THE MORAL AMBIGUITY OF POLITICAL CORRECTNESS
 AND ITS ASSAULT ON REASON AND INTELLIGENCE.

©Richard Roberts 1/10/04

 Richard Roberts has just completed his ninth book, AMERICA HI-JACKED: How Marxist-Nihilism Infiltrated American Culture. He sends out a weekly newsletter, of which the following is one example. For a year’s $18 subscription you may contact him at POB 1175, Farifax, CA. 94978.

Liberalism has sold the world on the idea that political correctness (p.c.) is good and beneficial to a society, because it is based on concern for others’ feelings, a desire to promote a caring, compassionate social environment for everyone. Additionally it is said that  p.c. promotes diversity, thereby making that society more inclusive, or so they say.  However, all of this claptrap is merely what I call the White Banner, a socially acceptable mantra of clichés that disguise the Black Banner, an effort to enforce totalitarianism by curtailing free speech and thought. Moreover, p.c. is fraught with moral ambiguity whereby evil appears to be good, and vice versa.

Around 1990, Time devoted a feature article to p.c., and for many years p.c. has been held up to general public ridicule. Now, however, those who do not follow its strictures are subjected to real animosity, and in some cases, prosecution for committing “hate crimes.” This week I had the sudden realization that p.c. is in reality an assault upon intelligence per se, in that it seeks to perpetuate an equality of mediocrity that disrespects higher intelligence, and greater ability and achievement. As such, p.c. is also an assault on Western Civilization and the canon of the humanities, which simply put has been called “the best that has been thought and said.”

A fascinating new book presumes to catalogue humanity’s resume, Human Accomplishment:  The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences from 1800 B.C. to 1950.  “What I ask, can homo sapiens brag about—not as individuals, but as a species?”  asks author Charles Murray, who catalogued some 4,000 significant individuals over a period of 2,750 years. From this data, Murray compiled a series of graphs charting the historical progress in the arts and sciences. Murray’s conclusion is that Western Christian culture attained the highest achievements because it saw both science and the arts as revelations of God’s glory, rather than being antithetical to God’s will. You may recall that we first heard of bin Laden and the Taliban when they destroyed some ancient cliff effigies of the Buddha in Afghanistan. 

There is the crucial question for us in examining the moral ambiguity of p.c.

Indeed, truth is the first thing sacrificed to the gods of p.c. Let us consider Biblical truth, which for more than 2,000 years has been the moral authority for Judeo-Christian civilization.

Whereas p.c. is a violation of free speech, those who enforce it are in agreement that certain things should not be said, and certain persons silenced, if they are not members of the official Victim class. Let us take a few more examples of p.c., and then by showing the parallels between p.c. and Nazi Germany, expose the moral ambiguity of p.c. 

To me, one of history’s great mysteries is how Germany, “the nation of philosophers and poets,” was converted to the mad ideas of Nazism. The people were generally well educated, and German universities were the envy of the world. I have read several well-documented books about the occult influences of Satanism upon National Socialism, emanating mainly from a clique around Himmler. We are supposed to believe therefore that the churchgoing Lutheran majority of Germans suddenly forsook their collective conscience and became devil worshipers. 

The truth is finally revealed in a new book, The Nazi Conscience, by Claudia Koonz, published by Harvard University Press, and the truth does not bode well for America’s future. The German conscience was subjected to a relentless attack of p.c  Hitler at first downplayed anti-Semitism, touting instead ethnic revival and individual sacrifice. Once in power, however, the Nazis enlisted academia in a program designed to prove that Jews were a threat to ethnic purity. The German conscience faced a daily assault from Walter Gross’ “Office of Racial Politics,” Goebbels’ propaganda, the Julius Streicher newspaper Der Sturmer, and the Hitler Youth. Therefore, states Koonz, “despite having been raised to believe in the Golden Rule and probably more or less honoring it in their private lives, citizens of the Third Reich were shaped by a public culture ... so compelling that even those who objected to one or another aspect of Nazism came to accept the existence of a hierarchy of racially based human worth.”

