Nah I lied, he's not a crypto-fascist, he's conservative in the way that being a British prison doctor and psychiatrist would tend to make you conservative.
And it's not that kind of crypto.
Here's the quote via Goodreads:
“Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”― Anthony Malcolm Daniels, M.D. (pen name:
....FP: You mention that your dad was a communist. Tell us about his world view and how this affected your family and your own intellectual journey.
Dalrymple: My father was a communist though he was also a businessman. Our house was full of communist literature from the 1930s and 40s, and I remember such authors as Plekhanov and Maurice Hindus and Edgar Snow. It was always clear that my father's concern for humanity was not always matched by his concern for men, to put it mildly, for whom (as individuals) he often expressed contempt. He found it difficult to enter an equal relationship with anyone, and preferred to play Stalin to their Molotov. We had The Short Course in the house, incidentally, and one of my favourite books (which I used to leaf through as a child) was a vast picture book of the Soviet Union in 1947.
I think the great disjunction between my father's expressed ideas (and ideals) and his everyday conduct affected me, and made me suspicious of people with grand schemes of universal improvement.FP: You make the shrewd observation of how political correctness engenders evil because of “the violence that it does to people’s souls by forcing them to say or imply what they do not believe, but must not question.” Can you talk about this a bit?
Dalrymple: Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.
FP: You discuss how Custine noted the “wide streets” of St. Petersburg and that these spaces were built this way intentionally to negate the possibility of spontaneity among the citizens and of crowds appearing to be large. It was a way to thwart the possibility of revolution. Can you expand on this a bit?
Dalrymple: Custine thought that the architecture - or rather town planning - of St Petersburg made the gathering of any crowd very conspicuous, and therefore a target. He thought that people could not gather spontaneously there as they could in, say, cities with narrower streets and vistas. He also thought that the grandeur was an attempt to impress upon the citizen how small and insignificant he was, and how powerful and important the state was. Whether he was right or not with regard to Petersburg (other explanations of its grandeur are possible), it was definitely a lesson learnt by the builder of modern Pyongyang, for example, who had the fole de grandeur all right, but not the taste of the builders of Petersburg....
And on the perverse effects of compelled beliefs:
