VICTIMOLOGY 6

We continue reviewing the 1986 book entitled “The Politics of Victimization” by Robert Elias, then of Tufts University.*

Elias considers the kinds of victimization that exist.

He notes the U.S. has the highest crime rate in the world. Nicely, in his list of types of victimization he includes not only violent crime but “personal, property, organized, professional, white-collar, corporate, juvenile, sexual and family crimes”. (p.47)

I wonder if – in addition to the radical-feminist interest in sex and family crime – it served the interests of that “white-collar” and “corporate” element to have the country’s attention fixed on ‘sex offenders’ , as it already had been on the 'awful' family? If so, the price for such distraction has been awesome, lethal, and perhaps fatal to the nation’s core economic and perhaps even political health.

From a conceptual point of view, he is on his solid – and not inaccurate – Victimology ground when he points out that some “offenses, like ‘victimless crimes’ produce no direct victims” at all. The wisdom of this can easily and clearly be seen in the white-collar and corporate categories, especially after the financial meltdown of 2008. It is now widely recognized that there have been many ‘victims’ indeed: persons whose livelihood and retirement savings have been wiped out.

But I would also point out that the practitioners of the whackulous financial partying were corroded as well. In her recent book “Bright-sided”** Barbara Ehrenreich recounts the “Woo!” culture that existed in such mortgage companies as Angelo Mozillo’s Countrywide Mortgage: as an employee, you were expected to be excited and ‘upbeat’ and always ‘positive’, and this remained true even as the first ominous warning signs of catastrophe made themselves clear within the financial sector as early as 2004. If you didn’t conform, if you sought to call attention to the danger signs and counseled (a very mature and prudent) caution, then you were labeled as ‘negative’ and ‘not a team-player’.

I can only wonder, as the Sex Offense Mania regime spawned its own unholy matrix of ‘experts’ and cottage industries presenting themselves as either ‘therapeutic’ or as adjuncts to law-enforcement, and also –worse – its own ‘wave’ among law enforcement and prosecutors and even the judiciary, and the legislators and their all-important staffers, what effects this Woo!-culture created.

And you can’t avoid noticing that even as ‘regulation’ intensified exponentially against SOs, the nation’s too-vital (all the real productive industry having been out-sourced, down-sized, or simply wiped away) financial industries were increasingly DE-regulated.

High-fives all around!

I can’t see how you can avoid the conclusion that the entire nation – and most profoundly and permanently – has been truly Victimized by its elites in business, finance, and – inescapably – political and governmental oversight. And yet the ‘regulation’ and ‘oversight’ of the government-created SOs went on and on, amplified by selective, sensationalist and lurid media coverage.

Whence Elias then goes on immediately to reflect that the U.S. itself – since its inception – has been a “violent society” (p.47) I think of Ehrenreich and consider that the U.S. has also always been an emotionally volatile society. Perhaps, even beyond their historical and deep philosophical concerns about the nature of humans and the historical experiences and examples of ancient Greece and Rome (and perhaps the remarkably nuanced chief-doms and governing structures of the Indian tribes) , the Framers also noted the volatility of Americans.

And thus both their hesitation in creating a wide and genuine ‘democracy’ and also their extreme care in constructing the machinery of Constitutional governance (which, in core, is self-governance).

Surely the Woo!-culture is a vivid and alarming example of a lack of individual self-governance, as a professional, as a mature adult, as well as a Citizen. And the group-think dynamic was allowed to break the bounds of good praxis, unhindered by such controlling principles as Maturity and Prudence and – surely – professional integrity.

But also included in that emotional volatility is Fear. In a Note at the back of the book Elias will acknowledge that “The fear of crime may have become a ‘social enterprise that provides entrepreneurs with political and pecuniary profit’” (p.271, Note 189). I think that in addition to the obvious elements of this observation – made in 1986 – there is also the unhappy possibility that certain ‘advocacies’ have themselves somehow been corroded by such dynamics.

Indeed, in a follow-on Note (he makes some meaty revelations at the back of the text, in all those Notes that an unsuspecting reader might overlook) he observes that “selectively using words to create alarm may provide an important tool of social control”. (p.271, Note 191) I would say that the relationship of the SO Mania regime to this vital matter of ‘social control’ is one that the entire SO community must keep in mind.

Who is doing the ‘controlling’? A government that has long been slipping away from the control of its Constitutional governors, The People. And not by outright rejection of the Constitutional vision, but rather by the subtle processes of manipulating and ‘dumbing-down’ and stampeding of the Citizenry, as if The People were merely a herd of cattle, to be spooked at will for the ‘convenience’ and in the ‘interests’ of the government and those to whom it has chosen to pander.

Harsh thoughts, and dark, perhaps. But nobody familiar with the effects of the SO Mania regime can deny the harsh and dark effects of this regime on everything and everyone it has touched, including – in an irony worthy of Tolkien – even its creators and abettors and servants.

And again in a follow-on Note he admits that “The media may promote a false ideology that criminal justice functions primarily to control and eliminate crime instead of promoting interests, protecting property, largely for the few, and controlling the population”. (p.271, Note 193) This comment of his reveals – I think refreshingly – an older ‘liberalism’ that was concerned first and foremost with the eternal predations of that ancient predator – Wealth, especially as it is concentrated to exercise power.

It was this ‘old liberalism’ – known in the 1960s as ‘the Old Left’ – that was wiped away by ‘the New Left’ of the 1960s: Identity Politics and the Identities and advocates supporting that Politics … which was really a revolutionary (in the French-Leninist-Maoist sense) movement profoundly antithetical to the American ethos.*** And that ‘control’ would be hugely influenced by the monstrous corpus of theory and experience created and amassed by such dark minds as Lenin and Goebbels as well as by the advertising-turned-nationalistic-propagandist Edward Bernays, a Swiss who in the early 1900s started advising U.S. corporations how to ‘create the desire’ for their products and then turned his craft to World War 1.****

And he even acknowledges – again, buried in the Notes – that “Offenders may become ‘sacrificial victims’ in society’s attempt to obstruct disintegrative forces”. (p.272, Note 195) This opens the possibility that in some deep and dark workings of the psychology of society the SO Mania regime was erected – perhaps like some sort of neurosis or psychosis or defense-mechanism in individual therapy terminology – to allay deep feelings about much larger and other societal matters.

In this emotional volatility, I think it becomes clear how the SO Mania regime is in deep ways to some extent an efflorescence of much that has been going wrong with American society in the past decades.

In one section he considers ‘Sexual Assault’ directly (p.48) – and recall that he was writing as a very knowledgable professional insider in 1986.

“Although rape was long considered a sexual crime, the women’s movement has helped us recognize it actually as a violent crime”. (p.48) This may sound a bit odd: rape has always been considered a felonious crime, and ‘violence’ – you might think – would be included in such a categorizational assessment.

But in immediate support of his statement, Elias quotes at length a feminist who herself was quoted in the 1979 book “Person/Planet: The Disintegration of Industrial Society”, by a guru of such ‘creative destruction’, Theodore Roszak (you can see, back then, how radical-feminism was supporting the Deconstruction not simply of ‘concepts’ but of the actual reality of American industrial society; from the vantage point of 30 years later, you can make your own judgments about the wisdom of that bit of ‘cutting edge progress’).

