Retreat From Reason VII

The Redistribution of Power



'But what is the point of political correctness? Why are
some things politically correct, and others not?
At its most fundamental, political correctness seeks to
redistribute power from the powerful to the powerless. At
its most crude, it opposes power for the sake of opposing
power, making no moral distinction between whether the
power is malign or benign, or whether the powerful
exercise their power in a way that can be rationally and
reasonably justified.
The only reason that it is more politically correct for
religious fundamentalists to deliberately kill as many
innocent civilians as possible (Hamas suicide bombers)
than for a liberal democracy (Israel) to selectively kill the
terrorist leader responsible for the wave of suicide
bombers (Hamas founder Ahmed Yassin) while trying to
avoid the loss of innocent life, is because the Israeli
government is strong, and the Palestinians weak.
America, as the world's most powerful country, can
never do any good, even though it is the world's most
powerful liberal democracy, the largest donor of overseas
aid, and it defeated both Nazism and Communism.
The West, as the world's most powerful cultural and
economic group, can safely be blamed for all the world's
ills, even though it is largely responsible for the worldwide
spread of prosperity, democracy and scientific advance.
Multinational corporations are condemned as the
oppressors of the world's poor, rather than seen as engines
of global economic growth with vast job-creating invest-ments
in the world's poorest countries, pushing up wages
and transferring knowledge.
Conversely, political correctness automatically supports
the weak and vulnerable, classifying them as nearly
untouchable victims, irrespective of whether they merit
such support or not. When the successful, affluent,
powerful Dutch film maker Theo van Gogh was ritually
murdered in the streets of Amsterdam for insulting Islam,
the politically correct, including the Guardian and Index
on Censorship, automatically sided with the comparatively
powerless Islamic Dutch-Moroccan killer.
The way that PC distorts news values was shown in the
comparative coverage of the murder of 52 innocent people
by Islamic extremists in Britain's worst ever terrorist
attack, and the killing of an innocent Brazilian immigrant
by British police a fortnight later. After a few days, the
coverage of the terrorist attack was obliterated by satur-ation
coverage of the accidental police killing, much to the
anger of relatives of the London bombings. The reason
was simply that the terrorist attacks, although a far more
important story, didn't fit the politically correct agenda,
whereas the killing of a vulnerable immigrant by a power-ful
police force did.
The extent to which PC subordinates moral consid-erations
to considerations of power is shown by the PC
response to the extraordinary spectacle of Iraqis
celebrating the first free democratic elections in their lives
under the auspices of the US, and being threatened with
being blown to bits for the simple act of voting by a
coalition of Islamic fundamentalists and fascist Baath
party supporters. Even the most cursory ethical consid-eration
would show it is right to support ordinary Iraqis
trying to choose their own government, over those who
want to kill them for practicing that democracy. But the
fact that the elections are supported by the powerful US
and opposed by the comparatively powerless funda-mentalists
causes problems for the PC. Opposing power
for the sake of opposing power, many of the politically
correct left-including the Guardian, the Independent,
most of the BBC and the former Labour MP George
Galloway-have chosen to champion those who are
deliberately trying to murder innocent civilians.
Automatically opposing the powerful and supporting
the powerless means that, when presented with a new
issue, the politically correct must decide not what is right
or wrong, malign or benign, true or untrue, but who is the
more powerful and who the less powerful. The PC
analytical process enjoys the beauty of simplicity:

1. identify the victim.

2. support them and their interests, irrespective of any
other factors.

Thus in a dispute between China and the US, the
politically correct will tend to support China; but in a
dispute between China, and, say, Tibet, they will
automatically (and rightly in this case) support Tibet.'


--
From: 'The Retreat From Reason:
Political Correctness and the Corruption of Public Debate in Modern Britain'
by Anthony Browne