WaPo's Nazi-free Ukraine

      In one of the ascerbic Serbian political jokes told in Belgrade 1999, Mirjana (wife) wakes up Slobo (Milosevic) in the middle of the night, all panicked: "Wake up, wake up, Slobo, American soldiers are outside the house ! " . "Go back to sleep" ,  Milosevic tells her, annoyed at being awaken for no good reason, "it's our border patrol !". 
     
      Let me attempt to explain the point of the joke for those unfortunate Americans who only speak  English,  have poor memory and not knowing how to google their way to reality in the Internet Tower of Babble, rely on the so-called "mainstream media" (MSM) for the news about the world around them. Of course, the joke would not have made any sense even to Madeleine Albright  or Richard Holbrooke who had their own sources, but that is a somewhat different story.  For the ordinary folk in the land of the free and home of the misinformed, Milosevic of course was an usurper who was striving to create "Greater Serbia", one properly ethnically cleansed of Croats, Gypsies, Shkiptari (Albanians) and whoever else James Rubin (and his wife) cared to declare to be his enemies. Of course, the Serbs had a different perception of Slobo, who lived his dream of Serbia as the Big Brother in the Balkan Brotherhood to his last days in the cell of the International Criminal Tribunal in the Hague. His popular image was that of a slippery wheeler-dealer (most Serbs would happily concede he was "dirty") who (by 1999) was badly outmanoeuvred by the lower ranks of the US State Department, dead set to reduce Serbia to either rubble or the size of Luxembourg, or both, if need be.  The joke of course also speaks to Milosevic' acting always - even through his worst bungling - like he was in control. Hence the howler about the border patrol. 

     Reading WaPo, the great bullhorn for whatever bull Secretary Kerry is made to recite thee days by the operations directors of the State (-anarchy-in-progress) Department, one gets the impression the bull in the bullhorn is getting stinkier.  Now of course, the villain today is not some local satrap who happens to be a traditional ally of Russia, as it was during the times of the friendly Boris Yeltsin tottering in the halls of Kremlin. The villain now is the President of the Evil Empire itself who has lulled the West into believing the empire was dead, or at any rate, more concerned in getting Russia catch up to modernity.  The Post editorial board collectively warns us that it is not so:  The Russian ruler [sic] has Euroasian ambitions. Even though Putin has never quite said of what WaPo accuses him of, one should not let the truth get in the way of a really scary story.

     I carefully studied Putin's speech that the editorial references (in translation here). Vladimir Vladimirovich certainly did not articulate a nationalist version of the Brezhnev doctrine. He did call Crimea going to Ukraine an "outrageous historical injustice" but he stressed that he himself concluded the transfer of the peninsula to Ukraine in 2000, and that the issue was "thereby closed".  He also made remarks saying in effect that Russia, and he personally, considered the Crimea and the Sea of Azov deal, an investment of sorts in fostering good relations with Ukraine, a sort of "land for peace" deal. As long as the relationship between Ukraine and Russia remained friendly (and brotherly), Russia would have lived with Crimea under Ukrainian flag. However, we expected Ukraine to remain our good neighbour, we hoped that Russian citizens and Russian speakers in Ukraine, especially its south-east and Crimea, would live in a friendly, democratic and civilised state that would protect their rights in line with the norms of international law.  This cannot be read as some universal principle a la Brezhnev doctrine that gives Russia automatically the right to walk in anywhere where Russians live and impose its will.  It does not even sound like Israel's reserving the right to protect Jews from persecution everywhere. It addresses Ukraine specifically, and the issue Putin articulates clearly is this:  "we are against having a military alliance [NATO] making itself at home right in our backyard or in our historic territory. I simply cannot imagine that we would travel to Sevastopol to visit Nato sailors". 
   
       The WaPo editorial elders accuse Putin of mendacious charges in saying the provisional government has been hijacked by nationalists, neo-Nazis, Russophobes and anti-Semites.  Now who is being mendacious here ?  Not only do the Svoboda and Right Sector party leaders posture and talk in ways (habitually referring to Jews as "kikes" and the Russians by the pejorative 'Moskali') that are deeply embarrassing to their western sponsors but they do so openly without the slightest blush.