Anyhoo, the quotation reads: “The male society has made rape the prototypical expression of its patterns. Domination of the other by force of nature and land and resources, of ‘inferior’ nations and groups of women, of money and markets and material goods …‘Victim’ is the most descriptive noun we have to designate the role women … must play … [I]n male institutions you are either the victim or the oppressor”. (p.48)

You can see here, by the late 1970s, how radical-feminism was seeking to include itself in the paradigmatic concerns of the Boomer generation and of the 1960s: American ‘superpower’ violence against native peoples, colonialism, imperialism … and with all respect to those thoughts, though supported by the Soviet rival as a way to keep its powerful U.S. competitor off-balance. (This dynamic is in addition to the effort to cast the radical-feminist agenda as merely a follow-on of the Black Civil Rights movement – ‘patriarchy’ as Jim Crow, ‘men’ as violent, lumpish Southrons … that sort of thing.)

While this was all ’30 years ago’, that period was the cusp of the era when ‘sex offenses’ started to rear their head, soon to follow with the early 1980s Child Day-Care Satanic Ritual Abuse Trials (now largely, maybe utterly, discredited) which themselves served to fuel the deep and dark fires in which the SO Mania regime was forged.

Again, while it may seem irrelevant to look at statements made decades ago (and surely the now-established Advocacies would prefer to ignore them), yet these statements were the Cutting-Edge Wisdom in the era when all of the present frakkulence was forged.

Men and rape and sexual ‘violence’ were equated with a macho and imperialist and neo-colonialist America. The neatness – cuteness, perhaps – of the equation does not establish its accuracy and legitimacy as a conceptual frame and as ‘knowledge’.

But I wonder if the acquiescence of the government in radical-feminist demands even in the Reagan Eighties was somehow an effort to buy-off the advocacies, and dampen the internationally-embarrassing possibility of a large American domestic ‘advocacy’ continually trumpeting what was in effect the Soviet-line: that the USA was indeed an imperialist and neo-colonialist nation and that – conversely – the USSR was a friend of all underdogs. (Although, in an equally delicious symmetry, the Democrats trumped themselves as champions of the ‘underdog’, a claim made as recently as last week by the Chairman of the DNC on Jon Stewart’s ‘Daily Show’.)

Which then leads to the thought that the radical-feminist advocacies (upon whom I focus here because they were key initiators and players in what became the development of the SO Mania regime) played their own political game by intimidating the Beltway to satisfy their demands or they would continue to embarrass the USA as Reagan started to work on his international efforts to deal with the USSR in the glare of the world’s attention.

Immediately thereafter, Elias starts with the ‘statistics’: more than 60,000 rapes reported in the U.S. each year, 5 to 10 times as many as Europe, and – of course – this number “underestimates the actual amount by at least 4 times”. This last estimate is provided by quoting a 1984 article in ‘Victimology’ magazine in an article on ‘date rape’, that amorphous and legally tortuous concept that began to stretch the definition of ‘rape’ into the most difficult territory of he-said/she-said, the complexity which for centuries all sane Western jurists had realized was a lethal swamp for organized sovereign justice.

Oh, and then on second thought about the amount of ‘rapes’, Elias adds immediately: “perhaps by as much as twenty-five times”. (p.48) It stuns to read these ‘old’ documents and realize how easily advocates threw huge numbers around like play-dough (and, come to think of it, the way defense contractors and Beltway pols threw around figures of money and nuclear throw-weights and numbers of awesome Soviet forces in the hugely powerful and well-established Soviet military machine (as they said back then before the whole Soviet illusion collapsed like a house of cards … where Hitler had failed in his1940 bid to ‘simply kick in the door and the whole structure will come crashing down’, the door and structure imploded on its own without an explosion less than a decade later.)

And – in a careful turn – Elias quickly adds that “Male rapes, often in prisons or among homosexuals, apparently constitute only a fraction of the total” (p.48). It is – given the nature of Identity Politics Correctness these days – impossible to know whether the question of homosexual rape is Correctly to be played-up or down-played, and what the Correct opinion is that one should have (now and also back in 1986). But here it serves in any event to make sure that the focus remains where the radical-feminist advocacy wanted it to remain: on females as the ‘rape victims’ of males.

While he acknowledges without obvious concern the phenomenon of “many women” not reporting “this crime”, he has no doubt as to its “prevalence”. (p.48) Rape is, he asserts, “the leading crime against women and the fastest growing index crime”. (p.49) Although to what extent this growth is attributable to the elasticity of the definition, the growing awareness that charges could be filed with increasingly less danger of being sanctioned for false-charges, the increasing social – or at least media – status of being a ‘victim’, or an intensifying reorientation of a law-enforcement apparatus responding to political pressures … there are numerous variables here rarely examined.

But this doesn’t stop Elias from quickly lamenting that “we have made little headway in reducing it or in promoting the victim’s role in prosecuting the offender (not ‘defendant’, I note) and that “prosecutions have not increased”. (p.49) Whether THIS is a result of a still-robust professional doubt as to the veracity or prosecutability of such allegations, or merely a macho stubbornness on the part of law enforcement in submitting to the demanded agenda … more variables not often examined.

The ‘sexual’ and ‘family crimes’ often “overlap” (p.49) – and here is the connection between the Domestic Violence regime and the SO Mania regime.

His next section is on ‘Battering’, but I will leave it for the next Post.

NOTES

*My copy is the paperback version put out by Oxford UP in 1986. It bears the ISBN 0-19-503980-7. It will be unwieldy to include both Chapter Titles and sub-headings as well as page numbers, in case you have a different edition. I will stick to only using page references when I make quotations, but for especially important points I will do so.

**Ehrenreich, Barbara. “Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America”. New York: Picador, 2010. ISBN: 978-0-8050-8749-9. This is the paperback edition at $15 US. Well worth the read, and it’s not difficult – although stunning and alarming in what it reveals about the country’s approach to life in all its major aspects.

***You are welcome to look at this Post about the effects of the social philosopher Herbert Marcuse, refugee from the Nazi regime in 1933, who in 1965 as an American university professor wrote an article urging that for real ‘liberation’ a society must repress and deny public discussion of ‘established’ ideas in order to create ‘space’ for whatever opposes that ‘establishment’. To be truly ‘tolerant’ a society must be ‘intolerant’ – a thought uttered in 1965, before the Vietnam-era military excuse that ‘we had to destroy the village in order to save it’.

****For the historically-minded, note the ominous progression (or, more aptly, regression) in Communism: where ‘propaganda’ as social control was initially employed, it then mutated into government-managed Terror, against its own population, to the point where in Soviet Russia Stalin gave little thought to ‘propaganda’; violations of the established Political Correctness (a Soviet term itself) were met with simply outright and forthright police Terror. Any government engaged in ‘revolution’ must by the very nature and dynamics of its undertaking somehow ‘war’ upon its own people. And the SO Mania regime is a fruit of that poisonous tree.

