THE POISON OF POLITICAL CORRECTNESS

Mike Scruggs

for The Tribune Papers

Political Correctness is simply shouting down the truth to promote and defend strongly held but unexamined social ideology. It is usually associated with left-liberal politics in Europe and America today, but it may come from the right or anywhere else. The point is that truth is suppressed in the name of some unexamined political or social “good.” That social “good” may involve a whole system of highly cherished but shaky or outright false beliefs.  Once a society succumbs to the scourge of political correctness, no one is safe from its poison. Jobs, careers, personal prestige, social respectability, and even friendships may be endangered by failure to conform.  Society as a whole may suffer from such a system of lies, but there are always those who profit. There are many more who fear the consequences of challenging the system.

Political correctness employs various forms of social, economic, academic, and legal pressures and propaganda in its arsenal for forcing compliance. The bottom line is that some socially fashionable error must go unchallenged and be enthusiastically embraced or unpleasant consequences will follow. The more self-evident the truth being denied and the bigger and more obvious the lie being perpetrated the more brutal and relentless the enforcement. Whatever its specific ideological nature, political correctness is an instrument for political and social dominance and control. It is an early stage of a society drifting toward totalitarian tyranny. Unfortunately, it is now so prevalent in the United States, Canada, and Western Europe that political and judicial judgments which would once have been considered absurd or bizarre, are now commonplace. 

Under politically correct regimes, religious freedom as well as academic and political freedom is shackled. For example, Swedish law now forbids saying anything negative about homosexuality. Even the Prime Minister has declared that the law means that pastors could under no circumstances even be allowed to say that homosexuality is unnatural. But Pastor Ake Green decided that he had a responsibility to his congregation to preach what the Bible says about homosexuality rather than what the Swedish government says about it. Shortly after delivering a sermon quoting several Biblical passages on homosexuality, Pastor Green was reported to authorities. He was arrested, found guilty at a trial, and put in jail.  His case was appealed to a higher court, and to everyone’s surprise he was acquitted. During the judicial process, one judge asked him, “Why don’t you find a Bible that doesn’t condemn homosexual behavior?” The Swedish Supreme Court upheld the acquittal, but for a shocking reason.  It might not pass muster with the European Union Court. European Union bureaucrats have not yet proposed a comprehensive hate-crime law.  Can’t happen here? Check Ted Kennedy’s Hate Crime Bill, S.1105, now in the U.S. Senate.  It already has 45 cosponsors.

The most common and effective device for enforcing political correctness is to threaten the politically incorrect dissenter’s social respectability.  The loss of respectability in academic and professional endeavors can have serious further consequences on careers and economic security.  Political correctness is a method to overcome truth, reason and logic first by social disapproval but if necessary by more stringent means. It may start with a simple social shunning or academic sneering, but can escalate to Stalinist character assassination followed by arrest and prosecution or worse. Carrying the banner of truth can be risky.

A famous non-leftist example of the awesome power of political correctness can be found in the history of the Salem Witch Trials of 1692. Many people saw the obvious absurdity of the accusations being made against innocent people by a handful of “afflicted” girls who believed they were being haunted and tortured by other members of the community secretly practicing witchcraft.  The examinations and trials of the accused witches were an appalling travesty of justice and an insult to common sense. The first confession was made by an Indian slave girl—yes, they had slavery in Salem, and the slave trade was a considerable source of wealth to Salem merchants.

She testified that the devil appeared to her “sometimes like a hog and sometimes like a great dog.”  But the more sensational part of her testimony was that there was a conspiracy of witches at work in Salem. That launched the original American “witch hunt.” More than 150 persons were eventually accused of witchcraft. Voicing a protest or even skepticism so threatened the “afflicted” girls and the enthralled Salem magistrates responsible for the insane course of events that it often resulted in accusations that the critic was also a witch. Several such critics were themselves tried and hanged. “Spectral” evidence—the visions of an accuser—were allowed in court and believed by the presiding magistrates. The fifty accused, who confessed to witchcraft and repented at their trials, were given a reprieve. Those accused who denied being witches were hanged. Nineteen died on the gallows, one by torture, and one from the squalid disease-infested conditions of a crowded prison.

