Monthly Archives: July 2017

The following guest commentary was written by Lou Zako, a semi-retired doctor living in Harbor Springs. His views are his own. Email him at lrzako@gmail.com.

As a person of faith, my world view recognizes that both good and evil are ever-present in our lives. While government can at times protect from evil, it is often ineffective, and at times counter-productive. We must look to our religions, our communities, and our families to help instill good in our psyches.

The radical left, which includes a significant number in government at various levels, much of academia, and much of the main-stream media, has been remarkably successful in silencing those of us with traditional values, including love of country, through the use of political correctness.

I challenge my readers to introspectively ask themselves if the threat of being called a racist leads them to remain silent in the face of obvious bias. How many of us are willing to go to a local school board meeting to challenge the board and the administration when they unconstitutionally prohibit students from expressing their religious beliefs.

An excellent example of the intimidation of the populace into silence is the insane issue of transgender bathrooms, forced upon every school district in America by the Obama administration, in concert with big business and the New York Times. The hypocrisy of pretending to protect a person of a specific biologic gender from harassment without any regard for an overwhelming majority of children deprived of their right to privacy is stark and dramatic. In graphic terms, this policy mandated public schools to permit a teenage boy with a penis to use the girls bathrooms and showers by simply declaring that he felt like a female that day. Most of us would label such an edict insane, but it is actually much worse. It is in fact, intimidation of the citizenry to bend to the will of a tyrannical leftist government.

Almost daily we witness the radical left silencing the rest of us by using the race card. While it is perfectly acceptable to mock a Donald Trump or a George W. Bush, rather than debating specific issues, we dare not mock or disagree with Barack Obama for fear of being labeled as a racist.

A frank look at the end result of the Western European and North American elite preaching to the rest of us about the virtues of diversity and multiculturalism leads to the conclusion that millions of ordinary Americans, Brits, or Germans are tired of being human fodder for radical Islamists. The elites have their high walls and their bodyguards to protect them from terrorists, while making every effort to disarm the rest of us and leave us as helpless prey to terrorists. The radical lefts definition of diversity, interestingly enough, apparently does not include diversity of political thought. Does one need to ask oneself how many conservatives are on the faculties of the University of Michigan, Harvard, and Berkeley? How many conservatives are on the staff of the New York Times, the Washington Post, NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, etc. How many climate scientists who express skepticism of the role of human activity in climate change receive funding for their studies? Even changing global warming to climate change is an example of political correctness. When radical environmentalists were mocked for their almost religious belief in the coming end of the earth through global warming by ordinary citizens who often had to don sweaters during cold weather, rather than questioning the validity of their unproven assumption that the seas would rise during our brief lifetimes and we would all fry, they changed the terminology to climate change. In Michigan the climate changes month by month. Our ancestors have endured both ice ages and ages of warming.

To silence critics, the radical left invoke the piety that the overwhelming majority of climate scientists agree that man-made global warming is beyond discussion or dispute. These same scientists fathers and mothers asserted that energy could neither be created or destroyed until a sole maverick, Albert Einstein, proved them all wrong. True science is not about forced conformity but rather a search for the truth and a healthy degree of skepticism for any theory.

As the Western World is now witnessing terrorist massacres of ordinary people in Europe and the U.S. on a frighteningly regular basis, still our governmental agencies, the intelligence community, the FBI, the military, and the local police are forced to eschew profiling. In other words, the Detroit and Chicago police are prohibited from stopping and frisking young black males any more often than old white ladies, in spite of the fact that a disparate percentage of violent crime is committed by young black thugs against defenseless black children and black seniors. Moreover, town after town in America has had imposed on its citizenry large numbers of refugees from violent areas of the Middle East, including young Arabic males, many of whom never assimilate or take on our Western values. Ask the families of the victims of terrorist attacks at the Boston marathon or San Bernardino whether political correctness was in any part responsible for the loss of their loved ones.

The next time you meet any of your liberal/progressive/morally superior friends, ask them whether they share more concern for the safety and welfare of their fellow citizens or for undocumented immigrants, aka illegal aliens.

Note the madness of the elites of the United Kingdom. In spite of terrorist massacre after massacre the vast majority of British police are unarmed. More than 90 percent of Londons Metropolitan Police Force carries no weapons.

A majority of rational people now agree that political correctness kills.

