Question: What is "PC"?

Diana West Website ^ | August 29, 2015 | Diana West

[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.

[Smokin' Joe]

But PC has even undermined courtesy.

Precisely! Common courtesy had rules. How else could common courtesy be 'common'?

PC is a swirling set of opinions by those who have to justify their Grievance Studies PhD.

[luvbach1]

Refraining from saying something (as you do), especially to spare another’s feelings, is tact, or even compassion.

[laplata]

Right.

[laplata]

PC is Cultural Marxism. And they use it well.

[Perseverando]

Sorry for not using html, but I didn’t want to be up all night formatting.

This is a rather long post but for those who have a couple of minutes, you will learn more than you want to about what “politically correct” really means.

To cut to the chase, in the section “The Dirty War” on page 99, below in the second paragraph is the first recorded usage of the term “politically correct” I have ever been able to identify (if you have an older usage, I’d really like to know:

“...in a secret resolution of the Bolshevik Party’s Central Committee on
24 January 1919: “In view of the experiences of the civil war against the
Cossacks, we must recognize as the only politically correct measure massive
terror and a merciless fight against the rich Cossacks, who must be extermi-
nated and physically disposed of, down to the last man.”

The rest of the article is just for emphasis on how “political correctness” was implemented by those who originated the term and the result of political correctness by Leninist-Marxist-Bolshevik-Stalinist-Communist-Progressive-Totalitarian ideologues (they’re all the same) once they had overpowered those who wished to be free and refuse to acknowledge the noble goals of their saviors. The excerpt is from “The Black Book of Communism: Crimes Terror and Repression - http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2924604/posts

“Despite the rapid crushing of the Pitchfork Rebellion, the peasant revolts
continued to spread, flaring up next in the provinces of the mid- Volga region,
in Tambov, Penza, Samara, Saratov, and Tsaritsyn, all of which had suffered
heavily from requisitioning. The Bolshevik leader Antonov-Ovseenko, who led
the repressions against the rebel peasants in Tambov, later acknowledged that
the requisitioning plans of 1920 and 1921, if carried out as instructed, would
have meant the certain death of the peasants. On average, they were left with
1 pud (35 pounds) of grain and 1.5 pudy (about 55 pounds) of potatoes per
person each year — approximately one-tenth of the minimum requirements for
life. These peasants in the provinces were thus engaged in a straightforward
fight for survival in the summer of 1920. It was to continue for two years, until
the rebels were finally defeated by hunger.

A State against Its People

The third great center of conflict between peasants and Bolsheviks in 1920
was Ukraine itself, most of which had been reconquered from the White armies
between December 1919 and February 1920; but the countryside had remained
under the control of hundreds of detachments of free Greens of various
allegiances, many of them affiliated with Makhno’s command. Unlike the Black
Eagles, the Ukrainian detachments were well armed, since they were made up
largely of deserters. In the summer of 1920 Makhno’s army numbered 15,000
men, 2,500 cavalry, approximately 100 heavy machine guns, twenty artillery
pieces, and two armored vehicles. Hundreds of smaller groups, numbering
from a dozen to several hundred, also put up stout resistance against the
Bolshevik incursions. To fight these peasant guerrillas, the government in May
1920 called on the services of Feliks Dzerzhinsky, naming him “Commander
in Chief of the Rear Front of the Southwest.” Dzerzhinsky remained in
Kharkiv for more than two months, setting up twenty-four special units of the
Troops for the Internal Defense of the Republic, elite units with special cavalry
detachments trained to pursue retreating rebels, as well as airplanes to bomb
bandit strongholds. 32 Their task was to eradicate all peasant guerrillas within
three months. In fact the operation took more than two years, lasting from
the summer of 1920 until the autumn of 1922, and cost tens of thousands of
lives.

Among the episodes in the struggle between peasants and the Bolshevik
authorities, “de-Cossackization” — the systematic elimination of the Cossacks
of the Don and the Kuban as social groups — occupies a special place. For the
first time, on the principle of collective responsibility, a new regime took a
series of measures specially designed to eliminate, exterminate, and deport the
population of a whole territory, which Soviet leaders had taken to calling the
“Soviet Vendee.” 33 These operations were plainly not the result of military
excesses in the heat of battle, but were carefully planned in advance in response
to decrees from the highest levels of state authority, directly implicating nu-
merous top-ranking politicians, including Lenin, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, Sergei
Syrtsov, Grigory Sokolnikov, and Isaac Reingold. Momentarily halted in the
spring of 1919 because of military setbacks, the process of de-Cossackization
resumed with even greater cruelty in 1920, after Bolshevik victories in the Don
and the Kuban.

