Political Correctness and the Erosion of Freedom – Part 1

Vladimir Bukovsky is a former Soviet dissident, author and human rights activist. He was one of the first to expose the use of psychiatric imprisonment against political prisoners in the USSR, and spent a total of twelve years in Soviet prisons. Now living in England, he warns against some of the same anti-democratic impulses in the West, especially in the EU, which he views as a heir to the Soviet Union. In 2002, he joined in on protests against the BBC's compulsory TV licence, which he considers "such a medieval arrangement I simply must protest against it" "The British people are being forced to pay money to a corporation which suppresses free speech — publicising views they don't necessarily agree with." He has blasted the BBC for their "bias and propaganda," especially on stories related to the EU or the Middle East. "I would like the BBC to become the KGB successors in imprisoning me for demanding freedom of speech. Nothing would expose them more for what they are."

He is not the only one who is tired of what he thinks is the Leftist bias of the BBC. Michael Gove, a Conservative MP, and political commentator Mark Dooley complain about lopsided coverage of certain issues: "Take, for example, the BBC's coverage of the late Yasser Arafat. In one profile broadcast in 2002, he was lauded as an "icon" and a "hero," but no mention was made of his terror squads, corruption, or his brutal suppression of dissident Palestinians. Similarly, when Israel assassinated the spiritual leader of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, in 2004, one BBC reporter described him as "polite, charming and witty, a deeply religious man." This despite the fact that under Yassin's guidance, Hamas murdered hundreds." "A soft left worldview influences too much of what the corporation produces. We have a right to expect more honesty from the broadcasting service we are being asked to pay for."

Vladimir Bukovsky thinks that the West lost the Cold War. "There were no Nuremberg-type trials in Moscow. Why? Because while we won the Cold War in a military sense, we lost it in the context of ideas. The West stopped one day too soon, just like in Desert Storm. Just imagine the Allies in 1945 being satisfied with some kind of Perestroika in Nazi Germany — instead of unconditional surrender. What would have been the situation in Europe then, to say nothing of Germany? All former Nazi collaborators would have remained in power, albeit under a new disguise. This is exactly what happened in the Soviet Union in 1991." "Communism might have been dead, but the communists remained in power in most of the former Warsaw bloc countries, while their Western collaborators came to power all over the world (in Europe in particular). This is nothing short of a miracle: the defeat of the Nazis in 1945 quite logically brought a shift to the Left in world politics, while a defeat of communism in 1991 brought again a shift to the Left, this time quite illogically." "It is no surprise, therefore, that despite the defeat of communism, the radical Left in the West still arrogates the moral high ground to itself."

"When the Nazis lost the Second World War, racial hatred was discredited. When the Soviets lost the Cold War, the tenet of class hatred remained as popular as ever." Bukovsky argues that while there might have been a Western military victory, Socialism still prevailed as a popular idea ideologically throughout the world. He writes: "Having failed to finish off conclusively the communist system, we are now in danger of integrating the resulting monster into our world. It may not be called communism anymore, but it retained many of its dangerous characteristics. . . .Until the Nuremberg-style tribunal passes its judgement on all the crimes committed by communism, it is not dead and the war is not over."

Cultural Marxism has roots as far back as the 1920s, when some Socialist thinkers advocated attacking the cultural base of Western civilization to pave the way for the Socialist transition. Cultural Marxism is thus not something "new." It has coexisted with economic Marxism for generations, but it received a great boost in the West from the 1960s and 70s onwards. As the Soviet Union fell apart and China embraced capitalism, the economic Marxists joined in on the "cultural" train, too, as it was now the only game in town. They don't have a viable alternative to present, but they don't care. They truly believe that we, the West, are so evil and exploitative that literally anything would be better, even the Islamic Caliphate.

The Free Congress Foundation has an interesting booklet online called "Political Correctness: A Short History of an Ideology," edited by William S. Lind. According to Lind, Political Correctness "wants to change behavior, thought, even the words we use. To a significant extent, it already has." "Whoever or whatever controls language also controls thought." "Political Correctness" is in fact cultural Marxism. The effort to translate Marxism from economics into culture did not begin with the student rebellion of the 1960s. It goes back at least to the 1920s and the writings of the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci. In 1923, in Germany, a group of Marxists founded an institute devoted to making the translation, the Institute of Social Research (later known as the Frankfurt School). One of its founders, George Lukacs, stated its purpose as answering the question, "Who shall save us from Western Civilization?" Lind thinks there are major parallels between classical and cultural Marxism: "Both are totalitarian ideologies. The totalitarian nature of Political Correctness can be seen on [University] campuses where 'PC' has taken over the college: freedom of speech, of the press, and even of thought are all eliminated." "Today, with economic Marxism dead, cultural Marxism has filled its shoes. The medium has changed, but the message is the same: a society of radical egalitarianism enforced by the power of the state."

