Between PC and non-PC lies the Shadow

Can anyone explain why, even as the entire politically correct world was celebrating as though it were the moral equivalent of the advent of Jesus Christ the election of a new U.S. president, specifically because he is nonwhite, that same politically correct world uniformly condemned and expressed horror at the “racism” of Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi, because he praised the president-elect as “young, handsome, and with a nice tan”? Somehow the PC humanity knew, without any consultations among themselves, that their way of praising Obama’s nonwhiteness was PC, but that Berlusconi’s way of praising his nonwhiteness was not PC. My sincere question is: how did they know this? Is there an intelligible rule that explains the difference between the PC race-conscious celebration of Obama’s nonwhiteness, and the non-PC race-conscious celebration of his nonwhiteness?

- end of initial entry -

The Editrix writes from Germany:

To me, “nice tan” when applied to a half-African, half-white man has a cynical ring to it. A tan is, in everyday usage, defined as something one acquires (isn’t it?), while Obama’s “tan” is genetically based. It sounds (to me) like a studied euphemism which may be intended to insult, as so many euphemisms are. But then, it may not. I have never watched Berlusconi on television, I don’t know his facial movements and I have never listened to his voice, so I can not tell whether he is inclined to use cynicism or not. He is one of the few credible politicians in Europe and thus everything he says will be met with utter hysteria by the politically correct vast majority, be it an intended cynicism or not.

Keith J. writes:

No doubt others will add. Two obvious criteria come to mind:

1) The identity of the speaker. Is he “One of Us”?

2) Humour/Light-heartedness. PC is deadly serious, and items within it count as Sacred Topics. In a Church you don’t laugh when one of the Sacred Topics is being discussed.

Near the edge. Berlusconi just might have got away with his remark if he had been “One of Us.” But he failed on both counts; the judgment was therefore easy to make.

James N. writes:

I am a very poor interpreter of leftish PC fads, but perhaps poor Silvio B., by his “with a tan” remark, was suggesting that Obama is just another politician, or, even worse, that he is one of us—i.e., that his half-African nature isn’t such a big deal.

As we know, to the left, all people are the same, unless they are white, in which case they are inferior. Calling Obama someone “with a tan” de-emphasizes his blackness, which is not only important, but is of the essence. If he’s not authentically black, in other words, he’s nothing, and since, as we know, he’s EVERYTHING, calling him merely tanned is unforgivable.

By the way, if you’re ever in the mood for a smile, this website nicely deconstructs what the author calls “libberish.”

Ted writes:

Well, for one thing it’s making the white man always wrong. Whatever he is saying must be wrong; he is always to be put down. There is nothing that is acceptable to come from him; he can offer nothing and is not to be listened to. His status is too low to allow him to talk about the being, the nature, the meaning of what it is to be “black person,” a “person of color.” That is something a white can not know He is to keep silent.

I have seen this behavior in discussions over the years. I learned that the subject is not what is right or wrong, factual or not factual, but simply putting down the Other. Finally, a tactic like this one can lead to a state of depression. “I’m always wrong, I must be bad.” I sometimes wonder if after years of being presented with continual criticism of their kind and continual praise of blacks, that whites are not largely in a state of racial depression. Is Obama the black therapist for the white race?

Ed L. writes:

In answer to your query about Berlusconi, it boils down to a matter of who’s who. Berlusconi has been remembered since 2002 for having asserted the superiority of Western civilization. That makes him one of “them”—a moral leper. Any current statement that he makes is therefore seen as suspect and interpreted negatively.

Sara R. writes from England:

Human beings are creatures of habit—Man, as we know him, as Gurdjieff said, is a machine. As a social creatures we learn to recognise shorthand signals, which become socially conditioned reflexes. These reflexes seem to make things easier—they cut out a whole lot of cogitation and at times can be useful.

The trouble is we get habituated to these shortcuts, and soon they overcome our rational intuitions about things. So the PC world has become a machine which responds instantly to certain signals—When a “right wing” politician like Berlusconi uses words like “nice tan” the machine goes into action and it must, it simply must, go into attack mode. Welcome to our Orwellian world where words serve as triggers for ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ response, like rats in a lab.

So the rule is that PC man is now a cog in the EU/Left Liberal machine, and will responds accordingly to certain key words like the automaton he is.

Flyboy writes from Canada:

Maybe the PC concept you are identifying here has nothing to do with what is being said, but is entirely related to, and governed by, who says it, or more accurately, what are the political/racial leanings of the speaker. Clearly Berlusconi is not acceptable to the PC crowd, being of such evil “right-wing” leanings.

I think you would see the identical, yet opposite, reaction to a black man criticizing Obama. He would immediately be labeled an “Uncle Tom.”

Peter J. writes:

Though I know it is perilous, let me speculate on what went on that made leftists angry, or made them pretend to be angry, at Berlusconi’s comment.

