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Political Correctness
Circumstances Surrounding Publication
This article, originally written in 1996 then censored by technocrats, has since developed a truism. It had prophetic significance when written and now describes a decadent condition that pervades American society generally and the academe in particular.
University of Washington officials and Washington Superior Court judges have three times destroyed various forms of Contra Cabal - this electronic journal first published in 1992. They based their decisions entirely upon content perceived as politically incorrect. They used censorship, sanctioned prior restraint, and held kangaroo courts to destroy a career.
A Washington Superior Court judge granted impunity to landlords who inserted an unlawful clause in leases that prohibited “rudeness” without defining the term. The landlords then considered any speech with which they disagreed as rudeness and cause for eviction.
Then, encouraged by City of Seattle and HUD1 laissez faire policies and dereliction, Council House landlords (directors) destroyed the author’s home, excluded him from a large area of Seattle, and had him jailed including solitary confinement. For three years they have tried to have him returned to jail with false claims of contempt violations. [HUD-Seattle and Bremerton Contract Administrator] [City of Seattle]
Directors had three other elderly tenants confined without due process of law. They evicted, or threatened with eviction, more than two hundred others for expressing their views or for speaking with people whom administrators had singled out for ostracism. They retaliated against tenants who reported crimes to oversight authorities. They had complicity in at least two alleged homicides.
No, this and other abuse did not happen to Jews or homosexuals in Nazi Germany. It resulted from actions by Seattle Jews cloaked in anonymity who abused elderly and impoverished Jews and other minorities. A homosexual judge advised them from the bench to bring a frivolous lawsuit then granted them impunity. To cover up their criminal activity and misappropriation of government funds, the directors maintained a politically correct environment by using zero-tolerance policies.
The judicial decisions became subject to a petition for review in Washington Supreme Court supported by journalism unions, the American Civil Liberties Union, and a Seattle newspaper. Supreme Court found for the journalist on all counts.
nota bene (30 Mar 2006)
By unanimous decision of nine judges, Washington Supreme Court concluded that the trial court abused its discretion in restraining the author from contacting non-parties and in adding content restrictions to an anti-harassment order. It also concluded that the trial court erred in multiple findings of contempt of court. It reversed draconian trial and appellate decisions which resulted in the author spending time in jail.
All the contempt motions based upon alleged violations of an original flawed and unconstitutional anti-harassment order. The trial court denied the author his right to counsel and jailed him for 111 days (including 25 days in communicado solitary confinement). By failing to address that neglect in violation of Vienna Convention, the appellate court concurred with the draconian trial court order - prior restraint, constructive eviction from a residence, and jail time, without considering constitutional and international rights. Supreme Court found that trial and appellate courts had absolutely no justification for refusing a continuance and neglecting to provide legal counsel.
Supreme Court considered the specter of preventing journalists from publishing information then jailing them. The case captured the interest of national media and broached a worldwide outrage in the journalism community. Supreme Court also addressed questions related to the issues that both Superior Court and Court of Appeals studiously evaded.
[Without Let or Hindrance]
[Washington Supreme Court - Review] [Washington Supreme Court - Decision]
Introduction
Cruel and oppressive dictators for time immemorial used politically correct (pC) techniques to set moral standards. Having established an illusion of morality, they used arbitrary zero-tolerance policies to abuse and vilify others in order to achieve power and wealth.
Political correctness corrupts language. Politically correct expression conforms to the absolutism of a privileged oligarchy and supports conformist ideology. It classifies as a technocratic, apolitical, aberration. It probably ranks as the most odious aspect of postmodernism. It denies history in an attempt to reject the past. It involves a mimetic “do as I do” type of posturing which demands unanimity on what to accept and what to exclude.2
The general public does not realize the process of indoctrination that exists within universities in the United States: an indoctrination that emanates from technocratic, pseudo-theocratic control which allows the establishment of politically correct cults - religions that have no theology.
Politically correct ignorance derives from beliefs that result from ideological indoctrination which presents the university as a bastion of integrity and freedom of expression. Gullibility allows technocratic despots to sanctify and impose their own politically expedient ideas with impunity.