The Cossacks, who since December 1917 had been deprived of the status
they had enjoyed under the old regime, were classified by the Bolsheviks as
“kulaks” and “class enemies”; and as a result they joined forces with the White
armies that had united in southern Russia in the spring of 1918 under the
banner of Ataman Krasnov. In February 1919, after the general advance of the
Bolsheviks into Ukraine and southern Russia, the first detachment of the Red

The Dirty War 99

Army penetrated the Cossack territories along the Don. At the outset the
Bolsheviks took measures to destroy everything that made the Cossacks a
separate group: their land was confiscated and redistributed among Russian
colonizers or local peasants who did not have Cossack status; they were ordered,
on pain of death, to surrender all their arms (historically, as the traditional
frontier soldiers of the Russian empire, all Cossacks had a right to bear arms);
and all Cossack administrative assemblies were immediately dissolved.

All these measures were part of the preestablished de-Cossackization plan
approved in a secret resolution of the Bolshevik Party’s Central Committee on
24 January 1919: “In view of the experiences of the civil war against the
Cossacks, we must recognize as the only politically correct measure massive
terror and a merciless fight against the rich Cossacks, who must be extermi-
nated and physically disposed of, down to the last man.” 34

In practice, as acknowledged by Reingold, the president of the Revolu-
tionary Committee of the Don, who was entrusted with imposing Bolshevik
rule in the Cossack territories, “what was carried out instead against the
Cossacks was an indiscriminate policy of massive extermination.” 35 From mid-
February to mid-March 1919, Bolshevik detachments executed more than
8,000 Cossacks. 36 In each stanitsa (Cossack village) revolutionary courts passed
summary judgments in a matter of minutes, and whole lists of suspects were
condemned to death, generally for “counterrevolutionary behavior.” In the face
of this relentless destruction, the Cossacks had no choice but to revolt.

The revolt began in the district of Veshenskaya on 11 March 1919. The
well-organized rebels decreed the general mobilization of all males aged sixteen
to fifty-five and sent out telegrams urging the whole population to rise up
against the Bolsheviks throughout the Don region and as far as the remote
province of Voronezh.

“We, the Cossacks,” they explained, “are not anti-Soviet. We are in favor
of free elections. We are against the Communists, collective farming, and the
Jews. We are against requisitioning, theft, and the endless round of executions
practiced by the Chekas.” 37 At the beginning of April the Cossack rebels
represented a well-armed force of nearly 30,000 men, all hardened by battle.
Operating behind the lines of the Red Army, which, farther south, was fighting
Denikin’s troops together with the Kuban Cossacks, these rebels of the Don,
like their Ukrainian counterparts, contributed in no small measure to the huge
advance of the White Army in May and June 1919. At the beginning of June
the Cossacks of the Don and the Kuban joined up with the greater part of the
White armies. The whole of the “Cossack Vendee” was freed from the dreaded
power of the “Muscovites, Jews, and Bolsheviks.”

But the Bolsheviks were back in February 1920. The second military
occupation of the Cossack lands was even more murderous than the first. The

100 A State against Its People

whole Don region was forced to make a grain contribution of 36 million pudy,
a quantity that easily surpassed the total annual production of the area; and the
whole local population was robbed not only of its meager food and grain
reserves but also of all its goods, including “shoes, clothes, bedding, and samo-
vars,” according to a Cheka report. 38 Every man who was still fit to fight
responded to this institutionalized pillaging by joining groups of rebel Greens,
which by July 1920 numbered at least 35,000 in the Kuban and Don regions.
Trapped in the Crimea since February, General Wrangel decided in a last
desperate attempt to free himself from the Bolsheviks’ grip on the region by
joining forces with the Cossacks and the Greens of Kuban. On 17 August 1920,
5,000 men landed near Novorossiisk. Faced with the combined forces of the
Whites, Cossacks, and Greens, the Bolsheviks were forced to abandon Ekater-
inodar, the main city of the Kuban region, and then to retreat from the region
altogether. Although Wrangel made progress in the south of Ukraine, the
Whites’ successes were short-lived. Overcome by the numerically superior
Bolshevik forces, Wrangel’s troops, hampered by the large number of civilians
that accompanied them, retreated in total disarray toward the Crimea at the
end of October. The retaking of the Crimea by the Bolsheviks, the last con-
frontation between the Red and White forces, was the occasion of one of the
largest massacres in the civil war. At least 50,000 civilians were killed by the
Bolsheviks in November and December 1920. 39