"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," for instance feminist women. Similarly, "white males are determined automatically to be evil, thereby becoming the equivalent of the bourgeoisie in economic Marxism." Both economic and cultural Marxism "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."

Raymond V. Raehn agrees with Lind that "Political Correctness is Marxism, with all that implies: loss of freedom of expression, thought control, inversion of the traditional social order and, ultimately, a totalitarian state." According to him, "Gramsci envisioned a long march through the society's institutions, including the government, the judiciary, the military, the schools and the media." "He also concluded that so long as the workers had a Christian soul, they would not respond to revolutionary appeals." Another one of the early cultural Marxists, Georg Lukacs, noted that "Such a worldwide overturning of values cannot take place without the annihilation of the old values and the creation of new ones by the revolutionaries." At a meeting in Germany in 1923, "Lukacs proposed the concept of inducing "Cultural Pessimism" in order to increase the state of hopelessness and alienation in the people of the West as a necessary prerequisite for revolution."

William S. Lind points out that this cultural Marxism had its beginnings after the Marxist Revolution in Russia in 1917 failed to take roots in other countries. Marxists tried to analyze the reasons for this, and found them in Western civilization and culture itself. "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?"

John Fonte describes how this cultural war is now being played out in the USA in his powerful piece "Why There Is A Culture War: Gramsci and Tocqueville in America." According to him, "beneath the surface of American politics an intense ideological struggle is being waged between two competing worldviews. I will call these "Gramscian" and "Tocquevillian" after the intellectuals who authored the warring ideas — the twentieth-century Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci, and, of course, the nineteenth-century French intellectual Alexis de Tocqueville. The stakes in the battle between the intellectual heirs of these two men are no less than what kind of country the United States will be in decades to come."

Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), Marxist intellectual and politician, "believed that it was necessary first to delegitimize the dominant belief systems of the predominant groups and to create a "counter-hegemony" (i.e., a new system of values for the subordinate groups) before the marginalized could be empowered. Moreover, because hegemonic values permeate all spheres of civil society — schools, churches, the media, voluntary associations — civil society itself, he argued, is the great battleground in the struggle for hegemony, the "war of position." From this point, too, followed a corollary for which Gramsci should be known (and which is echoed in the feminist slogan) — that all life is "political." Thus, private life, the work place, religion, philosophy, art, and literature, and civil society, in general, are contested battlegrounds in the struggle to achieve societal transformation." This, according to Fonte, "is the very core of the Gramscian-Hegelian world view — group-based morality, or the idea that what is moral is what serves the interests of "oppressed" or "marginalized" ethnic, racial, and gender groups." "The concept of 'internalized oppression' is the same as the Hegelian-Marxist notion of 'false consciousness,' in which people in the subordinate groups 'internalize'(and thus accept) the values and ways of thinking of their oppressors in the dominant groups." "This is classic Hegelian-Marxist thinking — actions (including free speech) that 'objectively' harm people in a subordinate class are unjust (and should be outlawed)."

He tracks how the ideas of Gramsci and cultural Marxists have spread throughout Western academia. Law professor Catharine MacKinnon writes in Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (1989), "The rule of law and the rule of men are one thing, indivisible," because "State power, embodied in law, exists throughout society as male power." Furthermore, "Male power is systemic. Coercive, legitimated, and epistemic, it is the regime." MacKinnon has argued that sexual harassment is essentially an issue of power exercised by the dominant over the subordinate group." At an academic conference sponsored by the University of Nebraska, "the attendees articulated the view that 'White students desperately need formal "training" in racial and cultural awareness. The moral goal of such training should override white notions of privacy and individualism.'"

This can sometimes amount to virtual brainwashing disguised as critical thinking. Fonte mentions that at Columbia University, "new students are encouraged to get rid of 'their own social and personal beliefs that foster inequality.' To accomplish this, the assistant dean for freshmen, Katherine Balmer, insists that 'training' is needed. At the end of freshmen orientation at Bryn Mawr in the early 1990s, according to the school program, students were 'breaking free' of 'the cycle of oppression' and becoming 'change agents.' Syracuse University's multicultural program is designed to teach students that they live 'in a world impacted by various oppression issues, including racism.'"

