Not long ago I was enjoying an elegant lunch at the Opera Cafe in former East Berlin, aside the very square where, just over 60 years ago, Brownshirt thugs and their young student collaborators burned books to demonstrate the Third Reich's determination to snuff out un-Nazi thought crimes.

As my colleague Tom Grant reminded me of the dark history of our immediate environs, I couldn't help but think how far the world had come since those times. We, too, were flanked by energetic young activists, but none of us had come to Berlin to goose-step or demonize racial enemies. We had come here, rather, to meet with the Chancellor of a humbled post-Holocaust, post-Communist Germany as representatives of its enlightened, tolerant, multi-racial conqueror, the United States of America. In our ranks were Jews, blacks, even homosexuals, all of whom would have been harassed, beaten, and possibly murdered in this neighborhood in the 1930s; and yet in the year 2000, we were being feted by the Germans as heroes.

Like most students studying abroad, the members of our group arrived in Germany a year ago full of questions about how things are done differently in European society than elsewhere. Unlike most, we actually had the chance to put these questions to leaders who could answer them. The flip side to this red carpet treatment was that we were expected to "represent" America, demonstrating respect for our German patrons by asking intelligent, pointed questions worthy of "future leaders" of our great democracy.

Sadly, I can't say we lived up to our billing. No matter what we talked about, or with whom, our discussions descended into the same rut, with our German host trying to fend off unwelcome and usually inappropriate questions about race, gender, and homosexuality (for future convenience let's just call this "RGH").

Thus we might be sitting with high-ranking members of the Interior Ministry, talking about the trillions of Deutschmarks sunk into the reconstruction of East Germany's economic infrastructure since reunification in 1990 to little apparent effect (unemployment there still stands at over 20%), but before we got to the bottom of this unbelievable bureaucratic boondoggle we would veer off onto the theme of gay rights for no apparent reason. Or we'd be learning about Porsche's marketing strategy for its new SUV vehicle, only for our resident feminist to sideswipe our presenter with a loaded question about why women were underrepresented on the factory floor.

So long as our German hosts played along, our group's PC venom spewed straight out of the well-worn RGH playbook: a deputized member of their ranks would hijack intelligent discussion on some unacceptably normal and actually informative theme, force us at rhetorical gunpoint into a sharp u-turn in mid-air, and before we knew it we had touched down on planet RGH. A half-decade spent in the American university system had taught me to expect this.

What I had not yet seen was what transpired when intelligent, confident adults offered real resistance to the hijackers. The scene of the biggest thought crime scandal was the German Defense Ministry. Our poor host, Jürgen Quensell, had clearly not spent much time at NATO's political charm school in Brussels. Unschooled in postmodern, press-friendly PC speak, Mr. Quensell spoke unapologetically with us as if we were adults who respected military institutions and took questions of international security seriously — and in doing so he stepped on all three land mines in the RGH arsenal one right after another.

The biggest blow-up was over race. Our interlocutor tripped up immediately here, speaking quite openly about what he (and just about every other military expert in Europe, mind you) considers the greatest security threats of the next several decades: Islamic terrorism and mass immigration from poverty-stricken Africa.

Nothing remarkable about this, so far as I could tell. Except that our speaker actually added a little color to his analysis, invoking a famous scene in the BBC film The March, in which four million unarmed blacks set off across the deserts of North Africa, intending to invade Europe without immigration visas.

In such a situation, Mr. Quensell intoned, he would not hesitate in reacting just as the generals did in the film, firing on the invaders as soon as they threatened European shores. Worse, he implied in his remarks that some such mass emigration from Africa may be inevitable, as most Africans were in his view "unable to govern themselves."

Compared to such shockingly incorrect opinions about Africans, Mr. Quensell's PC slips on gender and sexuality were both mild and reassuringly predictable. He didn't like the ideas of gays serving openly in the military, and he thought that the contribution of women to national security was best served by the raising of boys, who are required by German law (unlike girls, it seems apropos to mention) to do military service.

How, then, did our group of PC activists respond to this free-thinking provocateur? Did they take him to the mat on the issues, arguing that national security might actually be improved if women, too, were forced to serve in the armed forces like men were; or if gays were allowed to serve openly, thus improving their own morale (if not that of heterosexual men put off by them)? Or question the dark scenarios of African demographic explosion and aggressive Islamic terrorism?

