Taking Political Correctness to the Woodshed at Blogodidact

Several days ago, there was a little dust up over here at a post I did on the disgraceful photo of some of the White House staff women, including Karen Hughes, attending the rededication of the Islamic Center in Washington, D.C. wearing scarves and looking like Muslim converts. It was political correctness at its most shameful worst.

Whereupon, the comments starting flying advocating the respect we should show for all religious traditions, including Islam. I stuck to my guns on the disgracefulness of this photo in the face of liberal apologists for Islam.

Fortunately, Van at Blogodidact came over and took up the banner of righteous indignation with me. And today, he has done a larger post---go and read it all--- expanding his argument and defending our similar positions.

Van continues in a very insightful post saying:

"Numbers Don't Mean Squat
What Vienna VA and other members of the culturally clueless don't seem to grasp, is that a culture is not led by the opinions of its majority. A culture is led by those who effectively position themselves as its public face. It doesn't take a majority to impose the rules. It only takes an active, vocal minority to make demands and threaten those who disagree with them, to denigrate them - to put their face forward as THE Face, into your face, and with a majority who will not only let them do so, but will accept the denigration and embarrassment over their disagreements ("Gas guzzling, SUV Driving...", "Energy hogs.", "More concerned with comfort...", etc) in order to just get along, to not make waves, with just that and no more, the vocal minority will easily be able to rule - they will be perceived as the public Face of the Culture.

Webutante said "... to me political correctness and appeasement is generated by a deep and unacknowledged fear not to confront and make waves."

Yep.

What leaders, good and bad, have always understood - and what the rest of us never seem to grasp, is that those who make up the culture, are only a very small slice of the population. Those who appear to be the guiding lights of the culture make up an even smaller slice of them. They are the ones who set the tone, or seem to, which the entire population will then seek to march in step with - even those who fancy themselves as the 'counter-culture' busily take note of the popular beat, in order to be out of step with it - making themselves if anything even more slavish than the simple follower.

For those who take comfort in the reassuring nods of their leaders and the accompanying phrases such as ‘it can never happen here’, just what is it that they think secures the 'culture' they live in? Numerical advantages? How many people are aware that the US Revolutionary war was supported by only a fraction of the populace - a third at best? That Hitler was voted into power by a small percentage of the population - which nevertheless was larger than the opposition groups? It wasn't because the majority of the people agreed and was with them, it was because a majority of the people weren't aware that they were the majority, and so went along with those few they took the majority to agree with."

This is not stuff you're going to read or hear in the MSM. We need to listen to what Van says and there's more good writing over there.