The principles that govern a free society do not allow regulation of speech and the US Constitution explicitly prohibits Congress from making any laws that might abridge freedom of speech or of the press. However, in recent years government has tried to curtail anything they define as “hate speech” by championing political correctness and intimidating journalists.
Political correctness proponents have, in attempts “to improve” personal behavior and language, ruined careers and disrupted or banned public speeches on campuses. Paradoxically, these individuals claim that they champion free speech. Traditional tolerance for dissent has evaporated and a systematic and steady erosion of freedom of speech continues using pC as an excuse.
First Amendment to the US Constitution
US First Amendment protects non-controversial pC speech. However, it primarily protects the ideas and beliefs contained in controversial or fringe expression. Attempts to legislate and restrict rudeness, prejudice, and minority views, start by attacking clearly obnoxious expressions then later move to control anything with which the pC disagree.
Laws to restrict speech and movement demonstrate symptoms of a decaying society and pose a threat to democracy. Government has no right to control personal conduct and speech. That type of control undermines liberty by trying to make individuals conform to moral norms. Government must confine itself only to ethical standards based in law.
The pC may attempt to silence the bigoted and the profane but those individuals will not change and societal standards will not improve through restricting dissenting expression. All totalitarian societies have claimed that pC guidelines purportedly protect the weak. This allowed the Nazis and Soviets to totally control political and religious views. In so doing, in company with other ideological regimes, they caused the deaths of millions of people in the twentieth-century alone.
Government presently argues that political ideas of fanatical religions have become more dangerous than previously encountered. Yet it persists in practicing religious extremism itself by suppressing dissent.3 An influential leader and poet during the romantic literary movement, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), wrote about the rapacity of the industrial revolution. Expelled from Oxford for writing and circulating a heterodox pamphlet, he later married Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft (daughter of the feminist exponent of equality between men and women). [She that Lies with the Dogs . . .]
Shelley argued that people first surrendered their minds or capacity to reason, then their hearts or capacity to empathize, until only the selfish demands for self-gratification remained - critical components of pC almost two centuries later.4
pC advocates have conducted one of the most organized and systematic assaults on free speech and privacy since the McCarthy era. Social conflict based upon class, gender, and ethnicity, has left virtually no room for a life shared among people. Cultists control pedagogy as a component of political and economic ideology.
Vague antiharassment laws provide no definition of the terms “offensive” and “harassment”. That vagueness, combined with an explosion of frivolous litigation to silence writers, allows truculent judges to make writers responsible for offending their readers. Their decisions smack of cultural fascism similar to that imposed under Chinese communism.5
Unlike progress in some other countries, the US has denied creation of a broad culture of democratic values and secular civilities through stable political and cultural methods - methods based upon universal suffrage and constitutional governance. This has resulted in linguistic or cultural hegemony - predominance and influence of one state over others through religious and cultural fascism with market values as the arbiter of social justice.
Hedonism has led to destruction of day-to-day cultural life and the language that supports it.6 A politically controlled multicultural society that relies upon concentration of wealth and magnitude of deprivation portends a life censored to a point devoid of any culture.
Art as Free Expression
If one considers art as expression, then prior restraint and censorship also apply to art. Nazis certainly used “moral art” as a means of communication and propaganda. This allowed them to impose their “morality” upon others without applying the same criteria to themselves. They defined morality and ethics synonymously then used them interchangeably to impose political correctness. They then murdered Jews, homosexuals, and handicapped people, while cultural censors imposed hypocritical standards to evade reporting it.
In pre-war (WWII) Germany, Nazis made deliberate inroads into the art world for propaganda purposes. To advance pC they held an exhibition in Munich (1937) called Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art). They used that show to indoctrinate a gullible public that they should avoid art believed to promote non-Nazi themes: mental illness, criminality, Jewishness, Bolshevism, modernism, and homosexuality. They let the German people know that they did not accept some art forms as appropriate (pC) for viewing by the "highest race".
During the Entartete Kunst campaign they confiscated over 20,000 works by more than 200 prominent artists. They included works by Klee, Kandinsky, Munch, and the artist that they considered most degenerate - Pablo Picasso.
Those artists suffered persecution due to the content of their artwork and the beliefs they held concerning religion and government. Art has often expressed feeling in a way that has made it a scapegoat for persecution of particular views or beliefs. History shows the powerful use of propaganda in the arts to turn a perception of something unconventional into something evil.
