Nowhere to Hide

Richard Hoste

May 8, 2010

As an undergraduate, I learned early in my college career that I would hate almost any humanities class I took.  Sitting through the lies of political correctness, in an environment where the only conservative event I ever saw was “Islamo-fascist awareness week,” was too much for this talkative, energetic, opinionated young man.  I innocently signed up for a literature class and ended up reading postmodernist and anti-colonial philosophy.  When one summer I took a required “geography” course I was treated to a textbook which praised Mao Tse-Tung for his enlightened attitude towards women and a Dutch teacher who was so delicate that when I suggested that terrorism might have Islam itself as its root cause she turned white(r).   

My strategy became to check out early.  I would do what I needed to get an A as soon as humanely possible and then not pay attention for the rest of the semester, brushing up on the material right before the tests.  I understand, however, that it takes quite a bit of g to be able to stay unengaged for the duration of a class and keep one’s GPA up and this option isn’t available to many.  I also took as many classes as possible over a semester so when I was done I would never have to see the inside of a humanities classroom as an undergraduate again.  The one bright spot of my social science required curriculum was economics.  A girl once told me that she had had to read Pat Buchanan’s Death of the West for a class.  If only I could’ve had that professor. 

After the first two years of doing this I finally found a subject that would fulfill the rest of my requirements but was too scientific to be centered around PC: linguistics.  Sure, there was the occasional egalitarian lie.  For example, our textbooks would say that of the 6,000 languages in the world, each is equally complex.  How convenient!  I thought.  But most of the time, in studying phonology, morphology, semantics and historical linguistics one was dealing with documenting observable phenomena and studying theories that made predictions.   

I also took to studying French.  Surly they couldn’t make learning a foreign language an excuse to brainwash us with Cultural Marxism.  I couldn’t have been more wrong. 

The second year French textbook we used was Bien vu, bien dit.  There’s a story which goes with it and as the students go chapter by chapter the instructor plays the relevant part.  The book follows a journalist named Camille as she searches for her grandfather’s terrible secret, horrified that he may have been a collaborator with the Germans during World War II.  Well enough, you could brainwash the kids with things much worse than a color blind, bloodless patriotism. 

In chapter nine we are shown a political poster with the words sanctionner la droit, changer la gauche.  Chapter ten, Les sociétés plurielles et la perception de l’autre, is when they start laying it on thick.  Among the vocab are le racisme, la xénophobie, and la diversité.  A fill-in-the-blanks paragraph tells us that France had Italian, Polish, Spanish and Portuguese immigrants at the beginning of the twentieth century who assimilated just fine.  Today their descendants are considered French.  But more recent immigrants have come from North Africa, and due to a variety of reasons (historiques, culturelles, politiques, religieuses, etc.  No mention is made of possible facteurs biologiques) things haven’t worked out the same way.   

The beginning of another fill-in-the blanks section can be translated with the answers filled in as follows. 

We are proud to belong to SOS Racisme, an association founded in 1984.  SOS Racisme searches for a future where the egalitarian principles of the French Republic are respected.  It won’t have a quota system (like America), but all individuals will live in equal dignity in society and we will see a France that is a true mixing of the races (un véritable métissage).We will remain faithful to the values of our social contract and do what is necessary to fight against discrimination.   

Number two in the same section:

Children of a school wrote their anti-racist “commandments” for their comrades.  Here are two: 1) “You will be kind to all your comrades.  The color of their skin will not matter to you.” 2) “You will react if someone is mean to another child at school.  You will protect him.”   

On the same page is a note culturelle: 

Traditionally, the political parties of the Left protect the rights of immigrants in France.  One party of the extreme Right, le Front national, would like to on the other hand limit immigration and the rights of immigrants. 

After finishing with that textbook I continued to study the language on my own and was a little bit beyond cute stories about overcoming racism.  I moved on to La grammaire à l'oeuvre to continue to improve.  Within the first five pages I was in for another diversity shock.   

PC has always amazed me by managing to find new ways to spit in the face of tradition, nature and reason.  In every language book I’d ever seen before, when there was a list of verb conjugations and he/she and they(male)/they(female) were the same, the masculine came first.  So the conjugation for “to want” would go like this.  

je veux (I want)

tu veux (informal you want)

il/elle veut (he/she wants)

nous voulons (we want)

vous voulez (formal you want)

ils/elles veulent (they want) 

This book had switched the order of il/elle and ils/elles.  Worst of all, they did so when it made things more messy.  For example, for “he went” one would write il est allé.  For “she went” it’s elle est allée with an extra e.  Traditionally, one would show the third person singular conjugation as follows. 

il/elle est allé(e) 

Under the new regime of female supremacist language instruction, things get much uglier. 

elle/il est allée/allé 

As one can see, it’s not about arbitrarily picking one or the other to go first.  Since the verb predicating the female pronoun has something added to the masculine version, ‘il(s)’ going first is the most efficient way to write it.   

And this problem isn’t limited to conjugation.  In the entire language the masculine is usually the unmarked form.  So while most books write un(e) artiste for “an artist,” grammaire gives you une/un artiste.   

While my story of studying French isn’t the most egregious example of PC one is likely to run into, it is a reminder that in today’s education system there is nowhere to hide from indoctrination.  Though there seems to be no way to censor the media that’s consistent with the American political tradition, schools and the publishing industry that relies on them are a different story.  This is an area where our activism and votes can matter.  While the hysterical establishment reaction to the Texas schoolbook controversy tells us that change is not going to be easy, we should hope that the next generation of conservative activists understands how important of a prize the edbiz is. 

 

Richard Hoste (email him) is the editor of the HBD blog at Alternative Right. He writes prolifically on race, immigration, political correctness and modern conservatism. His blog is HBD Books, where he regularly reviews classic and modern works on these topics.