Follow this link:

OPINION: Lou Zako: Political correctness is killing us - Petoskey News-Review

Nothing is as it seems these days (Juan Gris, Still Life with a Bordeaux Bottle, 1919; Wikimedia, PD-Old-70)

The sources of euphemism and political correctness are too close to be seen.

The Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski spent the better part of the 50s and 60s attempting to create a (Soviet Communist-) Socialism with a Human Face.Some of his more important attempts are collected in Toward a Marxist Humanism: Essays on the Left Today.The failure to square the circlewas one of the things that forcedKolakowski into exile in the West. His success in documenting the failure of real-existing socialismin his magisterial three-volume The Main Currents of Marxism made him a short-term pariah among Western Cultural Marxist intellectualswhen such a thing actually still existed.His book, along with Solzhenitsyns The Gulag Archipelago (Im surprised and disappointed to see it out of print) and The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, put the final nails in the Western Marxist economic tradition. It hasnt recovered from the defeat, but those who keep on harping about the omnipresence of Cultural Marxism seem content with chasing a ghost, rather than dealing with the present. Im happy to let them chase their specters of Marx.

The collapse of Real-Existing Socialism (Soviet Communism witha Human Face) made it look like there was no alternative after 1989. It took less than 20 years for the world to realize that there is a problem with capitalism. 2008 was a watershed moment that made many realize that a project to create Capitalism with a Human Face is all thats left to us. That is,if we refuse to countenance other working solutions, what are called the Third Ways(between capitalism and communism). Mark Fishers little manifesto,Capitalist Realism: IsThere No Alternative?,is a kind of interim report card on how the human face refuses to stick to capitalism as it refused to stick to communist-socialism:

Really Existing Capitalism is marked by the same division which characterized Really Existing Socialism, between, on the one hand, an official culture in which capitalist enterprises are presented as socially responsible and caring, and, on the other, a widespread awareness that companies are actually corrupt, ruthless, etc. In other words, capitalist postmodernity is not quite as incredulous as it would appear to be, as the jeweler Gerald Ratner famously found to his cost.

Side Note: Gerald Ratner is famous for admitting during anInstitute of Directors annual conference at The Royal Albert Hall that some of his products are crap:

We also do cut-glass sherry decanters complete with six glasses on a silver-plated tray that your butler can serve you drinks on, all for 4.95. People say, How can you sell this for such a low price?, I say, because its total crap.

He became a laughingstock for hishonesty and lost hisfortunein the process, only to win it back.His is an unusual case of demaskingCapitalism with a Human Face?

99.9% of the time the mask stays on? What keeps it glued to the face of capitalism? Euphemism and political correctness.Polish philosopherTadeusz Gadacz, aformer pupil of Fr.Jozef Tischner (the Chaplain of Solidarity), explains in a Gazeta Wyborcza (only my Polish readers will understand the irony of this)editorial the gluing process using the categoryof thestructural lieas developed by his master.

[I would like to describe our situation of using euphemisms for everything] by referring to a very concrete concept, which Fr. Jzef Tischner, my master, called the structural lie. We live in a structural lie. In the past it was fascism, communism, today it is the neoliberal market. It is no longer the lie of a single person who is concealing the truth. This lie applies to whole structures of life: political, social, economical, medial, and also educational. We participate in it and we make our peace with it. We do not really believe that we are able to radically change the world, so we take part in it. After all, who can presently change the principles of the neoliberal market? Nobody? And so we say there is no exploitation, theres outsourcing and economizing, there are no murders, there is ethnic cleansing. It makes it easier for us to swallow our dinner.

As my friend likes to say, We no longer have garbage men, we have sanitation experts.' We cover upour economic garbagewith euphemism and political correctness, because we do not want to admit our complicity in the structural lie. That element of self-criticism was something that was sorely missing in the Occupy Wall Street critique of the 1%. The 1% would not exist if not for the complicity of the 99%.

Whos going to write The Black Book of Capitalism: Crimes, Terror, Repression?

Capitalist Realism: IsThere No Alternative? is a pretty good place to start for now.

Bon apptit!

For more on Fr. Tischner see: Solidarity Means Carrying One Anothers Burden.

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Read the original here:

What is the Source of Our Culture of Euphemism and Political Correctness? - Patheos (blog)