Bill Lind

Back in the good old days of the Soviet Union, whenever someone wanted a laugh they could open a Russian history textbook. There they would find not history, but ideological melodrama: capitalists in top hats and tails laughing as they ground the faces of the poor, heroic workers who loved their factory better than their girl, happy Stakhanovites rejoicing to get black lung while overfulfilling their norms in Comrade Stalin’s coal mines. And, of course, the automobile, the airplane, and the electric light were all invented by Russians.

So why aren’t we laughing now, when American history is being rewritten no less grotesquely by political correctness?

Recently, the PC crowd took up its usual howl upon the discovery that, at a southern university, a course was offered that suggested many blacks had fought for the Confederacy. The school showed the moral cowardice we have come to expect from American universities and cancelled the course.

But in fact, thousands of blacks did fight for the Confederacy. How do we know? In addition to many eyewitness accounts, Union as well as Confederate (one Union doctor who witnessed the passage of Lee’s army on its way to Antietam recorded that about 5% of the southern troops were negroes), we have pension records. While only Union veterans received Federal pensions, by the 1890s most Confederate veterans got state pensions, and the records show that a number of the pensioners were black.

But just as in the Soviet Union, the facts don’t count. Political correctness does not care what actually happened, only whether what it teaches supports the ideology. All history must be shown to be nothing more than the "oppression" of blacks, Indians, Hispanics, women, homosexuals, etc. by white males. One scholar calls it "awfulizing": the student is told, in effect, "You don’t really want to know what happened back then; it was all simply awful."

It is, of course, a lie, as Soviet history was a lie and as the rest of the cultural Marxism we know as political correctness is a lie. In many ways, life in America in the past was a great deal better than life in America today. As the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb has demonstrated, the same social problems—drugs, illegitimacy, alcoholism, domestic violence—that surged in the last 30 years declined steadily through the Victorian period. America in 1950 was a safer, saner, more decent place that America in 1999: crime was so low many people did not lock their doors, young children traveled hundreds of miles by themselves on the train in perfect safety (I was one of them), and even in the black community, four out of five children came home from school to a married mother and father. Drugs in school meant getting an aspirin form the school nurse.

Like other totalitarian ideologies, political correctness seeks to steal the past. Why? Precisely because the past gives people a basis for comparison. If people know their history, they can determine for themselves whether life is getting better or worse. No ideology can tolerate that, because all ideologies make life worse: just compare the degree of intellectual freedom on your campus today with that in, say, 1965, and you will understand what political correctness has done to you.

Moreover, if people know their past, they are resistant to ideology, because they recognize its assertions as bunk. The ideology becomes a joke, a farce, as Communism is now regarded in the former Soviet Union. Laughter is ideology’s deadliest enemy; just as political correctness has "awfulized" history, it has also forbidden humor, or tried to.

Fortunately, there is an easy and available antidote to the cultural Marxists’ attempt to steal the past: study the past. Libraries are full of excellent books of history, books written before political correctness took over academe. Check them out. Read them with care. Get to know the past as it was, not as some ugly professorette with doubtful sexual inclinations presents it in her classroom rants. You will find that America back then was a wonderful place, made that way not by the various "victim" groups political correctness whines about, but by normal people living normal lives.

They even had a name for that professorette: bluestocking. It was, appropriately, a term of derision, for a figure of fun.