In a recent post, Mark Steyn on the Leftist strategy to create a ‘society of emasculated liars’ [these remarks by him start with a quote from the Cavalier Daily of Charlottesville]:
“I felt people were fixating on the details and quality of Rolling Stone reporting, and the fact is, whatever happened, something happened to Jackie,” Mirza said. “And even if she made up the story, things like this do happen, and there are sexual assaults that don’t get reported, so I meant to bring the focus back to Jackie. Whatever comes of this, we’re still behind her and we still think she did something brave by coming forward.”
“Even if she made up the story”, she “pulled back the curtain on rape”. And even if there was no rape going on behind the curtain she raised awareness of how rape culture is so prevalent that women are being traumatized into making up stories that they’ve been gang-raped by seven Phi Kappa Psi men even when they haven’t been. The blogger Oliver Willis thinks it’s “super dangerous” that the right is seizing on the implosion of Rolling Stone‘s story to insist that “all rape allegations can be ignored”. But isn’t it the left that’s trivializing real rape by according fake rape the same protected status? After all, if Jackie is incredibly “brave” for “coming forward” to “pull back the curtain” on something that never happened, if “gang rape” no longer requires either rape or a gang, if it is not necessary to have actually been attacked, brutalized and sexually violated in order to be a rape victim, then what’s the big deal if one has been?
My old Spectator comrade Theodore Dalrymple once observed:
Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.
The less it corresponds to reality the better – if the purpose is to humiliate, and force you to acquiesce in the lies….
This Leftist strategy also has the benefit — a, perhaps, more important one — of eventually making people doubt the Truth of any claim or report. But the Human desire to know the Truth remains, so these people will start to believe in only those things that they have been trained to favor, those that fit-in with their way of thinking and feeling. If such conditioned people have been trained in the Leftist Way Of Thinking then they will be more receptive to the Leftist Narrative.
And, since the Leftist Narrative is based in fantastical thinking, such conditioned people will buy into the Leftist delusion.
The Leftist refuses to accept Reality, that things are what they are, that A is A.
He refuses to deal with the Truth of Life as it is.
The Leftist, therefore, is delusional is his approach to the problems of Human Existence.]
Such a buy-in will, inevitably, lead to the enslavement of the conditioned people because the Leftist Leaders seek this, so they will gear their lies to achieving this end.
A people that are able to separate the Truth from Lies are a people that can never be enslaved.
Take away the belief that Truth exists and you create conditions where people will believe in anything. Train such a people to think that everything is Relative and that Unicorns exist and you create the conditions where people will snap the locks on their own chains.
In the hands of a skillful indoctrinator, the average student not only thinks what the indoctrinator wants him to think . . . but is altogether positive that he has arrived at his position by independent intellectual exertion. This man is outraged by the suggestion that he is the flesh-and-blood tribute to the success of his indoctrinators.
—William F. Buckley Jr., Up From Liberalism
[Tip of the fedora to Stacy McCain for the WFB quote]
