Liberalism's Rape Corps

Daniel Greenfield

Two years ago the left launched a major assault on Haliburton over its mishandling of two sexual assault cases by or against its civilian contractors. Al Franken successfully introduced a bill to bar defense contracts from going to companies who behave likewise. Left wing media boasted that they were the defenders of rape victims, while Republicans support rape.

Now for the 50th anniversary of the Peace Corps, it's been revealed that over a 1,000 female volunteers have been raped in the last decade. Numbers that are positively 9/11 in scope. And that the idealistic Peace Corps leadership acted like the evil Haliburton leadership, blaming the victims and discouraging them from seeking legal action. There are no cries that Democrats support rape. No bills to defund the Corps, that awkward legacy of New Frontierism. This time it's Republicans like Ileana Ros-Lehtinen stepping up to demand accountability. And it's the Democrats who are standing in the way.Similar parallel stories involve female activists who head to the Palestinian Authority to combat Zionism, and the assault on Lara Logan in the middle of what was billed as a democracy celebration. Each time the assault was minimized, until the woman in question decided to speak out.

It's an old story about the naivete of Western liberals who imagine that the Third World is somehow better than because it is less materialistic, finding themselves in cultures where the inequality of women is a given, meeting a man's eyes is considered a sexual invitation, and the only justice system that matters is kinship based. Crimes are acted on depending on family influence. And Westerners in Africa or the Middle East have no family there. Which means crimes against them can go unpunished if no pressure is applied.

The Peace Corps' coverup of over a 1,000 assaults is disturbing, but also ideologically necessary. Its function depends on its image. To admit that over a thousand of its idealistic volunteers get raped in the countries they are coming to help, might make Americans think that those countries aren't worth helping. That maybe they aren't noble souls who happen to lack proper irrigation and classrooms, but that they lack those things because there is nothing noble about their cultural backwardness.

Most liberals would concede that a European man ten centuries ago was not spiritually nobler than a man today, just because he was part of a less technologically advanced culture. But then why insist that the people of Benin or Bangladesh are better than us, because they lack fast food and GPS satellites. The Peace Corps was built on the moral and physical fetishization of the exotic. The orientalism of a liberalism that claims to be progressive, yet worships at the altar of reactionary cultures.

In his memoir, Obama described watching his mother get lost in a showing of Black Orpheus, and its fetishization of black people, and the accompanying realization that its effect on the sixteen year old Ann Dunham is what had brought her to the man who would become his father. "I suddenly realised that the depiction of the childlike blacks I was now seeing on the screen... was what my mother had carried with her to Hawaii all those years before, a reflection of the simple fantasies that had been forbidden to a white, middle-class girl from Kansas, the promise of another life: warm, sensual, exotic, different."

But Dunham didn't find a warm, exotic and sensual life with Barack Obama Sr, she found a serial philanderer, bigamist and alcoholic. And so many other girls who joined the Peace Corps hoping to find a meaningful life waiting for them, have discovered much worse. Liberalism fosters a discontent with civilization, but what is waiting outside civilization is far worse. The Corps knows its volunteers and plays on their dreams, while hiding the reality of what is awaiting them. It is a big world out there and most of it does not value tolerance or equality. Going out there is an adventure, but the further you travel from lands governed by Western values, the more dangerous it becomes.

Western liberal activists pay tribute to the spiritual power of the Third World, but when they discover the atrocities and abuses underneath try to bring it in line with Western values. Whether it's Western countries trying to bring democracy to the Muslim world or Kate Puzey, a Peace Corps volunteer, murdered after she got a Benin local dismissed for raping native schoolgirls in a country where sexual assault rates hover around the 50 percent mark, the pattern is the same as Westerners discover that there isn't a single abuser in the form of a dictator or a rapist, but that the problem is buried in the culture.

The unwillingness of liberal activists to honestly confront the cultural problems of the Third World leaves them with nothing but charity tourism, Microfinance, Peace Corps, One Laptop Per Child, Buy-a-Village-a-Goat, Change Advocacy Training and all the usual efforts of pouring money down a great big hole.

Sure you can buy a village its own goat, but it might be better to ask why the village is so short of goats. You can send Western volunteers to build classrooms, but is there really any part of the world where the locals aren't capable of constructing them? And you can send off American girls to try and empower women in a culture where they are a commodity and their murderers often go unpunished. A culture they can't even begin to relate to, because its assumptions about human worth and liberty are at odds with their own.