       It is really unbelievable that something like the hoax in Donetsk at Passover, seeking to discredit the pro-Russian protesters, can be taken seriously by American legislators even for a minute . But obviously, the likes of John McCain are past caring.  Unfortunately, for the attempts of Washington to re-write the history and the roles in them, the issue of the Ukrainian collaboration with the Nazis during WWII. and the recent attempts at rehabilitation of the WWII. nationalist leaders  are impossible to hide. The protagonists are brazenly open and proud about who they are and what they want. 

      An amusing item that "corrects" WaPo's twisted perspetive on Ukraine appeared in the paper last  Thursday.  At issue are leaflets dropped from  a military-style helicopter operated by Ukrainian Security in the East warning the peaceful population against the pro-Russian terrorists and offering guidance how to protect their lives and those close to them. I repeat: it was a military-style helicopter which apperas to have been associated with the Ukrainian government offensive against the insurrection.  The curious item is the instruction number 5., on the list. It reads:

Avoid mass gatherings - there are agents of Russian special services among the demonstrators tasked with physically eliminating (!) all those who openly criticize Russian policies.  They will use you as "human shield"  as the occupiers of the Soviet Union did in the period of 1941-45.

Hmmm....thank you very much Washington Post for offering this curious piece of evidence for the existence of neo-nazi ideology within the current Ukrainian government.  Of course, places like Dniepropetrovsk and Donetsk were part of the industrial heartland of Stalin's Soviet Union (Donetsk was actually called Stalino at the time). They were part of Russia before the Soviet Union came into being.  So, the Soviets were not occupiers there (that despite the crime of Holodomor, which pace Solzhenitsyn was a mass political murder motivated by ideology rather than nationalism: I agree). So this piece of "history" sure will not fly in the Eastern Ukraine, and not just among the Russian speakers. There, like among most WaPo readers, Hitler and his national quislings were enemies not only of the Soviets (bad as they were) but of civilized humanity.
       

'Rape as Culture' is Feminazi Newspeak

      In today's Ottawa Sun, Anthony Furey ponders the feminazi academic Newspeak of 'Rape Culture' which will bear no dissent.  It appears to him that 'the debate is settled. Even though most people didn't even really know what it is'.  Of course, Furey is right, but unfortunately pleading ignorance has never been a good way to win an argument.

    It has been one of the curious fixtures of recent history that the origins of some of the most powerful political neologism that define our age remain profoundly obscured. The Victorians knew where 'Descent from the Apes' came from. Likewise later, terms like 'class struggle', 'Oedipus complex', 'Iron Curtain', and 'cult of personality' have all had definite and locatable origin.

   With the feminist nomenclatura, we are not so sure.   Conferences are held world over on the subject of 'Violence Against Women'.  The UN Secretary General issues quarterly reports how to combat it.  The US has a federal law (VAWA) against it. But what is it ?  Does an individual act of brutality of one male against one female imply a cultural historical conspiracy of one gender against the other ?  Who confirmed the theoretical framework for this monstrous and inept misapprehension ?  How come internationally acclaimed feminist writers writing before 1970 know nothing about the phenomenon ?  A witness no less authoritative than Simone de Beauvoir noted that sexual violence toward young women most often happened in the country and wherever manners are rough. By deduction then it was rare among urbanites who were well-bred.  In another passage in The Second Sex, analyzing the behaviour of lesbian partners, she notes that unlike hetero situation, the feminine duo is unconcerned with dissimulation and self-control. Hence the couple may end up in remarkably violent scenes.  So, for Simone de Beauvoir, it was not as much  men’s violence against women, as it was the lack of couth that leads to uproar in the house. A man and a woman, she continues, are intimidated by the fact they are different: he feels pity and concern for her; he feels bound to treat her with courtesy, indulgence, restraint; she respects him and fears him somewhat, she endeavours to control herself in his presence; each is careful to spare the mysterious other, being uncertain of his or her feelings and reactions.  No-one else of Simone de Beauvoir's generation knew of this vicious plot against the better half of humanity. There was not a word about Violence Against Women in the final report of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women in Canada 1967. Not a single word !   How could that be ?

