numerous examples of PC nonsense that are good for a chuckle (my personal favorite was the attempt by the government of Woonsocket, Rhode Island to replace the term “manhole covers” with “personhole covers.” They relented after the town became the laughing stock of the nation’s newsrooms.) But, unfortunately, PC is no longer a laughing matter. It has become a threat, not only to freedom of speech, but to our personal freedoms and, indeed, to our lives. From early 2002 to late 2009 I lived in the United Kingdom, a country where PC has literally run amuck.
Item: In October 2004, leftists in the European Parliament attacked Italian European Union commissioner Rocco Buttiglione for his Catholicism and the fact that he sees homosexuality as a sin. In spite of the Vatican coming to his defense, he was denied an important post due to his “politically incorrect” ideas on homosexuality. Apparently being anti-Catholic is okay with the PC crowd.
Item: The Defense Department runs schools for dependents of servicemen overseas and of these is the American high school at RAF Lakenheath (near Cambridge if you know your UK geography). In the same month as the Buttiglione fiasco, the new principal stated that if any students were overheard using the common expression "That's really gay,” they would have legal charges brought against them. Legal charges, not reprimands, or even suspension or expulsion, but actual charges.
Item: In July 2005, Mark Steyn in the excellent National Review magazine pointed this out. A certain Douglas Wood, an Australian, was held by Islamic terrorists in Iraq. During his ordeal, while blindfolded, he had to listen to the murder of two of his colleagues. Luckily he was released. Subsequently, in a statement, he called his captors a vulgar term meaning "rectal orifices" (he used the actual term which I will refrain from repeating here). Well, the editor of a Melbourne, Australia newspaper, one Mr. Andrew Jaspan, took offense and said that Wood's comments were "insensitive." Calling murderers you-know-whats is considered “insensitive.” Think about that.
Item: In 2007, certain British schools have been advised not to teach students about the Holocaust because it may offend Muslim students who are taught by their imams that the Holocaust did not happen. Is it PC to rewrite history? Apparently.
Item: Some banks in the UK have banned leaving piggy banks around their offices as the sight of a pig, however whimsical, may offend (you guessed it) Muslims. Guess you’ll have to put your money into a goat bank, kids!
Item: Some police in the UK have been reluctant to investigate so-called honor killings because (and this was reported on the BBC so take my word for it) it could be construed as being politically incorrect. Fathers, mothers, and uncles are butchering young girls in their own families merely because they wore “indecent” clothing or dated the wrong boy. You can’t investigate this, you see, it’s their “culture.”
And of course there are the killings that have taken place due to the “insult” to Islam by a few cartoonists a couple of years back (not to mention to the death threats to Sir Salman Rushdie. Kudos to the British for knighting him).
A couple more items that have recently come to my attention (again, courtesy of Mark Steyn who pointed them out in the 5 March 2012 issue of National Review): a gentleman in the UK lost his job in 2009 for having the temerity to suggest he was against allowing gay Church of England vicars marrying their “partners.” This is particularly interesting and troubling - first of all, this was said in a private conversation and, in any case, gay marriage in ILLEGAL in the UK!
In 1997, a newspaper was fined because of an advertisement which merely contained three Biblical references, Romans 1:26, Leviticus 19:22 and 20:13, and 1 Corinthians 6:9. Mind you the actual text was not included, only three references. Not familiar with them? They are proscriptions of homosexuality. Some “Human Rights” Tribunal thought these references insulted gay people. But what about religious freedom?
Okay, you say, all these examples happened outside the US. You think this can’t happen here? Tell you what, go on Google and type in this phrase: political correctness run amuck. Then read some of the stories you find. (One example - did you read about the guy who was fired from ESPN because he used the phrase “chink in the armor” in a story about basketball star Jeremy Lin? The PC crowd apparently cannot distinguish between a racial slur and a word meaning a narrow opening or crack.)
I could go on and on. I’m sure the readers of this are familiar with campus “speech codes,” because of which you can be thrown out of school for referring to someone with the wrong pronoun (I exaggerate, but not by much. And we’ve all seen members of the minority-group du jour get away with things the rest of us would probably go to jail for (or at least be severely criticized) because they’re part of an “oppressed” group.) Well, now some of them are literally getting away with murder.
