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« Kafka's Britain (2)
Main Bending the British mind (2) » |
January 02, 2006
Kafka's Britain (1)
Anthony Browne, the Europe correspondent for the Times, has written a tremendously important pamphlet about political correctness, called The Retreat of Reason,* which explains just why Britain has apparently lost its senses. Browne is one of the few who very clearly understands that ‘political correctness’ is not some ludicrous absurdity that can be laughed away, as it is so often depicted. It is instead a terrifying, totalitarian and in Britain wholly successful putsch against truth itself, the weapon of subversion of a moral, political and social order. It is an attempt to destroy the very notion of truth as a means of transferring power to those who designate themselves as ‘victims’, who can then hold the rest of society and truth itself to ransom; and they can never be challenged because, in the crazy pc moral universe, anyone who is ‘weak’ is incapable of doing wrong while anyone who is ‘strong’ is incapable of being a victim. As Browne so aptly describes it, this has produced a widespread conspiracy of denial, in which virtual reality becomes widely accepted as truth. Actual truth is often easily ascertainable in published material, but many have an emotional investment in disproving it. When those like Browne try to bring the truth to public attention, they encounter ...an almost universally intolerant and intellectually dishonest response by people who preferred political correctness over factual correctness. What caused Browne to sit up and take notice was when he reported that African immigration had overtaken gay sex as the main source of new HIV cases in Britain. HIV doctors praised him but the reaction from everyone else was incredulity and worse. Ministers refused to discuss it because they thought it was ‘racist’. As Browne says, this ideology has now completed its long march through Britain’s institutions and captured all of them, upheld by lobby groups from Liberty to Amnesty International, Friends of the Earth to Refugee Action and an array of domestic and international laws, charters and treaties. It has effectively stifled public debate, since anything that does not conform to its totalitarian tenets is by definition beyond the pale. Thus truth has been exiled from much of British public discourse altogether. Political correctness has promoted multiculturalism and fostered the creation of Muslim-only ghettoes; it promotes the rights of criminals over their victims; it promotes anarchy over teachers’ authority and promotes equality over excellence, thus degrading the standard of education. It is, as it has been previously described, ‘cultural Marxism’ — and it has achieved what Marxism never managed, the subversion of a society. It is Gramsci’s greatest posthumous triumph. Its selective and mind-twisting definition of truth makes its arguments almost impossible to refute. The politically correct often believe their version of truth can be justified by a lie. When the Daily Mirror published photographs purporting to show UK soldiers torturing Iraqis, the paper’s supporters continued to justify them even after they were revealed to be fake pictures on the grounds that they illustrated a ‘greater truth’. Browne gives some examples of the way debate has been twisted: Issue: women’s pay less than men’s Politically correct truth: sex discrimination Factually correct truth: different work/life choices; childcare breaks The truth is that public discourse in Britain has become a nightmare straight out of Kafka. Read Browne’s pamphlet and discover why. *The Retreat of Reason: Political Correctness and the Corruption of Public Debate in Modern Britain, by Anthony Browne; £9.50 from Civitas, 77 Great Peter Street, London SW1P 2EZ; tel: +44 20 7799 6677; email: books@civitas.org.uk Posted by melanie at January 2, 2006
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