EVEN MORE FRESH ASSANGE

I am keeping up with this Assange matter since it seems clear to me that we are seeing a clear example of the widely-emplaced SO Mania Regime now being deployed as a cover to ‘go after’ people whom a government (and the US government in this case) finds somehow ‘inconvenient’.

It should not be surprising.

In my view of the Regime, it was always about ‘convenience/convenience’: a powerful political demographic element on the Left found ‘men’ inconvenient, mixing themselves with another large swath of folks found it psychologically convenient to demonstrate that they really were pro-family and pro-children, while on the opposite side of the spectrum a whole bunch of folks just feel better when standing up for law-‘n-order any time the opportunity is presented, and a bunch of other folks just don’t like weirdos, different people, and – in classic sociological terms – ‘Others’.

Needless to say, all of the above find the Constitution, for all practical purposes, to be inconvenient.

(None of the foregoing is to be construed as my desire to ‘approve’ the infliction of unwanted sexual experience on any human being by any other human being. And I write with the clear awareness that the vast number of SOs are not slavering incorrigible monsters.)

Now the accused (although he hasn’t been charged with anything, which at this point is ominously interesting all on its own), Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks (which still has those 15,000 documents about military frakkey in AfPak that it’s preparing to release), is being urged by to step down as the operational head of Wikileaks.

The suggestion is being made by an “organizer” of Wikileaks, a woman who is a former resident of Sweden but is now “an Icelandic parliamentarian”.

Once again, her headline-grabbing public comment actually turns out to say much less than the quick reader would be led to believe.

He should just “give up his management” (which would include managing the release of the next 15,000 documents), but only while “he fights the charges filed by two Swedish women”.

But as we know, those two didn’t actually file charges (shrewdly, for the sake of their future legal vulnerability if this thing doesn’t work).

But this is one of those ‘suggestions’ and ‘invitations’ that is delivered with an alluring and – given the dynamics of these things – seductive sadness. The sad one says that “I am not angry with Julian, but this is a situation that has clearly gotten out of hand”. Nothing about the fact that the situation was made to get out of hand by the too-shrewd activities of the original allegators and a couple of Swedish prosecutors who are keeping the thing going – yet without bringing any charges.

And, of course, there’s absolutely no reason for Assange to step down in order to ‘deal with’ these charges. It’s not like he’s writing a major piece of work and needs all his concentration to keep focus on his writing. All that remains is to press the Send button on that cache of 15,000 documents that reveals a lot or a little that is new about American military badness in AfPak. He could do it from his PalmPilot while sitting in a courtroom … although there is no court in sight at this point, despite all the brouhaha.

Listen to her justification: “These personal matters have nothing to do with Wikileaks. I have strongly urged him to focus on the legalities that he’s dealing with and let some other people carry the torch”.

But if – as she rightly says – these matters have nothing to do with Wikileaks, and if all he has to do is press a Send button, then why does she think he needs to quit his job? The documents will speak for themselves, so it’s not even as if it’s bad for company business if its Founder is embroiled in a made-for-media sex-offense dust-up.

And I can easily imagine that if some Wikileaks subordinates are getting nervous about whether they’ll be next on some hit-list, then Assange’s stepping-down may well result in the 15,000 documents not being published.

But Birgitta Jonsdottir, the Icelandic parliamentarian and somehow connected to Wikileaks, also goes to great lengths to cover all of her bases, shrewdly enough. She’s not mad at him, but she “doesn’t support his claim that the allegations were part of a plot designed to damage Wikileaks”. If that’s true, then she shouldn’t be allowed to operate heavy machinery – which would include a microphone. While I am not going to make any bloggery sensational claims, I am going to say here and now that there is more than enough possibility that – regardless of the sex-offense ‘reports’ (which at this point is all they are and have been since Day One) – the heavy thumb of politics and ‘reasons of state’, especially with the US lurking in the background with a whole lotta motive, is impossible to discount on its face.

Ms. Jonsdottir, by the by, is now serving in the Parliament of a nation that is publicly pretty close to sovereign bankruptcy, and therefore in no position to annoy international monetary organizations – rather largely influenced, as it happens, by the US government.

Nor can I say with any seriousness that ‘feminism’ – even ‘international feminism ‘ – has the chops to roam this far afield for ‘support’ while simultaneously holding the theoretically well-grounded charges from being filed.

With even more careful – painfully careful – wording, Jonsdottir then undercuts herself by suggesting that maybe this is all just a “cultural misunderstanding” between himself and the two women.

But then, immediately, “And he’s a classic Aussie in the sense that he’s a bit of a male chauvinist”. Aha. So the old feministical stuff is trotted out; and when did we ever hear of a ‘man’ being just “a bit of a male chauvinist”?

She covers all the bases, balancing her ‘support’ with a shopping-list of all the classic male-hostile tropes of the feministical panoply. It’s a remarkable performance, but – as they would have said in the pre-electrical age of the world – ‘smells much of the lamp’. Meaning that somebody stayed up really really late last night putting this thing together verrrry verrrrry carefully.

And frankly, it reminds me of the dying Vito Corleone’s advice to his son and successor, Michael: whoever comes to you and offers to set up a meeting … he is the one who will assassinate you. And sure enough, loyal old sub-boss Tessio soon shows up, smiling and gentle, and purrs a proposal to set up a meeting between Michael and the drug-mob that wants to use the Corleone connections to bring in drugs. Old Vito had been saying No; but he’s behind the times and it’s a new era and there are new possibilities and … you saw the movie.

And I think we’re seeing a script here, and for all its weaknesses the US government is still capable of putting out a 'movie'.

Assange has said that he is “losing confidence in the Swedish justice system”. Nobody in the American SO community can be too surprised at such an observation.

That justice system, by the by, has now gone a week and hasn’t filed its charges. Which doesn’t prove that there are no charges that might be justifiably filed (especially given the frakkeries of SO Mania Regime jurisprudence), but it does suggest strongly to me that this is all about intimidating him to not-publish the documents. If he caves, then the Senior senior prosecutor might simply say that it was all a “cultural misunderstanding” and Nevvvvvvvvvvverrrrrrrrrrrrr Minnnnnnnnnnnnnd (as the late great Roseanne Rosannadanna character would have said on Saturday Night Live).

And the Swedish and Icelandic governments will get the Great Thumb off their necks.

Assange – in the article linked-to in the link in this Post – says that he doesn’t know if this is just a couple of people pursuing the matter for personal or ideological reasons, or whether this whole thing is driven by “geopolitical reasons”. I would suggest that it is both, given that the SO Mania Regime and its demographic support groups are both deeply enmeshed with the US government and have been for quite some time.

And let’s not forget that there’s an election coming up in these parts very soon; those 15,000 documents, possibly even more than the previous 72,000 or so, might not make certain parties to the election look very good.

Nor can I credit either the wits or the integrity or both of Ms. Jonsdottir when she says in that same linked-article that she reviewed all the documents in the case (you can do that in Swedish law?) and “quickly determined that this was not part of any western conspiracy against Wikileaks”. Which only makes me wonder that if the Icelandic folk had elected more insightful legislators their government might not have gone bust. In fact, since no actual 'case' has been formally brought, then what court 'documents' can she have seen? Or has she simply reviewed the written-up allegations of the two females?