Many honorable persons who would not belie themselves or compromise their integrity to save their own lives by agreeing to the absurd and lying spirit of political correctness that briefly enveloped Salem paid for their devotion to truth on the town gallows. It was later admitted that many of those who died were among Salem’s most godly citizens, and those who accused them lacked character and sound mind. The trials were ended by the new Governor of Massachusetts, William Phips, at the urgent behest of Boston clergy.

Political correctness in academia and the media is rampant but not always leftist. In 2002, the neo-conservative Claremont Institute tried to destroy the credibility of Thomas J. DiLorenzo for daring to write a book not conforming to their whitewashed idolatry of Abraham Lincoln. DiLorenzo’s book, The Real Lincoln, is a train of well documented facts and quotes with a well-reasoned analysis of Lincoln’s political philosophy and actions. DiLorenzo pointed out that there is a huge gap between what most people and most the modern breed of politically correct academics believe about Lincoln today and the Lincoln revealed by his own words, actions, and the accounts of his closest associates. Claremont’s Ken Masugi made a scathing but hardly researched attack on DiLorenzo in, of all places, the National Review. He simply tried to shout DiLorenzo down while trying to intimidate potential readers of the book into to thinking that taking his book seriously was not intellectually or socially acceptable. The usual adverse implications on character, academic credibility, social respectability, and even patriotism were made. The book, however, became a conservative best seller, and few academics or media pundits have dared to cross academic swords with DiLorenzo since.

America is threatened by political correctness in several ways. First, it is undermining free speech and clear thinking. It is a disease that leads to moral and intellectual blindness and a totalitarian society. This is enough to destroy our culture and society in itself.  But it is also disarming our ability to see and resist outside threats to our country. Our country is facing two great threats from the outside. They are massive third world immigration and Islamic terrorism. Political correctness makes us blind and defenseless against both.

Excessive immigration, unexamined and extravagant H-1B guest-worker programs, foreign outsourcing, and foolish trade policies are undermining the wages and employment prospects of American workers, oppressing taxpayers, and destroying the middle class. If unchecked, these policies and the multiculturalist, globalist, and corporatist ideologies that have spawned them will destroy first our culture and our economy and then our Republic. 

The threat of Islamic terrorism is made far more dangerous by insisting on the lie that Islam is a religion of peace and tolerance. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a former Muslim of Somali origin, tells of her experience as a new citizen of the Netherlands on hearing of the September 11, 2001, attack on New York and Washington. Her liberal Dutch supervisor remarked to her, “It’s so weird, isn’t it; all these people saying this had to do with Islam.” She was a new employee, but after a few minutes, she blurted out,

“But it is about Islam. This is based on belief. This is Islam.”

In her best-selling book, Infidel, she goes on to state:

“It was not a lunatic fringe who felt this way about America and the West. I knew that a vast mass of Muslims would see the attacks as justified retaliation against the infidel enemies of Islam.”

The Dutch newspapers and media pundits all sang the same song about poverty pushing people to terrorism, Islam being a great culture and a religion of peace and tolerance, and colonialism and Western xenophobia being the underlying causes of the attacks. Other articles blamed American support for Israel, Palestinian frustration, and European Islamophobia. They seemed to know nothing of the reality of the Koran and the Muslim world.

But Ayaan Ali realized that Osama bin Laden’s words justifying total war on America came right from Koran and the Hadiths (teachings of Muhammad):

“When you meet the unbelievers strike them in the neck…If you do not go out and fight, God will punish you severely…Wherever you find the polytheists, kill them, seize them, besiege them, ambush them…You who believe do not take the Jews and Christians as friends…The Hour of Judgment will not come until Muslims fight the Jews and kill them.”

Bin Laden’s quotes are from the eighth and ninth chapters of the Koran and Book 52 of the Sahih Al-Bukhari Hadiths narrated by Abu Huraira.

Successful political correctness requires intellectual bullies to enforce it and a mass of intellectual and moral cowards who will submit to it.  Will the epitaph on the tombstone of Europe and America read:  “They were too politically correct to see their danger or even to raise their voices to protest the extinction of their people and country?”