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Old May 20th, 2013 #43
Alex Linder
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Chapter Four

From Communism's "Enemy of the People" to PC's "Hate Criminal"


Communists, taking their lead from Lenin, expended vast amounts of energy attacking and damning ideological opponents. Western capitalist states were the main external target. Internally, the enemy varied accordign to the party's goals: peasants or kulaks during the Terror Famine or bigger fish during the Great Terror. As a collection of wealthy and powerful states, and despite the best efforts of fellow travellers, the West was in a position to counter Soviet attacks by highlighting the huge discrepancies between communist party propaganda and the grim realities of Soviet life. Inside the Soviet Union the struggle against the class enemy or enemy of the people was conducted in a far more one-sided manner, given that the state enjoyed a total monopoly in the dissemination of ideas and information. To be targeted as a dissenter in the Soviet Union could mean anything from harsh social ostracism and self-criticism at work to arrest and execution. The enemy of the people was an essential construct in all the party's media campaigns. During Stalin's Great Terror the Soviet people were told that many of the Bolsheviks who had made the revolution with Lenin and Stalin were in fact Western agents of one kind or another, or, worse still, that they were in secret contact with the great Satan, Trotskii. In its Chinese variant, communist thugs rooted out "enemies of the people" during Mao's Red Terror, compelling innocent people to admit to a whole range of bizarre, ideologically motivated, politically incorrect "crimes".

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This chapter first appeared as an article "From Communism's "Enemy of the People to PC's 'Hate Criminal'" in Volume 30 Number 1, Spring 2005 of The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies.

Political correctness, which became an issue in the West at the start of the 1990s, originated in the Soviet Union, undergoing various mutations on its way from Moscow via Peking to the West's universities and final modification by the new left. One key difference between old and new left was that whereas the old left concentrated on the means of production, the new left abandoned heavy industry, as it were, and set about seizing control of the means of expression. In the post-industrial society this gives the new left real power and influence way beyond its size. One thing both variants of the left retain, though, is the carefully constructed hate figure. For the old left it would have been the capitalist and his bourgeois lackeys who appeared in grotesque caricature in Pravda cartoons. Two important hate figures for the new left are patriarchy and the white, heterosexual, middle class male: patriarchy occupies center stage in feminist demonology, and for multiculturalism the hate criminal and enemy of the people is the white, heterosexual, middle class male.

Multiculturalism is a cult, and article one of the cult is that all evil in the world arises from the white male and his "civilization". His being heterosexual is in itself oppression since the society he has constructed has marginalised and punished homosexuals and women and, moreover, on the basis of the thoroughly erroneous belief that sex and sex difference are biologically and genetically determined, whereas they are, as every enlightened member of the cult knows, socially and politically constructed. Nor is his middle class status something that he has earned. It is secured and maintained through exploitation. Before 1991, the victims would have been that trusty stalwart, the working class. Today, the new victims are women and racial (ethnic) minorities. The ideological construct of the white, heterosexual, middle-class male embodies multiculturalism's unholy trinity of damnation: homophobia, sexism and racism. Xenophobia, a sub-genre of racism, can be added for good measure.

Sexism -- that is, discriminating against women -- is quite rational and desirable in a number of occupations. Certain military tasks are totally unsuited to women. That a statistically insignificant number of women may be able to perform on equal terms with some men is not an argument in favor of destroying the distinct and tested male ethos of the military in order satisfy the demands of feminists. As far as multiculturalists are concerned, racism is everywhere in Western society, another reason why it must be broken and remade. The forms and definitions of racism are just as diverse. We can find unwitting racism, cultural racism, institutional racism, covert racism, overt racism and intellectual racism. One of the curiosities of racism is that only whites seem to be guilty thereof, everyone else is a victim.

Why are homophobia, sexism and racism, so-called, deemed to be so dreadful such that every Western institution must be turned upside down and reformed ande where that is not possible destroyed (read "deconstructed")? Lurking in the background, according to the New Left, is the ghost of Hitler and it is always implied, sometimes it is explicit, that the reason we need hate crime legislation is to prevent another Hitler; that we are but one step removed from killing the "other". This focusing on the Nazis is intended to draw our attention away from the communist mass murder and genocide. Stalin's Terror Famine in the early 1930s resulted in some 11,000,000 peasants being shot and starved to death. Others were deported to slave labour camps where they died of starvation and exhaustion. Bear in mind that Stalin's Final Solution of the Peasant Question was completed ten years before the nazis convened the Wannsee conference to plan the extermination of Europe's Jews [not true] and one realises just how successful the left have been at hiding the far greater acts of genocide carried out by communists. To be fair, the left does not hide the truth: it just ignores it. And to the extent that we cannot be bothered to excavate the truth, we collude in the lie. Again, in the late 1950s, Mao repeated the whole Stalinist experiment. The numbers are stratospheric. At the very least 20,000,000 even as many as 50,000,000 were exterminated. Class war and the class struggle prosecuted in the name of equality and brotherhood have demonstrably killed far more people than the Nazis. Nor is China, slowly and relentlessly building up her economic and military strength, about to start apologising for the past (unlike Germany). This emphasis on the allegedly exclusively Nazi antecedents of racism and genocide exerts a grossly distorting influence on all legislation aimed at combating racism and xenophobia. One thing that made it possible for the Nazis and communists to carry out their abominable crimes was that they destroyed all opposition and that meant, among other things, destroying the means by which opposition sought to articulate its concerns.