Adolf Zieglar, president of the Reich Culture Chamber declared:
Our patience with all those who have not been able to fall in line is at an end. . . . What you are seeing here are the crippled products of madness, impertinence, and lack of talent. . . . I would need several freight trains to clear our galleries of this rubbish . . . This will happen soon.
Adolf Hitler echoed the sentiment by describing the art of artists whom he supported:
Art is a noble mission. Those who have been chosen by destiny to reveal the soul of a people, to let it speak in stone or ring in sounds, live under a powerful, almighty and all pervading force. They will speak a language, regardless of whether others understand them, they will suffer hardship rather than become unfaithful to the star which guides them from within.
Rudy Giuliani (former Roman Catholic mayor of New York) has vociferously attacked modern art. He has referred to as perverted, blasphemous, outrageous, disgusting, and anti-Catholic, as well it might be in the minds of the pC. However, in a democracy that professes freedom of speech (and accepts art as a language) his actions amounted to unwarranted censorship and prior restraint.
Giuliani tried to impose political correctness upon artists in the same way that others impose similar narrow views upon writers. Like the Nazis, who suspended monetary support for avant-garde artists, Giuliani tried to stop funding of institutions who encouraged and exhibited controversial art.
Cultural pC attacks have not only come from predictable political sources. Senator Joe Lieberman also leads a fight against “degeneracy” in popular culture. In an unholy alliance with William Bennett, he has tried to shame media conglomerates into adopting "voluntary common-sense codes of conduct" to "protect America's children".
Modern cultural censors speak of concern for the welfare of others but their platitudes actually mask a more sinister Nietzschean ideology or power play. Nazi moral critique of avant-garde art and writing deliberately masked propagandist attacks on those who threatened their power.
Propaganda
US government now makes similar propagandist attacks upon oppressed groups whose anger and criticism threaten the power of corporate oligarches and political aristocrats. These neo-fascists follow identical criteria to those prevalent among Nazis when it comes to attacking modern writers and artists.7 [Propaganda]
National Socialist standards for art idealized figures and sentimental landscapes that informed nineteenth-century popular taste - neoclassical themes that Adolf Hitler favored. However, a more sinister motive fed the acceptance of that art.
Neoclassical art symbolized a standard of beauty that cemented unity by projecting a pC (moral) standard to which government considered everyone should aspire. Those dictates claimed that true art embodied respectability, public morality, and “proper” sexual behavior at the expense of freedom of expression.8
Conversely, Nazi racial derogation in cartoon art followed centuries-old practices. Visual representations of Jews sucking sow's teats originated in thirteenth century art and reached their peak of obscenity during the fifteenth century when artists depicted Jews at the animal's hindquarters eating excrement. The popularity of these images ensured their survival until the nineteenth century.
This defamatory use of symbolism manifested in Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece. In addition to the positive Marian symbols of the bed and the bathtub contained in one of the paintings, it also includes a chamber pot with Hebrew characters. Many sixteenth-century observers saw the uncovered chamber pot as the antithesis of the bathtub by symbolizing decay and filth.
The use of Hebrew characters in Christian art remained recognizably stigmatic. The chamber pot expressed something more than symbolic decay. The inclusion of Hebrew characters, without semantic purpose, subtly symbolized vilification. It linked pollution metaphors with Jews and visually reiterated societal condemnation of contemporary Jewry. [Grünewald Paradigm]
In the case of Janet Jackson, pC proponents reached a new high by censuring jewelry (nipple shields) used as body art. Jackson probably used the occasion as a deliberate publicity stunt to increase her exposure knowing the orthodox outcry that it would cause. So what, Janet Jackson flipped a tit exposed a breast on television.
Buoyed by public outrage, Congress held hearings and voted for a tenfold increase in fines for broadcast indecency. Each of the 20 CBS-owned stations that aired the Super Bowl paid a record $27,500 each ($550,000) in fines. Congress ignored the fact that viewers probably see more graphic close-ups of knockers mammary glands each week on Desperate Housewives, ABC's racy prime-time soap opera.9
Cultural neo-fascists now try to shame and regulate media through political means which has made the job of ethical journalists and artists increasingly difficult. The media moguls care little about morality, ethics, and truth. They care more about political power and money.
