Friday, November 03, 2006

To hell with all this p_______ c_______

You'd better not accuse the Kirklees Council in West Yorkshire, England, of political correctness.

They've tried to ban the term as politically incorrect.

Yes, just when you thought you'd heard every possible variation in every key from cultural Marxists, they find a way to advance the ball a few more yards. Conspiracy theories aren't my line of goods, but I suspect there is a secret one-upmanship contest among backside-of-the-moon leftists to devise new forms of mental corruption and get the state to push them.

According to the Daily Mail (Britain's only conservative newspaper and the sole source of much news about outlandish political and social policies in that benighted country), "A council has warned staff against using the phrase 'political correctness' at work because it might offend people. A booklet outlining 'equality' policy to council workers claims using the term at work can be damaging and even linked it to the Ku Klux Klan."

The 44-page booklet, called "Equality Essentials," contains plenty of other Big Brother commandments. You won't be surprised that using words like "policeman," "fireman," and "chairman" is taboo — that's probably in most government handbooks, in the U.S. as in the U.K. But "Equality Essentials" manages to plow some new ground, even in an already well tilled field. The word "ethnic," for instance, is banned (not "appropriately descriptive"). The booklet says:
'The term political correctness was coined in 1988 by John O'Sullivan III, who was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. He was making an after dinner speech complaining about how Black Americans were being allowed to take the jobs traditionally reserved for the white majority because of a wave of political correctness. Since then the phrase political correctness has almost universally been used to decry changes which aim to prevent offensive behaviour.'

It goes on to say because this takes the form of 'blaming the victim, denying peoples experience or expressing the view of a popular majority,' using the phrase can represent a 'physical attack.'

No appropriate comment suggests itself. Words are simply inadequate to some things.

1 comment:

Vanishing American said...

The story about the origins of the term 'political correctness' is not true; surely we all heard the term long before the date mentioned. And the idea that it was originated by the Klan is absurd; I've always read that it originated on the left, possibly with Lenin.
And it's funny how the leftists never recognize that they themselves are practicing and enforcing the PC totalitarianism.
I really hate what is happening to the UK; I'm a lifelong Anglophile and I hate what the UK is becoming.