Vladimir Bukovsky:
Vladimir Bukovsky. Can Political Correctness be Worse than Leninism?
Vladimir Bukovsky (born. 1942) is one of the initiators of the dissident movement in the USSR, a neurophysiologist, and a writer. Since adolescence he was involved in anti-Soviet activities, and, as a result, expelled from school and university. In 1963 Bukovsky was arrested, judged to be mentally incapable and kept in a psychiatrist clinic by force. During this forced “treatment” he and his friend-in-misfortune Semion Glazman published “A Manual of Psychiatry for the Dissenters” – a tool for those whom communists tried to proclaim or make mentally incapable.
When Vladimir Bukovsky became widely known in the Soviets and in the West, the Soviet power decided to expel him. In 1976, this “hooligan”, of whom the Soviet authorities had more than enough, was traded for probably the best known political prisoner in the Western world – the Chilean communist leader Luis Corvalan. Mr Bukovsky settled in Great Britain, graduated from Cambridge University, and continued fighting communism. He was amongst the organizers of the boycott of the Moscow Olympic Games in 1980.
In 1978 he published his autobiography “To Build a Castle. My life as a Dissenter”, which later was translated into many languages. After the collapse of the USSR Mr Bukovsky visited Russia. At the invitation of the new authorities, he participated in the so called “USSR case” (July- October 1992) and acted as an official court expert of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation. When preparing for the process he had an opportunity to get acquainted with many top secret documents from the CK USSR, including KGB documents from the so called Russian Presidential Archive (later this archive was thoroughly cleansed by “specialists”). On the basis of those documents he compiled one of the most interesting archives to this day (http://bukovsky-archives.net), and wrote his book “The Moscow Process” Московский процесс (1995) on that very communism trial which never took place.
Although he does not live in Russia, Bukovsky remains one of the leaders of the Russian Democratic Movement. In December 2007 he was nominated as candidate for the Presidential election in the Russian Federation, but was not registered to run for the election. Being an ardent fighter for liberty, he belongs to many related organizations (Human Rights Foundation, The Freedom Association), and is a member of Great Britain’s Independence Party (UKIP) represented in the European Parliament. In 2009 he visited Sofia, Bulgaria, where he gave a lecture on political correctness, which did not go unnoticed by “Radio Svoboda” (Liberty Radio). Head of the programme “The Boundaries of Time” Mr Vladimir Tolz, dedicated his programme of 24 November 2009 to the subject of political correctness. This release was also taken notice of in Lithuania – its summary was published by the weekly Atgimimas.
Through the mediation of priests Petras Kimbrys and Robertas Grigas, the editorial office of NŽ- A contacted Vladimir Bukovsky and received full script of the said programme, which by then was published only by a small Estonian internet portal. With the kind consent of the author, we are pleased to present our readers with the full text of his lecture. It was translated from Russian into Lithuanian by Mr Nerijus Šepetys.
The text of the lecture:
You know what – I am mostly amazed at the events and processes, which started in the world right after the collapse of the Soviet Union. We all know that the Soviet Union was destined to fall apart. My friend Andrej Amalrik in 1969 wrote a book titled “Will the Soviet Union Last till 1984?”). Of course, he had in mind not the calendar year, but the Orwelian 1984. In any case, he almost hit it right, with a slight discrepancy of several years. And the plot he describes also came true – he predicted that the Soviet Union will break down into separate national republics.
It turned out to be that his forecast was fully realistic. And it is not only his personal opinion, but the shared view of us all. He only knew better how to formulate, convey, and argue it. So the downfall of the Soviet Union was by no means a surprise for me. In 1989 – 1990 I myself was about to release a small book in the West which thoroughly explained why communism was destined to collapse. The book received a cold welcome due to one peculiar reason. Back in 1989, in France everyone would say: “He made a gross exaggeration! How come! The Soviet Union now, with perestroika, gets back on track, and he wants to bury it…”. And when it appeared in Germany in 1991, everyone said: “Well, the Soviet Union is down, so what is there to write about?” So the book did not gain any popularity neither here nor there, and it was hard to predict where and when to release it.
The events that took place 20 years ago were by no means unexpected. But the events that ensued took us indeed by great surprise. So what did in fact happen? Firstly, it is what had not occurred – the reflection of this horrendous phenomenon, unique in the history of the world, which destroyed people by the millions. The attempts to philosophically reflect upon phenomena of the kind, make proper conclusions, understand the underlying reasons how things like that could have happened with us, civilized people – this has never occurred. Far from it, some processes started to unleash and they were rather illogical, to say the least.
After the Second Word War, after the collapse of Nazism, it seemed that the political balance in the world has shifted to the left (it is obvious when we take into consideration that Nazism was considered a right wing ideology. By mistake, as a matter of fact, but it’s another subject). So in the wake of the collapse of Nazism the public opinion has moved leftwards, but nothing of the kind – when the opinions must have shifted rightwards – happened after the breakdown of communism.
But what happened after the collapse of communism? All over the world, especially in Europe, left wing politicians and parties come to power. Therefore, the move was clearly to the left, which seems illogical to me. Moreover, no hopes cherished back in 1989 (which were so high) ever came true. Communism survived. Francisco Fukuyama could have said that it was the end of history, but history proved otherwise – Cuba, Vietnam, China, North Korea remained communist. And in the very post-communist countries the processes did not go too far either. All what happened there were in fact cosmetic, exterior changes. Several personalities were replaced with others, who also happened to come from the communist establishment. Those countries appeared to be not free, but rather densely meshed by the remains of the nomenclature (communist establishment). But it was what happened in the West that surprised me most. It is at this time that the utopian ideologies appeared in the West. If we were to pinpoint when political correctness came into being, I could specify precisely – it came into being at the beginning of the nineties of the 20th century.
This movement, as a phenomenon or rather a deviation from the norm of political correctness, existed before that, too. My first encounter with it happened when I worked at Stanford University. It must have been back in 1984. One day I was walking down to my laboratory and approached a door. In front of me there were two girls coming down the stairs. I opened the door and held open for them the way I would have held it for anyone – be it a man or woman, young or old. It was an act of mere politeness. They stared at me and uttered with undisguised contempt: “male chauvinist pig”.
I was greatly surprised, I did not understand their reaction, and, having entered the laboratory, told the story to the laboratory guys asking them: “what was it?” They started laughing like a drain and explained: “you see, there is Berkley University close by; people call it the People’s Republic of Berkeley, because all weird radical left-wing movements are born there”.
The philosophy of student revolution of 1968 was shaped at Berkley, and now there is a feminist movement spreading there. According to the feminists, we repress them when we speak to them like they were women, when we treat them like women. They even have a concept that they promote – women are a social construct, so if men would start treating women like men, they would indeed become men. In their view, it is our attitude towards them that shape them the way they are”. And, what is most surprising, they even performed the experiment in one of the leading universities at the end of the 20th century. They took babies of both sexes and raised them in the same conditions: same food, same clothing, same games and education (I am surprised anyone would give them a permission to do that).
Surely, this experiment did not bring any expected results. They boys did not lose any of the organs that they had from birth, and the girls did not grow any extra ones. On the whole, the boys’ penchant for guns did not go, just like that one of the girls’ for puppets. [Read more]
posted by: jrtelegraph
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