Posted on 08/30/2015 7:30:06 PM PDT by No One Special
Answer: The Marxist mechanism that disconnects facts from conclusions to make war on our minds.
Much of the Trump Effect today is due to Donald Trump's rejection of what we all know and instantly recognize as "PC." But what is political correctness? Where does it come from? The origins and seeding of "PC" into American culture are topics of much scrutiny in American Betrayal. Here is one excerpt that I just read for the upcoming audiobook.
Under discussion is the process by which what was at one time common knowledge, or a fact-based conclusion -- for example, that the Communist Party USA was controlled and directed by Moscow -- could be un-learned by society at large.
From Chapter 6, American Betrayal:
It's as if "two plus two make five," as George Orwell explained in 1984, the author likely seizing on a chapter of the same name in Eugene Lyons's 1937 memoir Assignment in Utopia. In the novel, which came out in 1949, less than six months after Bentley and Chambers testified [truthfully], Orwell explores the impact of such thought control, analyzing how "the very existence of external reality" could be "tacitly denied" by ideology. He concludes, "In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy."
The mind could adapt, though. Orwell: "And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable— what then?"79
What then? Here's what then: Whittaker Chambers is relegated to purgatory; there was no Lend-Lease to the Soviet Union; McCarthy is the Great Satan; John Bricker is remembered as "an amiable and photogenic figure of no remarkable qualities." [Soviet agent] Lauchlin Currie et al.—and I mean all—keep their cover in posterity's mainstream without even a teeny, tiny, scarlet footnote. And a Mao portrait by Warhol over the mantelpiece is just the thing.
No wonder it is Elizabeth Bentley who was garishly marked as a "neurotic spinster" from the hot July day of her 1948 testimony forward, tattooed in memory with faintly lurid question marks. Look carefully, though, where the slander against Bentley originated: The very first malign expectoration against her shot from the mouth of NKVD agent Gregory Silvermaster himself (KGB cover name "Pal"). It was Silvermaster who brazenly dismissed Bentley's charges before the House Committee on Un-American Activities before serially invoking the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination (including about his own basement). On August 4, 1948, the Soviet superspy said, "I can only conclude that she is a neurotic liar."
It was just a short hop from neurotic "liar" to neurotic "spinster"82 and back again, the constant being "neurotic." It was no coincidence, either, that Soviet agent and Ware group cell leader Lee Pressman additionally savaged the testimony of American patriot Whittaker Chambers as "the stale and lurid mouthings of a Republican exhibitionist."83
Then, thanks to the amplification of the echo chamber—from the Communist rag The Daily Worker to "respectable press" such as The Milwaukee Journal, The New York Post, and The Washington Post to the president—the Party line that it was all in their heads soon was all in our heads. Pace Orwell, if the mind was controllable, what then? Even when physical evidence—typewriters, rugs, microfilm—increasingly bore out Chambers's word, Communist Party lies vaporized into a dense haze of suspicion that obscured what should have been a diamond-clear line of sight to judgment: Hiss, Silvermaster, and the rest, guilty. Chambers, Bentley, heroes of conscience. But with a Communist-seared "liar" brand still smoking on Bentley's and Chambers's hides, the only guilty verdicts that endured were their own, the false verdicts that were upheld in the kangaroo court of elite opinion, the people with rattles and noisemakers, penthouses and publishing imprints, judge and jury with no more claim on fact and reason than the men who sent fourteen women and five men to their deaths for witch- craft in seventeenth-century Salem, and with the same zealotry.
Wait a minute. Wasn't it the anti-Communists who were the big, bad witch hunters?
Certainly, that's the message Americans have had drummed into their heads, Mao's-Little-Red-Book-style. The more literary text of choice in this case is, of course, Arthur Miller's The Crucible. Instead of violent Red Guard troops forcing us to live by it, our reeducators were high school teachers who merely assigned us to read it and absorb its lessons. (I had to read the thing in the eighth grade.) For two or three generations, anyway, Arthur Miller's dramatic re-rendering of congressional efforts to disclose extensive and clandestine Kremlin-directed assaults on our constitutional republic as the irrational and imaginary fetish of "repressed" and "Puritanical" "zealots" in Pilgrim hats was a classroom staple—Silvermaster's "neurotics" and "exhibitionists" elevated to the realm of theah-tuh. As a 2005 (post-Venona) collection of twentieth-century American drama puts it, "Miller wrote The Crucible in 1953 and it presents a clear parallel between the American anti-Communist paranoia of the period and the 1692 witch trials of Salem, exposing both to be maliciously motivated with ritualistic public denunciations of largely innocent people."84
Largely innocent? I'd like to plop the 650 damning pages of Spies right down in front of the editor that wrote that tripe. What is most breathtaking here, though, is the obdurate endurance of the glaring lie. In fact, a greater intellectual hoax than the Saleming of the Red hunters is beyond imagination. (Islam-is-peace is as great, but no greater.) Unchanged by the hard evidence, the deception continues, as impossible to claw back from the culture at large as a cloud.
