I wanted to cross-post this excellent article by James Delingpole.
When you mention to a Muslim or Hindu that the year is 2011, do you ever feel a twinge of guilt about your closet religious chauvinism? When you watch the old Raquel Welch film One Million Years BC, do you blushingly avert your gaze from the title sequence? When you catch your children reading 2000AD, do you furiously insist that they read something less offensive, such as The Beano or The Dandy, instead?
Well, the BBC thinks you should and it is taking action on your behalf. No longer will its website refer to those bigoted, Christian-centric concepts AD (as in Anno Domini – the Year of Our Lord) and BC (Before Christ). From now on, it will use initials which strip our traditional Gregorian calendar of its offensive religious context. All reference to Christ has been expunged, replaced by the terms CE (Common Era) and BCE (Before Common Era).
But the BBC isn't doing this because it has been flooded with complaints, you understand. Nor is it responding to public demand. No, as it primly explains on the Q&A page on the section of its website bbc.co.uk/religion, it is doing it to be 'in line with modern practice'.
'Whose modern practice?' you might well ask. Do you know anyone outside the BBC or the fields of Left-wing academe who has even heard of CE and BCE? Or anyone who seriously finds them preferable to the perfectly innocuous term 'AD'?
Almost certainly not. And this is what gives the lie to the BBC's weaselly, passive-aggressive excuse. The implication of 'in line with modern practice' is that anyone who disagrees with the change must be reactionary, backward, fuddy duddy. Note, too, how the phrase is careful to evade responsibility for the decision. Nothing to do with us, it's 'modern practice'.
And so yet another small part of our tradition, language and culture takes a step closer to extinction. We didn't ask for it; we didn't want it; yet still it's happening because a tiny minority of politically correct busybodies have wormed their way into institutions such as the BBC and taken control.
Their goal is to create a world where Left-wing thinking – on 'fairness', on race, on sexual equality, on the role of government – becomes the norm. So far, they are doing brilliantly.
This capture of the language for political ends was exactly what George Orwell warned us of more than 60 years ago in his book 1984. In the appendix he described how Big Brother devised its language Newspeak to make it impossible for people to think in the 'wrong' way.
'Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought,' he wrote. 'It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought should be literally unthinkable.'
'BC' and 'AD' are just the latest examples of the Oldspeak that the linguistic commissars of the BBC are so desperate to expunge. But the process has been going on for decades, accelerating under New Labour. Tony Blair's rejection of history ('We're a young country' he once nonsensically claimed) and his embrace of modernity may have seemed vacuous but they were part of a deliberate political strategy.
Who controls the language controls the culture. Who controls the culture wins the war.
So it was, for example, that a traditionally free market cap¬italist word such as 'investment' was suddenly being hijacked to mean 'government spending'. 'Diversity' no longer meant 'plentiful variety' but 'an excuse to nurture grievance at tax¬payers' expense'. 'Discrimin¬ation', formerly used to mean 'discernment', now meant 'yet another excuse to nurture grievance at taxpayers' expense'.
Once the original meanings of these words have been lost, it is hard to reclaim them – as you may have noticed with the word 'elitism'. Elitism ought to be a desirable thing: Who would you rather the SAS recruited – elite soldiers or shirkers with two left feet? Who would you rather did brain surgery on you – an elite specialist with years of training or a drunk plucked at random from the street?
Yet thanks to more than a decade's abuse of the word by New Labour Ministers, 'elitism' has acquired an almost wholly pejorative sense. Education Secretary Michael Gove's free schools, for example, are damned for their supposed 'elitism'. But isn't that exactly what most of us want: schools that strive to be the best – in everything from manners to academic standards and sporting achievement?
This is what the Left's capture of the word 'elitism' has achieved. 'Equality' – 'state-enforced mediocrity' as you and I might see it – is made through the power of language to seem like the only acceptable social norm.
Taken in isolation, these episodes of linguistic capitulation might seem harmless. Does it really matter whether we call it 'AD' any more? We may have been using it for nearly 1,500 years and even multicultural organisations such as the UN use the Gregorian calendar, which takes as its starting point the birth of Jesus. But it's not as though many of us go to church any more, the liberals say.
And isn't it only fair that we should be a bit more considerate to the sensitivities of other races, religions and creeds?
No, it's an act of cultural suicide. Most of us may not realise this but the ideological Left certainly does, for it has long been part of its grand plan to destroy Western civilisation from within. The plan's prime instigator was the influential German Marxist thinker ('the father of the New Left') Herbert Marcuse. A Jewish academic who fled Germany for the US in the Thirties, he became the darling of the Sixties and Seventies 'radical chic' set.
He deliberately set out to dismantle every last pillar of society – tradition, hierarchy, order – and key to victory, he argued, would be a Leftist takeover of the language, including 'the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or which oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care etc'.
In other words, those of us who believe in smaller government or other 'Right-wing' heresies should be for ever silenced.
Marcuse's teachings were de rigueur among student radicals on the campuses of the Sixties; his teachings formed the intellectual bedrock for every revolutionary group from the Black Panthers to the Baader-Meinhof gang. And also for that generation of long-haired students who now occupy senior positions in universities, in the judiciary, in government, in the civil service and, of course, at the BBC.
They may no longer define themselves as Marxists but they have absorbed the lessons of Marcuse unquestioningly.
At the time, Marcuse may have seemed like one of those fashionable Left-wing academics whose silly ideas you grow out of once you've got a job. Only now are we beginning to appreciate just how lethal he was.
Thanks to the sterling work done by his acolytes, Marcuse's most fervent desires – and Orwell's darkest predictions – are coming true. There was a time when we used to complain about it – remember our outrage when nursery children were taught to sing about 'Baa baa rainbow sheep'? – but now we've grown so used to it that we tend to shrug our shoulders, mutter under our breath about 'political correctness gone mad' and accept it as the way things are.
This complacency is fatal. Great civilisations do not die from the sudden arrival of the barbarians at the gates. They succumb much more slowly than that, from the death-by-a-thousand-cuts permitted from within by those who have forgotten why their traditions and cultural values are worth defending.
