Not browbeaten by a long shot

On December 15, Spencer posted an essay about the recent honor murder in Ontario, written by Rosie DiManno and published in the Toronto Star. Everything in Ms. DiManno’s essay was fine—expressing an intelligent and appropriate outrage—except for one fusillade of rhetorical questions and their answer that leapt out at me:

Where are the feminists? The civil libertarians? The secularists? Browbeaten into silence.

Not only the succinct impact of this fusillade, but also the telling fact that Spencer emphasized it in bold (but failed to editorially correct it), helped to catch my eye.

Unfortunately, it is dead wrong. The feminists, civil libertarians and secularists—a compendium of sociopolitical types that should embrace a majority of people in the West, unless the last term, secularists, is unduly restricted to those dastardly Leftists—have not at all been “browbeaten” into silence on this Islamic atrocity, nor on a thousand other Islamic atrocities perpetrated in various locales around the world over the years of our recent past. Not by a long shot. In fact, feminists, civil libertarians and secularists quite willingly, lucidly, and often eagerly lap up, swallow, digest and excrete the axioms of Politically Correct Multi-Culturalism (PC MC) on a daily basis—axioms that serve to inoculate Islam itself, along with the vast majority of Muslims, from the rational condemnation that such atrocities demand.

As is the case with all sociopolitico-cultural phenomena, PC MC did not fall out of the blue sky, nor is it some kind of inert rock upon which people stumble and around which people have to modify their ambulations. No: as is the case with all sociopolitico-cultural phenomena, PC MC is an organic process created by the people, sustained by the people, and continually shaped by the people, even as symbiotically it can be experienced and analyzed as exerting an influence upon us, like an external force. This is not to say that “Elites” do not enjoy a singular role in the sustenance and shaping of such sociopolitico-cultural phenomena; but that role should not be exaggerated in the name of infantilizing the people as passive sheep being led by the nose by those “Elites”. Such a sociopolitical relationship may pertain in despotisms (as in Islamic societies, for example), but last I heard, the despotic form of government became outmoded long ago in the modern West.

Why then do such otherwise intelligent analysts as Ms. DiManno and her uncritical messenger, Spencer, so egregiously misjudge the problem of PC MC? How could she possibly conclude that the prominent agents of PC MC are “browbeaten into silence”, when in fact their “silence” is merely the absence of rational condemnation of the Islamic culture upon whose virtues and grievances they rather happily and noisily pontificate on a routine basis? One must conclude that, along with the development of the mainstream dominance of PC MC, there has also developed a caricaturization of it among those who evidently cannot see that its mainstream dominance is just that—a diffusion everywhere, not restricted merely to “Elites” nor merely to “Leftists”. It’s a pity that so many of those who have managed to break through the box of PC MC, and to free themselves of its imprisoning paradigm about Islam, still fail to see the magnitude and normalcy of it.