[political correctness] and the coming backlash

Steve Rhodes, in reviewing Goldeneye, mentioned that:

Xenia Onatopp, the femme fatale, is played with tremendous zeal by Famke Janssen, and flies brilliantly in the face of political correctness.

Those last nine words are a credit to a modern day writer. It’s difficult to effectively analyse the essential problem with political correctness and many words have been written on the topic but maybe this post might contribute to the understanding of such a societally debilitating phenomenon.

Let’s start with a statement.

Surely no one would disagree with Professor Marilyn Edelstein’s take on what should permeate university policy and by corollary, society’s:

University policies must now become more pluralistic, more multicultural, more sensitive to race, gender, class, personal orientation and disabilities. Universities need to minimize harassment, on campuses, on the basis of gender or race.

Fine, ‘more sensitive’ and ‘minimize harrassment’ – all good stuff. But notice the other elements also slipped in there as a job lot.

Now we come to the problem. The Politically Correct see the method of implementing these ideals as rewriting history, indoctrination, legislating in order to beat people down with a big stick and finding funds from anywhere the state can lay hands on them, even plunging the country into a generation of debt.

You see the motif – no idea whatsoever of how money is actually generated, ‘someone’ injecting the finance, from ‘somewhere’ to pursue the noble cause and riding roughshod over any opposition. The amateur rules, OK?

The indoctrination itself can be seen in the quotes below but is especially visible in the Mentoring programme, which says that parents can’t be trusted to bring up the child so the state needs to take a key role in this.

Beating people down with big sticks can be seen, tangentially, in the Rest In Peace Act:

The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) was changed [in autumn, 2007] to allow police to force people to hand over passwords or keys to encrypted data. Refusal to do so is a criminal offence carrying a penalty of two years in jail, or up to five years, if the issue concerns national security.

One criminal law specialist has told technology law podcast OUT-LAW Radio that the law could be challenged under the Human Rights Act, though he also warned that such a challenge could fail under legal tests set out by the European Court of Justice (ECJ).

Perhaps the worst aspect of it all is the utopian lack of realism in the targets, the idea that the pursuit of an impossible dream lends legitimacy to heavy handed tactics, put well by Winston Churchill [1920], when he referred to the:

… world wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence and impossible equality …

You only need live in the former Soviet Union for twelve years to see the legacy of those years, especially in the ‘arrested development’ and the infantilization of the population, alluded to by Tom Paine.

The envious malevolence refers to the way the have-nots look greedily at those who have built something up, automatically ssume that it must have been come by corruptly, latch on to a political philosophy which reinforces and legitimizes the politics of seizure of that which is not theirs and so the call goes out for the state to redistribute resources their way, without the need for any contribution on their part. They’re quite happy for anyone other than them to be dispossessed, as with the calls to remove the pension from Goodwin, which, in itself, reveals a key aspect of the PCer’s mindset – vindictiveness.

Another key aspect is ‘multiculturalism’:

Multiculturalism is nowadays affiliated with a postmodern outlook. The pivotal ideas of this vision of life are relativism (cultural relativism, in particular), a negative attitude toward Western political tradition, the cultivation of collective guilt for the transgressions of the colonial past, and other real or presumed black pages in Western history.

If Western societies think they have no core values important enough to fight for (by peaceful means), then there is no reason for immigrant minorities to accept them. If the dominant ideology in Western societies is that democracy, the rule of law, and human rights have no specific quality that makes them superior to theocracy, dictatorship, and authoritarianism, there is no need to oppose the radical assault directed at Western democracies by the teachers of hate.

Here are a few examples of how bizarre it has got:

• In 1988 a Stanford University faculty changed its popular "Western Culture" course to "Cultures, Ideas and Values", as "western" was now seen as a dirty word for some minorities.

• The Central Council for Education and Training in Social Work, in the UK, believes that "non-fluency in English should not be used as grounds to refuse employment, even for an interpreter or air traffic controller". That means you don’t need English any more to become an English interpreter – you learn it on the job.

• In 2003, the University of Middlesex drew up a paper calling for a ban on all "unsound" words which a committee had identified. When you look at the composition of that committee, it becomes even more interesting.

• American historian and educator, Diane Ravitch, in 2003, quoted guidelines by New York publishing houses for prospective writers: "Topics not to include are: abortion, death or disease, criminals, magic, politics, religion, unemployment, weapons, violence, poverty, divorce, slavery, alcohol or addiction. Women cannot be depicted as mothers or caregivers or doing household work. Men cannot be depicted as lawyers, doctors or plumbers. African citizens are not to be portrayed in a negative light. None of these things can be themes in any publications handled by us."

• A London educational conference was told, in 2003: "Everything written before 1970 was either gender or racially biased" and that "reading and writing are merely technologies of control." Therefore, writers like Shakespeare are now out of favour.

• In 2005, at two universities in Britain, it is now possible to obtain a degree in English literature without even reading Shakespeare. Two-thirds of reading lists now comprise feminist writers instead.

• Early in 2005, in the United Kingdom, a government think tank wanted schools to replace the term "Failure", for under-achieving students who did not pass their exams, with the term "Deferred Success", so they would not "feel sad".

• An under age criminal must now be called a "child at risk", so that he does not become traumatized by the word "hooligan".

