Some notes on Political Correctness

Below is an excerpt and link from one of my students; I probably cribbed too much, but these opening paragraphs really capture the point of the article. 

I think the student sent me the link base on one of my opening remarks on the first day of class:  "Political Correctness kills soldiers on the battlefield."  You see, I hate political correctness, hate it with a passion.  It's a threat to the First Amendment, a threat to clear communication, a rock for the ne'er-do-well and miscreant to hide under, and ultimately a threat to those in my line of work!  The military exists to kill people and break their toys, yet we maintain a legion of troops whose sole jobs are to run Equal Opportunity offices throughout the military.  That's right: folks who don't pull triggers but live to brief me once a year on racial/sexual/religious sensitivities.  The training usually boils down to how white, testosterone-filled men are a threat to everyone else and I invariably leave the training feeling like a sinful, racist bastidge.

But if the Pigeon got to run the show, here's how my mission statement would read:

- There's only one race, sex and religion in the military, and it's an olive green uniform.

- I'm not kicking you out because of your race, religion or gender;  I'm kicking you out because you suck at your job, can't pull your weight, and are ultimately a liability to anyone within 10 feet of you.  So put your damn race and sex card down and take this work ethic one instead.  Try not to read it upside down this time, either, like you did with the discipline card.

- If you're squad can't get along because of race, sex or religion, then I'm sending you all out to dig foxholes until you learn to cooperate.  As an added bonus, I won't give you enough resources to the job so you'll be forced to share, and'll have flash bangs set to randomly detonate near your work area.

- In short, this is the military, and we all have one job:  to kill the enemy of the United States. I do not have time for your agendas, sexual tensions, religious dogmas, racial stereotypes, movements, deconstructivist mumbo-jumbo narratives, and other weepy stories.  I need unit cohesiveness, and if I can't beat all victimhood, self-centeredness, pride, and narcissism out of you in the sand pit, then I sure as hell can beat you out the door when you're enlistment runs out. 

- Plus, I can save money on MEO offices and give the MEO troops real jobs by putting such teamwork mentoring back in the hands of my small team leaders and out of the hands of some sensitive desk jockey at Headquarters.  I'll spend the money I save on a new hardwood bar at the NCO club.

But enough about me.  Here's the excerpt:

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The Origins of Political Correctness , Bill Lind:  Where does all this stuff that you’ve heard about this morning – 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.   CONTINUED

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But wait--there's more!  I sent the article to MOGS and he replied with some more fodder for my argument (I kept one article in my back pocket for later use).  To wit:

The Torch:  [The Traveler, the University of Arkansas] editorial staff explained, it’s just that the paper has unfortunately gotten very used to censorship on campus. The editorial pointed out that “[o]ver the years, the Traveler staff has become inured to the occasional attacks from the administration and student groups, demanding the paper's speech be ... restricted.” And despite a mealy-mouthed “commitment to free speech” offered by William Kincaid, Associate General Counsel for the university, The Traveler’s editorial staff said it took just “a two-second brainstorming session” before the staff thought of other examples of student speech being unfairly and unconstitutionally squelched or quarantined at UA.

What a wretched state our nation’s public universities are in when students are no longer the least bit shocked by the fact that they don’t enjoy the full protection of the First Amendment on campus. Has it come to this? Unfortunately, a quick perusal of some of the school’s current policies indicates that it has indeed.  For example, UA students are forbidden from using the internet to “annoy, harass, threaten, intimidate, terrify, or offend another person by conveying offensive language.” Of course, as any reader of The Torch well knows, the vast majority of “offensive language” is protected by the First Amendment, rendering this regulation void for overbreadth—and that’s without even mentioning that the intensely subjective nature of what speech can be deemed “offensive” means the rule is equally void for vagueness   CONTINUED

(Editorial Cartoon:  Mark Thornhill, North County Times)

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I pretty much said my peace at top, so don't have much more to add.  But if you're not disgusted... well, you probably wouldn't be reading my site in the first place.

But if you actually do rate yourself a PC kind of bird, AND you've made it this far, you probably don't want to click the next link.

The Ghost of Lord Admiral Nelson Meets Today's Navy

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Comments

[carly]

And there's the big old elephant in the room--where you sit and elsewhere. PC not only runs roughshod over speech, it plays fast and loose with standards, holding certain preferred groups to lower ones, even in professions where doing so means lives lost and greivous damage done. Most notable of these dangerous "alternative" requirements are those for females in professions where size and physical strength and power matter.... professions like yours, also police work and firefighting, to name just a few.

Some argue that it doesn't matter for certain aspects of these jobs, but if it doesn't, then why do the MEN in these situations have to meet specific standards....standards that are significantly higher than those for females? (Can we say "pull-ups"?)

I'm all for equal opportunity--everyone should have a chance to show/prove that he/she can do the job. But the bar should be at the same level for all. Then, if individuals from certain groups don't measure up--they just don't get hired to do the job (or admitted to study). Period. No PC whining or screaming about it being "not fair".

It should be "incorrect" to demean women by holding them to a lower standard....same thing for other "victim" groups who aren't expected to excel on their own and presumed to need preferential treatment lobbied for or legislated on their behalf.

[canuckistani]

So is Isaiah Washington the most recent victim of the PC lynch mob??? He called his co-worker a "fag" in the heat of a disagreement at work and used the word "faggot" on national t.v. He was in danger of losing his job after the outcry of the gay lobby and is now in "rehab" to deal with his feelings towards gays. I think Mr. Washington was insensitive, but I also think the brouhaha has gone too far and that, since the gay lobby is predominantly white males, Mr. Washington, being black, is the actual victim here of a PC gay lobby racial lynching. How's that for turning the PC -ness of this incident on it's head??!!

I've been the victim of pc -ness more than once when it comes to job ops. It is why I left my home province and teaching. It has become such a joke and I hope it comes back to bite the pc lobby in the ass. Most backlashes are ugly, it's just a matter of time before it happens. Given the article, perhaps a good old fashioned Commie style purge of the pc people is in order a la Joe Stalin. Maybe he was on to something!