  Simple ! Violence Against Women as a world-wide male conspiracy was not unmasked before early 1970's.  The first use that I have been able to discover comes from pamphlets issued by Andrea Dworkin on behalf of a NYRF (New York Radical Feminist)  workshop in New York.  It bears the unmistakable stamp of Dworkin's penchant for outrageous exaggeration. She claimed also eg. that all sexual intercourse is rape by definition (!),  that nine million women were burned in the Middle Ages as witches (against an estimate of twenty thousand in respectable academia), and that Caesarean Section was a "surgical f*ck" invented by perverted male doctors for their own pleasure and to disfigure women.

It may surprise Anthony Furey but the idea of the "culture of rape" has also an author whose ideas are gospel among feminazi ideologues, gospel obligingly deferred to by people like Alan Rock (now president of Ottawa U) who are liberal to the point of being clueless. Her name is Susan Brownmiller and the thesis has been expounded by her seminal work Against Our Will: Men, Women an Rape. She did not coin the term  "culture of rape" btw, it was first articulated by Wilhelm Reich,  a brilliant pupil of Freud, an inventor of a universal principle of life energy  called orgone who alas ended his days in a lunatic asylum.  The following is my assessment of Brownmiller's scholarly merits.

---   from an unpublished essay The Core Feminist Myth (2001)  ---

Five years after [Kate] Millett, Susan Brownmiller took upon herself the task to show that patriarchy is a  system which condones and promotes mass rape of women.  In order to manage such a difficult and ambitious argument her book Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape  would diligently strip events of their historical contexts and rearrange them in a long streaks of woes on the patriarchal flatlands. In a chapter on war, she sweeps through the Crusades, the American War of Independence (with a single incident of a Washington’s soldier hanged for rape - by mistake - presumably), forward to Kaiser Wilhelm and Stalin’s rapists entering Berlin, and back to biblical Hebrews, and Homeric Greeks molesting women at Troy.  On a fabulously  interesting subject of early Roman times she has this to say: ‘The rape of Sabine women, which supposedly led to the founding of Rome, is another famous example of woman-stealing in war, an event that captured the imagination of artists in later centuries who invariably painted the captured Sabines as full-fleshed and luscious and having a good time’. She condemns  St.Augustine because he called the co-ordinated operation in which women  ‘had been carried off and raped,  nothing more than a dirty trick.  Later in a chapter on the Heroic Rapist  she concludes : ‘Down through the ages, imperial conquest, exploits of valor and expression of love have gone hand in hand with violence to women in thought and in deed. And so it was the poet Ovid, the Roman celebrant of love, who wrote of the rape of the Sabine women  “Grant me such a wage and I will enlist today”, setting a flippant attitude toward rape in war that has persisted for two thousand years’.

Ok, let us straighten a few miniscule problems here: first, the story of Sabines is a myth, not an actual event. The mass abduction did not happen in war but in the story was casus belli itself. The act of women-stealing did not lead to the founding of Rome but the joining of warring tribes inside its walls.  St.Augustine did not condemn women-stealing Romans as 'mass rape' because he spoke decent Latin.¨And last but not least, Ovid, rest assured, was deprived of the sight of the cavorting, luscious bodies being dragged off by macho men in the rich verdure of the Renaissance canvasses.

So, we are dealing not with an actual mass rape but a mythical time of the early years of the rule of Romulus who gathered shepherds and craftsmen for his city but could not find enough women. There was surplus women among the Sabines. The Romans pleaded with the lucky tribesmen to let some of the young women go. When the Sabine men refused, the resourceful Romans set up a ruse in the form of a sporting event.  During the contest  they grabbed the extra fair maidens among the spectators and absconded with their loot toward the walls of their city.  The Sabines  massed an army and began a war against the abductors.  What happened next is related by Livy,  a Roman historian and Ovid’s contemporary.