It's not about poverty, lack of resources or technology. If it were, then we would be sending volunteers to build classrooms for the Japanese. But the Asian countries dramatically bootstrapped themselves in a short time to become our technological and economic equals. Japan took off like a rocket despite its resource shortages and former isolationism. China is breathing down our necks, even though it had the same population growth issues that are used as an excuse for Third World debility, and was colonized, invaded and turned into a Communist dictatorship.

Liberal geopolitical narratives assign responsibility for Third World debility to external factors. A country isn't poor because of its culture, but because of colonialism, dictators supported by the West, labor exploitation by Western companies, World Bank debts, Global Warming and that all time champion excuse, because people living in First World societies "just don't care enough" to help them. While societies may fail on occasion for external reasons, they go on failing for internal ones.

A culture has to want to change. It has to reward achievement and transcend the wishful thinking that prevents so many societies from moving forward. Most of the places where the Peace Corps sends its volunteers don't want to change. They're happy the way they are. Oh they would like aid money, cars and Coca Cola. They'll listen to Hip Hop and wear Lakers jerseys. But they won't stop keeping most of their population illiterate, aborting baby girls or maintaining a pseudo-feudalism in which most of the important enterprises are in the hands of the ruling family and their friends.

The issues are not racial. They never were. Go back far enough and you'll find that our ancestors didn't behave much better. That our societies don't behave that way is a testament to their cultural vitality. The rights we enjoy today didn't spring to life overnight, they are the outgrowth of cultures which remained committed to self-improvement through self-examination. And who accordingly evolved beyond the rule of power and toward the rule of law.

Law is more than words in a book, it is the absolute application of principles to human affairs. Without the law of principles, there is only the law of power and no individual rights or freedoms. Which ends any prospect of equality. The treatment of foreigners in such a society depends on how much fear there is of their country and how much benefit is derived from their presence. That risk/reward formula is the closest thing to code protecting them. If the rulers and elders officially extend their protection, making it clear that a crime against volunteers or tourists is a crime against them, some degree of safety is assured. When government authority breaks down, as it did in the "democracy protests", the people act out their democratic wishes. Lara Logan was a victim of this brand of Arab Democracy.

Even when the authorities do protect foreigners, they are still considered inferiors, doubly so if they are women. Their attackers restrained not by any moral code, which rarely protects outsiders, but by practical considerations. Can they do this and get away with it. The foreigners don't live here. Their women are unchaperoned and friendly. Therefore they don't have any rights worth respecting. Horrible things happen and and Western diplomats help the native authorities cover them up, because no one wants an incident on their hands.

The real burden of guilt falls on the liberal fetishization of the exotic, their distaste for their own culture and their obsessive cultural exogamy. That is how we ended up with Obama. And it's also how we ended up with a selective multiculturalism that damns native cultures and promotes foreign ones.

The assaults experienced by Peace Corps volunteers are no longer limited to women who travel abroad. With aggressive Third World migration, the ratios are even worse in Europe. In Oslo a study showed that two of three rapists were non-Western immigrants. Malmo's huge immigrant population has turned it into one of the rape capitals of Europe. In Denmark, the number is closer to three out of four. In Sweden it hovers around 85 percent. And Third World immigration will bring those same statistics to America as well.

As bad as the 1,000 Peace Corps rapes are-- the number of such incidents at home committed by immigrants from non-law abiding cultures, including Islam, is certainly far worse. Numbers like these are a wake up call of the cost of liberal orientalism. The consequences of what happens when a dominant ideology turns its back its own culture and embraces barbaric cultures instead. Only by recognizing how far we have come, can we understand the need to protect ourselves from those still left behind in the dark ages.

The Bullied Nation

Posted: 15 May 2011 07:16 PM PDT
When Obama inaugurated a conference on bullying by announcing that he too had been bullied, he made the one confession that no world leader should ever make. At least not a world leader who ever hopes to be taken seriously. But by this time it was doubtful that there was a world leader who didn't know that Obama could be bullied. Many of them had been rather successful at bullying him already.

The goal of the conference, according to Obama, was to dispel the myth that bullying is "an inevitable part of growing up". But of course it is an inevitable part of growing up. And of being grown up too. If you don't learn how to handle bullies while growing up, you'll have to learn those same lessons later on in life.

We may grow up, but we never entirely leave who we were behind. The bullies will always be with us. Their bullying may become more sophisticated, but the old dynamic never really goes away.

When Obama spent half his correspondents dinner taunting Trump, it was a sight you could easily see in any school cafeteria. The difference is that he chose to do it in a forum where he had no fear of being answered back, using lines written for him by a writer from the Daily Show. It was bullying of the cowardly sort. Which just goes to show you that some of the bullied, harbor a secret wish to be bullies themselves. But when they get the chance to be bullies, they still practice it in a cowardly way.