Have we become so cowardly that we cannot defend our own culture and traditions and our national heritage? Is it “racist” to try to maintain time-honored traditions and values within our borders? Is it “anti-immigrant” to insist that people who have entered the country illegally and have no intention of assimilating should consider going elsewhere?
Do we not realize the danger of letting this go on?
I refer you to two quotations from the French poet-philosopher, Charles Peguy:
“It will never be known what acts of cowardice have been motivated by the fear of not looking sufficiently progressive.”
and
“He who does not bellow the truth when he knows the truth makes himself the accomplice of liars and forgers.”
Truth is one of the main victims of PC, freedom is another. It is beginning to look as though personal safety is at risk as well.
“Political correctness” is nothing less than a cancer that should be expunged from the body politic.
I know it does not help us – because as a nation we have come far through fundamental honesty with each other. I am passionate that our success as a nation stems in large part from the brilliance of our founders starting with the freedom embodied in the First Amendment. This freedom has been complemented by a culture which, until recently, encourages and rewards the type of Will Rodgers honesty, entrepreneurial challenge to the status quo, and an immigrant-inspired push for something better. The precise antithesis of political correctness.
Political correctness is the enemy of honest communication. We saw it last year with the firing of Juan Williams from NPR after he said: “I’m not a bigot … But when I get on a plane, I’ve got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they’re identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.”
What’s troubling about this episode is that Williams was attempting to begin an honest discussion and got canned for it. As one who has spoken and written about civil rights, he was clearly doing some introspection and contrasting his feelings against what he had knew was the “correct” feeling. All Williams’ firing did was reinforce the concept that we should not have honest discussions about tough issues like religion and ethnicity.
But it’s not just in the political-pundit realm that political correctness has shut down the First Amendment. Take the laws protecting anyone in a “suspect class” from hiring, promotion or firing discrimination. As any lawyer, HR manager or employer knows, this means that an employer incurs more legal risk in hiring or firing anyone who is not a white male under 40. That means it is safer and less risky to hire a white male under 40. Given what these laws are trying to accomplish, does that make any sense at all?
Political correctness does not allow us to have a discussion on the harmful impact these laws may be having on hiring of females, minorities, disabled and those who are older. Many employers have encountered an employee who doesn’t work out, hires a lawyer and extorts a settlement from the employer. We hired an employee who was over 60 and insisted on a nap every day. When terminated for poor performance she hired an attorney who said we were discriminating against her on the basis of her age.
Political correctness prevents the type of honest discussion we need to solve our biggest problems. Our nation is in trouble. We are struggling largely because we are not being honest with each other. We are selecting politicians who promise easy solutions and avoid tough discussions.
We cannot expect to recover our economic prosperity when we pillory any politician, pundit or organization that dares to touch the third-rail. We should reward the Juan Williamses of the world for asking the tough questions. The difference between a culture of honesty, respect and diversity is different from a legal and elite mandate of a code of silence that precludes discussion of the toughest issues.
America can and should do better. We can begin by discussing and recognizing that political correctness is neither healthy nor helpful in the type of honest discussion we need to solve the big problems we face. This does not mean we need to change laws or start discriminating. It means we need to stop the censors and confront our divisive issues. Americans have turned on each other, and political correctness is the weapon of choice in ensuring we stay divided.
Here's a statistical finding that may confirm what many of us had been thinking in recent years without really realizing it:
A majority of Americans, who are globally famous for candidly saying what they think, now say they believe that their country has become too politically correct.
A new Rasmussen Reports survey finds that nearly six in 10 respondents (57%) say they think we've gotten too hung up on too many sensibilities. Can we even talk about this with the other 43%?
The subject of political correctness burst into the news again Wednesday night when NPR fired commentator Juan Williams for saying he gets nervous on planes when he sees Muslims on planes "identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims." And before that CNN fired Rick Sanchez for his comments.
But here's an interesting result from the Rasmussen research: Nearly three out of four Americans say they think that political correctness is a problem.
