Last week, my fellow columnist Michela Martinazzi wrote a piece denouncing the satirical film “The Dictator,” which purportedly mocks Middle Eastern despots, according to her, on the basis of racial stereotyping.
The general undertone of the piece was one of outrage at what Martinazzi considered libel on par with blackface in minstrel shows. While I do not wish to impugn her for her opinions, I would like to respectfully suggest a different point of view.
Political correctness is a paralyzing cancer on a free and conscientious society. It forces adherents to default to positions that often uphold wrong over right, evil over good and behaviors that lead to failure over those that lead to success. One might ask: How can this be?
Politically correct speech is merely an etiquette issue to avoid offending others, isn’t it? To which my response is an emphatic and enthusiastic “no!” It is a tool to enforce rigid homogeneity of thought, and it is not a recent phenomenon by any means.
The cardinal sin of political correctness is discrimination. According to this view, any assumption that one way may be better than another is necessarily discriminate.
We’ve all probably seen ads for the “discriminating drinker” or for the “discriminating diner.” Why then must we condemn the discriminating thinker? “Because you might be a bigot if you don’t,” according to the political correctness doctrinaires around us. It’s paralyzing.
To say that a film is racist for mocking a political phenomenon that, while certainly not peculiar to the Middle East, the Maghreb or North Africa, has certainly been the rule more often than the exception in that region over the years is preposterous. Chances are, Martinazzi’s objections are merely at making jokes at the expense of another culture’s political proclivities, rather than out of a genuine desire to stand up for “oppressed” dictators being bullied by the American film industry.
Nevertheless, her argument must stand or fall on the words she gave to us — that satirizing dictators and tyrants is an affront to an entire region’s culture, and is inherently racist.
This, in my mind at least, is a clear-cut example of political correctness inspiring an earnest young woman to publicly make the case before her peers that petty tyrants who oppress their people and their neighbors, many of whom have tortured and murdered millions of people throughout history, are no better or worse than any other culture’s way of life. They’re merely different and undeserving of our criticism. After all, that would be discriminating. The inference is chilling.
My wish here is not to massacre the work of one of my fellow writers, but to make the case that those interested in true justice and not merely fierce neutrality must free their minds from the shackles of political correctness.
It is the only way to love the good and to resist the evil in this world. For all the voiceless victims who have fallen before tyrants such as Pol Pot, Kim Jong Il, Saddam Hussein, Ayatollah Khomeini and others of their ilk, the very least we can do as free people is to mock them mercilessly.
Monsters deserve every ounce of spite we can muster, since their victims often aren’t able to protest their own condition. Resist the calls to engage in moral equivalence arguments. Do it for them. Do it for yourself.
Discriminating thinkers needed here.
Joshua Fonzi is a microbiology and cell science and entomology and nematology senior at UF. His column appears on Thursdays. You can contact him at opinions@alligator.org.