Trying to find a more tolerant government every four years does not provide an answer. Neo-fascism has the same result regardless of who stands at the helm. Cult leaders will always try to scapegoat and suppress culture that does not serve the needs of the ruling class.
Academic Censorship
Postmodernist proponents try to seize control by replacing normative curriculum with “a correct sort” without defining it. They demand changes and introduce speech codes, then expect everyone to imitate them in thought and deed without exception. They rely upon negative explication to avoid defining issues.
Plato used negative explication. In his dialogues, Socrates never defined the term knowledge. Instead, he proved the terms which do not apply to it and propounded that language represents neither sense perception nor true opinion with a rational explanation. He then used convoluted argument to support that contention. [Negative Explication]
Political correctness academics use terms and techniques like de-construction, semiotics, post-structuralism, post-colonialism, new historicism, and feminism, and any other -ism that they can coin. They use these terms to confuse their adversaries and each other enough to seize political control and gain tenure. They then honor each other to obtain substantial pay increases for their academic achievement. Simply put, they have developed an academic cloning process based upon convoluted thinking and speech codes which they expect everyone to accept without question.
Traditionally, in loco parentis (in place of a parent) has given professors parental responsibility for students; however, the courts have determined that this no longer applies. They have replaced the traditional concept with a law of contracts that gives students a contractual type of academic freedom despite professorial or parental control. Those laws also make professors, many of them state employees, personally responsible for negligence or fraud. As individuals, they cannot now hide behind the “risk management” procedures used by universities to evade culpability.
Many parents still demand pC among their children to compensate for their own ignorance, insecurity, and shame. Similarly, many professorial "parents" in the academic "family" demand pC to reinforce their own ignorance, insecurity, and lack of scholarship. They fail to recognize that by the time a student enters college they have reached adult age with attendant rights and responsibilities. The increased professorial control over student expression has become obvious from the increased number of pC censors trying to control student newspapers.
Both types of parental control support indoctrination. Parents with filiopietistic (immoderate reverence for forebears or tradition) leanings (co-dependence) and despotic academicians have their tenure and collegiality (absolutism). In denial of their own problems, both types of parent admonish their children or proteges to become pC.
Paternalism demands that students (offspring) take care that what they say, what they think, and what they do, offends nobody. It encourages them to decide issues, not on the evidence or the merits, but based upon the behavior of the oligarchy to which they belong. They then gain suitable rewards as pC clones for following the ideology taught by the oligarch. Eventually, they obtain a worthless sheepskin designating them “a pC pointy-headed clone”. [Cloning Pointy-Headed Cabalists]
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Cloning has moved from the intellectual to the physical. A state family-planning sperm bank in China has confined itself to donors from the academe. It will accept donations only from academics who have achieved at least the rank of associate professor. The agency received many calls from professors willing to donate, however, the agency makes no mention of the academic requirements for women recipients.10 To meet an urgent demand for sperm for its diversity program, University of Washington has developed rainbow sperm that meets pC criteria for Multicultural Academic In Vitro Fertilization (MAIVF).
Political correctness frequently appears in texts by authors valued for their minority status, gender, or political conviction rather than ethical rigor. To achieve acceptance they assume an erudite role then lie, as all stage actors lie, to indoctrinate their audience. This leaves their audience in a constant state of perplexity while eagerly awaiting enlightenment in the next scene. [Thespian Liar]
Politically Correct Liars
Serious education has virtually ceased to exist in some American universities. In those institutions, anything that does not have an application to a system of commerce and profit no longer has credence. Political correctness has enabled everyone to lie to the greatest economic or political advantage with impunity. [Impunity]
To lie convincingly, politicians have become consummate actors. US Secretary of State recently plagiarized a graduate student paper. He then lied in a report to the United Nations that the information had come from an intelligence source. Then, the media lied about what he had said. Ironically, officials covered up Picasso's Guernica during the speech. In their ignorance, few delegates realized the neo-fascist significance of the gesture and its relation to Nazi propaganda.
