By Doug Ward, Yorkshire BNP Press Officer. There appears before me too many problems for one man to comprehend, as I bury my head in my hands with despair my eyes close to see the future getting darker. Why do I feel a constant anger that I direct at no one but myself?

I feel the burden of guilt when I have no reason to feel guilty at all. Something is preventing me from questioning problems that appear guarded, protected, almost nurtured, but what could do such a thing?

The guardian of all evil is simply ‘Political Correctness’, the guardian angel of all problems that are designed to blight our very thoughts.

The David to this Goliath is a little book that has cleared the pressure from my mind, the cure for all the perceived insanity that I have tried to question for well over a decade, a little book that opened my eyes to the realities that have been so innocently burdened upon me, without a please nor thank you.

The Retreat of Reason by Anthony Browne

Members of the public, academics, journalists and politicians are afraid of thinking certain thoughts. People are vilified if they publicly diverge from accepted beliefs, sacked or even investigated by the police for crimes against perceived wisdom. Whole areas of debate have been closed down by the crushing dominance of the moralistic ideology of political correctness.

An argument is a pointless and meaningless act of which the outcome depends on the strength of force not on the power of debate.

To demonstrate truth in a debate is not about winners or losers, but about the free expression of speech and thoughts that are as correct as reason will allow, and if debate is prevented, then the force of one single man, who believes that his opponent has weapons of mass destruction, will undoubtedly lead to another act of war, that will be seen, again, as the greatest act of terrorism this country has forced upon another in the history of our civilisation.

The United States is very close to becoming a state totally dominated by alien ideology, an ideology bitterly hostile to Western culture.

Even now, for the first time in their lives, people have become afraid of what they say. This has never been true in the history of Britain.

Yet today, if you say the ‘wrong thing’ you suddenly have legal problems, political problems, you might even lose your job or be expelled from college.

Certain topics are forbidden. You can’t approach the truth about a lot of different subjects. If you do, you are immediately branded a ‘racist’, ‘sexist’, ‘homophobic’, ‘insensitive’ or ‘judgmental’.

Because the politically correct believe that they are not just on the side of right, but on the side of virtue, it follows that those they oppose are not just wrong, but malign.

In the PC mind, the pursuit of virtue entitles them to curtail the malign views of those they disagree with, rather than say “I would like to hear your side”, the politically correct insist: “you can’t say that”.

Believing that their opponents are not just wrong but bad, the PC feels free to resort to personal attacks on them.

If there is no explicit bad motive, then the PC can accuse their opponents of a sinister ulterior motive – the unanswerable accusation of ‘isms’.

It is this self righteous sense of virtue that makes the PC believe they are justified in suppressing freedom of speech.

Political correctness is the dictatorship of virtue.

People tend to believe that which makes them feel virtuous by those who espouse beliefs publicly acknowledged as virtuous. Nothing makes multi-millionaire Hollywood actors feel better about themselves than campaigning against world poverty by demanding more aid from the West, rather than holding corrupt leaders responsible for the plight of their people by demanding better governance.

One of the ironies of political correctness is that, since it subjugates objective truth to subjective virtue, it often causes more harm than good. Good intentions pave the road to hell, the world is not short of good intentions, but is often too short of good reasoning. 

The stifling of public debate can often make it very difficult for policy makers to deal with growing problems.

The wide spread systematic abuse of the asylum system by people smugglers was not confronted because political correctness made it almost impossible for politicians to be honest about the problem.

Rather than helping ethnic minorities, political correctness resulted in a notable deterioration in race relations. 

At its most basic, the censorship is self imposed. Political correctness succeeds by attaching a sense of moral superiority to itself and a sense of shame to opposing beliefs, so that people feel ashamed if they publicly state politically incorrect beliefs, even if they are believed to be true.

At its worse, a country that has long prided itself on its freedom of speech has been reduced by political correctness to a country where, despite endemic levels of violent crime, police spend time investigating and arresting leading writers and broadcasters for what they write and say.

Political correctness has led to wide spread ‘speech crimes’ which often drifts into Orwellian ‘thought crime.’

Members of the British National Party, a legal democratic political party, have been banned from being civil servants, banned from being members of trade unions.

A civil servant who is sacked for being a member of the BNP is not being sacked for anything they have done or said, but presumed to think.

In the topsy-turvy politically correct world, truth comes in two forms: the politically correct and the factually correct. The politically correct truth is publicly proclaimed correct by politicians, celebrities and the BBC, even if it is wrong.

While the factual correct truth is publicly condemned as wrong even when it is right. Factual correct truths suffer the disadvantage that they don’t have to be shown to be wrong, merely stated that they are politically incorrect.

When the Observer and the BBC denounced the tyranny of the government for locking up foreign terrorist suspects without trial in Belmarsh prison, they rarely mentioned that the suspects had defied government orders to leave the country.

Despite being in prison they were free to leave Britain to any country that would take them and that many had already done so.

But to admit this would undermine the politically correct attempts to incite the virtuous to a sense of outrage.

This book has now purged my mind of the disabling forces of political correctness, I see things as they are, and not as I am expected to think that they are, yet I still see those that suffer.

And now when I close my eyes I see ‘the holy lamb of God on England's pleasant pastures seen’. And with this new found freedom, I shall exercise my right to speak.

How do you overcome the vileness that is political correctness? Well I’m afraid you will have to read the whole book to reach the ‘Guide to Purging the Political Correctness Within.’

Anthony Browne’s Retreat of Reason can be purchased online by clicking here.