John Fonte thinks that the primary resistance to the advance of cultural Marxism in the USA comes from an opposing quarter he dubs "contemporary Tocquevillianism." "Its representatives take Alexis de Tocqueville's essentially empirical description of American exceptionalism and celebrate the traits of this exceptionalism as normative values to be embraced." As Tocqueville noted in the 1830s, Americans today are "just as in Tocqueville's time, are much more individualistic, religious, and patriotic than the people of any other comparably advanced nation." "What was particularly exceptional for Tocqueville (and contemporary Tocquevillians) is the singular American path to modernity. Unlike other modernists, Americans combined strong religious and patriotic beliefs with dynamic, restless entrepreneurial energy that emphasized equality of individual opportunity and eschewed hierarchical and ascriptive group affiliations."

This battle is now being played out in most American public institutions. "Tocquevillians and Gramscians clash on almost everything that matters. Tocquevillians believe that there are objective moral truths applicable to all people at all times. Gramscians believe that moral 'truths' are subjective and depend upon historical circumstances. Tocquevillians believe in personal responsibility. Gramscians believe that 'the personal is political.' In the final analysis, Tocquevillians favor the transmission of the American regime; Gramscians, its transformation."

"While economic Marxism appears to be dead, the Hegelian variety articulated by Gramsci and others has not only survived the fall of the Berlin Wall, but also gone on to challenge the American republic at the level of its most cherished ideas. For more than two centuries America has been an 'exceptional' nation, one whose restless entrepreneurial dynamism has been tempered by patriotism and a strong religious-cultural core. The ultimate triumph of Gramscianism would mean the end of this very 'exceptionalism.' America would at last become Europeanized: statist, thoroughly secular, post-patriotic, and concerned with group hierarchies and group rights in which the idea of equality before the law as traditionally understood by Americans would finally be abandoned. Beneath the surface of our seemingly placid times, the ideological, political, and historical stakes are enormous."

Britain's Anthony Browne writes in The Retreat of Reason of how the Politically Correct are more intolerant of dissent than traditional liberals or conservatives, since Liberals of earlier times "accepted unorthodoxy as normal. Indeed the right to differ was a datum of classical liberalism. The Politically Correct do not give that right a high priority. It distresses their programmed minds. Those who do not conform should be ignored, silenced or vilified. There is a kind of soft totalitarianism about Political Correctness." "Because the politically correct believe they are not just on the side of right, but of virtue, it follows that those they are opposed to are not just wrong, but malign. In the PC mind, the pursuit of virtue entitles them to curtail the malign views of those they disagree with." "People who transgress politically correct beliefs are seen not just as wrong, to be debated with, but evil, to be condemned, silenced and spurned." "The rise of political correctness represents an assault on both reason and liberal democracy." Browne defines Political Correctness as "an ideology that classifies certain groups of people as victims in need of protection from criticism, and which makes believers feel that no dissent should be tolerated." He also warns that "Good intentions pave the road to hell. The world is not short of good intentions, but it is too often short of good reasoning."

However, Anthony Browne focuses more in the geopolitical situation to explain the rise of PC than on Marxist strategies: "Political correctness is essentially the product of a powerful but decadent civilisation which feels secure enough to forego reasoning for emoting, and to subjugate truth to goodness. However, the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001, and those that followed in Bali, Madrid and Beslan, have led to a sense of vulnerability that have made people far more hard-headed about the real benefits and drawbacks of Western civilisation."

"To some extent, the rise of the eastern powers, China and India, will ensure in coming decades that western guilt will shrivel: finally having equal powers to compare ourselves to, the West will no longer feel inclined to indulge in self-loathing, but will seek to reaffirm its sense of identity. (…) in the long-run of history, political correctness will be seen as an aberration in Western thought. The product of the uniquely unchallenged position of the West and its unrivalled affluence, the comparative decline of the West compared to the East is likely to spell the demise of political correctness."

Lee Harris in his article "Why Isn't Socialism Dead?" ponders whether Socialism isn't dead because Socialism can't die. The Peruvian economist, Hernando de Soto, has argued in his book, The Mystery of Capital, that the failure of the various socialist experiments of the twentieth century has left mankind with only one rational choice about which economic system to go with, namely, capitalism. However, says Harris, "the revolutionary socialist's life is transformed because he accepts the myth that one day socialism will triumph, and justice for all will prevail." Thus there is "an...analogy between religion and the revolutionary Socialism which aims at the apprenticeship, preparation, and even the reconstruction of the individual — a gigantic task." "It may well be that socialism isn't dead because socialism cannot die. Who doesn't want to see the wicked and the arrogant put in their place? Who among the downtrodden and the dispossessed can fail to be stirred by the promise of a world in which all men are equal, and each has what he needs?"

Maybe Socialism is a bit like the flu: It keeps mutating, and as soon as your immune system has defeated one strain, it changes just enough so that your body does not recognize it and then mounts another attack.