But I think you can see just how the insidious SO Mania Regime can now be deployed for purposes far beyond – or beneath – its original and publicly-stated justifications.

But of course, the SO Mania Regime has always been vigorously and lethally alive, crawling beneath its surfaces with all manner of ulterior and far more lethal motivations and purposes than were originally stated.

And that will come as no surprise to the SO community at all.

MORE FRESH ASSANGE

The SO community will not be as surprised as the ‘civilian’ world to find out that on Wednesday, Sept. 1st, an even more senior Swedish prosecutor not only reversed the overturn of the warrant against Julian Assange, but totally and utterly set the entire matter up as a sex-offense (rape) case all over again – just as it had been set-up when the two self-proclaimed victims went to the police station (perhaps after consultation with a lawyer) and “asked for advice” (which gambit nicely prevents them from ever being liable for a charge of filing a false report with police).

As best I can make out, the rape occurred when Mr. Assange refused to stop after a condom broke, in one victim’s case, and after the condom had been removed, in the other. Mr. Assange must have been in remarkably good shape that evening (although it is well-known that among their other demonic super-powers, SOs are capable of amazing performance at sustained high levels).

The Senior senior prosecutor claims that on the basis of “new evidence” that materialized Tuesday she has concluded that a crime was committed, and that the crime was rape. Although no fresh warrant or charges have been brought against Assange by prosecutors.

Such remarkable reversals “are not entirely uncommon in Swedish law”, she said, “especially allegations in sex crimes”. Well, the SO community is no doubt well ahead of the ‘civilian’ population in regard to this phenomenon. Given the elasticity of definitions as to what constitutes the elements of a sex-crime, and the elasticity of evidentiary-proof rules, and the wide divergence in how this or that prosecutor or court can be expected to interpret all the fuzziness, but given the tantalizing possibility that an allegator and her counsel might score a trifecta and get a ‘friendly’ cop and prosecutor and judge … well, you can see where things might go.

Nor, in matters sex-offensual, do you need the trifecta to get your money’s worth out of a day at the legal track. The media may well make up for any reservations one or another official might have about getting into harness for a spin around the track. And ‘friendly’ government officials might also compensate very nicely for any principled qualms.

In this case, as I have been saying in earlier Posts, it is easy to see the current level of shenanigans as attributable to either standard sex-offense regime dynamics or to ‘reasons of state’ by foreign governments pressuring the Swedish government. Or both – which may well be what’s going on here.

From the sex-offense regime material, I can envision a passel of ‘justifications’ (they can’t be dignified as genuine Principles) such as: a) it sends a good message to see important men held accountable for their sexual activity; b) it is a good ‘symbol’ of the needs and power of ‘women’ that this sort of case can be brought; c) ‘facts don’t matter’ anyway since men are what they are (rapists by nature) and so you can presume that even if they don’t mean to, they ‘rape’ as naturally as they munch Ring-Dings;* and therefore d) you can do whatever it takes whenever you have a chance to drag a male’s eternally violent sexuality into the Klieg lights.

Perhaps it is clear that such a set of presumptions are hell-and-gone from the principles of the jurisprudence envisioned by the Constitution of 1787 (but of course that problem is solved by declaring the said document “quaint” and “insufficient”).

From the government point-of-view (which, wickedly, is now itself tainted by decades of Feminist, Victimist, and SO Regime ‘thinking’): a) this guy refuses to not-publish materials the US government would rather not have come to light; b) this makes him an enemy and therefore – since America is God’s Deputy – Evil; c) he will also ‘victimize’ everyone involved in the dark-doings by exposing them to publicity; d) since he is both Evil and an enemy of the US and a potential victimizer, then it is not only OK but absolutely required morally to do whatever it takes to stop him.

And you can also see where both the Feminists and the Government would see an opportunity here where both of them can ‘win’. Assange can be discredited as a ‘sex offender’.

I’m not sure, though, what use his ‘sex offender-hood’ (assuming he is tried and convicted – and most SO cases don’t do well in the bright light of day, much like most Government dirty-tricks cases) would do to discredit the material (15,000 more documents ready to go out) he is putting forth to the world. He’s not publishing his own ideas (and in a better world, an idea would be judged on its own merits, not on the ‘purity’ or ‘Correctness’ of its proponent)**; he’s publishing reports made by US officials at all levels, including the lower, boots-on-the-ground levels were ‘stuff gets done’ and ‘stuff happens’.

So I don’t think that from the Government’s point of view, the full SO treatment (all the way to trial and conviction) is going to do any good. The key would be to intimidate Assange so as to induce him to not-publish the reports; clearly, especially in light of the Senior senior prosecutor’s stunningly vague comments, they want to give him a little time to think about caving in to them. Then perhaps the charges will simply disappear.

But whether that will suit the other Party to this theoretical scheme – the Feminists – I don’t know. They may want to go for the full SO scenario: accusations and (possibly) trial and conviction … but again, unless you can really guarantee all the Players, a genuinely adversarial and honest trial process is an iffy things and most people with an agenda don’t prefer to subject their hopes to it. They try to ‘fix’ the outcome, much as has happened in American venues, but not so much perhaps in Swedish venues.

And then there is the question of what Assange actually did that night. Since the two females approached him and things went on from there, and since – at least as far as I can make out from the various reports – everything started off consensually for the actual encounter with each of the allegators – then if this turns out to be ‘rape’, it’s one of those ‘coded’ cases of rape where what really happened doesn’t fit any average person’s understanding of the word and concept (much like, say, most reasonable citizens would not say that by remaining silent in a long-distance phone call you were ‘battering’ your partner). Or perhaps he did nothing at all and all this has been created without any basis in fact or act at all.

I also think that it’s a relevant coincidence that he is applying for Permanancy status in Sweden (he is an Australian citizen) where the master servers of Wikileaks are located. Perhaps as a ‘sex offender’ – either convicted or merely accused – he is automatically ineligible for such status.

OR perhaps – as either a convicted or accused ‘sex offender’ – he either won’t be able to return to Australia or, having returned, won’t be able to leave again, at least not without all sorts of official procedural requirements that will both complicate his life AND let the US government know just when and where he is going.

Such is the Net and Web into which the SO Mania Regime – now gone international – can throw somebody

Verrrrrrry shroooooood indeed.

Allons, enfants de la patrie!

NOTES

*And once again, this to me indicates the lethal infection introduced through the misappropriation by the feminists of the civil-rights paradigm.

Martin Luther King was presented with a thorny problem when Bull Connor – the in-your-face Jim Crow ogre police chief of Birmingham, whose philosophy was beat’em down early and often – began to take a page from Chief Laurie Pritchett of Albany, Georgia, whose philosophy was ‘don’t confront, don’t be violent, always be polite, and be patient’.

As King relates in his book ‘Why We Can’t Wait’, this created a significant problem on several levels. If the police were being decent enough on any given day, then the demonstrators were deprived of the Ogre and the Violence – freely applied to them as they proceeded nonviolently – that gave them, with almost no effort at all, the High Ground in the campaign.

It became clear to King and his staff that THEY NEEDED THE POLICE TO BE VIOLENT.

But wouldn’t that be immoral and dishonest? To GOAD the police into violence?

