What is "Political Correctness"?


I listened to a “debate” on Radio NZ this morning on “political correctness”. It was a typical, “balanced”, RNZ debate. Gay Keating of the Public Health Association and Paul Morris of Victoria University defending PC and Christchurch City Councillor, Barry Corbett, “against” it. Corbett was so light weight, he made Calista Flockhart look like a Sumo wrestler.

PCism seems to be everywhere, National even has a “PC eradicator”, but nobody seems to be able to define what it is.

British academic Frank Ellis (a lecturer in Russian at Leeds University) has researched the subject. He has identified the origins of the term, charted its history and analysed its meaning. It can found in detail in his book “Political Correctness and the Theoretical Struggle” published by our own Maxim Institute.

Ellis traces the term back to Lenin, then to Mao and Maoism, with contributions by figures such as Gramsci, Marcuse and Foucault.“China….needs a unifying thought, revolutionary thought, correct thought. That is Mao Tse Tung Thought. Only with this thought can we maintain vigorous revolutionary drive and keep firmly in the correct political orientation.”

From China, the term and the thought control it implies moved through the “New Left” of the ’60s and ’70s into the western universities. The “radicals” of that era became lecturers, professors, journalists and writers in the ’80s and ’90s and spread PCism throughout society.

As Ellis explains “We have now moved from the struggle to control the means of production, the characteristic of class war and traditional Marxism, to the struggle to control and regulate the means of expression. Language is the new means of production. The politically-correct intellectual class are its new managers. This is Marxism without the economics“.

The consequences for free thought in our learning institutions is enormous. Students dare not criticise the lecturers who have the power to pass or fail them. Teaching staff can be drummed out of their posts for questioning “orthodoxy”. As Ellis says “The atmosphere is not one which is conducive to asking questions – it is one of coercion”.

Ellis maintains that PC is destroying our ability to make moral and intellectual judgements. Judgement is now a “sin”.“Note what has happened here: the politically correct commissariat condemns us for being judgemental, yet reserves the right to pass judgement on us…chastised and bullied in this manner, we fall silent. And this silence in the face of intimidation, which masquerades as the defender of tolerance, is deeply threatening to democratic society.

Essentially PC is about changing what it is permissible to say and how it may be said. If you can control language, you can control thought and consequently control action.

So called “human rights” legislation and “hate speech” laws are dsigned to enforce PCism, through the power of the state. Is it any coincidence that Joris de Bres of the Human Rights Commission, the epitome of PCness is an ex Maoist who studied Maruse at university in Germany? Alick Shaw, the deputy mayor of Wellington has been a strong advocate of “hate speech” legislation in the Labour Party. He was also a leading Maoist for many years.

My definition of PC is “a movement to control thought and action along Marxist lines, by means of controlling and altering the meaning of language.” Anyone got a better one?

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4 thoughts on “What is "Political Correctness"?

  1. My shot:

    Political correctness is the method by which alternative views are suppressed without proper discourse on their validity. A politically corect view is one that attempts to please all, one which will often restrict detail, debate, and ultimately deconstruction.

  2. I reckon this is a good description in the form of a one liner:

    ‘Political correctness pushes valid views to extremes then claims some superior human right to justify those excesses, then stifles legitimate investigation and debate’

    From Former Labour MP Michael Bassett

  3. ‘PC’ is really just a term for describing pro-socialist/collectivist policies justified using an emotional appeal to an airily-defined moral highground.

    Resorting to emotive moral highground appeals aren’t exclusively the terroritory of the left, but they certainly seem most commonly used by the left in NZ today.

    The idea being if a debater assumes the characteristics (facial expressions, tone of voice, indignant words, etc) of a person who believes they occupy the moral highground, many (lazy, ignorant, or likeminded) others will not analyse their argument but instead side with their moral stance.

    This strategy could only politically work at a country-scale if the people running the majority of public forums were biased towards the political beliefs of those assigning themselves the moral highground.

    Rational scientific debaters generally aren’t equipped to deal with this style of argument, as they resort to verifiably true technical arguments which might be correct but don’t exactly overwelm the bystander with a feeling of ‘this man has it right’.

    Logically consistent debaters coming from a philosophical point of view, such as libertarians, also have problems dealing with this style of argument as they generally lack specific examples required to punch holes in the PC windbags. Instead their arguments sound hollow and unrealistic, as they are apparently only based on theory.

  4. Gay Keating epitimises the essence of politspeak and the waste of taxpayers funding for a dubious propoganda organisation that produces not 1 measurable outcome in the enhancement of public health.

    see http://66.102.7.104/custom?q=cache:I8nvjzsXgGYJ:www.pha.org.nz/docs/About%2520the%2520PHA/ReportstoMinistryofHealth/Sept04reportMOHfinal.doc+gay+keating&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

    The origins of PC and beaurecratic suppression go back to the stalinist days.

    Nikolai Bezroukov writes an excellent dissertion on this subject for the UN Sustainable Development Networking Programme .
    http://www.softpanorama.org/Skeptics/lysenkoism.shtml

    All-in-all Lysenkoism was probably the most successful and horrifying reincarnation of middle-age inquisition practice, but instead of Christianity “communist religion” was used as a hammer to crush opposition (communism can be considered as a unique flavor of Christianity; many prominent communist viewed it as a religious idea.).

    The Lysenkoism is about creation of cult-style scientific establishment that has been hostile to scientific progress and has nothing to do with the scientific method — it wanted to prosper by serving as a political force. This role of the cult-style “scientific establishment” in modern science is probably the newest social phenomenon closely connected with Lysenkoism. This system includes three major components:
    Control of scientific or techno press.
    Control of scientific appointments.
    Control of the education system.
    he somes it up as a cargocult an appropriate analogy.

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