TRIBUTES TO WILLIAM PHILLIPS
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assumptions of numerous terrorist organizations, including several that
have originated in the West itself.
Political correctness and modern terrorism also share a relativist pre–
disposition. "The politically correct movement is imbued with the idea
of relativism, with the notion of absolute relativity," William Phillips
lamented. "The idea is rampant that no work can be considered better
than another, or that there are no truths we can accept." Yet, paradoxi–
cally, we are urged to accept all cultures as equal. The result is that
"[m]ulticulturalism is the battle cry of the politically correct and those
under its influence." Such a formulaic admixture of multiculturalism and
political correctness often works
to
disguise the true nature of terrorism.
According to the preferred equation, since all cultures are equally valu–
able, their various manifestations must be equally valid, including, to a
limited extent, terrorism, whose existence, at the very least, can be ratio–
nalized as being the byproduct of unique cultural circumstances.
Since September
I I
various commentators have detected the insidious
interrelationship between political correctness, multiculturalism, and polit–
ical terrorism.
In
his recent book,
The War Against the Terror Masters,
Michael Ledeen links these three phenomena with other, somewhat more
admirable, tendencies in the American character to demonstrate why the
country was so intellectually unprepared for September 11. Americans are
never ready for war [due
to]
our radical egalitarianism and our
belief in the perfectibility of man.... [H]aving turned the study of
history into a hymn to the wonders of multiculturalism, we are
reluctant to accept Machiavelli's dictum that man is more inclined
to do evil than
to
do good. Throughout this generation of political
correctness, it has been singularly bad form for anyone in America
to
suggest that there are some truly evil people, and even some
thoroughly evil regimes whose fear and hatred of us are so
intractable that "live and let live" (our mind set) will not do.
Aidan Rankin, the author of
Politics of the Forked Tongue,
asserts that
[t]hose who now advocate political correctness combine a starry–
eyed missionary fervor with totalitarian political impulses. Gener–
ally, they cut their teeth during the ideological battles of the 1960s
and 1970s. They are of the generation who were pacifists who
campaigned against nuclear weapons, albeit those of the West
rather than those of the Soviet Union and China. They agitated
against "racism," a political disease from which only white people
