DORIS LESSING: "POLITICAL CORRECTNESS" IS TOTALLY LEFTIST

On the occasion of her award of the Nobel Prize for Literature, the New Duranty Times republished an op-ed Doris Lessing wrote in 1992, "Questions you should never ask a writer." In the article, the former communist and fellow-traveler described how communist jargon and communist ways of thinking had infected mainstream culture. Her testimony indicates the success of the communists' Gramscian attack on Western culture, and underscores the importance of opposing it. She wrote:

There is a Communist jargon recognizable after a single sentence. Few people in Europe have not joked in their time about “concrete steps,” “contradictions,” “the interpenetration of opposites,” and the rest. The first time I saw that mind-deadening slogans had the power to take wing and fly far from their origins was in the 1950s when I read an article in The Times of London and saw them in use. “The demo last Saturday was irrefutable proof that the concrete situation...” Words confined to the left as corralled animals had passed into general use and, with them, ideas. One might read whole articles in the conservative and liberal press that were Marxist, but the writers did not know it. [Emphasis added.]

She goes on to note:

The phrase “political correctness” was born as Communism was collapsing. I do not think this was chance. I am not suggesting that the torch of Communism has been handed on to the political correctors. I am suggesting that habits of mind have been absorbed, often without knowing it.

There is obviously something very attractive about telling other people what to do: I am putting it in this nursery way rather than in more intellectual language because I see it as nursery behavior. Art — the arts generally — are always unpredictable, maverick, and tend to be, at their best, uncomfortable. Literature, in particular, has always inspired the House committees, the Zhdanovs, the fits of moralizing, but, at worst, persecution. It troubles me that political correctness does not seem to know what its exemplars and predecessors are; it troubles me more that it may know and does not care.

She concludes, ominously:

I am sure that millions of people, the rug of Communism pulled out from under them, are searching frantically, and perhaps not even knowing it, for another dogma.

RTWT.

And don't miss her candid reaction to being informed that she had won the Nobel.