by Brett Stevens on January 11, 2019

At first, we tried to understand political correctness as what it claimed to be, a righting of historical wrongs. We would prefer if our neighbors did not use racial slurs and our children did not call each other by slang terms for homosexual on the playground, after all.

However, over time the true intent of the movement has emerged, and it reveals itself as the oldest of Leftist gambits, the re-writing of history by removing the parts that were not flattering to the ideals that the Left holds dear.

This proves to be no different that how people use “downvotes” and complaint buttons on social media to remove opinions that offend their own pretense of having the singular correct answer to every question, or how people tear down political posters for the other side. It is a monkey response, not thoughtful.

On the other hand, it does prove effective. Consider this hypothetical debate:

Person 1: In this valley, we have always grown onions, because they are tasty and nutritious, and our soil lends itself well to growing a lot of them of uncommon sweetness and size. Person 2: Farmers killed my whole family. I cannot live in a society where farmers are celebrated. Person 1: Then how do we describe our town? Person 2: Say that it is a pleasant place ringed by trees, where people always do the right thing. Result: 500 years later, it is common knowledge that this town was a pleasant place that made its money off of kind-heartedness, and no farmers were present in the region.

Or even a more complex example:

Person 1: An aristocrat was traveling between cities. In one town, he and his retinue stopped at an inn where they had dinner. After dinner, the aristocrat presented a gold coin to the innkeeper and said, “Do you think this will cover it?” This caused much mirth among the kitchen staff — imagine someone who was too dumb to know the cost of a meal and pay the exact amount! — until a passing monk explained to them that the aristocrat was in fact being generous. He knew that the amount was too much, but wanted to spread prosperity to the small inn. Person 2: That’s impossible, aristocrats were buffoons and idiots because that is what it says in this comedy show here. Person 1: Then how do we record this event in our histories? Person 2: Well, we cannot mention that the aristocrat might have been competent, so… Result: It was written that the aristocrats were inbred morons who traveled the land spending lavishly while their hard-working kitchen staffs starved.

In the same way, political correctness makes us assume that some things were absolutely bad in a scientific/objective way, and that anything that remains is good. This contradicts the order of nature, where a few good things sit on top of a vast heap of the mediocre.

We can see political correctness erasing history in Texas with the removal of a Confederate plaque that identified the cause of the war as something other than slavery:

A unanimous vote by the State Preservation Board, which Abbott chairs, ordered the removal of the 60-year-old plaque that pledges to teach “the truths of history,” adding that “one of the most important of which is that the war between the states was not a rebellion, nor was its underlying cause to sustain slavery.”

Unfortunately for the Left, the above are true. Slavery was one pretext upon which the North began the war, but for the South, a laundry list of complaints including but not limited to Northern interference with slavery was the cause; ultimately, the South wanted the older states’ rights based format for America, and the North wanted a unified ideological republic.

Instead of looking into these complex dimensions, the Left wants an order based upon our response to the question of whether we join the Leftist cult: yes/no answers to questions, with one side being absolutely good and the other so absolutely bad that we must excise it from history.

Sensing victory, the Left is intensifying efforts to remove Confederate monuments so that it may humiliated, dominate, and brainwash future generations:

The coalition to remove Confederate monuments in Georgia appears to be widening. The NAACP and SCLC are now joined by the Southern Poverty Law Center and an independent ad agency. The coalition talked about the statue of former Governor and statesman Richard B. Russell in the front of our state Capitol… as well as the statue of Former Governor Herman Eugene Talmadge in the backyard of the capital. From the mammoth rock at Stone Mountain to the much talked about obelisk in the Decatur Square… these groups say they are symbols of hate. The Sons of Confederate Veterans vehemently opposes any legislation to remove what they call symbols of heritage. They believe “removal and modification is nothing more than an attack on true historical facts and is highly dangerous and evil.”

People forget that “might is right” is descriptive of basic interactions, not the course of human history. Whoever has greater military power, which in the modern time translates to greater industrial power, wins. And yet if the underlying issues are not addressed, the problem lives on and resurfaces as future conflicts.

We know this through how WW2 arose from WW1, but many fail to realize that WW1 was made inevitable by the chaotic democratic revolutions of the previous seventy years.

In fact, we can know for certain that our Civil War was not about slavery because slavery is gone but the basic fragmentation of America remains. Others are starting to notice the breakup of the American coalition along the same lines as our last civil war:

Rogozin is not the first to raise the prospect of a second Civil War amid the polarized political climate in the U.S. In June, former Trump adviser Roger Stone warned of a potential civil war in an interview with Newsweek and, days later, University of California, Berkeley professor Robert Reich argued that “serious social unrest” may be on the way, even if an actual civil war remained unlikely. Later that month, Republican Congressman Steve King tweeted, “America is heading in the direction of another Harpers Ferry” and “After that comes Ft. Sumter,” referring to the Confederate raid on the U.S. fort that sparked the Civil War. Amid all this talk of Civil War, a poll that same month found 31 percent of likely U.S. voters thought the prospect of a second such conflict breaking out in the next five years was likely.

Erasing history does not work; it only makes us less prepared to deal with the underlying problems that we have not only ignored in this cycle, but which recur throughout human history. The struggle between independent agrarian economies that move slowly and fast-paced cities that eventually self-destruct is eternal, as is the conflict between the desire for a civil rights oriented ideological republic and those who prefer to see power as a guardian for organic society, not something which replaces it through social engineering.

Tags: america, censorship, civil war, political correctness, slavery

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