So, wait a minute: More people think PC is a problem than think there's too much of it. So, how then is it a problem?
Of course, we respect the right of some people to hold nonsensical views like that. Such thoughtful minorities are an important part of the diverse American identity.
Rasmussen also finds that 13% say they disagree with the 74% and think PC is not a problem. And another 13% are wishy-washy can't-decides who should probably move to Canada.
There is, of course, a serious application to PC-ness in a society that prides itself on freedom of speech, if not civility. It is, first of all, an ill-defined social regimen. One person's statement of fact is another's outrageously incorrect assertion. Witness last week Fox News talker Bill O'Reilly plugging a new book on "The View" and telling the women, "Muslims killed us on 9/11."
Factually accurate but politically incorrect to the ears of Joy Behar and Whoopi Goldberg, who walked off with the impression he cast aspersions on all Muslims. When O'Reilly said he meant "extremist Muslims," they returned.
And a poll last year found that 63% of respondents said they believed that political correctness prevented military authorities from confronting a Muslim, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, before he killed 13 people and wounded many others at Ft. Hood, Texas.
But here's a final chilling factoid from the new Rasmussen survey: Eleven percent of the respondents adopt the Goldilocks approach, that is, the balance of political correctness and incorrectness in America today is just about right. Goody-goodies all of them in clean white socks.
However, nearly one in four of our countrymen (23%) think the country isn't sufficiently politically correct. We need to be even more careful about what we say to each other, lest someone gasp.
And, strangely enough, every one of those humorless prudes lives in Massachusetts.
I worry that our society has gotten to the point of insanity because we take offense to things way too easily. We are so focused on what other people think that we guard our speech to a point that our speech becomes meaningless.
If I told you the real reason I am writing this post I’m sure that I’d have plenty of people think that I am racist because the reason I am writing this post is not politically correct.
I’ve gotten to the point that I just want to be who I am and if others take offense at what I say then it has to be on them. I can’t make everyone happy.
Words Change Meaning
The term retard comes from latin and means, as a verb, to make slow or to delay the development or progress of something. As a noun, it means a slowing down or hindrance.The slang form means someone who is stupid, obtuse or ineffective. We’ve allowed the derogatory connotation of a word allow us to fear using it.
In 1953 the NARC or National Association for Retarded Children was founded and later changed to National Association for Retarded Citizens then the Association for Retarded Citizens of the United States. In 1992, the name changed to simply The Arc of the United States. Their website now suggests that the “r-word” shouldn’t be used… even in the medical community.
I recognize that when times change, we have to change with them but I believe that we’ve allowed idiots to hijack our language and, as a result, we guard our tongue but often don’t know what we are supposed to say.
What’s next? Are we going to have to change the way music is played because we can no longer retard the tempo?
Inconsistent Expectations
The other issue with political correctness is that we find there is inconsistency in the expectations. We are often told that individuals of African decent and darker skin (like that PC description?) should be called African-American yet, we’ve just concluded Black History Month. Moreover, the NAACP is still called the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.There are a significant number of even greater inconsistencies here that I won’t go into for fear of being called a bigot. See, even in this post, I have to be careful because I don’t know who I will offend.
As a result of this inconsistency, people don’t know what to say. We end up sounding racist because we don’t know how to respond. We simply don’t know what to say.
My brother-in-law is a very dark skinned fellow (like that PC term?). I found myself after a few years of knowing him saying an odd phrase when talking about him. I would say something like, “André is an African-American, but he’s a great guy.”
Really, that’s what I said? As if I didn’t include that ‘he’s a great guy’ everyone would have assumed otherwise. I realized what I was doing and, more importantly, I realized that I was doing it because I felt uncomfortable talking since I knew I had to guard my language. Now, he’s just André. He’s my brother-in-law and a friend.
The real result
When we worry about being politically correct, we find that we are always trying to figure out who we are going to offend next. We worry that if we say something that the ignorant (another term people don’t get) will get offended because they think we intended to hurt someone else.One example: If I use the phase, “That person is such a niggard!” The immediate assumption is that I am using a term regarding race. However, a niggard is someone who is a stingy or ungenerous.
