Thursday, August 18, 2011

Why The Never-ending Déjà Vu?

"During the late 1960s, I watched in despair as my brilliantly gifted [American] piano students suddenly began to speak as if someone had replaced their brains with prerecorded tapes. They spoke in phrases—repeated mechanically—which were neither the product of, nor accessible to, intelligent consideration. At first, these tapes seemed to contain only a few slogans about "love and peace." Fruitful conversation became impossible, but that was merely regrettable. The situation became alarming when the "tapes" began to include words and phrases that had become familiar to me in Hungary during the Nazi and Soviet occupations, and which contributed to the reasons for my decision to escape. Worse yet, the words and phrases were soon followed by practices of similar pedigree.

"Reactionary," "exploitation," "oppressor and oppressed," and "redistribution" were some of the words taken straight from the Marxist repertoire. The term "politically correct" first came to my attention through the writings of Anton Semionovich Makarenko, Lenin’s expert on education. Adolf Hitler preferred the version "socially correct." Then came the affirmative action forms which classified people by ancestry—first signed into law in Nazi Germany—and the preferential treatment of specific categories, introduced by the Stalinist government in 1950."  (Balint Bazsony, America's 30 Year War)