Moreover, inherent in the German character was obedience to authority, and in respect to the German ethnic revival, not only did scientists and Herr Professors rubber-stamp the Nazi agenda, but also did many Lutheran and Catholic clergy. Viktor Frankel has written that the architects of the death camps were the German Nihilist philosophers. Emmanuel Kant and Fichte professed that an individual can discriminate between right and wrong by virtue of his own judgment, but Hegel insisted that an individual’s “real self” was the State’s community, whose culture and laws constituted the real standard for judging good and evil. Thus as the Nazi agenda evolved towards a culture of racial purity, old tolerant Christian judgments towards Jews, Gypsies, and categories of the physically and mentally unfit became passe. In the interest of the greater communal good, elimination of those “contaminating” inferior strains in the body politic, much as a doctor would seek to kill viruses, became not merely a necessary evil but a necessary good. Thus Germany’s general acceptance of mass murder within its borders, and without for Lebensraum, was not forsaking religion for its antithesis, but embracing the shadow side of religiosity as ethnic righteousness. Note here the similarities to the KKK and its attempt to “save” America from racial contamination, and the misguided religious impulse behind that movement. 

Consider now the charisma of Hitler as preacher. Historians have concluded erroneously that the German people were simpletons to have been taken in by his speeches; yet he combined the political acumen of slick politicians with the rhetorical gifts of our most persuasive evangelists. In Mein Kampf he declared, “In the chase after their own happiness, men fall from heaven into a real hell. Yes, even posterity forgets the men who have only served their own advantage and praises the heroes who have renounced their own happiness.... Our own German language possesses a word which magnificently designates this kind of activity:  Pflichterfullung (fulfillment of duty); it means not to be self-sufficient, but to serve the community.” 

Once Hitler had convinced the German people of their duty to serve the community, the next step was to get them to serve unquestioningly, that is, to park their brains. P.C. makes the same demand today. An ardent spokesman for the Nazi philosophy was Alfred Rosenberg, who defended the imperative of the collective when he declared that an individual must be fallible in his judgment on moral issues, for Germany’s “race soul” must be the final arbiter: “Right is that which Aryan people find right; wrong is that which they reject.” This sentiment was echoed by Nazi writer Ernst Bergmann: “Christian ethics place the Ego in the center of thinking. A German Volkisch ethic educates men to make the People the centre of their thought.” 

Western civilization is the product of Greek, Roman and Judeo-Christian philosophies, which, with the exception of the Sophists and the Existentialists, believe that moral principles are immutable, unchanging with progressive generations. The German Nihilists in rejecting ethical standards of truth, good and evil, right and wrong, basically rejected civilization, and paved the way for Hitler’s barbarism. 

The final sacrifice that Hitler demanded of the German people was to accept his brand of political correctness,  “mind sacrifice.”  In Mein Kampf, he stated, “I will have no intellectual training.  Knowledge is ruin to my young men.”  Moreover, Hitler declared, “We must distrust the intelligence and the conscience and must place our trust in our instincts.”  And to Hermann Rauschning, he confided, “We are now at the end of the Age of Reason.  The intellect has grown autocratic, and has become a disease of life.” 

American education since the 1960s has moved away from a classical pedagogy in which pupils were instructed in how to think.  Now education stresses a “feelings-based”  approach based on what to think (political correctness).  Hitler would applaud.  What thinking there is in the schools is deductive reasoning rather than inductive reasoning, the best way to objectively determine the truth.  Thus, p.c. is an assault on intelligence per se. 

According to p.c. dictates, feelings must not be hurt.  The Volk have spoken, and officially designated victims are to be rewarded and their persecutors punished.

This is a good example of how civilization can be destroyed when 2,000 years of moral and religious authority can be overturned by revolutionary thought, that is, that which has no moral authority and which claims to be “good” for society based upon the dictates of p.c.  Both Marx and Lenin declared that destruction of the family, as carriers of the old moral order, was necessary for implementation of Communism.