We have to consider that while leftists make the rules, they can also change them at any moment. So consider that, while one of the rules is that race doesn’t exist, another is that, when it does exist, it is definitely not “only skin deep.” Berlusconi essentially implied that Obama’s race is only a matter of skin color. This is the proper leftist position on the race of any Latino or black person who has done something wrong (or that of any white person who deserves to be commended).

But if a white person had done something (racially) wrong, or if a black or Latino has done something commendable, then race is a deep part of that person’s legacy and explains pretty much everything about him, including his experiences with the “real world,” which whites can never know (because reality equals victimization, per the leftists). Berlusconi threatened to steal this—to say about Obama exactly what the left would say about Obama if he were caught in a major, undeniable scandal. He’s just a melting-pot American with a nice Hawaii tan.

Next, keep in mind that Berlusconi loves to make light of serious things. He said he wanted to introduce his wife to the Danish Foreign Minister, because the latter was so good-looking! He had a twinkle in his eye at the moment everyone—Europeans especially—are supposed to have only tears of profound, quasi-religious joy in their eyes.

Finally, it’s also important to note that Berlusconi is right of center. Thus anything he says is pretty much suspect. Attacking it serves to make the right look bad, plain and simple. Most of Berlusconi’s jokes are going to be called “gaffes” by the left, while the right has a nice chuckle—that’s the way it is.

Jeremy G. writes:

The difference is that one way of praise is worshipful and the other is mocking. Praising Obama for his tan is sort of like saying he’s really a white guy underneath. Liberals don’t like being laughed at.

Irwin Graulich writes:

You are correct. The PC crowd and liberal left are totally intolerant. They are only tolerant of gay/lesbian marriage and abortion. God forbid you should oppose those ideas—you are worse than a murderer according to them.

There is a lawsuit going on right now against Wyeth Laboratories in Rockland County, where eight black employees claim racial discrimination because their boss said to a supplier that she is “the head of the department.” I am still trying to figure out how that can be interpreted as racist.

Everyone associated with these types of lawsuits including the organizations behind them should have to pay very large fines or go to prison. They are harming America beyond belief.

Sickening—but welcome to America 2008!

LA writes:

Many good explanations have been given why Berlusconi’s remark made people angry. Perhaps the best is that he was being humorous or irreverent about a sacred subject, Obama’s race. So I can understand why the left considers the remark offensive. But what I think is still unexplained is, why does the left consider the remark racist? If the people condemning Berlusconi were asked why the remark was racist, what would they say? They couldn’t say that the reason was that he was being light-hearted about Obama’s race, since being light-hearted about race is not the same as being racist.

So, we have our explanations for the left’s attack on Berlusconi. But I’d like to hear the left’s explanations.

On further thought, I guess they could say that to be humorous about Obama’s race, to reduce his racial identity to “a nice tan,” was to diminish him racially, and that this is racist.

But again the irony of this, as Peter J. has pointed out, is that the left often tells us that race is nothing more than skin color, and therefore it can’t possible matter, and therefore to say that it does matter is wrong and racist. So, by describing Obama’s race as a “nice tan,” Berlusconi was really adhering to the liberal idea that race doesn’t matter. Yet for adhering to the liberal view of race and saying that Obama’s race doesn’t matter, Berlusconi is called a racist!

But Peter J. has adequately explained the contradiction. Race is only skin deep when the issue at hand is something objectionable about nonwhites. Thus if someone says that blacks are less intelligent, or that he doesn’t want to send his child to a largely black school, or that Mexicans are bad drivers, or that mass Hispanic immigration is changing America into a Third World, non-middle class country, or he doesn’t want his country to turn nonwhite, he will be told that race is only skin color, and that it’s absurd and immoral to believe that race matters. That’s the “race-blind” side of liberalism, which exists in order to remove white racial consciousness. But then there’s the race-conscious side of liberalism, which exists to advance nonwhites as nonwhites. And from this point of view, race, or, rather, the race of nonwhites, has a deep, profound, marvelous, sacred significance.

Now we might think these two views of race contradict each other. From a logical point of view, they do. But from the point of view of the real aim of liberalism, they do not. The real aim of liberalism is to destroy white society, and liberals seek to do this by replacing whites with nonwhites. This project requires both diminishing white people’s race consciousness, and increasing nonwhite people’s race consciousness. The “it’s only skin deep” view accomplishes the former; the “nonwhite racial characteristists are profoundly significant and beneficial” view accomplishes the latter.

This only seems like a double standard if we believe that liberalism is about racial fairness. But once we understand that liberalism is not about racial fairness, but about eliminating the white race, then we realize it’s not a double standard at all. It’s a single standard: whatever advances nonwhiteness over whiteness is good.