This is telling. The great witnesses (Bentley, Chambers, J. B. Matthews, Louis Budenz . . . ), the great investigators (Dies, McCarran, McCarthy . . . ), took their stand to save America from Communist subversion. Whether they realized it—and, for the most part, how could they?—they also took their stand to save the essential base of reality itself: the importance of fact-based narrative; the primacy of "neutral truth"; morality's need for absolutes. All would dissipate rapidly in society at large following anti-Communism's demise in American culture. It was the ultimate defeat for the anti-Communist opposition, with their facts and conclusions, their witnesses and their affidavits, their investiga- tions and their implications. This defeat cleared the field for the rise of brand-new waves of subversion: fungible facts, moral relativism, deconstructionism, and other explosive assaults on the rocks of civilizational equilibrium.
This was revolutionary struggle, raw and desperate. Unlike the discreetly private conspiracy to take Gareth Jones down back in the spring of 1933 in order to hide Soviet perfidy inside the Soviet Union—the very first Big Lie of the Terror Famine, as Conquest tells us—this was an all-out assault on the wit- nesses and investigators of Soviet perfidy inside the United States. When this battle was joined in our own backyard, the struggle against exposure took on climactic intensity. Whittaker Chambers explains why, and eloquently, in Witness:
The simple fact is that when I took up my little sling and aimed at Communism, I also hit something else. What I hit was the forces of that great socialist revolu- tion, which, in the name of liberalism, spasmodically, incompletely, somewhat formlessly, but always in the same direction, has been inching its ice cap over the nation for two decades . . . [This] is a statement of fact that need startle no one who voted for that revolution in whole or in part, and, consciously or unconsciously, a majority of the nation has so voted for years. It was the forces of that revolution that I struck at the point of its struggle for power.
Exactly. Nothing more.
That was your line two weeks ago, can’t you think of any new anti-Trump BS?
Well is IS A RINO... possibly still a democrat..
Whats your point?..
“Mind Control”.
You are correct. It is also a form of censorship that prevents discourse.
Political Correctness was developed by Marxists after the Russian Revolution. It was designed to Control The Narrative and it has worked.
Bump
Political Correctness has replaced Common Sense, among other things.
And I am a racist. The correct response
to both these characterizations is, “So what?”
OK.. do we need another Myth Romney?.. thats what..
I propose we do not NEED .. TRUMP—>> is Romney.. on acid..
Barack Obama on methadrine.. i.e. speed.. ice..
Fail.
Populist does not mean popular.
There is still a place for common coutesy.
Populist does not mean popular.
It means exactly that..
“There is still a place for common coutesy”.
Of course there is and it should be so. But PC has even undermined courtesy.
Google it.
Back in the day, it used to mean: Personal Computer. Now it’s just means crap as defined by a bunch of of whiny, thin skinned children who get their panties in a wad at the slightest thing.
Orwell explores the impact of such thought control, analyzing how "the very existence of external reality" could be "tacitly denied" by ideology. He concludes, "In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy."
I ran into a different manifestation of this about an hour ago. I'd like FR's polite discourse on it.
Some here are aware (if not a part of) the growing Christian movement deeming the "young Earth" interpretation of Genesis (that the Universe was literally created some 6,000 years ago) not just a notion or interpretation, but absolute Biblical doctrine to the point that dissension is utterly heretical.
I bring this up in this thread because the idea that literally all things did not exist outside the timeframe of sixty centuries (and being someone approaching the half-century mark, this strikes me as a rather short time as regards all things ever) is, of course, starkly at odds with (as Orwell put) "not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality": fossils are plainly far older than the oldest human artifacts, geology simply could not have taken shape in such a short time, the Solar System behavior plainly stable for orders of magnitude longer than that, and (the kicker few ever contemplate) the Universe visible at a glance outside simply cannot fit in a 12,000 light-year space.
So, considering Orwell's exploration, I'm curious how other FReepers respond to rephrasing the above to "the impact of such thought control, analyzing how 'the very existence of external reality [of every tangible & observable fact of the Universe]' could be 'tacitly denied' by ideology [of 'young Earth' proponents]. [I note], 'In the end the [young Earth proponents]' [] announce that [all things ever are no more than 6,000 years old], and you would have to believe it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy."
(I'm moved to discuss this as it seems the "young Earth" doctrine is being pushed from a simple debatable interpretation of Scripture to unquestionable doctrine, much akin to "PC" dynamics.)
Google it.
People are within their rights to use offensive language. It doesn’t mean they should.
PC is a part of the left’s (liberals, progressives, and communists, if there is any difference between them) effort to exert total control over everything (in this case largely language), their obsession, toward their lust for absolute power.
Some here are aware (if not a part of) the growing Christian movement deeming the “young Earth” interpretation of Genesis (that the Universe was literally created some 6,000 years ago) not just a notion or interpretation, but absolute Biblical doctrine to the point that dissension is utterly heretical.
Young earth.. Old earth..
Matt 6;34 So never worry about tomorrow, because tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”
The same could be said about yesterday.. and I feel is implied..
What will you do with TODAY?...
Young earth .. OK...
Old earth....... OK...
Are your a heretick? in your opinion?.. Nobody’s perfect..
I think both sides are pretty sensitive about what other people say. But, the more I think about it, I realize that I always say pretty much whatever I want to say. I don't tell fat people that they're fat, but that's really because I really don't want to say that to someone.
The more I've thought about this, the more I've come to realize that there really isn't anything that I want to say that I don't say. Maybe it's just because I'm getting older, but I really don't feel any external inhibitions to my speech. I say what I want.
I've come to believe that this PC paranoia is either something that mostly affects kids and young folks or is just a lot of hooey about nothing.
PC = the War Against Free Speech
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