The BBC website for Saturday November 12th has a lengthy account of Friday night’s riots in Lyons and Toulouse. The rioters are described as “youths” but nowhere is there a mention of ethnicity. At the end of the report there is a reference to the origin of the riots (two weeks earlier in outer Paris) being in “deprived” areas. [Associated Press (AP) reports contain exactly the same language for American audiences!]
The BBC is always very unwilling to ascribe ethnicity in any crime reports, unless the alleged perpetrators are white. It is too easy to write off this avoidance of honest reporting as the BBC being “politically correct”. This suggests that the BBC and its reporters are simply pandering to someone else’s norms. We can ask the questions, “where does this political correctness emanate from and who gives it such stamina and uniformity?”
The answer to the first question is that PC began in academia, created by Leftist professors and educators and affluent Feminist fanatics. Since most sane working people ( in other words the vast majority of the population) have never shown enthusiasm for PC, it’s eventual stranglehold on society’s discourse has not happened by popular demand. In the UK, it is the BBC which led the imposition of PC and most other Media outlets soon took their cue. Today, AP, Reuters, etc. routinely impose PC on the news across the world.
Political Correctness is now the norm because it is a very useful weapon for the Media Class. It is one of the ways in which the news can be sanitised of any content or implication that would conflict with the Media’s agenda. It is so uniformly employed that few question its use and even fewer stray beyond its confines. This is particularly true in the UK, where ordinary people look over their shoulders and drop their voices before saying something un-PC even to a friend. They have good reason to be fearful, since there is now a raft of laws which have been quietly put into place or been acquired from Supra-national bodies, which underpin PC. Using words like “inclusiveness”, “hate-speech”, “cultural diversity”, the Media Class has gradually been able to outlaw free speech.
PC is the weapon that has destroyed free speech (and its offspring, honest debate) in the UK and in several other Western Democracies. In the USA, only the good old Constitution and the avoidance of being signed up to Supra-national bodies prevents a similar fate.
There is nothing new about all this. It is the technique Stalin used in the Soviet Union in the 1930’s when he set about eliminating the last vestiges of disagreement with the bureaucratic class he led. Ironically, this was in his own Communist Party, debate having long been outlawed everywhere else. PC then preceeded terror, as the Soviet Union became a truly totalitarian society. The Show Trials of Zinoviev, Kamenev, Tomsky and Bukharin (and torture, “confessions” and death) were the culmination of the earlier imposition of political correctness.
If this sounds unduly alarmist, it is worth noting that BNP members in the UK are now facing criminal trial for speaking freely. Their “criminal” speech is not defensible on the grounds that it might be true, but that it is offensive.
This coming week, the United Nations (the ultimate Supra-national body) will advance its plan to gain control of the internet. If it succeeds, you can guarantee that PC will ultimately be imposed on all internet communication.
The absence of any reference to ethnicity when reporting the French riots shows how confident in its power the Media has become. Of course, the Media Class knows that we all know the ethnic nature of the events, but it is signalling that history can be revised, even as it is made, and the rest of us are becoming powerless to resist.