Political Correctness can reach absurd levels. Early in June 2006, Canadian police arrested a group of men suspected of planning terror attacks. The group was alleged to have been "well-advanced on its plan" to attack a number of Canadian institutions, among them the Parliament of Canada, including a possible beheading of the Prime Minister, and Toronto's subway. However, the lead paragraph of newspaper Toronto Star's story on the arrests was: "In investigators' offices, an intricate graph plotting the links between the 17 men and teens charged with being members of a homegrown terrorist cell covers at least one wall. And still, says a source, it is difficult to find a common denominator." Royal Canadian Mounted Police Assistant Commissioner Mike McDonell said that the suspects were all Canadian residents and the majority were citizens. "They represent the broad strata of our community. Some are students, some are employed, some are unemployed," he said. However, there was one common denominator for the suspects that wasn't mentioned: They were all Muslims. The front page article in the New York Times (June 4), too, was a study in how to avoid using the dreaded "M" word. The terrorist suspects were referred to as "Ontario residents," "Canadian residents," "the group," "mainly of South Asian descent" or "good people." Everything conceivable, just not as "Muslims."

Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair noted proudly during the press conference following the arrests, "I would remind you that there was not one single reference made by law enforcement to Muslim or Muslim community." Before launching the anti-terror raids, Canadian police received "sensitivity training" and were carefully instructed in Islamic traditions such as handling the Koran, the use of prayer mats, and blowing oneself up in the course of an arrest. As Charles Johnson of blog Little Green Footballs noted: "Do the Canadian police extend such considerations to Christian, Jewish, Hindu or other faiths? If they don't, then the Moslems have already won important recognition as a 'special' people." Commenting on the arrests, the Globe and Mail stated that "It may have been the most politically correct terrorism bust in history." Canada's secret security apparatus had been "putting serious effort into softening its image" among Muslims for much of the previous years.

The federal government in Canada was considering changes to the Anti-Terrorism Act to make it clear that police and security agents did not engage in religious profiling. The Calgary Sun interviewed a Canadian criminologist, Professor Mahfooz Kanwar, who stated that "Multiculturalism has been bad for unity in Canada. It ghettoizes people, makes them believe, wrongly, that isolating themselves and not adapting to their new society is OK. It is not." "Political correctness threatens us because we can't fight something we refuse to label and understand." Kanwar said the amount of political correctness during the arrests of 17 Muslims in the Toronto area was "sickening." "Political correctness has gone too far. Political correctness threatens our society," said the Pakistani-born Kanwar. "It is the responsibility of the minorities to adjust to the majority, not the other way around," added Kanwar. Meanwhile, the Canadian Islamic Congress blamed the Canadian government for not showering enough money on the problem. They wanted more funding for research "to scientifically diagnose problems and devise solutions."

They also wanted a nation-wide "Smart Integration program," whatever that means. Given the fact that Muslims in Canada had quite recently been pushing for the partial implementation of sharia laws in the country, one would suspect that "smart integration" would mean that non-Muslims should demonstrate a little more appeasement. After all, if Canadian authorities listen to the advice of their compatriot Naomi Klein, these planned mass-killings of Canadian civilians were all due to Canadian racism and because the country wasn't Multicultural enough. Muslims want to kill Canadians, Canadians smile back, tell them how much they "respect" them and ask what more they can do to please them.

This is what Political Correctness leads to in the end. It's not funny and it's not a joke. Political Correctness kills. It has already killed thousands of Western civilians, and if left unchecked it may soon kill entire nations or, in the case of Europe, entire continents.

As I have stated before, Islam is only a secondary infection, one that we could otherwise have had the strength to withstand. Cultural Marxism has weakened the West and made us ripe for a takeover. It is cultural AIDS, eating away at our immune system until it is too weak to resist Islamic infiltration attempts. It must be destroyed, before it destroys us all.

The Leftist-Islamic alliance will have profound consequences. Either they will defeat the West, or they will both go down in the fall. We never really won the Cold War as decisively as we should have done. Marxism was allowed to endure, and mount another attack on us by stealth and proxy. However, this flirting with Muslims could potentially prove more devastating to Marxists than the fall of the Berlin Wall.

As William S. Lind points out: "While the hour is late, the battle is not decided. Very few Americans realize that Political Correctness is in fact Marxism in a different set of clothes. As that realization spreads, defiance will spread with it. At present, Political Correctness prospers by disguising itself. Through defiance, and through education on our own part (which should be part of every act of defiance), we can strip away its camouflage and reveal the Marxism beneath the window-dressing of "sensitivity," "tolerance" and "multiculturalism."

Political Correctness is Marxism with a nose job. Multiculturalism is not about tolerance or diversity, it is an anti-Western hate ideology designed to dismantle Western civilization. If we can demonstrate this, an important part of the battle has already been won.