Political correctness amok
I appreciated the article by Moira Weigel (Phantom foe invented by conservatives, 16 December), about the co-option of the term “politically correct” by conservatives, and then by Donald Trump. However, she does not make clear that this term implies being overly concerned with lip service to good behaviour, ie hypocrisy.
During the election it became clear how much of a hypocrite Hillary Clinton was, how she was promising voters one thing and bankers another. It is not clear yet how much of a hypocrite Trump is. Activist Charles Eisenstein points out that the people have rejected “a wolf in sheep’s clothing in favour of a wolf in wolf’s clothing”. Trump’s vice is that he is a sexist, racist demagogue. His virtue is that he is real: he doesn’t cover it up. Politicians, in general, have a reputation for being two-faced.
I recall being involved in community-building workshops that unfolded in four stages: pseudo-community, chaos, emptiness, then true community. People were polite but not real, then fell into conflict, then expressed despair, then felt connected. With Trump in charge, the real nature of predatory capitalism, not masked by liberal platitudes, can be revealed. Chaos may ensue.
But chaos could bring an opening to new possibilities.
Edward Butterworth
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
• I think Moira Weigel has got herself trapped in a linguistic hall of mirrors. Surely the logic of her argument is that today’s anti-political correctness will inevitably become tomorrow’s political correctness and expose itself to exactly the kind of attack she is complaining about. She imbues the term with an unwarranted substance when it is, after all, simply a transient cultural label. You might call it political orthodoxy, and people have for ever railed against that. Marx expressed it better in his concept of false consciousness underpinning the dominant ideology.
The business of radical politics consists in exposing it. If the liberal community is having difficulty getting itself heard, it simply has to try harder, and part of that will be self-reflection. After all, as we have long known, the devil has all the best tunes.
Neil Blackshaw
Barbizon, France
• Moira Weigel is perplexed by Donald Trump’s victory, and puts it down to his being a “demagogue” manipulating the “vague nemesis of political correctness”. She goes so far as to deny the existence of the concept, and claims that it is merely a “useful invention”.
Let me dissuade her of that PC delusion. Political correctness is a fact for all muzzled outsiders who, having been born non-consensually, find themselves on a planet strewn with eggshells; careful as to how they tread, what they say or do, lest they are ostracised, imprisoned or even murdered or executed.
Political correctness is a fact for all who find their tongues made into prison cells. Who are constantly warned not to cause offence to a host of sensitive snowflakes, in society or an administration, who are offended by whatever they decide has hurt their feelings.
Political correctness occurs when our self-restraint is deemed inadequate and thought police are set loose to socially engineer our thoughts and actions, and to punish any recalcitrants into conformity.
We see political correctness throughout the world, in every country, in every age, to different degrees. But everywhere it is a miasma of oppression, overt or covert. The last thing we want or have ever wanted is to be denied even that awareness, and be told that we are imagining it.
Sam Nejad
Geraldton, Western Australia
• Moira Weigel does us a great service exploding the myth of political correctness and sowing its links with common sense, which can be another illusion and has a similar history. Common sense can be an assumption that what appears to be true actually is true, while the truth might actually be more complex. So a freezing winter might persuade some that common sense tells us there is no such thing as global warming.
Not only are we in for neo-fascist authoritarianism, but reactions from the masses that will be ugly indeed when they discover the massive deception of which they have been victims. Those who seek truth and honesty need to start planning now about how to manage the recovery of informed and humane responsibility.
Martin Jewitt
Folkestone, UK
• Moira Weigel provides an insightful survey of the use and misuse of that blessed phrase political correctness. She correctly observes that it is “an impossibly slippery concept”, now used only as an accusation.
Tracing the phrase to mocking references in American communist publications of the 1930s, she misses a much earlier and more sensible use of the term. In 1793, the US supreme court decided one of its first cases, which raised an issue concerning the relationship between the states and the federal government. Justice James Wilson wrote that when a toast to the new nation was called for, it was usually The United States, instead of the People of the United States. This, he said, “is not politically correct ... The toast is meant to present to view the first great object in the Union: It presents only the second: It presents only the artificial person, instead of the natural persons, who spoke it into existence” [Chisholm v Georgia, 2 US 419, 462 (1793)].
John V Orth
Chapel Hill, North Carolina, US
Endless tragedy in Syria
The Guardian Weekly’s leader of 9 December rightly lamented the killing in Aleppo. The purity of that message, however, was cast in doubt as US president Barack Obama has whined that we needed to be “willing to take over Syria” and his hypocritical UN ambassador Samantha Power asked Russia, Iran, and Syria, “Are you truly incapable of shame?”
The US has been involved in Syria for decades with regime change schemes, especially since 2011. American interventions are under way from Mali to Pakistan, an area wider than the European fronts of the second world war. There is no shame, whatever, about that. The Guardian should do a better job explaining this subject.
Afghanistan seems to be the model for this aggression, whether for imperial reasons or “humanitarian intervention”. Afghanistan has rejected foreign invaders for centuries: these have included Britain (at least twice in the 19th-century, its aerial bombardment of civilians in 1915-1919, and more recent presence in Helmand); Russia (1979-1989), and the US (since 1979, no relief in sight).
These invasions led to massive killing, refugees and impoverishment of the country. All were accompanied by the inevitability of crime. The same colonial pattern holds true of US actions from Libya to Pakistan, where dozens of places confirm the “west’s grim failure”.
Donald McNeill
New York City, US
• What I want to know is when will the Russians start to welcome refugees from the Syrian conflict ... and whether any Syrians would be willing to take them up on such a welcome.
Peter Scott
Elora, Ontario, Canada
Move beyond the primitive
Of course we live in A world divided (16 December). Your esteemed newspaper draws attention to this fact every week, as well as in this special edition.
But let’s be quite clear. We also live in a society that is primitive. For example, we watch adults and children starve to death and do very little about it; we are destroying the planet, our home in the universe; and we settle our most serious disputes by killing each other.
Only a civilisation in the first stage of its evolution, ie a primitive one, would do such things. We, therefore, need to start creating a united and more advanced society.
Colin Millen
Sheringham, UK
Briefly
• Your list of The Old Guard, five world leaders of whom four are over 70 (16 December), is a sobering reminder of how many men, at least those in high power positions, stubbornly refuse to be more conciliatory, especially when having to confront old age.
One can’t help but compare their despotic behaviour to that of the new US president, who remains highly intractable at age 70, and who therefore is unlikely to take a turn for the better any time soon.
Richard Orlando
Westmount, Quebec, Canada
• Contrary to your letter of 16 December, Mohammed Mossadegh, the democratically elected prime minister of Iran, was not killed in the 1953 coup organised by the CIA. In fact, he lived another 14 years and died at the age of 85, apparently from natural causes beyond the power of the CIA.
Patricia Clarke
Toronto, Canada
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