INTERNATIONAL VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN AND GIRLS ACT 2

I am following up here on the Post of December 7 that first discussed this Bill; you may want to review that Post.

I found the text of this Bill and read it. The text is available here. It’s only about 20 pages long and is not hard to read – although the plan and strategy outlined in it might give you some nightmares.

The Bill was indeed put forward a couple of times before; both times it failed to get to the floor – that says something encouraging about the Congress, but it’s too early to pop any champagne corks. The text of the Bill is that of the most recent effort to get it going, dated April 30, 2008.

I have put up a lengthy Post on my other site, and you can read it here. But that Post goes into politics and history, so what I am going to do here is simply point out the most directly SO-relevant material.

Essentially, this Bill wants to create in foreign countries the entire panoply of feminist advocacy and all its sub-divisions: law, law enforcement, health care, university education and community awareness.

Naturally, under the ‘law enforcement’ rubric, all of the police state tactics We have seen in the SO mania are included, as well as many from the Domestic Violence matrix.

The Bill does so – as We saw in the Shepard Act and a number of the key SO laws – by the government declaring itself some State’s “partner”, and then telling the State what it has to do … or risk losing its funding. But here the feds are not dealing with States of the United States but foreign governments.

And it is hugely dubious whether any foreign government can accept the entire panoply of feminist structures and – far more lethal – cultural and societal impositions: if you read the Bill in its entirety, then all of the assorted changes and reforms which ‘partnership’ with the US will bring add up to a profound imposition on, even an assault on, the target (or ‘partner) country’s warp and woof .There is no small chance of the people themselves rising up against their government.

There is no ‘carrot’ in this scheme. The ‘stick’ is that no country can receive foreign aid unless it complies. The old Al Capone scam now erected into national foreign policy as it was introduced into domestic policy in the SO laws.

Worse, and most cynically, however, is this: although the violence which the Bill deplores as an ‘epidemic’ is world-wide, the only countries ‘eligible’ for having this ‘partnership’ declared on them (much as war was once declared) are those that are officially ranked as “low income” by the UN.

In other words, although this is a world-wide and deeeeeep ‘emergency’, if you are big enough to tell the US government to go fly a kite, or have lent enough to the US government to be able to threaten to call in your Notes, or can afford a military able to turn back the American ‘partners’ on the landing strips … then you aren’t ‘eligible’ to be a ‘partner’. The Bill shrewdly picks only on nations too poor and weak to stand up for themselves.

The Bill itself deploys the usual “Findings” tactic of reporting outrageous amounts of everything, backed up with dubious statistics and fuzzy, overbroad definitions. It boils down to this: any nation in the world with women in it is probably vulnerable to being ‘declared’ a ‘partner’ in this scheme. Violence against men – by other men or even by women – is not mentioned at all.

The entire globe-girdling effort is to be presided over by a Coordinator who will “enjoy the rank and status of an Ambassador-At-Large” and who will report directly (and only) to the Secretary of State herself.

There is no clear indication of how this Ambassador-At-Large will interact (or not) with regular local American Ambassadors; looking at the text, this Ambassador-At-Large could wind up functioning as a sort of Proconsul for Female Stuff.

She (I’m guessing) – according to the vague but sweeping text – will have sweeping authority to deploy any US assets and resources in the PREVENTING or responding to violence (verrrry widely and vaguely defined) against “women and girls” (a peculiar phrase frequently used in the text).

So We can see ‘preventive’ law – as in the SO mania – now trying to break into the international arena of American foreign affairs.

And – don’t console yourself that this is ‘far-fetched’ – among those assets the military and CIA are not excluded. Indeed, there is a special role for training foreign police and militaries in the type of ‘awareness’ that We see in the SO mania.

I cannot see how this is going to enhance national security, as the new sponsor – Delahunt of MA – piously claims at the end of his Op-Ed. Such a profound and invasive programme, which has proven to be both hugely divisive within citizenry and society over here and the source of numerous police-state tactics and laws, stand a strong probability of generating much popular hostility. I can imagine that if this Bill ever passes and this programme is enacted into law, then this country is going to make a whole lot of new enemies – and do We need to be doing that?

Again, I note just what is at stake in all of the efforts to roll-back the SO mania laws. They are now trying to creep into international affairs, where the US has far fewer tools and declining authority to impose its visions and its will.

Furthermore, whereas in the US the citizens – male and female – are deeply inculcated with a peaceable-ness and civility that has permitted so much to go on for so long in the age of Mania, yet most of the other peoples of the world – especially in countries that are not “high-income” – are not at all so patient. Whether they simply laugh it all off (being laughed-at is an acutely informative experience that the advocates of this mania have never had to experience over here) or take more vigorous, forceful and direct negative action is hard to predict in any specific instance, but such outcomes would hardly be unpredictable. “Backlash” will take on a whole new meaning if those peoples and nations get riled up.

If the SO laws can be rolled back, then a significant chunk of the lethal and dangerous police-state enforcement apparatus will be eliminated – though, of course, it will be interesting to observe just how such mania can be sustained without all that apparatus.

Needless to say, I hold no brief for violence against anybody on the planet. But there are wise efforts and unwise efforts to address large problems. And America of late has been indulging in rather unwise policies and programmes, and all those consequences are starting to catch up with Us, like huge turkeys come home to roost.

The country stands at a volatile crossroads – efforts to roll-back the SO mania are not only an important national necessity but an international necessity as well.

Let Us continyuh!