Ron Collins
Sep 1, 2018 · 5 min read

Political correctness cannot change hearts.

My clearest comprehension of how political correctness works in practice is to assess it as a sort of hybrid:

It is made up in part of Soviet-style commissariat enforcement in any arena where there are formal rules to pretend to be adhering to such as in the workplace or in academic settings. The rule is not actually anything like “don’t discriminate/abuse/harass/marginalize [enter victim-demographic here]” in anything but a rhetorical and symbolic sense; the REAL rule is far simpler to grasp but far more slippery to try and obey: don’t get denounced. The actual working terms on how to avoid such denunciation are utterly incoherent, completely fluid, and subject to radical alteration on a moment’s notice.

The other component of PC is simply ethical anarchy at the personal level: one does not take risks or stands on the basis of what one actually believes, but rather one of what one needs to be seen as believing.

PC behavior, rhetoric and interpersonal mannerisms are all entirely opportunistic and expediential in their nature: even if the current guidelines on what is PC and what is not change as they tend to do from one day or even minute to the next, the important objective to remaining on the good side of PC-ness is not to remain consistent in one’s convictions but rather to remain reliable in parroting the imposed, and counterfeit, convictions that at a given moment everybody is supposed to be endorsing.

PC is every bit as fickle as fashions in grooming and apparel are, if not more so. Those skin-tight jeans with the carefully ripped holes all the way down the front and bleached just so may have been okay yesterday, but watch out if by tomorrow they are just so-last-week as to be nothing but a laughingstock; PC-ism works precisely the same way.

The rule there, in both forms of bovine compliance with current fashion trends, is simply: don’t get caught on the wrong side, wherever that happens to be at the moment.

One of my favorite ways to take the full measure of how a very real and dangerous form of political correctness in history could be observed in action, is to examine the period just before the Second World War, when the Soviet Union and Third Reich had suddenly (to the astonishment and dismay of both communists and fascists around the world) signed a mutual non-aggression pact, also known historically as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Accords, after the Soviet and German foreign ministers who had signed them.

Quite literally speaking, in two extremely repressive nations where saying the wrong thing in either one could land a person up in a death camp, overnight the entire dialectic in each country about the other one was reversed one-eighty. The Nazi Party’s entire rise to power for years had been predicated on the historic mandate for the eventual violent destruction of “Bolshevism”, as meanwhile the Stalinist internal political purging mechanism had for years in its own right been arresting and in many cases summarily executing “enemies of the people” on fabricated charges of their being “fascist agents” among other things.

All that changed, overnight, in 1939, after the Accords were signed and announced to the world. In probably the most overlooked and underestimated historic irony of that entire global conflagration, from WWII’s opening shots in Poland and for most of its first two years, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were, in effect, ALLIES. (No wonder nobody else knew what side to take when, for instance, the USSR invaded Finland a few months into the pact….)

Then, two years later, one signatory up and invaded the others’ country on June 22, 1941, its preparations to do so aided in vast measure by the fact that for two years it had been deemed politically incorrect to forward to the Kremlin any report of German military actions near the Soviet border. Many of the USSR’s intelligence operatives, from all over Europe and even as far away as Japan, acting from both duty and patriotism, had been trying to warn Stalin and the Party for months of an impending German invasion of the Motherland, and many had been denounced and arrested and even shot for having done so. It wasn’t what Comrade Stalin wanted to hear.

Similarly, there were multiple instances in the Fuhrer’s inner circles throughout the entire war, when accurate and timely intelligence reports were laid before him outlining in graphic detail what the Allies’ precise plans were, items which many German agents (again, all over the world) had paid for in their own incarcerations and deaths to acquire, in duty and patriotism, but the Fuhrer would launch into one of his infamous rage episodes on seeing them because they did not square with his fantasies of how the war was supposed to be an instrument of his personal historic will. Top generals came to know that even the most dire and immediate warnings of Allied intent had to be kept out of Hitler’s purview and not even discussed at the general staff level, lest they literally lose their heads for their trouble (yes, the Gestapo used guillotines, on an industrial scale….)

Supposedly, communism and fascism are each other’s hostile and incompatible opposites. That was the summary of both German and Soviet wartime propaganda, once Operation Barbarossa was commenced; but until that day in the summer of 1941, in each country it was as risky as committing homicide in public to say so and had been for two whole years.

But each country observed fluid and absolutely untruthful codes governing what was politically correct from one day to the next, in nearly identical ways and with similarly lethal consequences for those who violated whatever the rules governing speech were at a given moment.

The other thing both nations had in common in their applications of political correctness as a totally incoherent but utterly life-threatening means of power maintenance? That these mechanisms of repression were most likely to be unleashed on those among the Party faithful themselves who were denounced as violating them, as meanwhile the ordinary non-Party populace in each country was at much lesser risk.

Today’s PC is much the same in this latter way: regular folks, who wait tables and keep books and build houses and sack groceries and drive trucks, need not give a rat’s ass what is or is not politically correct to say or be thought of as thinking. (And refreshingly, they don’t, self included….) But university professors, media anchors, movie stars and sitting politicians, to name a few archetypes of the Total Insider, better beware: the very code of shifting-sands psychobabble they claim to endorse themselves one day, is quite likely to be leveled at them as a weapon the next day, and thus become their undoing.

And in true Barbarossa form, the denunciation will most likely come from someone they had deceived themselves into believing was an ally, they won’t see it coming until it falls on their heads because they hadn’t dared USE their heads, and there will be no defense and no redemption for them, once it does.

When was the last time anyone ever saw a news item about how some regular schmo nobody ever heard of got me-too-ed or no-platformed or fired or sued in federal court because somebody said he said something that was politically incorrect? You won’t see it happening, because PC is about the Party sustaining internal discipline and a permanent climate of fear within its own ranks; it has nothing whatsoever to do with altering much less bettering the conditions of everyday life for anyone else.

Steering clear of PC and its ravages is easy, effortless even:

Don’t join the Party. (duh….)

    Ron Collins

    Written by

    Facts don’t care about your faction