No, these armchair liberals merely pouted and grimaced, and then once we had left the building and the objectionable speaker no longer bothered them, our self-appointed group spokesman, a historian of pre-Holocaust German Jewry, wrote a letter to Chancellor Schroeder in which he asked that Mr. Quensell be fired for his violations of international RGH protocols.

What, after all, could a German Chancellor do, when an American Holocaust scholar (himself Jewish) accuses him of harboring racists in the German army? In the RGH playbook, this was roughly the equivalent of nuclear blackmail. Mr. Schroeder is an astute politician, and when we finally got to meet him in person, the Chancellor wasted little time dealing with the matter. "Der muss weg," he declared of the politically incorrect Mr. Quensell: he must go.

When it seemed prudent for reasons of civility, I kept my opinions to myself this past year, but there were several occasions when I simply could not be silent. Invariably, though, my interventions were deflected by subtle imputations of RGH guilt. Our unelected leader (the historian of German Jewry) had the habit of conducting post-discussion group huddles in the manner of a football quarterback — at some six feet four inches tall, he cut a natural figure as our "PC QB" — and I was often the odd man out of the huddle. When, on leaving the Defense Ministry, I played devil's advocate, claiming it was possible to argue the efficacy of excluding gays and women from positions of military command for reasons of unit cohesion, I overheard him whispering to the huddlers, "I can't believe one of us defended that guy."

Gradually I began taking pride in my propensity for asking "dumb" questions, as when I interrupted a strained argument between one of our gay militants and a conservative Christian politician about the "racism" that lay behind Bavaria's requirement of a blood test for residency certification to ask, what is racist about blood tests? To this day I am not sure what the answer to this question is: I was shushed no less than four times by the homosexual members of our group, one of whom whispered to me at last in exasperation, "Well we all know what's racist about it Sean, can't you just drop it." That settles that.

During a group lunch not long after this event, I got trapped in one of those only-on-planet-RGH conversations that simply boggles the imagination. We were talking about the issues facing boys growing up in America, speculating about the psychological and social factors underlying the recent spate of schoolyard shootings.

Amazingly, the men at the table reflexively deferred to the one woman present, our group's most radical lesbian feminist, for the presumably expert analysis she could offer as ... well I wasn't really sure why we were deferring to her. Having once been a young man myself, I took offense at her predictable diatribe against the evils of "patriarchal" society, which socializes boys against their own selves to be aggressive and violent. I offered instead an argument which viewed unmediated nature as the culprit — all young men, so far as I know, fantasize about avenging their enemies, pulverizing the mean kids who make fun of them, etc.; but most of them have something, either sports or boy scouts or church groups or whatever, that channels their potent physical energies and frustrations away from destructive vengeance seeking.

Anyway, the substance of my argument was immaterial: our feminist lesbian expert on adolescent male psychology cut me off before I was even finished. "That's not what I'm saying," she angrily intoned, both upset and confused by my remarks. "That's right, I'm disagreeing with you," I replied, producing a look of profound shock on her face such as I had never encountered. Not only was this homosexual woman, contrary to all available logic, apparently quite accustomed to being consulted as an expert on adolescent male psychology, but she had not imagined that someone might disagree with her in such a conversation.

How had this become possible? Had no one contradicted this woman during her entire graduate student career? Did no one dare offer her the slightest give-and-take during undergraduate dorm room jam sessions? Had the PC brownshirts staged a secret coup, switching the entire American university archipelago over to an RGH-only frequency back in 1997 without my noticing it?

Perhaps it is fear that keeps the silent majority of tuition-paying undergraduates from speaking out more often when thoughtful dissent is called for. Maybe students have simply acquiesced in the new orthodoxy, feeling that the risks ensuing from provocation of an RGH incident — a bad grade, unspoken ostracism from peers, or outright name-calling (racist! sexist! homophobe!) — outweigh the more intangible benefits that accrue from sticking up for honor, morality, or the truth.

But this is no time for surrender. Especially because Americans are now reaping the benefits of unprecedented wealth and global power, because in our every action we influence not only our fellow citizens, but virtually everyone on the planet, we must be careful about the example we set.

Silent dissenters, please speak out now, before these fanatical thought policemen ruin America's reputation for good. Millions of people around the world still look to our country as a beacon of freedom of expression. Let us remember our better selves, that we may no longer disappoint them.