>
> The Origins of Political Correctness
> An Accuracy in Academia Address by Bill Lind
>
> Variations of this speech have been delivered to various AIA
> conferences including the 2000 Consevative University at American
> University
>
> Where does all this stuff that you've heard about this morning - the
> victim feminism, the gay rights movement, the invented statistics, the
> rewritten history, the lies, the demands, all the rest of it - where
> does it come from? For the first time in our history, Americans have
> to be fearful of what they say, of what they write, and of what they
> think. They have to be afraid of using the wrong word, a word
> denounced as offensive or insensitive, or racist, sexist, or
> homophobic.
>
> We have seen other countries, particularly in this century, where this
> has been the case. And we have always regarded them with a mixture of
> pity, and to be truthful, some amusement, because it has struck us as
> so strange that people would allow a situation to develop where they
> would be afraid of what words they used. But we now have this
> situation in this country. We have it primarily on college campuses,
> but it is spreading throughout the whole society. Were does it come
> from? What is it?
>
> We call it "Political Correctness." The name originated as something
> of a joke, literally in a comic strip, and we tend still to think of
> it as only half-serious. In fact, it's deadly serious. It is the great
> disease of our century, the disease that has left tens of millions of
> people dead in Europe, in Russia, in China, indeed around the world.
> It is the disease of ideology. PC is not funny. PC is deadly serious.
>
> If we look at it analytically, if we look at it historically, we
> quickly find out exactly what it is. Political Correctness is cultural
> Marxism. It is Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms.
> It is an effort that goes back not to the 1960s and the hippies and
> the peace movement, but back to World War I. If we compare the basic
> tenets of Political Correctness with classical Marxism the parallels
> are very obvious.
>
> First of all, both are totalitarian ideologies. The totalitarian
> nature of Political Correctness is revealed nowhere more clearly than
> on college campuses, many of which at this point are small ivy covered
> North Koreas, where the student or faculty member who dares to cross
> any of the lines set up by the gender feminist or the homosexual-
> rights activists, or the local black or Hispanic group, or any of the
> other sainted "victims" groups that PC revolves around, quickly find
> themselves in judicial trouble. Within the small legal system of the
> college, they face formal charges - some star-chamber proceeding - and
> punishment. That is a little look into the future that Political
> Correctness intends for the nation as a whole.
>
> Indeed, all ideologies are totalitarian because the essence of an
> ideology (I would note that conservatism correctly understood is not
> an ideology) is to take some philosophy and say on the basis of this
> philosophy certain things must be true - such as the whole of the
> history of our culture is the history of the oppression of women.
> Since reality contradicts that, reality must be forbidden. It must
> become forbidden to acknowledge the reality of our history. People
> must be forced to live a lie, and since people are naturally reluctant
> to live a lie, they naturally use their ears and eyes to look out and
> say, "Wait a minute. This isn't true. I can see it isn't true," the
> power of the state must be put behind the demand to live a lie. That
> is why ideology invariably creates a totalitarian state.
>
> Second, the cultural Marxism of Political Correctness, like economic
> Marxism, has a single factor explanation of history. Economic Marxism
> says that all of history is determined by ownership of means of
> production. Cultural Marxism, or Political Correctness, says that all
> history is determined by power, by which groups defined in terms of
> race, sex, etc., have power over which other groups. Nothing else
> matters. All literature, indeed, is about that. Everything in the past
> is about that one thing.
>
> Third, just as in classical economic Marxism certain groups, i.e.
> workers and peasants, are a priori good, and other groups, i.e., the
> bourgeoisie and capital owners, are evil. In the cultural Marxism of
> Political Correctness certain groups are good - feminist women, (only
> feminist women, non-feminist women are deemed not to exist) blacks,
> Hispanics, homosexuals. These groups are determined to be "victims,"
> and therefore automatically good regardless of what any of them do.
> Similarly, white males are determined automatically to be evil,
> thereby becoming the equivalent of the bourgeoisie in economic
> Marxism.
