The on–going obsession with political correctness continually gives me “a sense of deja vu all over again” as Yogi Berra so memorably put it.
I was just 13 years old when I first encountered it in George Orwell’s terrifying novel Nineteen Eighty Four. A scant 10 years later, I came face–to–face with the horrifying reality of applied political correctness in the Soviet Bloc.
There’s nothing particularly new about the notion of suppressing unacceptable ideas and recasting current and historical events to conform with contemporary political fashion.
It is a favorite tool of tyrants seeking to control subject people. But here in today’s America a majority of the folks promulgating politically correctness appear to be motivated by a desire to avoid giving offense to their fellow men.
But, far from being beneficial, the consequences of their good intentions are terribly dangerous: Political correctness prevents us from discussing serious, but painful, issues arising from such matters as race, sex, and equality of opportunity. It also deprives us of the ability to comprehend the true lessons of history.
Analyzing the political, economic, and sociological events past enables us to strive to emulate our ancestors’ successes and avoid their failures. But, as the philosopher George Santayana observed, if we are unable to learn from history, we will be doomed to repeat it.
Many of Russia’s current problems, for example, are the legacy of more than 70 years of political correctness. Its history has been so extensively and systematically falsified, it is difficult to tell fact from fiction.
No Russian history book, for example, can give a true figure for those who died in the gulag. The number is put at 20 million or so, but it’s only an estimate. The lack of hard facts have made it difficult to discredit utterly Lenin and the Communist Party.
Researching the history of the Soviet economy is an even more complicated task. It is virtually impossible to sort fact from fiction when skewed statistics from government ministries are compounded by, say, falsified production returns from factory managers.
The problems are exactly the same in a sociological sphere. For example, the Soviets used to boast that crime wasn’t a problem in their major cities. Criminality, they claimed had virtually disappeared as a consequence of the revolution.
This was pure humbug. The Soviets and their satellites averted their eyes to the legion of mobsters who exploited the shortages that are endemic in socialized economies. And those same gangsters are now undermining both Russia’s moral fabric and its economic stability.
The deliberate falsification of Soviet history has made it useless as as an analytical tool. A pack of lies is not a valid yardstick by which to measure anything. This, in turn, has made cleaning up the mess the communists left behind an absolute nightmare.
Thanks to our own current obsession with political correctness, a similar, though slightly more subtle, falsification of the past is under way in the U.S. Important elements of our history are being suppressed. Others are being invented out of whole cloth.
For example, Western culture—the crucible of American democracy—is unjustly denigrated in the nation’s schoolrooms. At the same time, barbaric native societies are falsely portrayed as fundamentally more civilized and humane than the European settlers’ culture.
The foundational role played by Christianity in framing the United States’ Constitution and forging its system of government is being suppressed. Instead, students are led to believe that the nation was founded by skeptics who sought to shelter government and the people from “oppressive” nature of Judeo–Christian thinking.
Politically correct historians even have the effrontery to claim that George Washington—a loyal Anglican vestryman—rejected the divinity of Jesus Christ. Yet his prayer for the nation gives the lie to the notion.
The folks who engaged in falsifying the historical record in this fashion claim that their efforts will make people who are not of European stock, and who adhere to religions other than Christianity or Judaism, feel more comfortable here.
Such delicacy of feelings might be admirable, but they are based on a profound misunderstanding of human nature. The reason non–European, non-Judeo-Christians come to America is precisely in order to enjoy the freedoms and opportunities offered by a nation governed according to the Judeo-Christian principles laid down by our founding fathers.
Like it or not, our governing elite need to accept the fact that our Anglo-Saxon founding fathers’ principles were unswervingly Christian. Denying this truth puts at risk the liberty we so casually take for granted. GPH✠
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