Finding themselves again on the losing side, the Cossacks were again
devastated by the Red Terror. One of the principal leaders of the Cheka, the
Latvian Karl Lander, was named “Plenipotentiary of the Northern Caucasus
and the Don.” One of his first actions was to establish troiki, special commis-
sions in charge of de-Cossackization. In October 1920 alone these troiki con-
demned more than 6,000 people to death, all of whom were executed
immediately. 40 The families, and sometimes even the neighbors, of Green par-
tisans or of Cossacks who had taken up arms against the regime and had
escaped capture, were systematically arrested as hostages and thrown into
concentration camps, which Martin Latsis, the head of the Ukrainian Cheka,
acknowledged in a report as being genuine death camps: “Gathered together
in a camp near Maikop, the hostages, women, children, and old men survive in
the most appalling conditions, in the cold and the mud of October . . . They
are dying like flies. The women will do anything to escape death. The soldiers
guarding the camp take advantage of this and treat them as prostitutes.” 41

All resistance was mercilessly punished. When its chief fell into an am-
bush, the Pyatigorsk Cheka organized a “day of Red Terror” that went well
beyond instructions from Lander, who had recommended that “this act of
terrorism should be turned to our advantage to take important hostages with a
view to executing them, and as a reason to speed up the executions of White

The Dirty War 101

spies and counterrevolutionaries in general.” In Lander’s words, “The Pya-
tigorsk Cheka decided straight out to execute 300 people in one day. They
divided up the town into various boroughs and took a quota of people from
each, and ordered the Party to draw up execution lists . . . This rather unsat-
isfactory method led to a great deal of private settling of old scores ... In
Kislovodsk, for lack of a better idea, it was decided to kill people who were in
the hospital.” 42”

[MrEdd]

That’s a pretty big vocabulary fail.

[hosepipe]

That’s a pretty big vocabulary fail.

---

It’s about understanding what words really mean
NOT what liberals say they mean...

Failure to understand liberals and what they are up to..
Can confuse you.. like calling republicans “conservatives”..

Liberals did that to offset them as “Progressives”..
Liberals invented the term to put a HANDLE on republicans..
To highlight the lie that they were “PROGRESSIVE”.. and republicans WERE NOT..

When liberalism is the most regressive system known..
with the Taliban and Islam generally.. a close second..

Conservative MEANS same old same old.. always did still does..
There is plethora of words liberals have RE_positioned..

Academia is pure leftist propaganda tanks..
Trusting “their” words.. can make an idiot out of you.. *caution*

[nathanbedford]

Question: what is the definition of a racist?

Answer: someone who is winning an argument with a leftist.

The joke is funny because it illuminates two truths about Political Correctness 2. Proceed from an unassailable premise -racism is bad; 2. The tactic -attack and smear the messenger.

The premise: in this case the unassailable premise is racism is bad but the unassailable premise might be that sexism is bad or homophobia is bad or any kind of discrimination is bad. This comes from a root premise that says that inequality is bad and anything which fails to attack inequality is therefore bad.

That inequality is bad is really a root premise of leftism and from it all other unassailable "truths" are spawned. It justifies attacks on property, attacks on wealth, attacks on disparity of income, attacks on achievement and attacks on the legitimacy of a system which permits any sort of inequality.

It is an easy jump from the premise to the attack. If inequality is bad then any system which does not do away with inequality is bad. And those who do not agree with the doing away of the system or the symptoms of inequality found within the system such as racism, classism, sexism, homophobia are themselves bad and, ultimately evil, or, in the case of the joke, racist.

The article talks about "fungible facts, moral relativism, deconstructionism" and these are concepts which come directly from The Frankfurt School which have taken over our culture and have effectively imposed political correctness on the culture. All of these tactics are in service of the premise which is the collectivist equality of communism.

The Frankfurt School evolved into a purpose which was to make the world accepting of communism but the old Marxist appeals of communism did not persuade in Germany and elsewhere in the wake of the First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution so the strategy of the left morphed into a cultural attack on the institutions which sustained a capitalist model. But the attacks on culture were but battles in the war. The purpose of the war was to undermine the epistemology of the culture, to change the way people think, to change the way they accept what they think they know. Change the way people think, and you can make them think your way.

Political correctness is not a matter of absurdity which can be lampooned, it is a diabolical attack on the psyche the purpose of which is to render the victim psychologically and philosophically defenseless.

[Democrat_media]

Obama is a marxist and is an anti-American

It’s pure lies and slander that you are comparing Trump to Obama

Trump is not a marxist and Trump is very pro-America, everything is America first with Trump. can’t say the same for your bought and paid for politicians beholden to internationalist rich donors and foreign interests.

The liberal media is also comparing Trump to Hitler. you and the liberal media are on the same page.