>
> Fourth, both economic and cultural Marxism rely on expropriation. When
> the classical Marxists, the communists, took over a country like
> Russia, they expropriated the bourgeoisie, they took away their
> property. Similarly, when the cultural Marxists take over a university
> campus, they expropriate through things like quotas for admissions.
> When a white student with superior qualifications is denied admittance
> to a college in favor of a black or Hispanic who isn't as well
> qualified, the white student is expropriated. And indeed, affirmative
> action, in our whole society today, is a system of expropriation.
> White owned companies don't get a contract because the contract is
> reserved for a company owned by, say, Hispanics or women. So
> expropriation is a principle tool for both forms of Marxism....
>
> In 1923 in Germany, a think-tank is established that takes on the role
> of translating Marxism from economic into cultural terms, that creates
> Political Correctness as we know it today, and essentially it has
> created the basis for it by the end of the 1930s. This comes about
> because the very wealthy young son of a millionaire German trader by
> the name of Felix Weil has become a Marxist and has lots of money to
> spend. He is disturbed by the divisions among the Marxists, so he
> sponsors something called the First Marxist Work Week, where he brings
> Lukacs and many of the key German thinkers together for a week,
> working on the differences of Marxism.
>
> And he says, "What we need is a think-tank." Washington is full of
> think tanks and we think of them as very modern. In fact they go back
> quite a ways. He endows an institute, associated with Frankfurt
> University, established in 1923, that was originally supposed to be
> known as the Institute for Marxism. But the people behind it decided
> at the beginning that it was not to their advantage to be openly
> identified as Marxist. The last thing Political Correctness wants is
> for people to figure out it's a form of Marxism. So instead they
> decide to name it the Institute for Social Research.
>
> Weil is very clear about his goals. In 1971, he wrote to Martin Jay
> the author of a principle book on the Frankfurt School, as the
> Institute for Social Research soon becomes known informally, and he
> said, "I wanted the institute to become known, perhaps famous, due to
> its contributions to Marxism." Well, he was successful. The first
> director of the Institute, Carl Grunberg, an Austrian economist,
> concluded his opening address, according to Martin Jay, "by clearly
> stating his personal allegiance to Marxism as a scientific
> methodology." Marxism, he said, would be the ruling principle at the
> Institute, and that never changed...
>
> The stuff we've been hearing about this morning - the radical
> feminism, the women's studies departments, the gay studies
> departments, the black studies departments - all these things are
> branches of Critical Theory. What the Frankfurt School essentially
> does is draw on both Marx and Freud in the 1930s to create this theory
> called Critical Theory. The term is 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. They explicitly refuse to do that.
> They say it can't be done, that we can't imagine what a free society
> would look like (their definition of a free society). As long as we're
> living under repression - the repression of a capitalistic economic
> order which creates (in their theory) the Freudian condition, the
> conditions that Freud describes in individuals of repression - we
> can't even imagine it. What Critical Theory is about is simply
> criticizing. It calls for the most destructive criticism possible, in
> every possible way, designed to bring the current order down. And, of
> course, when we hear from the feminists that the whole of society is
> just out to get women and so on, that kind of criticism is a
> derivative of Critical Theory. It is all coming from the 1930s, not
> the 1960s.
>
> Other key members who join up around this time are Theodore Adorno,
> and, most importantly, Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse. Fromm and
> Marcuse introduce an element which is central to Political
> Correctness, and that's the sexual element. And particularly Marcuse,
> who in his own writings calls for a society of "polymorphous
> perversity," that is his definition of the future of the world that
> they want to create. Marcuse in particular by the 1930s is writing
> some very extreme stuff on the need for sexual liberation, but this
> runs through the whole Institute. So do most of the themes we see in
> Political Correctness, again in the early 30s. In Fromm's view,
> masculinity and femininity were not reflections of `essential' sexual
> differences, as the Romantics had thought. They were derived instead
> from differences in life functions, which were in part socially
> determined." Sex is a construct; sexual differences are a construct...
