Dalrymple on Political Correctness

Jamie Glazov interviews Theodore Dalrymple in Front Page Magazine. It is a long interview and covers a good deal of ground, but here is one of the better exchanges:

FP: You make the shrewd observation of how political correctness engenders evil because of “the violence that it does to people’s souls by forcing them to say or imply what they do not believe, but must noquestionn.” Can you talk about this a bit?

Dalrymple: Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense
of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.

In 1984 George Orwell has O'Brien ask Winston how one truly exerts power over another. Winston answers that one does this by making someone suffer. O'Brien agrees and explains that to reward obedience is not good enough. After all your subject might be doing as you tell him only because of what he is getting out of it. In other words he may in fact be serving himself and not you. But if you make him suffer then he is obeying out of nothing but abject submission.

I think that there is an element of this in political correctness. Make people call good evil and evil good. Make them say things which any person with an IQ in the double digits will know are false. Make them deny things that any person with normal intelligence will know to be true and you corrupt and degrade them.

Corrupt and degraded people hate and resent anyone who is not corrupt or degraded. This is why Ann Coulter drives the left apoplexy. she tells the truth and will not be cowed into silence by their name calling.