Consider two states. State A possesses a modern armed forces, from a well trained professional army with expertise in everything from peacemaking to conventional military operations and counter-insurgency to a professional navy and airforce. To these conventional forces can be added a nuclear, biological and chemical defence capability and tactical and strategic nuclear weapons. State B has no army, no airforce or navy, but it does have a a strategic nuclear arsenal. Now, state A, by virtue of its having a full range of modern weapons and services, is in a position to react in a flexible manner to many different threats to national security -- from minor border incidents to nuclear attack. As the sequence of a conflict starts to escalate, as measured by the military assets deployed, so the conflict moves up the diplomatic agenda. The Cuban Missile crisis is a good example. State B, whose leaders only have at their disposal a strategic nuclear arsenal, enjoys no such flexibility. It has unilaterally withdrawn from the sphere of conventional weapons and forces and thus is powerless, paradoxically, to react even to border violations or to defend itself against conventional attack. It has only two responses to all contingencies: to unleash nuclear war or to do nothing.

Now let us return to the question of hate crime legislation that seeks to criminalise the entire spectrum of rejection words and ideas. One function of moderate rejection words is to warn others of our disapproval at an early stage. That is not to argue that because I have earlier signaled my disapproval in fairly moderate language that the dispute will never escalate to even harsher words an an exchange of blows. However, that outcome can at least, in theory, be avoided. If I am denied the option of using even moderately critical words, because they are now deemed to be racist or hate speech, then I have been verbally disarmed. I cannot signal my disapproval, my rejection of certain types of behaviour or attitudes (spitting in public places, arranged marriages, female circumcision, for example). I either disengage from my interlocutor which may not be possible, or, denied a non-violent communicative response, and frustrated, I escalate to a violent response: I assault him, my nuclear option, which is an emphatic rejection.

The criminalising of words, ideas, attitudes and jokes as racist or hate speech removes the option of graded responses, thereby increasing resentments and making things worse. Even Bhikhu Parekh, a leading guru of multiculturalism, recognises the dangers which in the light of his attempts to limit free speech -- it has, he tells us, no privileged status -- is either grossly inconsistent or Machiavellian. He warns us:

Quote:
First, a contentious issue can be resolved relatively easily or at least prevented from getting out of control if it is identified, isolated and dealt with at an early stage (Parekh, 2000, 304)
How true. And it is not happening. Hate crime legislation promotes self-censorship, the worst kind of censorship. Again, there are some obvious parallels with the later stages of communism. From the state's point of view, this is a desirable outcome, since one does not need to be heavy handed. Every citizen becomes his own censor. At an individual level, the loss of being able to express oneself is bad enough, but what happens when a whole society cannot express itself for fear of incurring accusations of racism and hate crime? Does this really promote better race relations, understanding and good will? On the contrary, it promotes mutual suspicion and resentment which under certain circumstances can erupt into something very nasty indeed, as the disintegration of Yugoslavia showed. Fifty years of compelling people to act and to believe as if Yugoslavia was a model of multiethnic harmony was blown to pieces in the 1990s, when resentments and festering hatreds suppressed by the communists erupted in an orgy of genocid. Legislators in the West who think that the West will always be immune from such violence overestimate the extent to which human behaviour can be manipulated by ill-conceived laws. People do not become favourably disposed to one another because of hate crime legislation. Public displays of tolerance are not enough to hold a multicultural society together.[1] Without that essential feeling that the "other" belongs in my tribe, the "other" will always be an outsider. The more governments coerce public opinion, the bigger will be the divide between the private and public spheres. The more I am told that I must accept the "other", the more I will come to resent and, eventually, to reject him. Denied the option of expressing my rejection of multiculturalism in public, I can give free rein only within the four walls of my own home. And what happens when eventually the barriers come down, as they must, between what I really think and feel, and between what I am expected to say in public? the obedient arrows of my hatred, lovingly made and crafted, will do my bidding.

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[size=1][1] Parekh recognises the problem yet again wants to push ahead regardless: "a multicultural society cannot be stable and last long without developing a common sense of belonging among its citizens". (Parekh, 2000, 341).

Terms such as hate speech or hate crime imply that there are no circumstances where articulating one's hatred, red and raw, of another culture, race or individual can ever be tolerated. This, too, is not as straightforward as it seems. What do we believe was the reaction of people in New York when Islamic terrorists murdered 3,000 people? No different at all, one suspects, from the reaction to the news that Pearl Harbour had been attacked.

Hate speech legislation attacks and erodes the institution of free speech. We might like to remind ourselves just how crucial free speech and related freedoms were and remain for the West. In explaining why I believe that the set of ideas and freedoms embodied in something known as the West is inherently and demonstrably superior to all other competitors, past and present, I could cite not just a very long list of scientific, cultural and technological achievements and the names associated with them, such as Plato, Shakespeare, Newton, Galileo and Beethoven, but the key elements of the social and intellectual infrastructure that made it at least possible that such achievements could be conceived and brought to completion. Fundamental would be the idea of the rule of law, the right to own and to dispose of property, the right to practice one's religion and free speech.

The rule of law demands that charges against a person be heard in a properly constituted legal setting; that the due process be observed; that the individual and his defence be given every opportunity to rebut them. He is innocent until proven guilty (multiculturalists reverse this: if we say you are a racist, you are a racist). If there are to be free and fair elections, then the contesting parties must be able to submit their ideas to public scrutiny without being censored. If I am to confess my religion, then, manifestly, I require the ability to do so without my being prosecuted as a heretic or a turbulent priest. If my home is my castle, over which I exercise sole dominion, then I am free to express my thoughts orally and in writing. The link between being a property owner and free speech, not immediately obvious, becomes clear, when we consider Recommendation 39 of The Macpherson Report, a landmark publication in race relations in the UK:

Quote:
That consideration should be given to amendment of the law to allow prosecution of offences involving racist language or behaviour involving the possession of offensive weapons, where such conduct can be proved to have taken place otherwise than in a public place (Macpherson, 1999, 331).

Last edited by Alex Linder; May 20th, 2013 at 10:28 PM.