>
> How does all of this stuff flood in here? How does it flood into our
> universities, and indeed into our lives today? The members of the
> Frankfurt School are Marxist, they are also, to a man, Jewish. In 1933
> the Nazis came to power in Germany, and not surprisingly they shut
> down the Institute for Social Research. And its members fled. They
> fled to New York City, and the Institute was reestablished there in
> 1933 with help from Columbia University. And the members of the
> Institute, gradually through the 1930s, though many of them remained
> writing in German, shift their focus from Critical Theory about German
> society, destructive criticism about every aspect of that society, to
> Critical Theory directed toward American society. There is another
> very important transition when the war comes. Some of them go to work
> for the government, including Herbert Marcuse, who became a key figure
> in the OSS (the predecessor to the CIA), and some, including
> Horkheimer and Adorno, move to Hollywood.
>
> These origins of Political Correctness would probably not mean too
> much to us today except for two subsequent events. The first was the
> student rebellion in the mid-1960s, which was driven largely by
> resistance to the draft and the Vietnam War. But the student rebels
> needed theory of some sort. They couldn't just get out there and say,
> "Hell no we won't go," they had to have some theoretical explanation
> behind it. Very few of them were interested in wading through Das
> Kapital. Classical, economic Marxism is not light, and most of the
> radicals of the 60s were not deep. Fortunately for them, and
> unfortunately for our country today, and not just in the university,
> Herbert Marcuse remained in America when the Frankfurt School
> relocated back to Frankfurt after the war. And whereas Mr. Adorno in
> Germany is appalled by the student rebellion when it breaks out there
> - when the student rebels come into Adorno's classroom, he calls the
> police and has them arrested - Herbert Marcuse, who remained here, saw
> the 60s student rebellion as the great chance. He saw the opportunity
> to take the work of the Frankfurt School and make it the theory of the
> New Left in the United States.
>
> One of Marcuse's books was the key book. It virtually became the bible
> of the SDS and the student rebels of the 60s. That book was Eros and
> Civilization. Marcuse argues that under a capitalistic order (he
> downplays the Marxism very strongly here, it is subtitled, A
> Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, but the framework is Marxist),
> repression is the essence of that order and that gives us the person
> Freud describes - the person with all the hang-ups, the neuroses,
> because his sexual instincts are repressed. We can envision a future,
> if we can only destroy this existing oppressive order, in which we
> liberate eros, we liberate libido, in which we have a world of
> "polymorphous perversity," in which you can "do you own thing." And by
> the way, in that world there will no longer be work, only play. What a
> wonderful message for the radicals of the mid-60s! They're students,
> they're baby-boomers, and they've grown up never having to worry about
> anything except eventually having to get a job. And here is a guy
> writing in a way they can easily follow. He doesn't require them to
> read a lot of heavy Marxism and tells them everything they want to
> hear which is essentially, "Do your own thing," "If it feels good do
> it," and "You never have to go to work." By the way, Marcuse is also
> the man who creates the phrase, "Make love, not war." Coming back to
> the situation people face on campus, Marcuse defines "liberating
> tolerance" as intolerance for anything coming from the Right and
> tolerance for anything coming from the Left. Marcuse joined the
> Frankfurt School, in 1932 (if I remember right). So, all of this goes
> back to the 1930s.
>
> In conclusion, America today is in the throes of the greatest and
> direst transformation in its history. We are becoming an ideological
> state, a country with an official state ideology enforced by the power
> of the state. In "hate crimes" we now have people serving jail
> sentences for political thoughts. And the Congress is now moving to
> expand that category ever further. Affirmative action is part of it.
> The terror against anyone who dissents from Political Correctness on
> campus is part of it. It's exactly what we have seen happen in Russia,
> in Germany, in Italy, in China, and now it's coming here. And we don't
> recognize it because we call it Political Correctness and laugh it
> off. My message today is that it's not funny, it's here, it's growing
> and it will eventually destroy, as it seeks to destroy, everything
> that we have ever defined as our freedom and our culture.
>
> <http://www.thebirdman.org/Index/Others/Others-PC-Origins-Tony.htm>