The solution, carefully reasoned out, was something like this: the police are thoroughly steeped in the Jim Crow system; the Jim Crow system is a vicious and violent system that has been in place for so long (80 years in the 1950s) that its rawness is now thoroughly ‘civilized’; but the heart of the system is dark and repressive violence; and so the cops – whether they know it or not – are ultimately in the service of that dark and repressive violence IN THEIR VERY HEARTS; and so it’s not dishonest or ‘violent’ to create a situation where that violence would be drawn forth for all to see.

King’s assessment here strikes me as a good one (although fraught with unhappy possibilities in the matter of consequences). BUT I say that precisely because he was actually and genuinely facing the unspinnably noxious and violent reality of the Jim Crow regime, which over the course of generations had come to genuinely and profoundly taint the Southron culture and traditions and all the persons raised according to that culture and those traditions.

HOWEVER, when radical-feminism tried to run the same play and game-plan, they had to literally create what King had merely had to confront: an incorrigibly and profoundly violent and oppressive ‘enemy’ that sought eternal repression and oppression.

Thus ‘Patriarchy’ was to be the Jim Crow of the radical-feminist gameplan; ‘men’ were to be the Southern cops and officials; and on the basis of those assigned roles, the radical-feminists could then proceed to ‘do whatever it takes’ to get their agendas imposed, since they dwelt in the sure and certain knowledge that they were Good and Men were Evil (the they-are-Evil gambit Bush would try to run against the Arabs and Islamics after 9-11, although it was shrewdly combined with the Churchill-vs-the Axis Menace gambit as well).

I think you can see where, in due course, the ‘Sex Offender’ was simply an intensification of the image of the ‘Male’ as uncontrollable oppressor and rapist. And while I have no doubt that nowadays most feminists would try to defend it all by saying that all that is in the past and was just a lot of hyper-excited talk back in the early days, YET I will answer that it was precisely all that hyper-agitated stuff that became the motivational force for all the frakkulent beliefs and Findings that fueled the SO Mania Regime. And still do.

**I can’t help but notice the same dynamic here that is so often seen in the Catholic Church abuse cases: by destroying – at least for public purposes – the credibility of one or a few priests, you hope to weaken the credibility of all priests and – more importantly – of the Ideas or Beliefs that they stand for.

In that regard, I recall an episode of the TV show “House, M.D.” where the usually professional and sane and upright friend and colleague, Wilson, is discovered by House to have been sleeping with a female patient consensually. At the end of the episode, Wilson says to House: a principle is still good and still worthwhile and and still real even if you can’t always live up to it.

Which strikes me as very relevant to everything under discussion here.

LINKS

You can check the stories I looked at here, here, here, and here.

ADDENDUM


The BBC has also put up a report, available here. This BBC report has the Director of Public Prosecutions (who overruled the Stockholm prosecutor who overruled the weekend duty-prosecutor in Stockholm) saying merely that “more investigations are necessary before a final decision can be made”.




 

FRESH ASSANGE

Just a bit more as things continue to come out in this Wikileaks ‘sex offense’ brouhaha in Sweden.

Under some pressure (see below) the Swedish police are back to questioning Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks – whose site has published those 92,000 US military reports that indicate how wrong things have been going in Afghanistan.

At this point, the focus is on the charge that he “mistreated a woman”. I notice how much less than ‘rape’ or ‘sexual abuse’ this ‘mistreatment’ is. And from what I’ve seen of the SO Mania dynamics, when this sort of thing happens then you can be sure that if ‘advocates’ could in any conceivable way make their target seem more sensationalistically ‘evil’ they would certainly try to do so.

But they can’t, I think, and yet still want to keep the thing alive.

Apparently, if you read the article linked-to above, it is now said that the two women “befriended” him the night that he gave a seminar in Sweden on the Wikileaks-related stuff. Then, “six days later” the two women “filed their complaints together”.

We already know that they didn’t quite do that: they slyly went down to the police station on a drowsy weekend like a pair of innocent Goody-Two-Shoes and “asked for advice” – which (I can’t imagine that they didn’t know this) under SO Mania regime laws as they exist in Sweden required the police to immediately open a ‘sex offense’ case, which led to a trip-wire warrant by the weekend-duty prosecutor, which was then recalled within hours by a more senior and experienced prosecutor.

But, alas, the Swedes aren’t Americans. When the case was considered as a ‘molestation’ matter (which is not a sex-crime and not a felony in Swedish law) they still couldn’t find much.

The women’s attorney (who in previous bloggers’ Comments was identified as feminist-friendly – and I wonder if the women had visited the attorney BEFORE they dropped by the police station to ‘ask advice’) complains that (in best SO Mania style) that the women were dis-respected by the legal system and still wants both of their complaints re-opened as ‘sex crime’ investigations.

So now “a separate prosecutor’s office is investigating [the attorney’s] complaint”.

Of course, it is perfectly plausible that the US government – foreign affairs division – is behind this as a “smear campaign”. After all, as I’ve said before, if the government has gone to all the trouble and expense of creating the SO Mania Regime, then it sort of has a right to get its money’s worth on the investment: multi-tasking SO charges so that they serve the purposes of foreign-affairs and assorted types of international ‘security’ skullduggery would be a two-fer ever dear to the Beltway calculations.

But as I’ve also said, it’s quite possible that the US government – feminist and/or sex-offense advocacy divisions – could also be in on this. The Mania is self-sustaining (and self-licking, as in ice-cream cone) and once a match is put to any wood, then the fire will feed itself, granted there’s enough surrounding oxygen (meaning: a manipulated and stampeded public opinion and outrage).

And quite possible the SO Mania is operating along its own dynamics, but simultaneously fronting-for and masking the larger governmental purposes of squelching a class targeted by the government: whistleblowers.

After all, the SO Mania was initially designed to strike terror into parents and families so as to mask its original and core ‘feminist’ campaign against males. Then ‘the children’ were raised up as the poster-victims to front-for any ‘feminist’ elements of the thing that might scare off allies on the Law-and-Order Right who wouldn’t want to be seen lending their creds to any merely-feminist agenda.

And after all, the SO Mania was itself constructed as a way of squelching a class (‘men’, re-scripted by advocacy central-casting as monstrous, incorrigible, recidivist committers and perpetrators of ‘sex’) so squelching a selected target is just what the program was designed to do in the first place.

Which also make you wonder if this gambit would ever have been tried if Assange were an … ummm – OTM (other-than-male).

Anyhoo, I want to re-affirm what I said in previous Posts: it must be taken as a vitally significant fact that in all the commentary – official and mainstream and by bloggers and Commenters and Letter-writers to assorted sites – nobody is discussing the Sex-Offense Mania Regime itself. Even though the allegations were for ‘sex offenses’, all the discussion is limited to foreign-affairs angles.

Which leads me to say again to the SO community: it is profoundly strange and significant that the SO Mania, even when it is officially involved in a ‘story’, remains invisible to Americans: it’s as if they had trained themselves not to see what’s right in front of them, AND EVEN clearly labeled as such.

I have always been interested in the history of the First and Second World Wars, and – History being what it is – I have found certain themes and tropes and dynamics that occurred back then to be occurring now (in altered form) nowadays.