The only hope of at least some whites becoming able to resist the liberal anti-white campaign is by their realizing that liberalism is not aimed at achieving racial fairness and equality, but at diminishing whites and eliminating white society.

(I employ a similar analysis of the “double standard” in my FrontPage Magazine article, “How to Oppose Liberal Intolerance.”)

The Editrix writes:

After having read all the many comments that followed mine, I feel quite stupid. Berlusconi may have indeed just irreverently jested about Obama’s skin colour. One just doesn’t expect jokes in this specific context. If it was a joke, it was actually quite funny. As to your original question, I still have no answer. It is just a fact that the politically correct crowd makes the rules by which we all have to abide. Chapeaux to Berlusconi for this border violation.

Jonathan L. writes:

Let me commend you for an excellent thread which demonstrates, once again, that if political theory were math, traditionalism would be on the level of real analysis (pun intended) while mainstream conservatism would not have made it past the “intricacies” of addition and subtraction. The customary conservative response to an incident such as this is to tally both sides of the ledger (what whites are allowed to say vs. what minorities are allowed to say), uncover an imbalance, then ineffectually whine to anyone who will listen about the hypocrisy of liberalism. This emotionally gratifying reaction, which many of your respondents succumbed to, is counterproductive as it diverts conservatives from the indispensable chore of analyzing and then confronting liberalism on its OWN terms.

The first thing that must be done here is to get away from the distracting particularities of the case at hand (Was it because the “right-wing” Berlusconi was the one saying it? Was it because “tanned” was a euphemistic put-down?) so as to arrive at more general principles.

Liberalism is about total equality, whether at the political, economic, social or even psychic and conceptual levels. Members of a majority, by the very fact that they constitute the norm for their society, are unremarkable and the traits which distinguish them from minorities are generally not even captured in their language. That is why it is nonsensical (at least in 2008) to speak of George W. Bush as our 43rd white President—he is simply our 43rd President. Barack Obama, however, because he is racially distinct, can reasonably be spoken of as our 1st black President. Whiteness studies scholars claim that this constitutes a form of immoral inequality (“white privilege”), even if the inequality operates only at the linguistic and conceptual levels. In order to achieve total equality throughout society, then, it is necessary for members of the majority to feign obliviousness to those characteristics of minorities which distinguish them as minorities. When those characteristics are negative, liberals obviously react vociferously to their acknowledgment.

However, even neutral or somewhat positive characteristics cannot be acknowledged as constitutive of a minority, because by doing so the majority draws attention to the fact that this minority is not the norm, that it is different, that it is an outsider within its society. Liberals claim that minority awareness of their “outsiderdom” is responsible for a whole host of social dysfunctions (low self-esteem, bad standardized test scores, etc.), but the interesting thing is they would take umbrage at such drawing of distinctions even if they carried no real-world consequences. You yourself highlighted this in a story about the outrage sparked in Britain when someone recommended black pedestrians take extra precautions at night to avoid being hit by traffic. Even the most neutral and scientifically objective minority differences cannot be acknowledged in a liberal society, because in so doing the majority “marginalizes” them.

November 13

The Editrix writes from Germany:

An excellent thread indeed! I still have no answer to the question that started the thread, but what occurred to me is that liberal or leftist political correctness is the first of that sort in history that considers itself to be “on the right (as in “good”) side.” If one reads, for example, the tedious drivel produced during the “Thousand Years” between 1933 and 1945 in Germany, the politically correct content was, markedly and volitionally, exclusive. “Good” was what was to the advantage of the German people and the “Aryan” race, and no attempt whatsoever was made at appearing “good” (in an ethical sense). It is so easy and cheap for the descendants to distance themselves from this sort of political correctness.

Liberal/leftist political correctness works the other way round and is therefore as difficult to dismiss as dangerous. The information about the dismissal of extra precautions at night for black pedestrians as “racist” made me remember that I once read in a specialist German magazine that is well known that the pharmacokinetics (what happens to a substance administered externally to a living organism within that organism) of Turks is very different from that of Germans, but that this knowledge is not put into practice because it is—you’ve guessed it—racist. Anticipating that there must be a similar phenomenon at your end, I performed a brief Google-search and found this post at a message board. The author makes a couple of interesting points about political correctness generally and his conclusion is stunning. It seems that our current political correctness is a reversal of Goethe’s “power that wills evil and does good.”

LA writes:

For those who didn’t recognize the paraphrase in the title of this entry, it is based on T.S. Eliot’s poem, “The Hollow Men.” Here is the last section of the poem, with the repeated line about the Shadow. I wouldn’t say that the poem is particularly apropos to our discussion, except that it conveys the quality of a world that has lost truth and definitions, which is also the world of liberalism and PC.

V

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o’clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 12, 2008 02:01 AM | Send