We lose richness in our language because people become offended when a word sounds like it might be derogatory even when the two meanings couldn’t be more divergent.
If this offends you then get over it.
History Of
Where does all this stuff that you’ve heard about come from – the victim feminism, the gay rights movement, the invented statistics, the rewritten history, the lies, the demands, all the rest of it – where does it come from? For the first time in our history, Americans have to be fearful of what they say, of what they write, and of what they think. They have to be afraid of using the wrong word, a word denounced as offensive or insensitive, or racist, sexist, or homophobic.
We have seen other countries, particularly in this century, where this has been the case. And we have always regarded them with a mixture of pity, and to be truthful, some amusement, because it has struck us as so strange that people would allow a situation to develop where they would be afraid of what words they used. But we now have this situation in this country. We have it primarily on college campuses, but it is spreading throughout the whole society. Were does it come from? What is it?
We call it “Political Correctness.” The name originated as something of a joke, literally in a comic strip, and we tend still to think of it as only half-serious. In fact, it’s deadly serious. It is the great disease of our century, the disease that has left tens of millions of people dead in Europe, in Russia, in China, indeed around the world. It is the disease of ideology. PC is not funny. PC is deadly serious.
If we look at it analytically, if we look at it historically, we quickly find out exactly what it is. Political Correctness is cultural Marxism. It is Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms. It is an effort that goes back not to the 1960s and the hippies and the peace movement, but back to World War I. If we compare the basic tenets of Political Correctness with classical Marxism the parallels are very obvious.
First of all, both are totalitarian ideologies. The totalitarian nature of Political Correctness is revealed nowhere more clearly than on college campuses, many of which at this point are small ivy covered North Koreas, where the student or faculty member who dares to cross any of the lines set up by the gender feminist or the homosexual-rights activists, or the local black or Hispanic group, or any of the other sainted “victims” groups that PC revolves around, quickly find themselves in judicial trouble. Within the small legal system of the college, they face formal charges – some star-chamber proceeding – and punishment. That is a little look into the future that Political Correctness intends for the nation as a whole.
Indeed, all ideologies are totalitarian because the essence of an ideology (I would note that conservatism correctly understood is not an ideology) is to take some philosophy and say on the basis of this philosophy certain things must be true – such as the whole of the history of our culture is the history of the oppression of women. Since reality contradicts that, reality must be forbidden. It must become forbidden to acknowledge the reality of our history. People must be forced to live a lie, and since people are naturally reluctant to live a lie, they naturally use their ears and eyes to look out and say, “Wait a minute. This isn’t true. I can see it isn’t true,” the power of the state must be put behind the demand to live a lie. That is why ideology invariably creates a totalitarian state.
Second, the cultural Marxism of Political Correctness, like economic Marxism, has a single factor explanation of history. Economic Marxism says that all of history is determined by ownership of means of production. Cultural Marxism, or Political Correctness, says that all history is determined by power, by which groups defined in terms of race, sex, etc., have power over which other groups. Nothing else matters. All literature, indeed, is about that. Everything in the past is about that one thing.
Third, just as in classical economic Marxism certain groups, i.e. workers and peasants, are a priori good, and other groups, i.e., the bourgeoisie and capital owners, are evil. In the cultural Marxism of Political Correctness certain groups are good – feminist women, (only feminist women, non-feminist women are deemed not to exist) blacks, Hispanics, homosexuals. These groups are determined to be “victims,” and therefore automatically good regardless of what any of them do. Similarly, white males are determined automatically to be evil, thereby becoming the equivalent of the bourgeoisie in economic Marxism.
Fourth, both economic and cultural Marxism rely on expropriation. When the classical Marxists, the communists, took over a country like Russia, they expropriated the bourgeoisie, they took away their property. Similarly, when the cultural Marxists take over a university campus, they expropriate through things like quotas for admissions. When a white student with superior qualifications is denied admittance to a college in favor of a black or Hispanic who isn’t as well qualified, the white student is expropriated. And indeed, affirmative action, in our whole society today, is a system of expropriation. White owned companies don’t get a contract because the contract is reserved for a company owned by, say, Hispanics or women. So expropriation is a principle tool for both forms of Marxism.
