But just like your friendly local environmental NGO, it won’t go away when the job is done. The goal posts simply shift to create a new, and if possible larger category of victims. Take today’s American poors, according to government definitions; three quarters own a car, and one of the major health problems for a majority of them is not malnutrition, as it was in the 19th century or in third world countries today, but obesity. Victims, nonetheless. Just like the ozone layer was not such a nasty life-and-death problem after all, the Amazon will not disappear by 2007 as planned, and acid rains didn’t wipe out all our northern forrests, but Greenpeace has grown bigger in the meantime because most people accept the idea that the state of the environment is worsening.

And so the story goes on. And because it literally is its business model, if not its raison d’etre, the Left goes on naming “victims” and talking up their “rights”. Being a victim makes everything you do right, and gives you rights others don’t have nor, apparently, deserve. And anyone who disagrees is made to look like a heartless bastard and labelled with the appropriate code words that mark him or her as ‘toxic’ or ’100% fat’.

A lot of political correctness rests on this culture of victimization. Things can no longer be said because someone has become a victim. It is distateful for a football team to call itself the ‘Crusaders’, but OK for Arab Muslims to call their team ‘Jihad’ or ‘Intifada’. And so on.

So I think political correctness is only a superficial symptom of the disease. Insert freedom and individual responsibility in the picture and the intellectual house of cards and all its arbitrary barriers crumble. At least, that’s my $.02.

All in all, I don’t see how one can argue that this is different than any other stripe of totalitarianism.

The fact is, nobody ever got beaten up or shot in the street for insulting Jews. In fact, this activity is obviously rewarded with praise in quite a few locales. Unless you take up arms against Israel itself, there is no physical risk involved. But say one ambiguous thing about Islam on TV and you’ll get the s***t kicked out of you when you come out of the grocery store.

So given the choice, the morally weak and the spineless cowards will beat on civilized targets. Nothing new here.

And for a good critique of the Kilroy-Silk article, see Samizdata.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/uk/2000/newsmakers/2481623.stm

However, what Robert Kilroy-Silk said was beyond the pale apparently.