More on Political Correctness from Melanie Phillips - Granite Grok

More on Political Correctness from Melanie Phillips

Melanie Phillips is an outspoken writer from Great Britain – she often ends up in hot water for her opposition to the Islamiaation of Great Britain – it was she that coined the name "Londonistan".  In this column from November, she discusses how liberal (not the big "L", but the classic definition of Western liberalism) Western philosophical tenets such as democracy, free speech, practice of religion, and our traditional philosophy of life are all being undermined.

In a different way, it speaks to the analogy that I have used for years (and most recently here) – continue to remove the bricks that make up the "wall of society" and eventually it will fall down.  Many who practice this, I believe, are the "useful idiots": believing that if something sounds "nice" why not do it and never go past the surface levels to see what the effects are on our fundamental "bricks".  Helping the poor?  Great!  Raising taxes to do so?  Is skewing taxes to do just that "redistribution" for and to the poor such that it heavily taxes the rich and middle classes?  Just look at California and New York to see the effects when the tax revenues dry up as the rich go broke.

As they are now doing here in the US (currently masked by the recession).  But back to the main point that this "yanking the bricks" has been for decades ("abstracting" and emphasis mine):

We were fools to think the fall of the Berlin Wall had killed off the far Left. They’re back – and attacking us from within

…To so many, that heady day seemed to herald the emergence of a better world. The spectre of communism had finally been laid to rest. Liberty had triumphed over tyranny.

The end of the Cold War even led some to proclaim that this was ‘the end of history’  –  which was to say that liberal democracy was now the dominant and unchallengeable force in the world.

The collapse of communism was actually a slow-burning process. Its moral and political bankruptcy became obvious decades before that glorious Berlin day in November 1989

…But what is perhaps less obvious is that communism did not just vanish in a puff of historical smoke. The Soviet Union was defeated and fell apart, for sure. But the communist ideology that fuelled it did not so much disintegrate as reconstitute itself into another, even more deadly form as the active enemy of western freedom.

Subversive

Soviet Communism was a belief system whose goal was to overturn the structures of society through the control of economic and political life. This mutated into a post-communist ideology of the Left, whose no-less ambitious aim was to overturn western society through a subversive transformation of its culture.

For many communist fellow travellers, the scales fell from their eyes when the Hungarian uprising was crushed in 1956. Others, over the years, lost faith not just in communism but in its less radical sister, socialism, as their core tenet of ‘equality’ proved itself in a myriad different ways to be the enemy of freedom and justice, with market forces appearing to carry the torch of liberty instead.

But as communism slowly crumbled, those on the far-Left who remained hostile towards western civilisation found another way to realise their goal of bringing it down.

This was what might be called ‘cultural Marxism’

It was based on the understanding that what holds a society together are the pillars of its culture:Transform the principles that these embody and you can thus destroy the society they have shaped.

This key insight was developed in particular by an Italian Marxist philosopher called Antonio Gramsci. His thinking was taken up by Sixties radicals  –  who are, of course, the generation that holds power in the West today.

…He believed instead that society could be overthrown if the values underpinning it could be turned into their antithesis: if its core principles were replaced by those of groups who were considered to be outsiders or who actively transgressed the moral codes of that society.

So he advocated a ‘long march through the institutions’ to capture the citadels of the culture and turn them into a collective fifth column, undermining from within and turning all the core values of society upside-down and inside-out.

See this.

Education was wrecked, with its core tenet of transmitting a culture to successive generations replaced by the idea that what children already knew was of superior value to anything the adult world might foist upon them.

…Law and order were similarly undermined, with criminals deemed to be beyond punishment since they were ‘victims’ of society and with illegal drugtaking tacitly encouraged by a campaign to denigrate anti-drugs laws.

The ‘rights’ agenda  –  commonly known as ‘political correctness’  –  turned morality inside out by excusing any misdeeds by self-designated ‘victim’ groups on the grounds that such ‘victims’ could never be held responsible for what they did.

Feminism, anti-racism and gay rights thus turned men, white people and Christians into the enemies of decency who were forced to jump through hoops to prove their virtue.

This Through The Looking Glass mindset rests on the belief that the world is divided into the powerful (who are responsible for all bad things) and the oppressed (who are responsible for none of them).

This is a Marxist doctrine….

However, the terrifying fact is that they form a totalitarian mindset that replicates the way communist societies clamped down on any other than permitted views. Thus the intolerance  –  or even arrest  –  of Christians opposed to gay adoption and civil union, or the vilification as ‘racists’ of those opposed to mass immigration.

This mindset also led to the belief that a sense of nationhood was the cause of all the ills in the world, precisely because western nations embodied western values. So transnational institutions or doctrines such as the EU, UN, international law or human rights law came to trump national laws and values.

But the truth is that to be hostile to the western nation is to be hostile to democracy. And indeed, with the development of the EU superstate we can see that the victory over one anti-democratic regime within Europe  –  the Soviet Union  –  has been followed by surrender to another.

For the republic of Euroland puts loyalty to itself higher than that to individual nations and their values. It refused to commit itself in its constitution to uphold Christianity, the foundation of western morality.

Instead, it is committed to moral and cultural relativism, which sets group against group and guarantees supreme and antidemocratic power to the bureaucrats setting the rules of ‘diversity’ and outlawing all dissent from permitted attitudes.

…The Iron Curtain came down only to be replaced by a rainbow-hued knuckle-duster, as our cultural commissars pulverise all forbidden attitudes in order to reshape western society into a post-democratic, post-Christian, post-moral universe. Lenin would have smiled.

the structures and institutions of education, family, law, media and religion.

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