And finally, both have a method of analysis that automatically gives the answers they want. For the classical Marxist, it’s Marxist economics. For the cultural Marxist, it’s deconstruction. Deconstruction essentially takes any text, removes all meaning from it and re-inserts any meaning desired. So we find, for example, that all of Shakespeare is about the suppression of women, or the Bible is really about race and gender. All of these texts simply become grist for the mill, which proves that “all history is about which groups have power over which other groups.” So the parallels are very evident between the classical Marxism that we’re familiar with in the old Soviet Union and the cultural Marxism that we see today as Political Correctness.
But the parallels are not accidents. The parallels did not come from nothing. The fact of the matter is that Political Correctness has a history, a history that is much longer than many people are aware of outside a small group of academics who have studied this. And the history goes back, as I said, to World War I, as do so many of the pathologies that are today bringing our society, and indeed our culture, down.
Marxist theory said that when the general European war came (as it did come in Europe in 1914), the working class throughout Europe would rise up and overthrow their governments – the bourgeois governments – because the workers had more in common with each other across the national boundaries than they had in common with the bourgeoisie and the ruling class in their own country. Well, 1914 came and it didn’t happen. Throughout Europe, workers rallied to their flag and happily marched off to fight each other. The Kaiser shook hands with the leaders of the Marxist Social Democratic Party in Germany and said there are no parties now, there are only Germans. And this happened in every country in Europe. So something was wrong.
Marxists knew by definition it couldn’t be the theory. In 1917, they finally got a Marxist coup in Russia and it looked like the theory was working, but it stalled again. It didn’t spread and when attempts were made to spread immediately after the war, with the Spartacist uprising in Berlin, with the Bela Kun government in Hungary, with the Munich Soviet, the workers didn’t support them.
So the Marxists’ had a problem. And two Marxist theorists went to work on it: Antonio Gramsci in Italy and Georg Lukacs in Hungary. Gramsci said the workers will never see their true class interests, as defined by Marxism, until they are freed from Western culture, and particularly from the Christian religion – that they are blinded by culture and religion to their true class interests. Lukacs, who was considered the most brilliant Marxist theorist since Marx himself, said in 1919, “Who will save us from Western Civilization?” He also theorized that the great obstacle to the creation of a Marxist paradise was the culture: Western civilization itself.
Lukacs gets a chance to put his ideas into practice, because when the home grown Bolshevik Bela Kun government is established in Hungary in 1919, he becomes deputy commissar for culture, and the first thing he did was introduce sex education into the Hungarian schools. This ensured that the workers would not support the Bela Kun government, because the Hungarian people looked at this aghast, workers as well as everyone else. But he had already made the connection that today many of us are still surprised by, that we would consider the “latest thing.”
In 1923 in Germany, a think-tank is established that takes on the role of translating Marxism from economic into cultural terms, that creates Political Correctness as we know it today, and essentially it has created the basis for it by the end of the 1930s. This comes about because the very wealthy young son of a millionaire German trader by the name of Felix Weil has become a Marxist and has lots of money to spend. He is disturbed by the divisions among the Marxists, so he sponsors something called the First Marxist Work Week, where he brings Lukacs and many of the key German thinkers together for a week, working on the differences of Marxism.
And he says, “What we need is a think-tank.” Washington is full of think tanks and we think of them as very modern. In fact they go back quite a ways. He endows an institute, associated with Frankfurt University, established in 1923, that was originally supposed to be known as the Institute for Marxism. But the people behind it decided at the beginning that it was not to their advantage to be openly identified as Marxist. The last thing Political Correctness wants is for people to figure out it’s a form of Marxism. So instead they decide to name it the Institute for Social Research.
Weil is very clear about his goals. In 1971, he wrote to Martin Jay the author of a principle book on the Frankfurt School, as the Institute for Social Research soon becomes known informally, and he said, “I wanted the institute to become known, perhaps famous, due to its contributions to Marxism.” Well, he was successful. The first director of the Institute, Carl Grunberg, an Austrian economist, concluded his opening address, according to Martin Jay, “by clearly stating his personal allegiance to Marxism as a scientific methodology.” Marxism, he said, would be the ruling principle at the Institute, and that never changed.
