Guest Editorial
By LAWRENCE SELLIN, PHD | OCTOBER 8, 2014
National suicide by political correctness
Barack Obama said "ISIL is not Islamic. No religion condones the killing of innocents."
That definition includes: al- Qa'ida, Abu Sayyaf, Gama'a al-Islamiyya, Hamas, Hizballah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Jaish-e-Mohammed, Lashkar-e Tayyiba, Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, Asbat al-Ansar, al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, Jemaah Islamiya, Ansar al-Islam, Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, al-Shabaab, al-Qa'ida in the Arabian Peninsula, Boko Haram, al-Nusrah Front, Ansar al-Shari'a in Benghazi, Ansar al-Shari'a in Darnah, Ansar al-Shari'a in Tunisia - Well, you get the idea.
As noted recently by Diana West, Americans continue to be perplexed as to how the Obama Administration and the media keep repeating the politically correct propaganda that Islam has nothing to do with jihad. Such widespread, politics- and mass-media-driven brainwashing is not new.
Today's politicians, journalists and academics seek to separate Islam from its radical impact; brutal conquest, forced conversion, sex slavery and beheadings. Past opinion-makers worked equally hard to separate communism from its own brand of inhuman impact; brutal conquest, forced collectivization, concentration camps and mass murder.
Few Americans realize that political correctness, a policy implicitly promoted by Democrats and established as the de facto totalitarian legal system on American universities, was designed by communists in the 1930s to undermine western civilization and democracy while disguising the nature of the threat.
After the successful 1917 communist revolution in Russia, it was widely believed that a proletarian revolt would sweep across Europe and, ultimately, North America. It did not. The only two attempts at a workers' government in Munich and Budapest lasted only months.
As a result the Communist International began to investigate other ways to create the state of societal hopelessness and alienation necessary as a prerequisite for socialist revolution.
The single, most important organizational component of this conspiracy was a Communist think tank called the Institute for Social Research, popularly known as the Frankfurt School. The task of the Frankfurt School was first, to undermine the Judeo-Christian foundation of Western civilization that emphasized the uniqueness and sacredness of the individual and, second, to determine new cultural forms which would increase the disaffection of the population.
Political Correctness is cultural Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms. Just as in classical economic Marxism, certain groups, i.e. workers and peasants, are a priori good, and other groups, i.e., the bourgeoisie and capital owners, are evil. In the cultural Marxism of Political Correctness certain groups are good, such as feminist women, blacks, ethnic minorities and those who define themselves according to sexual orientation. These groups are deemed to be "victims," and therefore unquestionably good. Similarly, white males and, by extension Western civilization, are determined to be automatically evil, thereby becoming the equivalent of the bourgeoisie in economic Marxism.
Perhaps the most important, if least-known, of the Frankfurt School's successes was the shaping of the electronic media of radio and television into the powerful instruments of social control which they represent today.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, American universities now represent the largest concentration of Marxist dogma and political correctness in the world. This is not the academy of a republic, but Hitler's Gestapo and Stalin's NKVD rooting out deviationists in the guise of racial, ethnic, gender and cultural sensitivity.
The policies of the Obama Administration reflect what David Horowitz described as an unholy alliance between leftists and radical Islam. They have been brought together by the traits they share – their hatred of Western civilization and their belief that the United States is the embodiment of evil on earth. While Islamic radicals seek to purge the world of heresies and of the infidels who practice them, leftist radicals seek to purge society's collective "soul" of the vices allegedly spawned by capitalism – those being racism, sexism, imperialism, and greed.
Given the existential threat posed by such ideologies, political correctness can no longer be considered merely a peculiarity of cowardly politicians, a biased media or tenured radicals, but a dangerous subversive element of an anti-American and anti-Western strategy.
But frankly, Mr. Obama, I don't care if ISIL is "Islamic" or not. Wanting us all dead is a sufficient reason to take the war directly and aggressively to them.
Lawrence Sellin, Ph.D. is a retired colonel with 29 years of service in the US Army Reserve and a veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq. Colonel Sellin is the author of "Restoring the Republic: Arguments for a Second American Revolution." He receives email at [email protected]
