Political correctness I

Steve Kaufmann here and what I'm going to do for the next little while is that I'm going to record my videos. I'm also going to record them as podcasts and I'm going to provide transcripts. This will make it possible for people who want to use these for language learning to do so.

I'm going to talk about two types of subjects, I'm either going to talk about language learning or I'm going to talk about other, call them, interesting, topical, controversial subjects, which I hope will be interesting for people to listen to, because in language learning if the subject is interesting, you're more likely to learn. And, certainly, that has been my experience with my Russian studies. Ever since I discovered Echo Moskvi I have just been fascinated by the range of interviews and daily commentary/monologues that the various journalists on Echo Moskvi have provided me with.

Now I'm not a mini multitasking Echo Moskvi, but I'm going to try to, somehow, do what they do and I'm going to provide video as well, even though I, personally, don't believe that video is all that helpful in language learning. But I asked the question here at my blog, The Linguist on Language, and I would say a majority of people who answered said they like video.

Now video as in a movie with action and people talking to each other is a lot more fun than looking at some old coot deliver a monologue, but I can't provide drama here. All I can provide is me talking in a video and I will also provide the audio as a separate file and the transcripts.

Now what am I going to talk about? Let's talk a few things here; first of all, I want to stay on the subject of political correctness because it does relate to how we use language. I made the point that I think we should be free to express ourselves freely, without being constrained by sort of new techniques of dialoging and making sure we're nice to people, because all of that is hypocrisy. Whenever I come across people who try to tell me how I should be more considerate and not try to impose my views, they are the most intolerant of anybody's views that don't conform to theirs, so I consider that to be just an attempt to squash other people's points of view. Now I want to talk a bit about something that came up on Echo Moskvi, which is this very fascinating radio station in Russia that is available online where you download both sound files and text files, which I import, of course, into LingQ. It seems that in Russia a minister, apparently a very highly-respected minister of the government there, has proposed a piece of legislation that would make it a crime, a criminal offense, in Russia to deny that the Soviet Union won what is known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War. They don't refer to it as II Word War, it's known as the Great Patriotic War and, of course, it is true that the Soviet Union, by far, suffered greater casualties than any other of the allies. It is also true that the Soviet Union probably was instrumental, if not decisive, in defeating Hitler, because Hitler committed more troops into the Soviet Union than anywhere else.

There were some absolutely monumental battles, like Stalingrad, and the combination of the Soviet manpower and the industrial capability that was set up back of the front in the Euros; whether, to some extent, but mostly, this absolutely incredible mobilization of the human and industrial resources of the Soviet Union was responsible for the defeat of Hitler.

Now why would you have a law that makes it a criminal offense to deny that the Soviet Union won the war? Are there people out there saying that the Soviet Union lost the war? I haven't heard them and many of the commentators on Echo Moskvi were of the same tone that this was rather unnecessary and I think a vote amongst their listeners found 75% who said that this was not necessary. However, it raises some interesting points as, again, the commentator on Echo Moskvi made the point. Well, he said what if you…for example, there was a documentary film that was produced in Russia, which said that the Russian Army was poorly prepared, poorly led, uncertain of their battles and this contributed to massive losses, which were unnecessary. In other words, they criticized some of the actors, some of the officers or some of the people, who were involved in the Russian defense of the motherland.

A leader of the Veteran's Association in Russia has said that the person who created this documentary not only should be put in prison, but he should be hanged…I find that tone in Russia is very common, you know they don't come after you in half measures, it's “hang ‘em”...because he has offended the memory of many people who died defending Russia against Hitlerism and eventually defeating Hitler. So should we be allowed to say things that might offend people? You know what if it's true that there were officers who were incompetent, drunk or committed troops to battle before they were ready and caused unnecessary loss of life and so forth and so on, should we not be allowed to say that? It's similar to the discussion we've had in Canada about the massive bombing of civilian targets in Germany during the war by the Royal Air Force, the British Royal Air Force. Twenty-five percent of those airmen that flew over Germany, obviously, they risked their lives, they were considered heroes and these were dangerous missions, but what they did was they just totally massacred civilians in a number of cities.

Dresden is always raised as the sort of German Hiroshima, but, in fact, the numbers in Dresden have been grossly exaggerated for a variety of reasons and what happened in Dresden is no different from what happened in Hamburg and a number of other cities.

Are we not allowed to question the tactics and strategies that were used at that time in warfare? Maybe we are and maybe we aren't, I don't know. Personally, I would be in favor of freedom of speech and that we should be able to question some of those decisions.

Similarly, here, freedom of speech, you know, I've been discussing. We now have this political correct movement in North America and, yeah, that reminds me. There is a Canadian 75 year old man of aboriginal origin from Saskatchewan who served in the Canadian Army who was given the Order of Canada and is highly-regarded in the native community and who has -- on several occasions and on one occasion – given a speech where he said the Jews were responsible for the war and Hitler had the right idea in frying six million of them. I mean he said the most ghastly things. He was initially accused of spreading hate and then, just recently, a judge acquitted him of these crimes.

Now, on the one hand, I think it's perfectly harmless for someone like this to say what he said and if not such a big fuss had been made about it nobody would have paid much attention; they would have just said he's a foolish old man. Now they've turned it into a major incident so that his words have been written all over our newspapers. But now the judge acquits him and says he's acquitted because he didn't really mean these comments to be public. I mean of course that's totally ridiculous, because he said these at a public meeting and he repeated them on several occasions. So he meant it, there's no question; he's just a stupid old man. But, of course, the only reason he's acquitted is because he's native, because that's a protected group. If his name had been John McDonald, member of sort of a high-class Anglo-waspish society, he would have been castigated. There would have been handwringing and we have to fight racism, this is very bad, it's widespread and we've got to do something, so it all depends on who you are. You know we're going to run out of time on this first video, but I also wanted to comment a little bit on this fellow David who's come at me on this whole political correctness front, but I'll have to do that in another video. Bye for now.