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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”