• A person living illegally in our country is now to be called an "undocumented immigrant", so he does not become anxious about his situation.

• Men must never call their beautiful wives "wives", because that’s humiliating. They are now your "spouses" or "significant others".

One from some time back, related to a Glasgow City Council tiff:

I'm actively involved in trying to rid the church of exclusive language, and would like to see certain words banned, such as ‘brethren’.

Pause for a moment, good reader and consider that last statement, which now brings us to the dirty F word. As Patricia Sexton points out in "The Feminized Male" (1969):

... our schools are run by women for girls" and "cultivate feminine ways of life ...

To succeed in them, notes Richard Podles, boys must betray their masculine identity.

In the last generation we have built a society that is severely inhospitable to men and boys. When one considers the four- to fivefold increase in youth crime, drug use, emotional illness, educational failure during the same period, it's clear whose interests have been served and whose injured.

Or this:

More couples are getting divorced because women no longer see the importance of a dad/husband in the family's life. They think they can and should do it all on their own and no one should tell them otherwise. This leads to higher rates of sexual activity among teenage girls who do not have a father figure that is prominent in their lives.

Thus we come to the recent news of the beauty pageant front-runner who lost the title because she said that ‘gay marriage was wrong’. Far more significant to me was why she was asked that question in the first place. How does that sit with the ‘privacy of the individual and human rights’, parrotted by PCers?

Beauty pageants and the women who enter them are another question, so leaving that aside for the moment, why, when she was supposedly being judged on her feminine charms and intelligence, would an overtly political question have determined her fate instead?

This brings in yet another characteristic of PCers – the rampant hypocrisy.

Ostensibly believing in tolerance and free speech, they ended that woman’s shot at the title on the grounds of her political views. How totalitarian is that? But if you call them totalitarian, they’ll try to legislate for you to retract that statement or implement existing laws to silence you.

Johnathan Pearce, at Samizdata, wrote:

One of the problems with Political Correctness … is that it will invite a backlash. That backlash will not necessarily be for the good, but could encourage a new sort of ugliness: a desire to say things that are by any yardstick offensive, rude and coarsening of public life.

This is the huge fear. It allowed the National Socialist party to be overrepresented at the Reichstag. It enables groups like the BNP to flourish and fare well at elections, as in 2010. Whoops, that hasn’t come yet, has it?

The quietly smug, mentally unsound, hypocritical, big stick intolerance of the intrusive, female-dominated, bourgeois nanny state is heading for a huge over-reaction from the newly oppressed, indigenous population and folks, it ain’t gonna be pleasant when it comes.

The reason I am so concerned with the damage women have done in these two decades is that I’ve spent the majority of my professional life, especially in the early years, trying to improve the lot of girls and by extension, women, only to see the advances in understanding on the part of many males, of which I was but one, swamped and soured by the nutters in the feminazi movement who have, with the connivance of the state, Them, with its own tacky agenda, undone all the goodwill with which the modern male was prepared to meet the needs of the female, in favour of the politics of confrontation and legislation, [the dark side of the female].

Now the average non-emasculated male harbours deep resentment, particularly the older he gets whereas before, he was quite willing to meet the girls halfway. For a person who adores and has worked for women all his life, this is hugely dispiriting and yet understandable.

The average non-rabid woman reading this illustrates, in herself, why PCism is so corrosive – she can’t see that such a concept exists in the first place, outside a male’s fevered imagination and even if it does, she sees it as a positive thing, that feminism did bring a better situation for women and no amount of argument, such as the one below, will persuade her otherwise.

The trouble is, that falsehood usually starts with truths, then perverts them. Yes, women’s material position did improve and she thinks the climate for her own marriage has improved, whereas she can’t see the deep resentment of the male which is going to spearhead the reaction mooted by Johnathan Pearce.

She genuinely believes things are better now.

However, sorry to say, ladies, women in the not-too-distant-future will find themselves in one of two situations:

One scenario says they’ll go right back to where they started from, as oppressed as ever, still clinging desperately to the plethora of legislation designed to protect them from men, not realizing that their politics of hatred and confrontation with the male will have exploded back on them, when their real skill - the ability to influence and persuade – will have been left unexercized these many years and would now need to be rediscovered, in order to avoid a Sharia like situation, even in the west.

Or …

An even more likely scenario, which explains the active collusion of the state in driving a wedge between men an women in a fundamental way, creating the desire to be unencumbered with a partner we can’t deal with [as distinct from office friendships and pillow talk], a scenario which is the logical extension of the current climate of female infidelity and non-commitment, matching that of the male, something the female has always wanted for herself but can only have with the active support of the state, will be the disempowerment of all of us, male and female.

This will put the last nail in the coffin of marriage as an institution and result in a semi-permanent Brave New World scenario of enforced, female, sluttish promiscuity, a climate of coupling with anyone and separating the act from the notion of love, with in-vitro procreation reserved for state-controlled ‘hatcheries’.

Girls, the state’s agenda is far more focussed and powerful than your warm, fuzzy feelings and your demand for gender justice but you can’t see the danger we’re all in as a result, can you?

When we unbalance society, however much it is to our personal advantage, we are reaping a whirlwind and it has always been so throughout history – it’s always been the avenging wind of Moriah.