Politically Correct Beyond Words

Political Correctness is a phenomenon that increasingly reaches beyond simply neutering our language. Sadly, we now have Politically Correct toilets across the pond. Recently, British prisons, at taxpayer expense, had to remodel their restrooms so that the toilets wouldn't face Mecca. Muslim prisoners had been sitting sideways creating a number of hygienic issues for prison officials. The new toilets are now placed in a direction that no matter what business needs to be taken care of, it won't be done in the direction of Mecca. I suppose the toilets now face Washington.

This might be humorous, except that we all know what the reaction would have been if some Western sensitivity had been offended. All over the West, it's the same story as with hardly a whimper we accommodate the most frivolous demands. Political Correctness in its many manifestations weakens all Western nations. How have we arrived at this point?

What has evolved into Political Correctness has its origins in Cultural Marxism which developed after World War I. Antonio Gramsci of Italy and Georg Lucas of Hungary pioneered the idea that Western Civilization itself was the main reason for the failure of Communist revolutions. The culture itself kept the "workers" from seeing their true class interests and rising up. The trick, then, was to deconstruct the culture first and the revolution would follow.

Lucas and his ideas migrated to Germany and he become a part of a think tank called innocently enough, the Institute for Social Research. Historians now refer to this as the Frankfurt School. Here devout Marxists married their ideology with Freudian ideas which begot Critical Theory. The term Critical Theory is best described by Bill Lind as "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....What Critical Theory is about is simply criticizing. It calls for the most destructive criticism possible...designed to bring the current order down."

The Frankfurt School members emigrated to America with the rise of Hitler. Here a quiet academic aberration gets a new lease on life. New members Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse add the sexual liberation element and thus the finishing touches to Political Correctness. With the rise of the counter culture in the 60s it's "hey hey, ho ho, Western Culture has got to go". Yesterdays radicals made their "long march" through the universities where today they "teach" and torture future corporate executives into line. Now, Political Correctness is everywhere in the West. It's in our language, in our rewritten history textbooks and now, of course, in our toilets.

Is there a road back? It's a long difficult one where the individual Westerner confronts growing cultural amnesia. Political Correctness is the new creed of an ever increasing segment of our cultural and governing elite. The first step, however, is to "know thy enemy" and understand how this attack on our civilization came to be. In particular, if you are an American, you can start by rejecting the newest Politically Correct terms such as "United Statians" (see my blog - 9/28/07)which are attempting to move into our vocabulary. This term is particularly insidious robbing Americans of even the name by which we've been known for centuries.

Also,take the time to take a look at your children's textbooks. History books, in particular, now leave out a whole host of heroes and accomplishments that made our nations and civilization. Those who remain are subject to relentless criticism (in line with Critical Theory script) turning former heroes into villains. However, textbooks can be challenged and changed. There have been individuals who have successfully taken on school boards and won. They have been able to bring back to their school districts more balanced histories of our nations and the West.

People have passed off Political Correctness as some kind of joke but the joke has been on us. It's a very dangerous form of identity theft causing cultural amnesia and robbing us of being able to find even the words with which to defend ourselves. The very intolerant enemies of our way of life certainly aren't silent. Wake up before it's too late and we are all silenced like Theo Van Gogh.