I am not trying to go for a ‘Nazi trump’ point here when I observe that all of this reminds me of the German people (NOT all or mostly Nazis, by any stretch) who saw the Jews with their Yellow Stars being paraded in front of them on the streets and yet managed not to ‘notice’.

Which was a self-serving and self-protective and self-forgiving gambit that came back ,eventually, to bite them with verrrry big teeth indeed.

I have two final thoughts then.

First, that the SO Mania Regime is quietly recognized by many Americans as being repugnant and repellent, so much so that they dare not even think about it – let alone comment about it. While in the short-term this serves the interests of its ‘advocates’ and indentured political and judicial official supporters, yet in the long-term this is an ominous harbinger indeed. Because when it finally becomes clear to the American people just what a lethal and corrosive scam has been pulled on them, they are going to be verrrrry displeased (nor will it be able to be dismissed merely as ‘backlash’).

Second, that when public opinion and public discourse are so deformed that they are partially blinded to realities well within the purview of public matters, then the public itself – The People – is profoundly weakened in its competence as governors-of-the-government.

So the SO community’s Resistance against this increasing Occupation of American public discourse by the dark forces of Ignorance and Manipulation must continue.

As the club-goers sang in the face of Major Strasser’s goons that eternal evening at Rick’s Café Americain: “Allons enfants de la Patrie! Le jour de gloire est arrive!”

GLENN GREENWALD ON THE SURVEILLANCE STATE

There is another issue that is garnering an unusual amount of Comment: the existence of America’s Surveillance State.

What caught my eye was attorney Glenn Greenwald’s piece on the Salon online magazine site: you can access it here, and follow that page down to Greenwald’s entry for Thursday, August 26th, entitled “Debating America’s Surveillance State”.

This piece quickly drew two lengthy rebuttals from attorneys or law school deans, one of whom is a close associate of John Yoo (the ‘torture lawyer’ of the Bush administration). Those responses are linked-to in the Greenwald piece.

There have been so many comments on the Cato website (where it was first published) that its server has been overloaded for a while.

And even on the Salon site there are almost 300 Comments/Letters, which is high indeed for that site.

I am bringing this up to the SO community because: A) ‘surveillance’ is nothing new to SOs; B) nobody that I’ve seen so far has drawn a connection between the SO Mania regime of the past 20 years, and instead seem to think that this all started after 9-11 only nine years ago; and C) I think it’s vital that the SO community realizes just how this dangerous surveillance dynamic has now migrated into much larger national issues where it is creating visible (to the average engaged Citizen) problems AND – encouragingly – generating significant pushback in the Comments/Letters … the SO task is now clearly intertwined with much larger, more ‘discussable’, but also vitally important and dangerously mutating public matters.

In this Post I am going to make just a few comments on the Greenwald piece itself, and then just a couple of points gleaned from the Comments/Letters that follow the article. I am not going to go into the two lengthy responses, which you can read by following the links in Greenwald’s article, reading them – I would recommend – from an SO community perspective. The demon Greenwald and many of the Commenters suddenly find themselves confronting is the demon the SO community has been battling for decades now.

So to Greenwald.

The topic problem is that surveillance supporters are using America’s present and alleged “state of war” as pretext and justification for increased surveillance.

First, the ‘surveillance State’ is based on fear-mongering. And the SO community knows that; one of the hallmarks of the SO Mania regime has been its creation of the ‘Sex Offender’, an almost script-like vampiric or zombie monster(and almost always a male) from central casting: a weird and depraved stranger, driven by perverse and violent and uncontrollable lusts and urges, incapable of rehabilitation or self-control or self-mastery, capable of the most sublime and calculating subtlety and/or the most repulsive and hideous violence, hiding behind the goodwill and civic openness and Constitutional protections to wreak his wrack upon unsuspecting families and children (the ‘women’ part shrewdly downplayed for fear of driving away ‘allies’ on the Right who are averse to ‘feminist stuff’).

Second, the definition of “war” in the surveillance State is elastic. We need the surveillance, its supporters argue, simply because the country is “at war” (note that there is no mention of the sex-offense pre-history of ‘surveillance’). But there is huge and valid question as to whether whatever state of military operations We are currently in can actually be defined as “war” in the Constitutional sense.

The Constitution simply requires a Congressional declaration of war – forthright and so simple that it can legitimately be only one sentence long.

But the SO community knows the definition-demon: elastic, expansive, vague, increasing the size of its grip by sacrificing any solid Shape of Definition, it oozes in ever-widening pools to infect and ensnare more and more persons. ‘Molesting’, ‘abuse’, and even such seemingly clear sub-terms as ‘battering’ and ‘rape’ are softened into toxic mush, the better to spread them like rancid butter.

And who can forget the always-queasy but increasingly tenuous distinction between ‘regulatory’ and ‘punitive’ legislation?

And with the problem of Definition goes the problem of Duration: if this is a ‘war’, then how can it be so if – as even Obama says – there will be no surrender ceremony to certify its ending, and the country will most likely be waging it one year, five years, ten years from now.

And yet a state or permanent or semi-permanent ‘war’ is precisely the graveyard of democracies. AND it was precisely what the Framers sought to avoid: some sort of Genghis-Khan-like ‘war state’, or Rome towards the end when its overwhelming military commitments turned the Citizenry into merely a troglodyte life-support system for the legions (and the imperial court).

But the Framers have been ‘overtaken by events’ and by ‘progress’ and they and their vision and maybe even their Constitution are “quaint” and unequal to the present challenges and perhaps the Constitution really serves merely as an ‘obstruction’ to the progress now urgently demanded by the ‘emergency’.

The SO community has heard all of this before. This is exactly the web of excuses deployed in the service of the Sex-Offense Emergency 20 years ago (and the Domestic Violence Emergency just before that). And all this crapulence was given benefit-of-government through enshrinement in grossly inaccurate legislative Findings and the Opinions and Decisions of courts high and low.

Third, there is the ominous reality – now – of Obama’s (!) proposed “preventive detention” for persons who ‘cannot be brought to court’ but ‘are still too dangerous to be allowed to be at liberty’. Surely the SO community has been struggling with this demon since ‘civil confinement’ raised its queasy, sleazy head over a dozen years ago.

Fourth there is the “hyperbolic enemy”, an ‘enemy’ so exaggerated by the official and sensationalist-media ‘spin’ that it appears to be a ‘natural’ predator of almost supernatural abilities and ‘evil’. There is supposed to be facing Us an enemy as dangerous and potentially capable as the Axis combination of Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany at the height of their powers and as omnivorous in their evil objectives (‘world domination’) – a characterization of Imperial Japanese and Nazi war aims that was inaccurate even back in the days of the Good War.

Of course, it doesn’t hurt that such an ‘enemy’ automatically makes those who oppose it ‘Good’. And who doesn’t like to play that role in Life’s and History’s script? In a society where ‘feeling good about yourself’ is supposed to be the ultimate salvation; in a culture where such a condition is now presumed to be a ‘status’ and not an ‘achievement’ of personal excellence and civic participation; and in an economy where significant material ‘success’ is no longer on the table for most folks … well, every little bit of ‘feeling good about yourself’ helps, doesn’t it? Especially if such a status doesn’t require any heavy-lifting (maturity, say) but rather merely requires that you declare yourself or consider yourself ‘against’ the ‘enemy’.

