A protester burns a cardboard face of US President Barack Obama during a May Day rally in San Jose on May 1, 2013.
If something is wrong for you or me, it is also wrong for the cop, the soldier, the mayor, the governor, the general, the Fed chairman, or the president. Theft does not become acceptable because you call it taxation, counterfeiting when they call it monetary policy, kidnapping when they call it the draft, mass murder when they call it foreign policy. We understand that it is never acceptable to wield violence or the threat of violence against the innocent, whether by the mugger or the politician.
– Lew Rockwell (via disobey) Via Dustin R. Snyder
Because it’s something I’ve been researching for a while now in preparation for something I’m (eventually) writing, I’ll briefly bring up one thing about Thatcher we should all remember. She reversed the previous Labour government’s policy of accepting refugees and exiles from Chile after the horrific U.S. backed coup which put Pinochet in power on Sept. 11th, 1973. This was a regime which dropped pregnant women out of aeroplanes, which tortured girls by putting live rats in their vaginas, which once held a man at gunpoint and gave him the choice: sodomise your son or we kill you both. It was announced today that Pablo Neruda will be exhumed to investigate claims that his death a few days after the coup was in fact an assassination by poison rather than cancer; if it was the former he would only be one of thousands of others killed or simply dissapeared because of their leftist leanings. This was all well known at the time, but Thatcher still denied there were any human rights abuses or any need to accomodate those still fleeing Chile. They weren’t just political allies (it should be noted the only reason the UK even won the Falklands war was the amount of help from Chile), they were also good friends, and when he was finally put under house arrest in the UK, Thatcher was lobbying for his release. Pinchoet’s Chile was also the first real testing ground for the virulent form of neoliberalism which Thatcher and Reagan would then happily adopt and impose throughout the 80s, a project that the current coalition is now intent on completing. If you want to see what current cuts and policy trends will do to the UK, look into what they did to Chile. One example: every year after the privatisation of the Chilean NHS cases of typhoid practically doubled (they had until then been dropping), jumping from around 3,000 to over 10,000 in the space of a few years. Poverty, malnutrition, unemployment, depression and alcoholism, all shot through the roof as the national industries and banks were privatised, and multinationals were allowed to return and establish monopolies. The gap between rich and poor became an unbreachable chasm.
Against those making bland moral objections about people “celebrating her death” I say: if she didn’t want her death to be celebrated she shouldn’t have spent her life doing and defending such irredeemably terrible things.
A HORRIFYING 12-minute video of young men in Steubenville, Ohio, joking about the brutal, extended gang rape of a 16-year-old girl last August is now international news after it was posted on the Internet January 2 by the hacker group Anonymous—along with a stream of Twitter and Facebook posts, and photos of the unconscious victim being dragged by her wrists and ankles.
The very clear picture that emerges is of a young woman drugged and then taken unconscious from one party to another while being repeatedly raped and violated by members of the school’s self-styled “rape crew”—while other members took pictures, tweeted about what was happening and made vicious jokes mocking the victim.
The Steubenville case is now about more than this horrific crime, however. The Anonymous postings, in particular, have shown the complicity of town and school officials in trying to bury the details and blunt the effects of this crime—and the readiness of some in the community to blame the victim of a gang rape, and in the most sickening terms.
In this respect, a rape in one Ohio town is revealing how U.S. society and its most revered institutions—law enforcement from the local to the federal level, and schools from the high school level to the most elite of college campuses—routinely minimize rape and sexual violence, and subject any woman willing to speak up about them to abuse and humiliation.
The rot goes far beyond Steubenville. The first national coverage of the case was an extended New York Times feature that ended up illustrating all the problems with the ways that rape and sexual assault are discussed in our society. The article read like a cross between a nonfiction retelling of the high school football TV drama Friday Night Lights and an anguished commentary on the uses and misuses of social media.
Readers could easily have been left with the sense that what happened in Steubenville was a tragedy for everyone involved, that the young men who committed the rape were also victims because they might lose promising futures, that it matters whether the town’s beloved football team had its reputation tarnished—and even that it’s difficult to determine what happened that August night because of conflicting stories and outlooks.
While the Times article extensively profiled the two young men charged with rape, the experiences and feelings of the victim are almost entirely missing. We only learned in the last few paragraphs that she is traumatized, unable to sleep, socially isolated and afraid to go to school.
In this context, the Anonymous leaks are welcome in having shone the spotlight on the misogynistic cruelty of the “rape crew” and the multiple ways in which the victim was dehumanized and brutalized. The facts about what happened are stomach-turning—and, as a record of the evening posted at the Local Leaks website shows, not at all difficult to piece together.
What’s clear is that school and town officials have been engaged in a systematic cover-up ever since August—which in turns shows the extent to which these young men could reliably expect to act with impunity.
The revelations about Steubenville are so horrifying that there is a danger the events will be seen as exceptional. Already, the young men involved are being described as sick sociopaths.
While it’s hard to watch the video footage and disagree, this misses the critical point that sexual assault is pervasive in our society—and that the ruling institutions of this society are responsible.
An extensive report by the Centers for Disease Control in 2010 found that one in five women reports having been the victim of rape or attempted rape in their lifetime. Any serious of discussion of rape and sexual assault today has to address why they take place so widely—and the multiple ways in which sexual assault survivors are re-victimized.
THE European Court of Justice ruled yesterday that the European Union can lawfully suppress political criticism of its institutions and of leading figures, sweeping aside English Common Law and 50 years of European precedents on civil liberties.
The ruling stated that the commission could restrict dissent in order to “protect the rights of others” and punish individuals who “damaged the institution’s image and reputation”.
I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.
–Abraham Lincoln, September 18, 1858.
So don’t go around pretendin’ like Lincoln was the savior of non-white folk in the 19th century.
(via anarchyagogo) Via choose your futureNow that Veteran’s Day is over… Fun Fact: The United States hasn’t been attacked by a sovereign nation since 1941.
It was really nice watching you all wax poetic about blatant aggression, and then choose a supporting phrase from your grab bag of “most commonly used Fox News…
