A recent advertisement in the New York
Times announced that Christianity was not responsible
for the Holocaust, in spite of the fact that the cultural
products of Christendom bristle with negative characterizations
of Jews. One way to approach this argument would be to say
that Christians don't need to be forgiven, thank you very
much (see related editorial.)
But on the other hand the advertisement reminds us first
and foremost of the tendency of interest groups to effectively
denature the contrasts that comprise what used to be called
Western Civilization.
This isn't a "Jewish only" thing, although it seems that every time
we turn around there's another request to bowdlerize a performance
of The Merchant of Venice, or suppress
the ethnicity of Dickens' master-thief Fagin in Oliver
Twist. There's also the matter of African Americans
who object to Huckleberry Finn, Amos
and Andy reruns, Conrad's Nigger of the Narcissus
and so on. There are occasional glimmers of complaints from
feminists, gays and Hispanics but these have yet to acquire
much momentum. Give it a chance, and pretty soon Western
Civilization will have its starting date given at some point
in the 1970's.
We often hear complaints about how dumbed down the educational system
is, how much our younger generations seem oblivious to the
history and culture of the past. One wonders if it has ever
occurred to anyone that one reason why past history and
culture are ignored is because they aren't taught, and they
aren't taught because they aren't politically correct, or,
at least, they aren't politically correct in the right way.
They certainly were "politically correct" in their own way. They had
no hesitation in taking some elderly woman with a sharp
tongue and burning her at the stake for being a witch. They
thought it was perfectly appropriate to take the disabled
and the insane and the violent and put them in stocks in
the public square where everyone else could laugh at them.
If you and your ruling class cohorts suddenly found yourself
out of power, the odds were good that the ensuing political
realignment could cause a serious misalignment between you
and your head. We, on the other hand, would never do things
like that. We have elections too frequently.
Our historical forebears also had no problem with turning the other
side into demons. From the time of the Old Testament until
quite recently, anyone who didn't share your religious convictions
was an infidel, destined to burn in a lake of fire, someone
who could be tortured or murdered with impunity. Whereas
today, the buzzword is tolerance -- or else.
Naturally, the opinion makers and academics today like to think we
are so much more enlightened than those who lived in the
past. We don't destroy people because they are "minorities"
or because they are disabled, or gay, or women, or Jews,
or Native Americans or African Americans. We don't even
destroy people because they are witches. Instead, we try
to destroy people for other things, like not believing that
crematoria can burn 12,000 people in a day, just because
some guy said so in 1945. We try to ruin the reputation
of historians who don't understand why, if it looks like
a bomb shelter, and it has a bomb shelter door, it isn't
a bomb shelter, but a homicidal gas chamber.
One of the reasons we don't see the analogy between our treatment of
revisionists and the witchcraft era is because we won't
allow ourselves to see it. Just as we have defined new classes
of the "evil ones", we have hidden the fact that the same
kinds of things that people say about revisionists today
are the same kinds of things that were said for hundreds
of years about -- Jews. And not only Jews, but Freemasons,
Jesuits, and anyone else who had the misfortune to be a
half-inch off the center line of their own cultures. And
yes, these medieval "minorities" also made scathing attacks
on the parent culture as well.
The past is not hidden to conceal the revisionist-witch mania analogy,
of course. The past is hidden mainly because it is feared.
Those academicians and opinion makers, paid by the word,
have, as a result, put too much faith in the weight of words,
and not enough in the ability of intelligent and cultured
people to make distinctions, see the present in the past,
and strive to be more humane based on a sound understanding
of their culture. As a result they have to suppress Shylock
because it might inspire anti-Semitism, or they try to hide
Nigger Jim so readers won't turn into racists. And above
all, they have to suppress anything that might hurt someone's
"feelings." On the other hand, they want to make sure that
we get a daily dose of the Holocaust, never mind if that
hurts some German's feelings.
"Political Correctness" is just a variation on triumphalist
ideologies of the past. "Everybody up until now was doing
it wrong, but we got it right, this time." That's the slogan,
but it's an old one. And it's a kind of slogan that breeds
hatred, intolerance, persecution, and, yes, mass murder.
Frankly, it's also the kind of thing that inspired the destruction
of much ancient culture, as in the destruction of the Byzantine
and Alexandrine libraries because they were considered impious.
We would know these things, and so would our children, if
they were allowed to study the past and its culture, warts
and all.
Bradley R. Smith, Publisher 