The initial work at the Institute was rather conventional, but in 1930 it acquired a new director named Max Horkheimer, and Horkheimer’s views were very different. He was very much a Marxist renegade. The people who create and form the Frankfurt School are renegade Marxists. They’re still very much Marxist in their thinking, but they’re effectively run out of the party. Moscow looks at what they are doing and says, “Hey, this isn’t us, and we’re not going to bless this.”
Horkheimer’s initial heresy is that he is very interested in Freud, and the key to making the translation of Marxism from economic into cultural terms is essentially that he combined it with Freudism. Again, Martin Jay writes, “If it can be said that in the early years of its history, the Institute concerned itself primarily with an analysis of bourgeois society’s socio-economic sub-structure,” – and I point out that Jay is very sympathetic to the Frankfurt School, I’m not reading from a critic here – “in the years after 1930 its primary interests lay in its cultural superstructure. Indeed the traditional Marxist formula regarding the relationship between the two was brought into question by Critical Theory.”
The stuff we’ve been hearing about this morning – the radical feminism, the women’s studies departments, the gay studies departments, the black studies departments – all these things are branches of Critical Theory. What the Frankfurt School essentially does is draw on both Marx and Freud in the 1930s to create this theory called Critical Theory. The term is ingenious because you’re tempted to ask, “What is the theory?” The theory is to criticize. The theory is that the way to bring down Western culture and the capitalist order is not to lay down an alternative. They explicitly refuse to do that. They say it can’t be done, that we can’t imagine what a free society would look like (their definition of a free society). As long as we’re living under repression – the repression of a capitalistic economic order which creates (in their theory) the Freudian condition, the conditions that Freud describes in individuals of repression – we can’t even imagine it. What Critical Theory is about is simply criticizing. It calls for the most destructive criticism possible, in every possible way, designed to bring the current order down. And, of course, when we hear from the feminists that the whole of society is just out to get women and so on, that kind of criticism is a derivative of Critical Theory. It is all coming from the 1930s, not the 1960s.
Other key members who join up around this time are Theodore Adorno, and, most importantly, Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse. Fromm and Marcuse introduce an element which is central to Political Correctness, and that’s the sexual element. And particularly Marcuse, who in his own writings calls for a society of “polymorphous perversity,” that is his definition of the future of the world that they want to create. Marcuse in particular by the 1930s is writing some very extreme stuff on the need for sexual liberation, but this runs through the whole Institute. So do most of the themes we see in Political Correctness, again in the early 30s. In Fromm’s view, masculinity and femininity were not reflections of ‘essential’ sexual differences, as the Romantics had thought. They were derived instead from differences in life functions, which were in part socially determined.” Sex is a construct; sexual differences are a construct.
Another example is the emphasis we now see on environmentalism. “Materialism as far back as Hobbes had led to a manipulative dominating attitude toward nature.” That was Horkhemier writing in 1933 in Materialismus und Moral. “The theme of man’s domination of nature,” according to Jay, ” was to become a central concern of the Frankfurt School in subsequent years.” “Horkheimer’s antagonism to the fetishization of labor, (here’s were they’re obviously departing from Marxist orthodoxy) expressed another dimension of his materialism, the demand for human, sensual happiness.” In one of his most trenchant essays, Egoism and the Movement for Emancipation, written in 1936, Horkeimer “discussed the hostility to personal gratification inherent in bourgeois culture.” And he specifically referred to the Marquis de Sade, favorably, for his “protest…against asceticism in the name of a higher morality.”
How does all of this stuff flood in here? How does it flood into our universities, and indeed into our lives today? The members of the Frankfurt School are Marxist, they are also, to a man, Jewish. In 1933 the Nazis came to power in Germany, and not surprisingly they shut down the Institute for Social Research. And its members fled. They fled to New York City, and the Institute was reestablished there in 1933 with help from Columbia University. And the members of the Institute, gradually through the 1930s, though many of them remained writing in German, shift their focus from Critical Theory about German society, destructive criticism about every aspect of that society, to Critical Theory directed toward American society. There is another very important transition when the war comes. Some of them go to work for the government, including Herbert Marcuse, who became a key figure in the OSS (the predecessor to the CIA), and some, including Horkheimer and Adorno, move to Hollywood.