And in a country where being ‘for the children’ simply requires being ‘against’ ‘sex offenders’ (broadly defined) then far too many people can consider their civic responsibilities well-discharged if they merely go along with whatever new sex-offense legislation and ‘regulation’ is pushed their way by legislators who can’t seem to muster the chops to craft genuinely responsible and competent legislation.

Fifth, increasingly intrusive government oversight. While there seem to be no large sex-offender laws coming along at this point, there remain ant-hills of ‘local’ ordinances as well as occasional stabs at ‘international’ regulation. Although, happily, increasing numbers of originally SORNA-supportive folks – women even more than men, from the sound of the reports – are coming to realize just how many ‘regulations’ and how much ‘surveillance’ is wrapped into the life of any ‘sex offender’, and how much this, that, or another legislator or local government type would like to add on.

Sixth, Greenwald notes what he calls a “severe bar-lowering” in all of this. The bar of legislative integrity and the careful use of language and concepts is being lowered, and has been – the SO community knows – for 20 and more years. Was it Orwell who observed that the decline in the integrity of using language signals a culture and polity in decline?

And of course, in a nice double-entendre, the Bar itself is being lowered: attorneys – whether prosecutors or jurists or legislators with law degrees – are continually being corrupted, or more specifically corroded, by daily participation in such queasy and essentially rotted and unprincipled laws and procedures.

A couple of the many, many points raised in the Comments/Letters about this piece of Greenwald’s also strike me. (And reading all of them or a hefty sampling of them is a heartening and encouraging experience – though sex-offense sites don’t get this much comment-participation, it’s good to see just how much concern will reveal itself if given a chance.)

First, there is the pretext and justification of some British woman who was caught by a public surveillance camera stuffing a cat into a dumpster. THIS is supposed to be a justification for ‘the surveillance State’ (which the Brits, without a written Constitution, have had imposed upon them to a far greater degree than the Americans). I suppose the surveillance-supporters would have preferred having somebody (God forbid) stuff a child into a dumpster, but they had to go with what they had.

Second, one Commenter observes that the Surveillance State “is already a done deal” and goes on knowledgeably about that. But he doesn’t make any reference at all to the SO Mania regime.

Third, a Commenter wishes for a Wikileaks trove that might shed even more light on all of this. I can’t help wishing for a Wikileaks trove in the matter of SO Mania legislation. But of course, from the get-go, these Mania regime laws were shepherded (stove-piped is more like it) through the legislative deliberation process in such a way as to i) discourage any deliberation (there was so much to be skeptical about) and ii) prevent any legislator from having to have his/her support (and responsibility for that support) be on the record – where they might be held accountable if things went wrong, as they have. Short-circuiting committee-deliberation, forcing discussions on the floor, voice-votes (anonymous by their nature) … all these little legislative tricks and more were deployed to get these things passed by legislators who, apparently, had more reservations than We were led to believe.

Fourth, the surveillance State supporters are seen to be claiming that it’s OK to introduce all of this surveillance since America has such a strong civil-rights tradition that it won’t matter. BUT of course this is like saying that it’s OK to run Titanic into a berg-field since she is unsinkable anyway and no harm can come of it.

And of course, Our responsibility – as is the responsibility of every generation of Americans – is not simply to HAVE a democracy, but to KEEP it – which is a lot more work than many folks care to imagine. (Ben Franklin saw all this at the outset.)

And you don’t keep a democracy by figuring that you can do any amount of undemocratic stuff to it since, being a democracy, it can’t be changed into anything un-democratic. That’s childish mental processing from hell.

And thanks to decades of the SO Mania Regime (with the Domestic Violence regime and the Satanic Ritual Child Day Care Abuse Trials pushing things back to the early 1980s) this country does NOT any longer have so strong a Constitutional ethos as it once had. And from what I can see of what they’ve been teaching in the law schools, the recent and future graduates are not going to be deeply competent in preserving or restoring it either.

Fifth, the “war” imagery – as Greenwald also noted in the text of his article – is a huge warning sign with a long history that should leave no doubt as to what is happening. But again, no Commenter notices that the country has been “at war” against sex-offenses for decades; nor that the Mania regime is a complex and multi-rooted infestation that was put in place with the government’s vigorous connivance.

Sixth, and most telling of all, is that surveillance-State presumes THAT ALL AMERICANS ARE POTENTIAL ENEMIES OF ‘AMERICA’, which is – if I may allow myself the word – shocking. But isn’t this precisely the dynamic of the SO Mania: that just about anybody (male, anyway) can be and probably is a ‘sex offender’? The earliest formulations had it that ‘all sex is rape and ergo all men are rapists’ (except, I suppose for the males who don’t have sex, who are either lying or weird anyway).

Once again, a classic trope of the Sex Offense Mania now migrates to a larger arena of national affairs, creating an even wider swath of civic destruction, corrosion, corruption, and decline.

But I take heart from the number of persons who are motivated to speak up and speak out, and it leads me to think that there is still time and grounds for hope.

The SO community now possesses an expertise and familiarity gleaned over long decades of struggle against the infestation of anti-Constitutionality.

I think there are many more Citizens now who might be able to understand just what the struggle has been all about. And still is.

LINKS

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/

MORE ON WIKILEAKS

I have a few more thoughts on this Wikileaks matter, where founder Julian Assange had a warrant for rape issued against him, and then quickly withdrawn shortly thereafter, by Swedish prosecutors.

You can refresh your memory here.

I have been reading national-commentators and there is a clear sense that this may well have been a US government put-up job. This should not be surprising to the SO community: one of the quiet and under-the-radar bennies accruing to the government (or any government) in the SO Mania is that once you have created such a ‘monster’, then it’s not very hard to discredit – and lethally – any person whom the government wants to neutralize.

But there’s another odd element, which becomes clear if you read the Comments to ‘Salon’ online magazine’s ‘Broadsheet’ section, largely overseen by feminist-writer Tracy Clark Flory.

The two accusing women were both, it appears, of a feminist bent. And the manner of their ‘reporting’ of their claims was most shrewdly cagey: they simply went to the local Swedish police and ‘asked for advice’ about what they should do. It is a given in Swedish (and most) SO regime regulations and laws nowadays that the police MUST treat every mention as a ‘report’ and open a file.

However, since the two accusers did not actually ‘file a police report’ then they are not technically guilty of Filing A False Report and of making a false accusation. Neat.

There was some question of the lesser charge of ‘molestation’ even after the rape-warrant was withdrawn – but that too apparently has gone away. And in Sweden – again, the SO community will not be surprised – the regulations define ‘molestation’ verrrrry broadly: apparently you don’t even have to have physical contact.*

But what strikes me most strongly in the Comments to Flory’s lament that the women are being dissed by the withdrawal of the warrant is that a number of otherwise informed and thoughtful commenters are presuming that the only reason this whole matter could have gone so far so fast in the first place is that there had to be US government ‘pressure’ (the CIA and that sort of thing) on the Swedish government.

