Until recently I thought the most extreme example of (to use the Yiddish phrase) chutzpah had come from the lips of that very successful American historian Eric Foner. In response to a question in the socialist periodical Dissent by historian Eugene Genovese in the summer of 1994 about why he had never apologized for being, like his father and uncle, an unabashed Stalinist, Foner explained that he had wanted to do something for American blacks. He was particularly distressed by “residential apartheid,’ which he ascribed to “a putatively free market economy.” Joining the Communist Party seemed to be the best way to pursue Foner’s goal. My friend Wes McDonald responded to this reasoning by asking whether Stalin protected civil rights in the gulag. Apparently Foner wishes us to think that he did.
But now FOX-news, the voice of the GOP, may have gone beyond Professor Foner as a perpetrator of outrageous hypocrisy. Last Tuesday night various talking heads, led by Sean Hannity and Karl Rove, were lamenting “all the political correctness” they found on the American left. American military leaders and prominent Democrats just wouldn’t admit certain obvious facts, despite the massacre at Fort Hood. They still wouldn’t come clean that Islam may not be a religion of peace. Rove was particularly concerned about “where this political correctness could lead,” and he urged his fellow-media personalities, politicians, and military brass to become critical of this fashion.
As I listened to Karl Rove yammer on about the PC epidemic, I thought I was hearing the equivalent of a plea by Adolf Hitler to end German anti-Semitism. There is nobody I can think of who has exerted himself more tirelessly than Rove to make the GOP a “minority-friendly” party. And as Steve Sailer has underlined multiple times, none of this pandering has yielded the slightest electoral benefit. But whether pushing for sub-prime loans for Hispanics, urging the removal of Confederate flags from just about everywhere on the planet, or advising Bush to give his self-abasing speech in Senegal in July 2003 about America as a penitent, recovering slave society, Karl has always been for the wearing of sackcloth and ashes as well as for giveaways as means by which the GOP can win over minorities. Karl, of course, is not an original. He stands entirely in the tradition of Newt and the late Jack Kemp, two GOP congressmen and party leaders who could never do enough to talk up the redemptive mission of Martin Luther King or sing the praises of the civil rights movement.
Like other Republicans, Newt and Jack even back in the 1980s were indignant about how little their party was doing for racial and ethnic minorities, even though the GOP was disproportionately involved in enacting the landmark liberal legislation of the 1960s and, moreover, introduced affirmative action under Richard Nixon. I suppose Republicans can never reach out far enough to please their leaders and advisors, who nonetheless continue to bewail their party’s lack of outreach. Thus we read last month about the RNC’s black chairman visiting a black college in Little Rock, where he deplored the “subtle forms” of racism that still exist in American hiring practices and college admissions. This was a not very “subtle” promise of affirmative action in a future GOP administration (or what George W. called in 2000 during a debate with Al Gore “affirmative recruitment”).
What exactly is this unsettling Republican outburst against “too much political correctness”? It is nothing more than a synchronized outburst against people whom the neoconservative sponsors of FOX wish to have their mouthpieces rant against, namely Muslims. Note I am not calling for the importation of more Muslims into the U.S., and particularly not of the Fundamentalist kind. Moreover, were I a European, I would try to expel as many Fundamentalist Muslims as possible from my country and from the European continent. But in the U.S., political correctness has taken a more noxious form than letting embattled Muslims enter American territory. It has created through public education, government policies, and the entertainment industry a mindset that is helping to destroy a recognizably Western civilization.
Political correctness sanctifies feminism and homosexual lifestyles; and its condemnation of a traditional white Christian bourgeois society is far more ominous than the treatment of Muslim lunatics as privileged victims. This newest manifestation in the case of Muslims is simply the most recent excretion of a cultural disease that has already paralyzed our civilizational defenses. Even if all the Muslims vanished from the West, this PC mindset, disguised as economic need, which permitted and even encouraged the Muslims to settle in Western countries, would remain. And without Muslims in the U.S., the GOP and the Democrats would go on courting the usual designated victims.
Denouncing the politically correct treatment of Muslim terrorists allows the GOP to seem to be saying something courageous without departing from its conventional behavior. Although GOP and neocon journalists seem to be defying the Left by mocking PC, they are only catering to those who dislike anti-Israeli Muslims. Gen. George Casey and his officers should be ridiculed not only because they won’t attach “murder” to the crimes of a Muslim zealot. They should also be exposed for the kind of multicultural indoctrination they put their recruits through. Don’t expect the Wall Street Journal or Weekly Standard to blow the whistle on the PC educators. I had to learn about this by reading the “extremist” publication American Renaissance. In an outstanding article “Diversity in the Army,” (January 2008), there is information about the true extent of the political correctness besetting the armed forces. One may conclude after reading this brief that the selective, anti-Muslim critiques of PC in the military which is coming from FOX and other GOP outlets reek of dishonesty.
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Until recently I thought the most extreme example of (to use the Yiddish phrase) chutzpah had come from the lips of that very successful American historian Eric Foner. In response to … [Read More]
Posted by Paul Gottfried on November 22, 2009
The Usual Suspects