These origins of Political Correctness would probably not mean too much to us today except for two subsequent events. The first was the student rebellion in the mid-1960s, which was driven largely by resistance to the draft and the Vietnam War. But the student rebels needed theory of some sort. They couldn’t just get out there and say, “Hell no we won’t go,” they had to have some theoretical explanation behind it. Very few of them were interested in wading through Das Kapital. Classical, economic Marxism is not light, and most of the radicals of the 60s were not deep. Fortunately for them, and unfortunately for our country today, and not just in the university, Herbert Marcuse remained in America when the Frankfurt School relocated back to Frankfurt after the war. And whereas Mr. Adorno in Germany is appalled by the student rebellion when it breaks out there – when the student rebels come into Adorno’s classroom, he calls the police and has them arrested – Herbert Marcuse, who remained here, saw the 60s student rebellion as the great chance. He saw the opportunity to take the work of the Frankfurt School and make it the theory of the New Left in the United States.
One of Marcuse’s books was the key book. It virtually became the bible of the SDS and the student rebels of the 60s. That book was Eros and Civilization. Marcuse argues that under a capitalistic order (he downplays the Marxism very strongly here, it is subtitled, A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, but the framework is Marxist), repression is the essence of that order and that gives us the person Freud describes – the person with all the hang-ups, the neuroses, because his sexual instincts are repressed. We can envision a future, if we can only destroy this existing oppressive order, in which we liberate eros, we liberate libido, in which we have a world of “polymorphous perversity,” in which you can “do you own thing.” And by the way, in that world there will no longer be work, only play. What a wonderful message for the radicals of the mid-60s! They’re students, they’re baby-boomers, and they’ve grown up never having to worry about anything except eventually having to get a job. And here is a guy writing in a way they can easily follow. He doesn’t require them to read a lot of heavy Marxism and tells them everything they want to hear which is essentially, “Do your own thing,” “If it feels good do it,” and “You never have to go to work.” By the way, Marcuse is also the man who creates the phrase, “Make love, not war.” Coming back to the situation people face on campus, Marcuse defines “liberating tolerance” as intolerance for anything coming from the Right and tolerance for anything coming from the Left. Marcuse joined the Frankfurt School, in 1932 (if I remember right). So, all of this goes back to the 1930s.
In conclusion, America today is in the throes of the greatest and direst transformation in its history. We are becoming an ideological state, a country with an official state ideology enforced by the power of the state. In “hate crimes” we now have people serving jail sentences for political thoughts. And the Congress is now moving to expand that category ever further. Affirmative action is part of it. The terror against anyone who dissents from Political Correctness on campus is part of it. It’s exactly what we have seen happen in Russia, in Germany, in Italy, in China, and now it’s coming here. And we don’t recognize it because we call it Political Correctness and laugh it off. My message today is that it’s not funny, it’s here, it’s growing and it will eventually destroy, as it seeks to destroy, everything that we have ever defined as our freedom and our culture.
We have all seen numerous examples of PC nonsense that are good for a chuckle (my personal favorite was the attempt by the government of Woonsocket, Rhode Island to replace the term “manhole covers” with “personhole covers.” They relented after the town became the laughing stock of the nation’s newsrooms.) But, unfortunately, PC is no longer a laughing matter. It has become a threat, not only to freedom of speech, but to our personal freedoms and, indeed, to our lives. From early 2002 to late 2009 I lived in the United Kingdom, a country where PC has literally run amuck.
Item: In October 2004, leftists in the European Parliament attacked Italian European Union commissioner Rocco Buttiglione for his Catholicism and the fact that he sees homosexuality as a sin. In spite of the Vatican coming to his defense, he was denied an important post due to his “politically incorrect” ideas on homosexuality. Apparently being anti-Catholic is okay with the PC crowd.