Many politicians, like actors, cannot make a living in a “real” profession. They live in a perpetual, manic conflict. A few infiltrate the community at large for economic reasons. They use their acting skills to survive by persuading gullible colleagues that they can perform the functions for which they receive payment.
An examination of their motives leads to a better understanding of their scruples or lack of them. Both politicians and actors create fiction instead of applying facts which also describes the art of academic lying based upon pC. Ronald Reagan, a consummate actor, saluted a cemetery of Nazi dead with heartfelt solemnity and did not mention the tens of millions of victims of that vile regime.
Mel Brooks extended that thinking into palatable shticks for both the masses and intellectuals. Like Reagan, politicians and academics act with seeming sincerity using a confusion of movie events and reality to further secret political agendas. Reagan displayed an intellectual weakness that really defined as Stanislavskian mastery. His political performances emphasized the psychological motivation in role playing. [Thespian Liar]
An infamous and telling Pinochet “reform” related to pC in education. It ended the academic role in social criticism and political opposition. Universities dismantled departments in disciplines connected with political discussion and reasoning and issued degrees in business and technology - training not education. Similarly in American universities, students can now graduate without a foreign language, philosophy, science, music, art, history, political science, and economics. Like the Chilean example, this has created a politically subliterate society ill-equipped to support and nurture a democracy.
Technocracy
To control students in a technocracy, administrators make frivolous claims of user infraction of regulations to deny computer access and to curb freedom of speech. Then, they arrogantly use their administrative powers to deny due process. This arrogance represents the quintessence of totalitarianism.
Fortunately, technocrats, politicians, and judges can neither gain absolute control of internet content nor empower themselves as absolute censors because of the global nature of the medium. However, in universities they may temporarily impose their ideology through apathy and lethargy of academics who consistently allow the expropriation of their academic freedom by administrators and technocrats.
Unfortunately, academicians do not use academic freedom to prevent technocratic despots from usurping their communication rights. Many faculty members and students voluntarily relinquish their rights through fear, apathy, ignorance, or lethargy. Then they find themselves censored when they have a need to publish controversial research material.
By their fear, they fall victim to the totalitarianism that usually accompanies censorship. By their ignorance and constant carping about the "appropriateness" of messages distributed by email, they give systems operators the means to disenfranchise them and their colleagues. By their apathy they give these latter day Big Brothers and Sisters the excuse, and inordinate power, to silence them. By their lethargy they do to themselves what they have done to others through their irresponsible carping. Then, freedom of speech ceases to exist and academic communication becomes controlled by avaricious technocrats and administrators instead of faculty members and students.
Lethargic and apathetic academicians have allowed technocrats to sanctify and establish their own ideas of pC and political expediency. This turns the idea of academic freedom into a farce. Conversely, many academics indoctrinate university students with a subtlety that most religious cult leaders would envy. Their students genuinely come to believe that they have freedom of thought and deny that they have become victims of a pernicious system. They learn too late that thought controllers eventually evolve as very powerful rulers.
The academic system has now reached a point where one may not survive without accepting psychological cloning. Academic dissidents first receive a taste of acceptance that gives the illusion of democratic behavior but a steady diet of discrimination, harassment, and humiliation soon follows.
Eventually, the victims either succumb to unbelievable ideologies or become pariahs and eventually leave the oligarchy. The psychological damage caused by this abuse requires extremes of self-appraisal and self-discipline to reverse it.
Those who succumb to the totalitarian ethic must participate in the same propaganda and academic fraud as their benign mentors. They become the next generation of honored and respected academicians and subscribe to all aspects of pC and cultic theology.
Oligarchical power allows them to impose their opinions upon others who express different views. They can then revel in the harassment of selected victims and stimulate feelings of power and self-worth in retribution for their own experience as students. Finally, they feel deep gratitude for all the benefits that have resulted from parental admonitions of long ago, and always remember, in anything they say, that:
If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all!
Their rewards become manifest in absolute parental pride in their activities and the possession of worthless sheepskins.
Politically Correct Cloning
Everyone has a responsibility to distinguish between prejudices perpetuated by pC and legitimate points of view. Professors need empathy to understand the prejudices, sometimes deeply seated, of their students. They also need to encourage discussion of apparently negative views to show how changed attitudes become productive. They need to show how prejudice can diminish after rational disputation and without coercion or “sensitivity” training.