The captured women, said to be very angry and despondent, were given an oration by Romulus, who apologized to them and said the lawlessness only happened because their fathers refused to negotiate intermarriage between the clans. He implored them not to be overcome by bitterness but give themselves willingly to those ‘whom fate made their masters’. He  guaranteed them citizenship, and civil rights; they would all be married  properly

§ Romulus exhorted the husbands to be the best men they could be to make up for the women’s loss of family and country.   The men then each made their own apology,  pleading the irresistible force of their passion, something, the male sexist pig historian said had a great appeal, for such is supposedly the nature of women.  
 

The war went badly for Rome. Within a year, the Sabine king Titus Tatius laid a siege to the city.  Then one of  the captured women changed her mind and opened a city gate to the invaders. She was crushed to death instantly by the throng that poured in. Titus Tatius took the citadel. As the final battle flared up, the rest of the Sabine captive women, some clutching their babes, stepped boldly in the middle of the fray with their fathers and brothers on one side and  their husbands on the other.  They shouted, if you want to go on killing, better kill us first, because it us who are the cause of this war, for we have accepted our fate, and our marriage bonds, and we will not betray them as we will not betray our kin. Better for us to be dead than to live as widows and orphans!

The men stopped in their tracks, dumbfounded.  Romulus and Titus Tatius signed a treaty which opened the city for  the Sabines to settle in. Honoring  the fearless women who stopped the war and saved the city founders,  Roman citizens were thereafter called Curites, after the old capital of Sabines (Cures). 
 

 This is more or less what Ovid was alluding to when crooning to Roman matrons. 

The Abduction of Sabines indeed later became ready material for some early erotica in the emerging modern European urban culture re-discovering the beauty of human body.   But there is no evidence that the Sabines were ever, anywhere, apprehended as anything else than the image of desirable womanhood, thought well worth getting into trouble for,  by desirable manhood.

Brownmiller’s impossible mishandling of the Sabines story speaks of a number of things. [In the context of these essays ] tracking the technological and social elements contributing to the suppression of masculinity in our times, two are important.
 

One, the fact that books like Millett’s and Brownmiller’s can be passed around as exhibits of learning is a witness of a most serious decline in our academia and a lingering fault in our present-day culture selectors. That such ugly and transparent nonsense can go around unchallenged – unchallenged by men, at any rate - is an important indicator of something really strange and sinister going on. Second, the a-historic, here-and-now cultural bubble that breeds ideas like patriarchy , suggests that feminism is a re-engineered throwback into the times and mores of our distant past when men and women moved around in their biologically spun social cocoons that defined their gender identity, both paranoid about and aversive of the other sex, and despairing  to comprehend the roots of the misery of the original sin, which assigned them mutual gender loathing.  In a touch of irony, the mindset that creates the patriarchal monstrosity operates on the psychological principle of female freedom from time and space given by the biological function of nurturing, their attending to immediate human needs. If you nurse babies, make house and mend socks all your life, it does not matter what century it is or whether the males in the place go out to fight Hitler or  warmongering Jewish bankers led by Churchill.  All men are the same, tous les hommes sont pareil, alle Manner sind gleich, vsjakiiie mushchiny rovniie…..

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¨ ‘Rapio’ or legally ‘raptus’ means ‘abduction’ in  Latin and in modern European languages, the lawless act is traditionally referred in that manner; i.e. Entfuehrung der Sabine, l’enlévement des Sabines ,  etc.  Consequently,  the original Latin legal concept, of ‘raptus’ had very little to do with the sexual offence of rape, which the Latins called stuprum , and which was a capital offence. The abduction was not a public wrong but a civil tort against the woman's kin and its male leader under whose protection the woman lived. Blood feud in this case was legitimate if restitution was not offered and accepted. The consent of the woman to the arrangement was essential in the Roman legal code.

§  We should keep in mind the story allegedly happened some eight hundred years before it was told in this manner, but the rights for women, at the time of Ovid and Livy, included separate property in marriage, and a right to divorce.