[ExI] "PC"

Lee Corbin lcorbin at rawbw.com
Tue Sep 9 22:39:38 UTC 2008


Damien quotes from 

> blog quite nicely put, and clarifying, on a widespread misunderstanding:
> 
> http://ladislaw.livejournal.com/
> 
> 
> When the Ministry of Truth Got Ahold of Orwell
> 
> During the dustup surrounding the recent online posting of an ethnic 
> (or maybe it was religious) slur, some people objected to the 
> imposition of what they viewed as political correctness; they 
> referred to Orwell in their defense. (The author himself did so....)....

> The correlations these folks find between politically correct speech 
> and the Newspeak of 1984 simply aren't there. Though PC has become a 
> kind of swear word--a marvelous twisting of its intent by 
> conservatives, though certainly some on the left are to blame for its 
> "mission creep"--the purpose of being politically correct in one's 
> speech is to cause as little offense as possible to others.

What a huge load of misleading crap.

> This is achieved by using the terminology for self-reference employed by 
> those who are not you. Certainly such decisions are going to be 
> imperfect, but the knowledge that one should at least try to moderate 
> language in order to remove innately offensive terms is the key to 

(now get this!)

> politically correct thinking. It doesn't mean people don't have 
> differences and that you don't call each other on them; it purely has 
> to do with politeness. When language becomes loaded in unintentional 
> ways, we lose exactitude, hostility increases, and people focus on 
> the words rather than the message.

"Purely to do with politeness". Oh, sure! I strongly suspect that
if those who first coined the term had meant only politeness, then
they would have used "courtesy" or "politeness" or some phrase
based on them. No, instead we have "political correctness" which
does have a Comintern/Orwellian ring to it, as it *obviously*
rules as "incorrect" (i.e. inadmissible with implied threat of
forbidden) anything that is not the Party Line. And this is *exactly*
how the fellow-travelers and Communists of the 1940s and 1950s
thought (and kept right on thinking in the Worker's Paradise itself
by deeming dissenters as in need of psychiatric confinement), and
how, alas, today almost everyone has learned to think and talk.

I actually love those last five lines. They're a hoot;  unintentionally
quite hilarious. "When language becomes loaded in unintentional ways..."
he says, as he deliberately loads his own favored meaning into a phrase
that never had it.  Or she?  Oh, so sorry!  Alas, I'm afraid I may have
inadvertently given grave offense, not to mention falling down on my PC.

> Newspeak is about removing words not because they are offensive, but 
> because they are precise. Newspeak is about imprecision. Remove 
> words, the logic goes, and one removes the very concepts. Orwell was 
> not thinking of, say, ethnic slurs or rude speech; he was thinking of 
> humanistic language, exacting language, the language of human virtue 
> and inhumane horror.

Yeah, and just where have terms like "virtue", "courtesy", and "politeness"
gone, and (even in the best case) why did they need to be replaced
(according to his own absurd claim) by "political correctness"?  Just
who is it anyway who recoils from concepts like "virtue"? It's the
same damned folks who introduced, sponsored, and sanctioned
being "politically correct" in the first place, and have done every other
thing that they can think of to attack tradition, Victorianism, traditional
standards of conduct and decorum, and tradition in general. 

> The military term "collateral damage" is Orwellian precisely because
> it removes ethics and humanity and human suffering from its reach.
> Newspeak, like some military speech, blunts our understanding,
> and thus blunts our humanity.

Yes!  And notice the cherry-picking of examples so goddam common
in propaganda. He made a feeble attempt at even-handedness in the
second paragraph above, that looks to me little more than subterfuge,
though admittedly in the right direction. Yes it is perfectly true that
efforts towards newspeak, whether it be attempts to replace "AD/BC"
by the more PC terms "BCE/CE", or whether it be "terminate",
"collateral damage", or "pro-life" as other disparate groups and
sentiments pick up on the idea, all still stink to high heaven with
this same horrid odor of propaganda and silly efforts at mind-control.

> Of course, people can take even the clarity of Orwell and distort his 
> meaning for their own purposes.

Yes---and not only is it now common to do so in every field, Lenin's
own personal and ultimate gift to humanity, but we have an example of
this very author doing it too, right here!

> There is a better parallel to politically correct speech, and it's to 
> be found in Fahrenheit 451; however, this parallel too misses the 
> mark.

A remarkably good parallel, indeed that fits the author's own
twisted claims about "political correctness" is the use of 
euphemism that goes far beyond politeness and runs amuck
into vast regions of silliness. You are *not* going to improve
the status of black people in the western world by renaming
them every decade or two. You are not going to make cripples
any less lame by moving from "cripple" to "handicapped" to
"challenged" or "special". But I tell you it's the same mindset
as those who absolutely need to abolish the traditional and
quite harmless use of the default "he" in order to save endless
repetitions of "he and she" (or to constantly be distracting
readers with "she" superposed over the traditional "he" at
every turn).

> inappropriate; people in Bradbury's world object because they refuse 
> to have anyone speak at all about the differences that exist. To 
> speak of politics, religion, race and sex is to disturb the facade of 
> bland sameness, and people don't want their perfect future disturbed. 
> As Montag tells his wife, sometimes we need to be shaken up. Bradbury 
> objects to a culture that fears confronting its issues, not one 
> that's merely addressing itself to impolite forms of speech.

Sometimes language that the author might find to be impolite,
(perhaps a sentence that employed the word "janitor"?), others
might find to be just disturbing "the facade of bland sameness".

I do fear that if I became dictator tomorrow, the author would
find himself suddenly "liberated" from certain "improprieties of
speech" in one of my "re-education" camps, two more terms
there that we owe to modern left-wing totalitarianism.

Lee




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