The Iconoclast wonders about the "Great Inhibition", which I take to mean the culture of political correctness, in the context of the recent dissembling injunction of the Australian Foreign Minister Stephen Smith against Dutchman Geert Wilders' groundbreaking production of Fitna-the Movie.Modern political-correctness was born of the Womyn's Movement; a forced scrubbing-out of the "patriarchal" and "racist" nomenclature of our common cultural inheritance--the inauguration of police officers, firefighters, councilmembers, congresspersons and mail carriers whilst ushering out all of the policemen, firemen, councilmen, congressmen and mailmen. The end of history and the birth of herstory, the end of negroes and the beginning of the endless parade of neologisms designed to replace an inherited vocabulary, however imperfect, that had been developed over historical time to discuss and to cope with common problems and problems in-common. Built essentially upon pretense and wishful thinking, political correctness has, by-and-large enervated our political vocabulary, debilitated our culture's ability to think straight, inhibited reasoned analysis of political problems with historic roots and has cut us off from our intellectual patrimony. Now, against the onslaught of a profoundly not-understood ideology, the "profundity" of which may be lain entirely at the feet of the political correctness movement, The Iconoclast wonders:
"What do the Western scholars of Islam say about the history of Islamic conquest, what prompted it, and what happened to the non-Muslims in the lands that were conquered, over the past 1350 years? Does he know that for a very long period, and especially in that century between roughly 1860 and 1960, before the Great Inhibition, all kinds of Western scholars, German and Dutch and Italian and Russian and English and American and Spanish, studied Islam and the history of Islamic conquest, and their works are not to be ignored nor denied, in the intolerable rush to embrace the assorted espositos and armstrongs, who have nothing like the learning of Schacht, Hurgronje, Jeffrey, Zwemer, Lammens, Dufourcq, and hundreds of others.
This kind of thing cannot be endured..."
I wonder, too. Read it all.
Update: a quote from the British psychiatrist and commentator Theodore Dalrymple (Anthony Daniels) on the corrosive effects of political correctness upon societies:
“Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small…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.”