Item: The Defense Department runs schools for dependents of servicemen overseas and of these is the American high school at RAF Lakenheath (near Cambridge if you know your UK geography). In the same month as the Buttiglione fiasco, the new principal stated that if any students were overheard using the common expression "That's really gay,” they would have legal charges brought against them. Legal charges, not reprimands, or even suspension or expulsion, but actual charges.
Item: In July 2005, Mark Steyn in the excellent National Review magazine pointed this out. A certain Douglas Wood, an Australian, was held by Islamic terrorists in Iraq. During his ordeal, while blindfolded, he had to listen to the murder of two of his colleagues. Luckily he was released. Subsequently, in a statement, he called his captors a vulgar term meaning "rectal orifices" (he used the actual term which I will refrain from repeating here). Well, the editor of a Melbourne, Australia newspaper, one Mr. Andrew Jaspan, took offense and said that Wood's comments were "insensitive." Calling murderers you-know-whats is considered “insensitive.” Think about that.
Item: In 2007, certain British schools have been advised not to teach students about the Holocaust because it may offend Muslim students who are taught by their imams that the Holocaust did not happen. Is it PC to rewrite history? Apparently.
Item: Some banks in the UK have banned leaving piggy banks around their offices as the sight of a pig, however whimsical, may offend (you guessed it) Muslims. Guess you’ll have to put your money into a goat bank, kids!
Item: Some police in the UK have been reluctant to investigate so-called honor killings because (and this was reported on the BBC so take my word for it) it could be construed as being politically incorrect. Fathers, mothers, and uncles are butchering young girls in their own families merely because they wore “indecent” clothing or dated the wrong boy. You can’t investigate this, you see, it’s their “culture.”
And of course there are the killings that have taken place due to the “insult” to Islam by a few cartoonists a couple of years back (not to mention to the death threats to Sir Salman Rushdie. Kudos to the British for knighting him).
A couple more items that have recently come to my attention (again, courtesy of Mark Steyn who pointed them out in the 5 March 2012 issue of National Review): a gentleman in the UK lost his job in 2009 for having the temerity to suggest he was against allowing gay Church of England vicars marrying their “partners.” This is particularly interesting and troubling - first of all, this was said in a private conversation and, in any case, gay marriage in ILLEGAL in the UK!
In 1997, a newspaper was fined because of an advertisement which merely contained three Biblical references, Romans 1:26, Leviticus 19:22 and 20:13, and 1 Corinthians 6:9. Mind you the actual text was not included, only three references. Not familiar with them? They are proscriptions of homosexuality. Some “Human Rights” Tribunal thought these references insulted gay people. But what about religious freedom?
Okay, you say, all these examples happened outside the US. You think this can’t happen here? Tell you what, go on Google and type in this phrase: political correctness run amuck. Then read some of the stories you find. (One example - did you read about the guy who was fired from ESPN because he used the phrase “chink in the armor” in a story about basketball star Jeremy Lin? The PC crowd apparently cannot distinguish between a racial slur and a word meaning a narrow opening or crack.)
I could go on and on. I’m sure the readers of this are familiar with campus “speech codes,” because of which you can be thrown out of school for referring to someone with the wrong pronoun (I exaggerate, but not by much. And we’ve all seen members of the minority-group du jour get away with things the rest of us would probably go to jail for (or at least be severely criticized) because they’re part of an “oppressed” group.) Well, now some of them are literally getting away with murder.
Have we become so cowardly that we cannot defend our own culture and traditions and our national heritage? Is it “racist” to try to maintain time-honored traditions and values within our borders? Is it “anti-immigrant” to insist that people who have entered the country illegally and have no intention of assimilating should consider going elsewhere?
Do we not realize the danger of letting this go on?
I refer you to two quotations from the French poet-philosopher, Charles Peguy:
“It will never be known what acts of cowardice have been motivated by the fear of not looking sufficiently progressive.”
and
“He who does not bellow the truth when he knows the truth makes himself the accomplice of liars and forgers.”
Truth is one of the main victims of PC, freedom is another. It is beginning to look as though personal safety is at risk as well.
“Political correctness” is nothing less than a cancer that should be expunged from the body politic.
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