The horrors of 1990: "Dances With Wolves" and "inclusive language"

"1990 was the beginning of the end," part 2

“Dances With Wolves”: the scurrilous anti-white 1990 blockbuster

Note: this article is part of a larger work that I am currently composing. Part 1 may be read here.

Being a Gen-Xer, who entered adolescence in the mid-80s and broke into young adulthood in the early 90s, I recall the 1990 "flex point" with great clarity, at least in retrospect.

Though I witnessed this rapid transition firsthand, like everyone else at the time, I singularly failed to discern a possible or even likely connection between two concomitant yet seemingly disparate occurrences playing out on the world stage: namely, the fall of the Soviet empire in the East and the inception, and metastatic growth, of "political correctness" in the West.

It is my assertion, for reasons I detail in my earlier work "Havoc," that there is indeed a likely causal relationship between the removal of a malignant ideology in one part of the world and the simultaneous establishment of another, no less insidious ideology in another part of the world. The former ideology was called Communism, while the latter has gone under various appellations through the years: political correctness, PC, SJW-ism, and finally woke-ism or wokeness.

Like Communism, political correctness did not spring forth from any truly organic or grass-roots sources. Neither Communism nor wokeism were movements, that is, truly “of the people.” Instead, both ideologies were pushed, quite relentlessly, from above. (This of course does not mean that they didn't opportunistically glom onto forms of activism already in existence, some of which may initially have possessed more organic foundations.)

Like Soviet Communism, contemporary political correctness/PC/SJW-ism/wokeness is an ideology designed to facilitate the dominance and control of a ruling caste. Both ideologies masquerade, quite disingenuously, as being interested in establishing justice and equality, when in truth they push campaigns characterized by nonstop rancor, vitriol, coercion, ruthless manipulation, and vicious psychological terrorism.

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Finally, the inception of both ideologies-- Soviet Communism in 1917, and political correctness in 1990-- saw the "new thought" ardently propagandized through the medium of cinema. The former's beliefs were transmitted most famously through the classic silent movie Battleship Potemkin directed by Sergei Eisenstein. Similarly, the early 90s saw the release of several big-budget Hollywood movies which aggressively proselytized in favor of the "PC" mindset.

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The first movie ever made with all of the earmarks of "PC," was, I believe, Dances With Wolves, which released in October of 1990, almost exactly a year after the iconic fall of the Berlin Wall in East Germany.

Prior to Dances With Wolves, many left-leaning movies had certainly been made. But "liberal" movies of the 70s and 80s, of which there were many, differed crucially from the blitzkrieg of "PC" movies churned out by Hollywood in quick succession in the 90s.

One major difference is budget. A year before the release of Dances With Wolves, in 1989, Spike Lee released his controversial, racially-charged drama Do the Right Thing. Though Lee could certainly be described as a black militant, with a history of indulging in incendiary rhetoric regarding race relations, his movie was actually quite equivocal in its message, and packed with a good degree of ambiguity and nuance. In Do the Right Thing, we are introduced to a cast of characters who are both black and white; nearly everyone is given a voice by the film, and thus many points of view are heard.

Lee's film got a lot of hype, but it was basically an indie-level production and budget, and it wasn't marketed to mainstream audiences. Dances With Wolves, by contrast, featured a major Hollywood star (Costner) and lavish production values; it was geared towards "Middle America," marketed as a Western filled with exciting adventure, set in the vast, beautiful plains country amongst the majestic and mysterious Lakota Sioux people.

There is plenty of action in Dances With Wolves, but also some romance, (presumably to attract women viewers). Costner's character Lieutenant Dunbar is a sort of "white everyman," with whom the viewer is meant to relate. This is crucial in understanding the extent of the film's indoctrinatory ambitions, since Dunbar eventually completely abandons white society and adopts the dress, language, and culture of the Lakota tribe as his own (this was well before whites were scolded if they were seen as being guilty of “appropriation”).

Unlike in Do the Right Thing, here there is absolutely no nuance or ambiguity in the film’s racial messaging. It's all quite elementary, in fact: the red man is good, and the white man is bad.

With the sole exception of Dunbar, the whites in Dances With Wolves are all uniformly depicted as murderous, rapacious, spiteful, and cruel. The American Indians, on the other hand, are shown to be wise, peace-loving, dignified, spiritually advanced, and serenely in harmony with nature.

The sole exception to this otherwise monolithic "red man good" depiction are the Pawnee tribe, who have sold out their own kind and are marching with the white cavalry brigades; in other words, they are bad because they have joined forces with the evil white men. Meanwhile, Dunbar, who has joined with the Lakota to do battle against the ignominious whites, is depicted as noble for having turned against his own kind.

In other words: it's bad, very bad when a red man turns race traitor, but it's good, ever so good, when a white man does so!