[minnesota_bound]

PC is constantly changing depending on the day of the week and the subject and who is the person targeted.
Anyone can be targeted but it is mainly conservatives and those that support America.

[hosepipe]

It’s pure lies and slander that you are comparing Trump to Obama

---

You do know their friends don’t you...
Trump is friends with MANY traitors without a second thought..
Especially Hellary and Bubba..

Course HE does not consider them traitors?.. WHY?..
TRUMP is a LIZARD.. a Chameleon.. always was.. still is..

And SOME are worried about the other pubbie candidates that switch views like a cable channel selector..

BUT; alas, TRUMP is UN-VETTABLE... or they make excuses.. for his obvious leftist ways..

TRUMP has a get out of the RINO Holding tank FREE.. card..

[Democrat_media]

This country is done already. Trump can't kill a dead corpse

your politicians have spent all of the last 100 years growing government, piling more laws and regs on us that gum up the works, selling us out to foreigners,letting in more leftist immigrants etc.

Obama has about 100 seeds for socialism planted already as in Obamacare, the HUD racial integration plan, Obama trade (yet set to pass but it will because they all voted for TPA ) etc.

This country is done

and you are worried about the only one speaking for America and against China, Mexico , illegals

who else is speaking out against China, Mexico etc.? no one that's who

I trust Trump. I don't trust politicians who are owned by rich internationalist donors who have destroyed the USA

Plus not that i needed to see that but every person that's worked for Trump said this man's word is impeccable
and here you slander this man because you are probably paid by one of the other candidates or are in cult-worship mode of some politician

Yeah whatever I don't buy your lies

[hosepipe]

This country is done already. Trump can't kill a dead corpse

Good Point..

I trust Trump. I don't trust politicians who are owned by rich internationalist donors who have destroyed the USA

You do know THAT Trump is one of those Internationalist Donors don't you?..
AH!. I thought not..

*** A bit more research on TRUMP just might blow yer mind.. Sure some of it is bull sperm.. but others of it is not.. Watch who you are getting info from.. Unless you have no idea of whom to trust and whom to be leery of..

Be careful of conservatives here now.. some have lost there freepin minds.. Mention TRUMP and their EYEs ROLL BACK..

[Democrat_media]

Trump has had thousands of people that have worked for him and that he has had contracts with. All of the people that I’ve heard like these have said only praise for Trump and how he is man of his word.

Surely the liberal media is digging through all these people that worked for Trump and with Trump to try to get them to throw mud at Trump. I haven’t heard of anyone saying Trump lied and the media hasn’t been able to turn anyone. They even tried to say Trump raped his ex wife and she denied that and said Trump would make a great president.

[hosepipe]

Trump has had thousands of people that have worked for him and that he has had contracts with. All of the people that I’ve heard like these have said only praise for Trump and how he is man of his word.

---

Why would they, he’s a good businessman, politician not so much..
Electing a Crony Capitalist(trump) as President.. is completely wrong.. even worse than electing a lawyer(Cruz)..

Cruz knows more of whats WRONG in D.C. than Trump knows..
TRUMP out conniving the Senators and Congress people.. is a MISTAKE..
A BIG HAIRY MISTAKE.. Uncle Sam with a Combover.. and Lady Liberty showing some LEG... were we’re headed for trouble with Trump..

[equaviator]

As long as “PC” is political you can’t expect it to be correct.

[No One Special]

Below is from a review of the Black Book of Communism that you're links led to. See:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1341941/posts

Seems to jive with some of the ideas presented here about PC.

Controlling the language

Above all, there are the passages about the Communist's skillful manipulation of language for political purposes.

This manipulation took two forms, both of which are in use in American and Europe today: The first is a demonization and dehumanization of everyone unpopular with the regime. It was not people the Communists killed. It was "capitalists," "running dogs," "enemies of the people," "saboteurs," "the bourgeoise," or "wreckers." Just as Nazis didn't exterminate Jewish human beings but "maggots," "menaces to society," "parasites" "corrosive influences on Aryan culture" and "masters of the lie." Just as today government and the media do not merely disagree with, but demonize and marginalize "militia nuts," "right-wing extremists," "haters" and "religious fanatics." (And just as it might be "fags," "knee-jerk liberals" or "godless humanists" shoved to the fringes if politicians of a different viewpoint got into power.)

My guess is that not one in a thousand Americans has any idea what happened under Communism in the USSR and elsewhere.

[wastoute]

When I get there that is gonna probably be my first question for Him. Then again, maybe not. I read Job.

[No One Special]

you’re = your

[monocle]

PC is stupidity strutting around in a cloak of pseudo intellectualism.