Circa1865

This excerpt from a July 2000 Samuel Francis article traced the Leninist origins of and predictable conclusion of the political correctness phenomenon already in stride by the turn of the century.  Dr. Francis wrote that “the whole strategy of the revolution today known as “political correctness” relies on the distorted title of Lenin’s [1904] pamphlet,” One Step Forward, Two Steps Back.”  Lenin’s goal was “the seizure of total power, in particular power over culture, the forms and structures of human thought and judgment.”

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

From PC to the New Public Orthodoxy

“The term “political correctness” is now more than ten years old, and no sooner had it come into vogue than it began to excite the kind of ridicule that it deserved. Tales of college classes where elementary facts of history, science, literature and philosophy were deliberately butchered or silenced in order to suit the sexual, class, or racial obsessions of blatantly unqualified teachers became commonplace.

Students and even faculty were disciplined and sometimes punished with expulsion or threats of violence for the slightest verbal deviation from the “codes” imposed at distinguished universities.

For some years after its appearance, the battle against “political correctness” served as a major theme of almost all conservatives, paleo or neo, not a few of them made their reputations as writers in exposing the p.c. farce.

Once the radicals retired [from universities] in the next ten or twenty years, [a prominent neoconservative] predicted, the political correctness cult would disappear. As usual, the neoconservatives were wrong.

What has actually happened is that p.c. took its degree and graduated into the larger society. Today, not only universities but corporations and even town and city councils maintain codes of speech and behavior often far more draconian than anything ever concocted at Berkley of Madison.

The common response of most conservatives and even of the most sensible liberals to political correctness is to treat it as a joke, a silly excess of ignoramuses and intolerant mediocrities unable to master the traditional curricula or abide by standards of conduct that prevail in real schools and universities. Unfortunately, that response largely misses the larger point about political correctness, which is that it represents an actual revolution.

The experimental, university phase of the revolution lasted for about five or six years – the end of the 1980s and the first part of the 1990s – before the speech codes imposed by the first generation of revolutionaries began to be dismantled and replaced by more “moderate” ones.

That the revolution has now entrenched itself well outside the English departments and dormitories of academe ought to be clear enough. In 1999, the famous incident of the use of the word “niggardly” by a white Washington, D.C., city worker led to the worker’s dismissal for using racially inflammatory and insulting language.

The point is that it is not the act of offense that is being punished, it is the language used and the ideas invoked. To use a word that even points toward forbidden subjects is not a breach of etiquette; it is an act of subversion.

What is happening is that one set of icons, symbols, and (in the cant of the day) “role models” created and established by the old American culture is being replaced by another set of icons and symbols created and established by another culture that has found a new master race: The Virginian Confederate heroes of Richmond’s Monument Avenue are displaced by a statue of black tennis star Arthur Ashe; a mural of Lee in Richmond is altered to suit black demands but is later firebombed and vandalized with the slogan “Kill the white demons”; names of Confederate generals on the city’s bridges are changed to names of local “civil rights” leaders.

The revolution will probably not finish as radically as it began . . . [and] will allow the “conservatives” who defend the old culture to save face a bit and boast of how moderate they are and how they are willing to accept change. But the premises – that the old nation and culture are so evil that their symbolism must be altered or discarded and that the new dominant race and culture are so good that theirs must be saluted and worshipped as part of the new public orthodoxy, the new political formula that justifies the new ruling class – have already been conceded.”

(The Revolution Two-Step, Dr. Samuel Francis, Chronicles, July 2000, excerpts, pp. 32-33)