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Dances With Wolves was an overwhelming box office success, and only a small handful of critics took it to task for its blatantly anti-white distortions of history. But this was the very infancy of PC; the phrase, short for "political correctness" had only begun to be used in everyday parlance. Those who uttered this term, generally speaking, were the ones decrying this sudden new trend; those who supported it, on the other hand, simply invoked bland-sounding concepts like "multiculturalism" and "diversity," both of which, if "deconstructed" (another term that suddenly became famous during this period) amounted to little more than the risible assertion that "it is morally desirable to reduce, by as much as possible, the percentage of white people living in a neighborhood/town/nation," a premise which has scarcely ever been acknowledged, much less challenged.

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Accompanying implicit and explicit depictions of anti-white-ism in early 90s fare like Dances With Wolves were the first ever manifestations of what today we might call "administrative feminism."

In 1990, edicts began to be handed down demanding a universal adoption of what was called "inclusive language," wherein every reference to a hypothetical person had to be accompanied by the pronouns "he or she" or sometimes "s/he," or— to be truly progressive— one could put the female pronoun first: "she or he" (though in truth few writers capitulated to such manifest linguistic grotesquery).

Prior to 1990, it was generally accepted in the broader culture to use a singular pronoun thusly:

If a person boards a passenger plane for the first time, he might find himself feeling cramped and apprehensive.

It was understood that the "he" in the sentence could be a man or a woman; the use of "he" was just convenient shorthand, and carrying no exclusionary agenda. But starting in 1990, it became incumbent for writers to fling aesthetics to the wind in the interest of grammatical social justice. The “correctly” adjusted sentence

If a person boards a passenger plane for the first time, he or she might find himself or herself feeling cramped and apprehensive.

reads quite awkwardly, with all of the "inclusive" pronouns needlessly cluttering up the syntactical flow. Yet if you chose to opt out on "inclusive language," for aesthetic or other reasons, you were without exception castigated and shamed as a sexist (even if you were a woman!).

Other "inclusive" changes demanded in the lexicon included replacing the suffix -man for that of -person. Thus no more "fireman," "spokesman," "right-hand-man," "point-man," "cameraman," etc. Even if the person in question being described were indeed male, we were told that his designation should nevertheless be gender neutral, even if the result sounded patently ridiculous: e.g,," con-person," "ice cream person," etc.

(There was no opting for the use of "they" to replace "he" as the go-to generic pronoun at the time, since "they" was still acknowledged to be the plural pronoun that it is, and non-binary and gender-fluid persons had yet to be appointed their cultural moment.)

"Mankind," naturally enough, now had to become "humankind," a man’s wife could only be called his “significant other” or “partner” (“wife” having been deemed patronizing and patriarchal), and many more similar rhetorical abominations were born. For a time it became vogue for feminists to refer to themselves as "womyn," in displaying a wish to be absolutely separated from the hated M-A-N word. I recall one corporate advertisement which ran in numerous glossy magazines at the time; it read, "What if history were HERstory?" with an accompanying picture of an attractive female model (maybe Cindy Crawford?) sporting Revolutionary War garb.

In addition, cultural arbeiters— and their legions of scolds, busybodies, and sycophants-- had suddenly grown quite adamant that young women should never, ever under any circumstances be called "girls." It was acceptable, we were informed, to refer to females up to perhaps age 15 or so thusly, but after that, it was deemed totally patronizing and absolutely disrespectful not to call them "women" (or better yet, "womyn" or "wimmin").

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It is crucial to note that this flurry of demands from all of the duly appointed grammar commissars for the elimination of "sexist" or "gender-exclusive" nouns and pronouns had never been sticking points on a society-wide scale prior to 1990.

Before then, it is true, some feminists were making use of these sorts of deliberately contrived syntax in order to make a point about male-dominated systems of oppression and the like, but their idiosyncratic preferences were never deemed mandatory upon the population at large until the onset of the 90s and the imposition of “inclusive language.”

Looking back, one notices a definite cultural shift on numerous fronts, forming a definite pattern taking the form of coercion to conform, at the risk of suffering dire consequences. In noticing these things, one feels quite foolish for not having considered the possibility that something truly nefarious was up. At the time, even the most ardent hater of "PC" (and I was one such person) always wound up swatting away at all of the individual manifestations of this pernicious trend, as if they were a bunch of pesky flies, without considering the question: "Why is all of this being pushed on us now? What is behind this trend, which seems to be replicating itself everywhere regardless of whether people want it or not, like a virulent contagion?"

Then again, it wasn't as common to hear about "psyops" back then as it is now. We were all much more naive and trusting, and-- with a few exceptions here and there-- generally believed that our elected representatives actually strove to do the will of the population, instead of slavishly serving the interests of their appointed masters.

We had a lot to learn.

Andy Nowicki is the author of several books, most recently The Insurrectionist, Muze, and Love and Hidden Agendas, as well as the just-published The Rule of Wrath. Visit his YouTube channel.