Race/Racism/ Rudyard Kipling:

I am convinced that RK upon being asked to fill in one of those iniquitous 'landing cards' for presentation at the immigration desk, would have written the word HUMAN in the slot alongside the word RACE.

 

This is absolutely true.  Those of us who are against the EU find it vaguely irksome to be accused of 'xenophobia'.  After all, we are arguing for withdrawal from 'Europe' and reconnection with the rest of the world, with its rich range of cultures, all of which the British are more used to, and find easier to accommodate, than our continental chums.

This brings me on to an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, in which a number of people in public life have selected photographs they regard as symbolising the twentieth century.  Trevor Phillips, the black broadcaster and candidate for Deputy Mayor of London, has chosen among other things a photograph of RK with King George V.  He acknowledges RK's genius, but  regards him as an ideologist of imperialism, who helped to 'persuade' colonial subjects that they were unfit to govern themselves.  I don't support Phillips's party, but I think he is a man of integrity and decency, who has worked hard, has an interesting mind and will prove effective in office if elected.  It might be worth writing to him and trying to persuade him to view RK from a different perspective.

 

Some other comments on political correctness, the feminazis, etc.

 

As it has been  some 45 years since I served in the Royal Navy when  ship were most certainly manned , I felt some diffidence about making categorical statements on the issue of 'manning'. Having recently consulted several Naval officers (including my ex-submariner son-in law) I am assured that  H.M. Ships are 'manned'.

 

I too have checked this and the word 'manned' is still used, and applied as it should be to male and female personnel alike.  There are some sections of the services that remain off-limits to women, and that is as it should be.  The idea of training the fair sex for front line roles is another example of barbarism and pagan insouciance masquerading as 'progress'.

Emasculation of language is a project dreamed up by blue-stockinged Sapphists and their male camp-followers, and is part of a more general tendency towards creating a society of 'victims' pleading for 'rights'.  They would have us believe that all our great women novelists are 'victims' of 'language'.  How absurd.

 

That is good enough for me!  Manned they will remain as far as I am concerned.

When it comes to 'manning' guns : the splendid ladies who were on the Anti Aircraft gun sites during the 1939-45 conflict would be most upset to learn that they had no part to play in the 'manning' of armament.

 

This illustrates clearly the point I have just made.  It would be very patronising to tell these brave ladies that they should be addressed differently from their male colleagues.  The term 'lady' is politically incorrect, too.  The centre of Oxford has a large sign near St John's college saying 'Women's Toilet'.  For much of my undergraduate career I genuinely believed it was a feminist meeting place with a satirical title! 

 

The responsibility for distortion of accurate terminology to suit 'politically correct' phraseology rests entirely and sadly (in my opinion) with  elements involved in a questionable agenda.

 

Not only questionable, but downright tendentious, and tyrannical also.  I have heard of students being marked down by left-wing academics for not using politically correct terminology.  Not all the younger generation have been brainwashed, however.  I am 33 and proudly politically incorrect.  I was immunised against political correctness when I was a boy of eight.  Having been encouraged to get ahead by my previous teacher, a lady of some character, I then found myself in a class taught by a left-wing woman who tried to stop me reading books 'too advanced' for my age.  I was quite successful in exposing her stupidity and ignorance.  Once she set us anagrams and one of the words was 'soal'.  Having a map of the world at home, I knew there was a country called 'Laos', but to her the correct answer was 'also'.  I then took the chalk in my hand and demonstrated to the whole class that Laos is correct.  'What if everyone behaved like you?' she said, witlessly sending me out.  She wore a CND badge, was a Labour Party member and had feminist stickers on her car.  That evening I asked my parents to send me to boarding school, which they did, and where I respected the men who taught me.  But that early experience was an inoculation against anything smacking of 'PC' or 'progressive liberalism'.

 

BEWARE THE LINGUISTIC THOUGHT POLICE.  BIG SISTER AND LITTLE BROTHER ARE WATCHING YOU!

 

 

Aidan Rankin