It’s usually possible to guess a man’s political views without ever bringing up politics.
For instance, a political conservative is unlikely to express enthusiasm for pop music, ‘conceptual’ sculpture, garden cities, vegetarianism, same-sex marriage, facial metal, yoga or body art. And it’s impossible that in writing he’d ever choose BCE and CE over BC and AD.
Nor can one easily imagine a conservative sporting a tattoo, say ‘ACAB’ on his knuckles (for the benefit of those who’ve led a sheltered life, this stands for All Cops Are Bastards). Such telltale signs may of course mislead, but not often.
Of all possible signs, language is by far the most reliable. It’s not hard to understand why.
All ruling elites share the need to exercise crowd control. When the majority stops being silent and becomes vociferous it can easily loosen the elite’s hold on power, something no elite in history has ever welcomed.
There exist only two discernible methods of controlling a potentially restless crowd: coercion and brainwashing. All modern elites without exception use both, but in different combinations.
Crudely, and only for this ad hoc purpose, dividing all modern states into totalitarian and democratic, one can observe that the former mix the two ingredients in roughly equal proportions, perhaps favouring violence slightly, while the latter mostly have to rely on brainwashing.
But this is a matter of proportion only: both types of modern regimes use both methods. They must therefore enforce their monopoly on both violence and language.
Because so-called democratic regimes are somewhat limited in their use of violence, they have to place a heavy emphasis on controlling language. What people say, and how they say it, may threaten the elites more than anything people do.
Our ruling elite, regardless of what parties it represents, inclines to the soft left. The hard variety is generally marginalised in the West, although this may change as the EU edges closer to the precipice.
The vocabulary of the soft left has to be more subtle: slogans like “kill [capitalists, priests, Jews, blacks, whites, aristos and so forth]” can’t yet be part of their lexicon, and neither has the public been sufficiently primed to heed such calls.
Few people realise that the language of political correctness, its vocabulary, grammar and even phonetics, represents the elite’s way of managing dissent. By brainwashing the populace into believing that some words, phrases, grammar and even pronunciation are so immoral that they should be made illegal, the soft-left elite achieves the same end as the Bolsheviks did by making the starving children of murdered parents chant “Thank you, Comrade Stalin, for our happy childhood.”
Since Comrade Stalin was also at liberty to torture people to death, there was precious little dissent during his rule. Here the situation is still different.
Comrade Cameron or even Comrade Miliband can’t rely on violence to the same extent, although our elite is beginning to acquire some taste for criminalising word and even thought. That’s why residual resistance still has some, albeit attenuating, strength.
Language being the battleground on which the elite clashes with the dissidents, it has become a clearly visible watershed. The line runs between the elite backed up by those willing to submit to its logocratic rule and those who still have the temerity to resist it.
One example from today’s BBC sports website: “West Brom will inform their new head coach that they will have to lead the club to Premier League safety.”
Unless this football club decides to appoint Siamese twins, which is statistically unlikely, the team’s new head coach will be singular. Moreover, and I know I’m going out on a limb here, he’ll probably be a man.
This isn’t in any way to imply that a woman would be congenitally incapable of managing a football team, God forbid. It’s just that so far no major football club has ever appointed a female manager, and one doubts a team locked in relegation struggle would wish to blaze that particular trail in mid-season.
So why not follow the singular, implicitly male antecedent with the singular, masculine, utterly appropriate pronoun ‘he’? Moreover, how can people who use the English language professionally be so utterly tone-deaf? Can’t they see that the sentence violates not only grammar in particular but also elementary taste in general?
Anyone asking such questions misses the point. The BBC, along with most of our media, is the mouthpiece of the ruling soft-left elite. That’s why it not only acquiesces in linguistic mangling but actively promotes it.
The implicit message is, “Yes, we know that what our friend Tony called ‘the forces of conservatism’ will cry havoc when hearing such phrases. Well, they can go boil an egg.
“Our mission is to control the populace by controlling their speech, and control their speech we will. To weaken resistance we’ll make sure that schools neither teach proper English nor encourage any affection for it.
“Once the people have accepted our diktat in such seemingly small matters, they’ll think it churlish to object to more serious sabotage. For example, if they accept that ‘gay’ is the only proper word, while ‘homosexual’ is iffy and, say, ‘poofter’ borderline illegal, they won’t have any leg to stand on when we insist that ‘gay persons’ can get married.”
This is how the soft left works, by taking small incremental steps rather than bold leaps. Some of its attacks on decency and tradition, such as ‘gay’ marriage, only seem to have come out of the blue. In fact, all the necessary groundwork had been laid meticulously and deliberately.
We have no means of resisting this escalating onslaught actively. But passive resistance is possible: everyone must mind HIS language, refusing to submit to PC usage – and mocking it when others fail to do so.