Many people will think it silly for me to call political correctness in South Africa totalitarian, but some of its characteristics have analogs in fascist and Communist propaganda. The system, like Communism and fascism, destroys wealth and disperses energy, so that it is forced to expand, to move further and further onto what has been private and productive and loot its fuel from there. It is not the truth or falseness of the language that is important, but its inflexibility, its inability to serve thought. White South Africa is still deplorably racist. But then most of us would also agree with Stalin that idleness is bad and with Pol Pot that rural life is wholesome.
Truisms have to be developed in a particular way.
They consider any competent and honest person a threat. This entire fascinating country has no public fora for analysis. No magazine like The New Yorker or The Atlantic Monthly carries long, in-depth stories about why things are the way they are, stories that dismiss wishful thinking in a way mere reporting cannot. I can see where the timidity of the majority of South African journalists comes from. The truth in Africa is a big ouch.