Dear Jeffery

I entirely agree with you about this most insidious form of 'political
correctness'.  Bleeping out words does no service to the people it is
supposed to protect and is a way of falsifying history familiar to communist
and fascist totalitarians.  PC is not really about helping individuals at
all, for its advocates do not see the individual, but place him in an
arbitrarily defined group.  I recently reviewed for the TLS a book by Roy
Kerridge called The Story of Black History.  He describes the way in which
people who came to Britain from the Caribbean saw themselves, quite rightly,
as British, and were proud of their contribution to the war effort.  Their
children had left-wing teachers who encouraged them to think of themselves
as 'black' and to regard anything British as alien and oppressive.  This
form of institutionalised racism, as much as more traditional types of
prejudice, has kept black Britons down.

Worse than this is the assault on language by feminists and their male
fellow travellers, who are trying to abolish the word 'man' and 'mankind'.
This absurd nonsense has a lot of support in academia, and the result is
unreadable, limp-wristed prose.  I cannot help thinking that there is an
unconscious motive for this: a castrated language, after all, reflects a
society that has lost its sense of direction and purpose.

Over the past few months I have been writing some articles for The Times
(Comment section) in which I debunk some of the revered bovines [a.k.a.
Sacred Cows] of political correctness.  Far be it from me to promote my own
work, but I feel I can share my latest one - in today's paper - with you and
others on the Mailbase.  For I think it most likely that Kipling would agree
with the points I make about the armed forces, 'Europe' and the superiority
of human responsibilities to human rights.

Best Wishes - and Happy New Century.

Aidan Rankin
***
Aidan Rankin
'Set up to guard against tyranny and torture, the
European Court of Human Rights is now an apologist for
deviance and sadistic crime'
There is a spectre haunting Britain in Europe: the spectre of "human
rights". Or rather,
the debasement of human rights, their reduction to a wish-list of truculent
demands.
The phrase human rights, once associated with the heroism of Soviet
dissidents, the
Czech "underground" and the Polish Solidarity union, is now hijacked by
every
fashionable politically correct cause. The confusion of human rights with
elitist
liberalism presents a new threat to freedom and a new form of social
injustice.
Next year we shall mark the 50th anniversary of the European Convention on
Human
Rights. As a founder member of the Council of Europe, Britain was one of the
first
signatories and the convention is soon to be part of British law. Drawn up
in the
aftermath of war and the Holocaust, the convention enshrines basic freedoms:
freedom
of speech, religion and association; freedom to lead a private life and
freedom to think.
Through the European Court of Human Rights, the convention upholds
democratic
values. It is the friend to the little man, protecting him from bullying big
government or
corporate greed.
That is the theory. A beautiful theory, too, but like socialism, so
different in practice
from the grand design. The European Court did play a positive role in
British politics
once, in the late 1970s, when it established the individual's right not to
join a union.
This protected working-class people from being forced to conform in ways
that the
privileged would never accept. But now the court is a bastion of bien
pensant
privilege. Far from protecting ordinary people, it insults their instincts
and values. Set
up to guard against tyranny and torture, it is now an apologist for
politicised deviance
and sadistic crime.
Two recent rulings against Britain by the court have more in common than at
first
appears. They are the lifting of the ban on gays in the Forces and the view
that James
Bulger's killers did not get a fair trial. In both cases a liberal-elitist
view of the world
prevails. The gay lobby is articulate, powerful and rich, and rich enough to
buy
"rights". The serviceman who does not want open homosexuals as officers and
comrades in arms has no access to money or power, and therefore no "rights".
Similarly those who champion murderous children have access to
well-connected
London lawyers and favoured organisations such as Liberty. James Bulger's
mother,
Denise, is a working-class woman with no such contacts. Rights have become
commodities, bought by the few at the expense of the many.
In both instances, there was a case to answer. Homosexual servicemen should
be free
from cruel interrogation. Children, even murderous ones, should be tried in
humane
conditions. That is not the same as to say, as the court does, that sexual
orientation is
equivalent to "race, origin or colour". Nor should it strip the Home
Secretary of his
limited power, vested in him by voters,, to affect the sentencing of
dangerous
criminals. The court's objection to the Home Secretary's role is based on a
refusal to
engage with the British political system, with its tradition of balance
between elected
representatives and appointed officials.
The cult of narrowly defined "rights" is creating a society of spoilt
children who ask
not what they can do for their country but what their country can do for
them. That is
the opposite of the mature citizenship envisaged by the convention. Fifty
years on,
perhaps it is time to go back to first principles. For when we think of
human
responsibilities, the cases cited above look very different. The
responsibility to be
tolerant is balanced by the responsibility to be discreet. Responsibility to
child-criminals is balanced by responsibility to their victims.
A British "declaration of human responsibilities" would restore compromise,
decency
and fair play. It would provide an alternative to abstract, continental law.
What better
task for an Opposition in search of big ideas and wishing to reconnect with
the British
people?

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-----Original Message-----
From: Jeffery D. Lewins <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thursday, December 23, 1999 09:13
Subject: poltical correctness


>A colleague has sent me this quote from the UK paper The Telegraph.
>
>"20th December 1999
>
>The Editor
>
>The Telegraph
>
>Independent Television recently screened that wonderful film 'The Dam
>Busters', made in 1954 and starring Richard Todd as Guy Gibson VC and
>Michael Redgrave as Barnes Wallis. Guy Gibson had a pet dog called
>'Nigger'. Throughout the film, everytime the dog's name was mentioned, it
>was bleeped out. All other references to the dog's name were censored. Even
>the codeword for the successful breaching of the Mohne dam, which was
>'Niggwe', was bleeped out, thereby leading to utter confusion to anyone who
>did not know the story. Whilst I am fully sensitiive to the use of suc
>words in current speech, I have to ask whether this is not the start of a
>new form of political correctness, in which all old films (and even books)
>will be banned or revised to accord with modern standards ?  Watch out
>Shakespeare and Dickens."
>
>To which I think we must add:
>                Rudyard Kipling
>
>Jeffery Lewins
>
>
>from Jeffery Lewins
>Magdalene College &
>Engineering Department
>Cambridge CB3 0AG UK
>[log in to unmask]
>
>



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