I recently mentioned that Anders B. Breivik may have seemed like a potential terrorist from his Twitter profile, but his blog posts sounded like the work of a run-of-the-mill cultural conservative.
His manifesto lies somewhere between those two extremes. It starts with a dreadfully boring and somewhat desperate exhortation to spread the word, to translate his manifesto, to make it available in multiple formats, etc. — signed as follows:
Sincere and patriotic regards,
Andrew Berwick, London, England – 2011Justiciar Knight Commander for Knights Templar Europe and one of several leaders of the National and pan-European Patriotic Resistance Movement
With the assistance from brothers and sisters in England, France, Germany, Sweden, Austria, Italy, Spain, Finland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, the US etc.
So, yeah, that part’s pretty nutty. (The Anglicized pseudonym is the least nutty part.)
Then he switches to an introduction — What Is “Political Correctness?” — that sounds awfully familiar.
In fact, his introduction is an edited version of William S. Lind’s “Political Correctness”: A Short History of an Ideology, a product of the Free Congress Foundation — which obviously does not endorse mass-murder to kick off a violent (counter)revolution:
As Russell Kirk wrote, one of conservatism’s most important insights is that all ideologies are wrong. Ideology takes an intellectual system, a product of one or more philosophers, and says, “This system must be true.” Inevitably, reality ends up contradicting the system, usually on a growing number of points. But the ideology, by its nature, cannot adjust to reality; to do so would be to abandon the system.
Therefore, reality must be suppressed. If the ideology has power, it uses its power to undertake this suppression. It forbids writing or speaking certain facts. Its goal is to prevent not only expression of thoughts that contradict what “must be true,” but thinking such thoughts. In the end, the result is inevitably the concentration camp, the gulag and the grave.
While some Americans have believed in ideologies, America itself never had an official, state ideology — up until now. But what happens today to Americans who suggest that there are differences among ethnic groups, or that the traditional social roles of men and women reflect their different natures, or that homosexuality is morally wrong? If they are public figures, they must grovel in the dirt in endless, canting apologies. If they are university students, they face star chamber courts and possible expulsion. If they are employees of private corporations, they may face loss of their jobs. What was their crime? Contradicting America’s new state ideology of “Political Correctness.”
But what exactly is “Political Correctness?” Marxists have used the term for at least 80 years, as a broad synonym for “the General Line of the Party.” It could be said that Political Correctness is the General Line of the Establishment in America today; certainly, no one who dares contradict it can be a member of that Establishment. But that still does not tell us what it really is.