“Politically Incorrect”

1,165 words

I recently caught the December 3, 2012 rerun of the popular syndicated TV quiz show Jeopardy! hosted by Canadian-born half-Ukrainian/half-French Alex Trebek. In the Final Jeopardy round the question (technically, the answer) in the category “Phrase Origins” was: “This 2-word adjective for ‘going against accepted speech or conduct’ first appeared in a 1933 translation from Izvestia.” Of course, it helped to know that Izvestia was the official newspaper of the Soviet government during Communism’s heyday.

Nevertheless, I was astonished that none of the three contestants knew, or guessed, the correct response. I assumed that all three intelligent contestants would get the answer easily. Instead, one wrote down “counterculture,” another “going against the grain,” and the winner wrote down nothing.

Although I didn’t know the answer in the sense of having heard it or read it, I instantly had it: “Politically Incorrect.”

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition (2000, 2009) defines “politically correct” as follows: “Of, relating to, or supporting broad social, political, and educational change, especially to redress historical injustices in matters such as race, class, gender, and sexual orientation.”

Note the overwhelming ideological tilt and assumptions built into the Dictionary’s definition—which indeed is inevitable in an intellectually rigid, politically correct regime. Other definitions include adhering to “progressive ideals” (Left-wing ideology) and being “ideologically sound.”

In current parlance, “politically correct” encompasses “good” thoughts, and “politically incorrect” “evil” or “unacceptable” thoughts. As a TV network honcho employed by Jewish-owned media behemoth NBCUniversal said when conservative commentator Patrick Buchanan was fired for having written a book (what did that have to do with his on-air job?), Suicide of a Superpower (2011), containing chapters titled “The End of White America” and “The Death of Christian America”: such ideas shouldn’t be “part of the national dialogue, much less part of the dialogue on MSNBC.” That is political correctness in a nutshell. It is an instrument of the ruling class.

The translation referred to on Jeopardy! appeared in the following passage in the Christian Science Monitor on November 28, 1933: “The results of a recent investigation of the knowledge of 65,000 Soviet pupils are candidly summed up in the official newspaper, Izvestia, in the following terms: ‘Bad grammar, abundance of mistakes in spelling . . . superficial and often politically incorrect information in civics and social sciences.’”

The term was prevalent among Chinese Communists from the early 1930s on as well. Later, in the 1970s, the popularity of Maoism among socially influential and, very soon, Establishment New Left adherents in the United States caused them to appropriate the phrase.

Because formulations like “politically correct” and “politically incorrect” lay proponents open to appearing to be what they are—narrow-minded, intolerant bigots who arrogate to themselves the right to dictate the parameters of public and private thought—many Leftists became uncomfortable with the designations. They did not reject the essence and practice of political correctness, of course, which is essential to Leftism and a psychological trait of fanatics, but simply wanted to cast aside the label.

They even went so far as to claim that conservatives invented the terms, which is a lie. This widespread falsehood characterizes Wikipedia’s entry on “Political Correctness,” which, like most of its articles on sensitive topics, is rigidly doctrinaire, the furthest thing from an objective account one could imagine. As is widely-known, Wikipedia is heavily ideologically policed.

Conservative Jewish commentator Paul Gottfried noted that Frankfurt School radicals

explicitly eschewed debate in favor of reviling and if possible repressing their opponents. (This is fundamental to the Marxist method: although it claims to be “scientific,” it is in fact an a priori value system that rejects debate and its concomitant, “bourgeois science.” Hence “political correctness”—the most prominent product of “cultural Marxism”.) (“Yes Virginia [Dare], There Is A ‘Cultural Marxism,’” Vdare.com, October 14, 2011)

He added: “An observation made by [Helmut] Schelsky [the leading post-WWII German sociologist] decades ago still holds: once the Left becomes sovereign over meaning (Deutungshoheit) [alternative translations include “prerogative of interpretation,” “interpretive authority,” and “sovereignty of interpretation”], then all discussion must take place on its turf. This, of course, is why the Left [now] hates the fact that the term Political Correctness has entered the language.”

Incidentally, Gottfried’s article is an interesting specimen of Talmudic-style, quietly subversive reasoning and argumentation. He subtly takes issue with several standard right-wing interpretations of the Jewish/totalitarian Frankfurt School—so subtly that I expect most Gentile readers miss the fact completely, at least with their conscious minds.

The whole idea of minutely dictating people’s thoughts in such a manner, whether it is given a label or not, is integral to Leftism and an obvious variation of the Communist concept of the “Party Line.” It represents the exact opposite of traditional Western concepts of freedom of speech and thought. Fundamentally it is anti-human as well as un-Western.

Theodore Dalrymple (the pseudonym of conservative English-born Jewish writer Anthony Daniels, a retired prison doctor and psychiatrist), says that

Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. . . . [T]he purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself.

This is a decent statement of the case, though I differ with Dalrymple on two points.

First, political correctness is not communist propaganda writ small. Given the triumph of communism in its Orwellian incarnation (as opposed to state ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange), it is Communism. Therefore, it is no surprise that an iron curtain of political correctness has descended over the intellectual, political, cultural, and social life of the West.

There is nothing “small” about the crimes committed by the state and Left-wing domestic terrorists against the Institute for Historical Review, revisionists Ernst Zündel and Robert Faurisson, historian David Irving, attorney Edgar Steele, Matt Hale, and many, many others. Like the millions of victims of Communism who preceded them, the true fates of most victims of political correctness are invisible to the world at large.

Nor is there anything “small” about the purposeful biological and cultural annihilation of the white race occurring right now—a literal crime against humanity according to the rulers’ own laws. The perpetration of the crime requires political correctness for its fulfillment.

Secondly, to assent to obvious lies of this type, on this scale, is not in “some small way” to become evil oneself, it is to become evil in a big way. The more significant one’s role in perpetrating the crimes, the greater the sin shouldered by the assenter.

I have always known—I refuse to say “believed”—this. It is by no means a minor point.

Further Reading

Geoffrey Hughes, Political Correctness: A History of Semantics and Culture (Maldon, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 336 pages