Most people suffer from some inherent bigotry, primarily from parental examples both ignorant and subliminal. However, personal attitudes change in a climate that caters to neither suppression nor internalization of bigotry.
Political correctness does not allow freedom of expression because it controls disputation. It allows those in authority, both administrative and professorial, to exercise an unrighteous domain. Unsuspecting students often absorb propaganda calculated to enrich the speaker or to cover up personal insecurity. Unfortunately, this helps the academic cloning process and perpetuates a standard of mediocrity enhanced by suppression of speech.
Cloning presents a real threat to academic freedom. The threat lies in the non-selection and non-promotion of those with nonconformist views. This process results in the standard of quality and excellence emanating from those making judgment. Consequently, academic cloning supports a cultic instinct toward conformity. This conformity eliminates an inconvenient nonconformity (also honest dissent) and the usurped power of the cult remains safe from free expression.11 [Conspiracy of Silence]
The process of cloning that relates to student fellowships and scholarships requires even greater subservience and humiliation. The academic cabal refuses to award fellowships and scholarships to students based upon merit and experience unless they submit to purgatorial cabalism. Cabal members evaluate the student's response to a series of predetermined cloning criteria.
The process guarantees the preservation of, and extends the range of, the extant mediocrity practiced by cult members into the graduate student population. Many unqualified students submit to the cloning process and receive awards, then the cabal falsifies files and transcripts to cover up illegal discrimination.
Once cloned, the stable of student mercenaries provides teaching assistants that relieve professors of their responsibility to teach. The student clones ensure that what the professors would not have taught, if they had taught, continues not to be taught in the same way.
In the Rensselaer model, undergraduates teach graduate courses. This results from appointing them as lecturers. These unqualified, inexperienced, pC cloned students teach instead of accredited, experienced, non-cloned lecturers with many years of teaching experience in the same discipline.
This should not surprise anyone in an institution that for more than thirty years had a pC Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences that did not possess a graduate degree. This Roman Catholic priest had a baccalaureate degree from Catholic University of America supported by a transcript retroactively handwritten during a single day.
Perhaps the new president of Rensselaer should investigate then hear his confession and remove the outrageous retirement benefits that he receives after many years of subterfuge, demonization, and destruction of those with whom he disagrees - both faculty members and students.
Conclusion
Cruel and oppressive dictators for time immemorial used pC techniques to set moral standards. Having established an illusion of morality they used arbitrary zero-tolerance policies to abuse and vilify others in order to achieve power and wealth.
Today, tolerance for dissent has evaporated and a systematic and steady erosion of freedom of speech continues using pC as an excuse. Political correctness corrupts language. Expression then conforms to the absolutism of a privileged oligarchy and supports conformist ideology. It denies history in an attempt to reject the past. It involves a mimetic “do as I do” type of posturing which demands unanimity about what to include and what to exclude.
All totalitarian societies have claimed that pC guidelines purportedly protect the weak. This allowed the Nazis and Soviets to totally control political and religious views. In so doing, with other ideological regimes they caused the deaths of hundreds of millions of people in the twentieth-century alone.
Unlike the progress in some other countries, the US has denied the creation of a broad culture of democratic values and secular civilities. It denies the stable political and cultural mechanisms based upon universal suffrage and constitutional governance essential to democracy. Hedonism has led to destruction of day-to-day cultural life which portends a life censored to a point devoid of any sense of culture.
Trying to find a more tolerant government every four years does not provide an answer. Neo-fascism has the same result regardless of who stands at the helm. Cult leaders will always try to scapegoat and suppress culture and curb free expression that does not serve the needs of the ruling class.
Political correctness does not allow freedom of expression because it controls disputation. It allows those in authority to exercise an unrighteous domain. In the academe, unsuspecting students often absorb propaganda calculated to enrich the speaker or to cover up personal insecurity. Unfortunately, this helps the academic cloning process and perpetuates the standard of mediocrity.
US First Amendment protects non-controversial pC speech. However, it primarily protects the ideas and beliefs contained in controversial or fringe expression.
[Nmesis]
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