But there is – as the SO community well knows – every possibility that the ‘charges’ went so far so quickly simply because of the now-normal trip-wire dynamics on which sex-offense law deliberately operates: once the charge is made or simply comes to the attention of the police, then things must happen quickly and the police have little leeway left in the matter.

This reflects the founding impulses of both the SO regime and the Domestic Violence regime: that either through ‘patriarchal’ condescension or official disbelief in the accusations or claims police and prosecutors would exercise their boots-on-the-ground discretion and refuse to mire the accused in the toils of the law.

The shrewd solution to that problem was for advocates to ensure that legislators blocked off that possibility by removing all discretion from police and even from prosecutors.

Later, as time went on and more feminist-law trained females entered the ranks of police and prosecution, an extra thread of trip-wire was added to the bundle.

Which seems to have been what happened here: the two accusers went to the police on a weekend, the low-level ‘duty-prosecutor’ was a female, and she quickly applied for the warrant merely on the basis of the situation about which the two accusers were ‘merely asking advice’.

It was only when a senior-level prosecutor (also a female) reviewed the justification for the warrant that she quickly withdrew it.

Perhaps in Swedish law the fact that there was no actual ‘report’ would have fatal consequences to a prosecution; perhaps the Swedish government realized that it was going to look complicit in some international skullduggery that had nothing to do with sex-offending at all; or perhaps it didn’t want to look like a chump.

This is not a problem that arises in the U.S. where almost by script-convention the prosecutors and police in sex-offense matters are looked upon as the cavalry heroes riding to the rescue of some besieged settlers. If mistakes are made and ‘peaceful Injuns’ are killed in the process, well that’s what Injuns are in Western scripts for in the first place. No prahhhblum!

I don’t know if a lot of folks realize just how frakkulous the regime laws are when it comes to ‘investigations’ of allegations.

And I think that many of them – even in a case where a rape is alleged – simply can’t imagine that the SO Mania regime would have any bearing on an international incident that is primarily about matters far removed from ‘sex’ (i.e. Wikileaks publishing the government documents about actual lack of progress in the Afghan operations and the government trying to quash the publication).

But the SO Mania machinery has been in place for quite a while and it’s now a tool available for any type of Beltway activity where somebody thinks it might be useful.

In this case, I don’t think it worked as hoped. Perhaps the Swedish government, or public, or media, or even that senior-prosecutor, simply weren’t as stampede-able as their American counterparts. Or still retain sufficient sense of principle and professional integrity to realize a bad job when they saw one.

Mr. Assange has been spared the full-treatment shrewdly and craftily constructed by the Mania-architects. Although his personal life has been turned inside out and all the Web-cached ‘news stories’ will shadow him forever now. In that sense he joins a long and large line of SOs and those accused of ‘sex crimes’.

Most of them will be lucky simply to escape the toils of AWASORNA. At least until such time as this entire repugnant regime can be rolled-back.

As Ike put it: “So much remains to be done”.

NOTES

*Recall that in the new Internet SO initiative, one does not have to actually meet or request to meet anyone ‘offline’. Recall also that in the Domestic Violence regime, ‘battering’ has long been expanded to include being-silent in a conversation, including a long-distance phone conversation. This takes Thomas More’s reliance on the ancient legal maxim “Qui taceat consentire” (whoever remains silent, consents) to “Qui taceat percutere” (whoever remains silent, batters).

CATHOLIC PRIEST AND CARDINAL AGAIN

A Catholic priest is in the news again – and the Cardinal that protected him from police investigation.

It hasn’t received a lot of play here though.

The man is long dead (1980) but that has rarely made a difference in current American media and legal praxis.

He was a member of a shadowy and indeed secret organization that rather fancied it a good thing to screw up lives, perhaps since in the Big Picture they were actually doing the work of the Lord.

The man’s alleged crimes certainly ruined the lives of nine victims. ‘Totally screwed them up” as no doubt might be said anywhere in the US these days.

His Cardinal got together with the police and they all quietly decided that the best thing would be to transfer him out of the country – and so they did. He died uninvestigated and un-charged. There will be, thus, no ‘closure’, as they like to say in these parts.

His alleged victims will never go to church again.

They are dead. He allegedly masterminded the IRA bombing that killed them in 1972.

It was in Ireland during ‘The Troubles’ that started in 1969 and went on for quite a few years.

The story hasn’t received much play here.

I think I can see why.

It’s been an elephant in the middle of the room around these parts that priests could easily be tarred with a metaphorical ‘killing’ through this, that, or another form of ‘abuse’ since – reliably – priests rarely really actually killed anybody and so there was no reality-principle to act as a brake on the incessantly trumpeted ‘soul-murder’ or ‘life-destruction’ said to result from this, that, or another form of ‘abuse’.

So it has been easy-peezy to play the ‘death’ card against ‘abusive’ priests, since there was never any real death on the field that would put the ‘abuse is death’ mantras in proportion: as being rather substantially exaggerated. Not to put too fine a point on it, if one is well enough to be taking nourishment and breathing with some regularity, one is not really dead. And claims to be so must be taken as the (perhaps well-intentioned) exaggerations that they are.

This embarrassing reality is clearly not ‘friendly’ to the cause of certain interests in the country these days, nor to their media enablers. Indeed it threatens to inject an irrefutable reality into a forum that has been somewhat prone to something other than reality: the exaggerated mantra itself, of course, and then the somewhat phantasmagorical reliance on ‘spectral evidence’ – I am ‘dead’ because I believe I am dead and you can’t tell me otherwise.

Which in any normal world would elicit, at best, counseling, and at worst, a bit of tough-love explication of just what ‘reality’ means.

Although then again, We no longer live in a culture whose elites value ‘reality’. ‘Facts don’t matter’; symbols are more useful than actualities; if enough folks can be gotten to believe something then it is ‘true’.

All of the foregoing are signs not of cutting-edge progress (no matter how ‘sensitive’) but of regression to more primitive forms of public discourse.

George Bernard Shaw once said that “all progress depends on the unreasonable man” – say “unreasonable people” if you like. There’s a bit of truth to it, real truth.

Although it’s exaggerated for effect, as all aphorisms are. The ‘unreasonable’ – like the nonconformist lemmings of the later Boomer generation – are helpful, indeed indispensable.

But they cannot be the policy-makers or the policy-drivers in a civilization. Especially in a remarkable civilization – the Western civilization – that was built on Reason and reasonableness. And especially in the American version of Western civilization, that was founded upon a politics of reasonableness NOT for the purpose of creating an idolatry of Reason – that was the French Revolution’s vision, that poisonous tree that also bore the fruit of the Leninist and Maoist revolutions – BUT for the purpose of ensuring a reasonableness in politics and a reasonable politics.

It was in that way that the Framers sought to avoid the dark and primal excesses that abide in the human self and were enshrined, one way or another, in so many of the world’s prior civilizations and systems of government.

It has not been ‘progress’ that unreasonableness has been enshrined here and drives far too much of the American government’s policy and the country’s politics, and has now for decades. It has been, rather, a monstrous regression to a more primitive politics and has resulted in a much more primitive and greatly weakened polity.

And that must change.