NEW BOOK ON POLITICAL CORRECTNESS

"This new book by English academic Frank Ellis, Political Correctness and the theoretical struggle, from Lenin and Mao to Marcuse and Foucault, shows that political correctness has a history much longer than generally recognised. In this pioneering study, Frank Ellis shows convincingly that PC is a Russian COmmunist invention, going back to the times and plans of Lenin, and an intrinsic part of the unprecedented system of total censorship introduced by the Bolshevik leadership in the late autumn of 1917. It was used to ensure total ideological orthodoxy in the communist part. By the end of the 1920s, the notion of political correctness was dominant in almost every aspect of Soviet society, including education, law, psychiatry and entertainment. It was used to justify terror, torture, and man-made famine, first by Lenin and his successors in what became the USSR and later by Mao Tse Tung in China. Through one of the ironies of history, just when the "Soviet experiment" was beginning to run out of steam after the partial dethroning of Stalin, political correctness took on a new life in the West.

One of the underlying themes of political correctness is that if you change the language, you change the way people behave and thereby culture and society. Ellis demonstrates how, by promoting its ideas of what is and is not politically correct, the New Left throughout the English-speaking world is corrupting our cultural institutions, especially the news media and universities, while its devotees are using the state to re-order our thoughts and lives.

The ideas are being promoted through such instruments as human rights legislation, hate speech laws and government promotion of "diversity" and "tolerance". Ellis says that one of the extraordinary things that makes political correctness different from the older Marxism is that instead of talking about public ownership of the means of production, it is talking about public ownership of the means of expression. The political correctness brigade now control the commanding heights in every area of society, including the media and universities. To combat this, Ellis suggests that we need to recapture language, challenge the PC concepts and be prepared to speak out in defence of reality.

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