THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

MORALS: A NEW NAME IS NOT A NEW THING | nationalsalvation.net

The fact that something has acquired a name does not make it new.

What we have recently begun to call Stockholm Syndrome has been all over forever.

Every drunken father who spent his life beating his family and was loved by that family for the times when he had a little mercy demonstrated what we now call Stockholm Syndrome. The people Stalin DIDN'T send to the Gulag the night before were sincerely in love with him.

Respectable conservative behavior toward leftists has been straight Stockholm Syndrome for well over fifty years while I have observed it. Leftists have no mercy, and conservatives are lucky if they get off with just being called racists. On the other hand, Buckley was so flattered that Professor Galbraith would associate with him it, made one sick to read him glory in it.

Nowadays I get the impression that if Christopher Hitchens visited National Review the male staff would rape him. He said some honest things about the Clintons during the controversy and conservatives keep praising this rather mindless Marxist to the skies.

Stockholm Syndrome has been around the corner with every little toady who ever came to love his buddy because the bully didn't hit HIM.

People who find Stockholm Syndrome novel are exactly like someone who read Newton for the first time and said, "Gee, I never noticed this gravity stuff before!"

But people do not analyze what they have no name for. We always knew political correctness was required by leftists. But it was not really discussed generally until the standard Marxist term slopped over into everyday discussion.

The fact is that one can prevent people from thinking about something by not giving it a name.

One's brain, like any computer, is limited in the number of steps it naturally makes. So if every time one hears someone say political correctness and that person does not know it is a standard Marxist term, one must go through that extra mental step, and the process stops there.

The establishment sets a limit for how much any conservative who wants to make his living on his respectability can go. Twenty years ago one could debate Martin Luther King's politics. The day came when anyone who wanted to make a living as a "conservative" had to grovel when the Great Name was spoken.

When a paradigm like this changes, you are ruined if you don't know it and you are ruined if you mention it. This is the environment I made my living in.

The day that something becomes verboten for a respectable to say is a lot like the Israeli Lobby on Capitol Hill. Everybody knows that you never mention it, only respectfully and as little as possible. When you do mention it you talk about it as if it were just one of many lobbies.

But if you ever really BELIEVED the Israeli Lobby is one of many lobbies you could never get a job anywhere near a congressional office. Anybody who doesn't make the facts about that group part of his everyday thinking would have to be a genuine retard.

In the case of knowing exactly when a respectable disavows the stance his side made a quarter of a century ago, there is nobody who is a practicing professional on either side who talks about it, and there is nobody on either side who is smart enough to get a job who doesn't recognize it.