Compare Bush's willingness to laugh at himself in a double act with Colbert at that same dinner years earlier, to Obama taunting his rivals when they're prevented by decorum from answering back. Just as he did to Paul Ryan. This is how a man who can dish it out, and can't take it, acts. And that's the difference between a man and an insecure child who never really grew up, whose emotional compass is still tethered to his childhood memories. Who still dreams of repaying minor slights and takes every criticism personally.

Obama may hold conferences on bullying, but he is the worst sort of bully, too cowardly to do it without a lot of protectors and plausible deniability standing between him and his targets. How many Republican car dealerships were targeted under O's car company regime, and what about the pass given to the New Black Panther party's voter intimidation tactics, or launching Operation Rushbo against one of his more vocal critics. Or using 'teabaggers' to describe his opponents. To say nothing of the thuggishness by teachers in Wisconsin. Strip away the billion dollar political machine and you're left with something that looks a lot like High School.

The obsession with childhood bullying is another misguided application of social engineering to children. Obama may speak of creating "an atmosphere at school where children feel safe". But no amount of government intervention can prevent kids from being bullied. And no government officials can teach them to stand up for themselves. Children and teenagers have their own culture apart from adults, and no matter how many bureaucrats poke and pry into their lives, they can never find their way inside. Instead of protecting them against bullies, the injection of bureaucracy becomes its own form of bullying.

After the Columbine Massacre, all the conferences on bullying yielded a Zero Tolerance madness that criminalized everything from toy soldiers to plastic knives to playing cops and robbers. Six year old cub scouts have been suspended for bringing camping equipment to school. Arrests have been made for shooting rubber bands. Advil and Midol have become controlled substances. An 11 year old was suspended because the chain on her Tweety bird wallet was found to be long enough to qualify as a weapon. Another 11 year old died because zero tolerance policies prevented him from carrying an inhaler. A National Merit Scholar was arrested and expelled because she had misplaced a kitchen knife on the floor of her car.

There will be no conferences held on this type of bullying, because it is practiced by the conference attendees, the school bureaucrats and teachers, and the public officials who enable them, against the children placed in their care. And their only solution to every problem is more of the same. More bureaucracy and more regulations. It is a form of bullying that most Americans have become terribly familiar with. And it is worse than any ordinary bullying, because while you can stand up to an ordinary bully, defying the government bureaucracy at every level is much harder.

As go the schools, so goes a nanny state in which everyone is treated like children. Subjected to constant regulation and supervision. Treated like incompetent wards of the state who need to be told what to do at all times. The cradle to grave state treats those at the grave, much as it does at the cradle, as nuisances who need to be brought into conformity with paragraph 19, section 32, subsection 92B of their marching orders circa this week. American history is the story of people who tried to escape the governments that were making them miserable, only for the bureaucrats to make it over anyway.

The nanny state promises that we will no longer be bullied by big business, and then gets down to the job of bullying us so thoroughly and relentlessly that the only escape is death. And not even then. For dying doesn't free you of the tangle of laws and regulations. It just puts your conscious mind beyond their reach. Like the protagonist of 'Brazil' your soul may escape, but your body is left behind under their authority.

Obama's promise of a safe atmosphere for every student reeks of the same thing. A paranoid hothouse in which a wrong word, a wrong look or a wrong implication can result in criminal prosecution under a new wave of Zero Tolerance enforcement. This vision of PS Stalag 17 is being realized not just in schools, but everywhere. The EUSSR has its political prisoners, and so will we, as any hindrance to public order becomes a crime. Bad ideas are held responsible for causing violence. The logic of Crimethink that arrests students for having something that is not a weapon, but has some common conceptual resemblance to one, dictates that a bullseye on a political map is the same thing as an assassination plot.

In the name of maintaining that hothouse atmosphere, independent traits or atavistic behaviors must be rooted out. The only properly safe nation is one in which all the people are sheep, and the guns are in the hands of the ranchers and the wolves. But from a sheep's perspective, the only difference between the ranchers and the wolves, is that the ranchers keep them alive longer than the wolves. Once the wolves come or the ranchers grow tired of them, the sheep have no survival skills left. Those were wiped out in order to keep a safe atmosphere for the herd.

European newspapers frowning at the sight of Americans loudly celebrating the end of Bin Laden posit that Americans and Europeans have different values. But it's not so much a matter of different values, as of different governments. European governments have built their stifling nanny states and declared many normal human behaviors to be against their values. But their ancestors would have taken issue with such a characterization of European values. As would the Italians who spat on Mussolini's upside down dangling corpse. American values are individualistic. And though the chains of political correctness creep over their shoulders, they still react like free men and women, rather than children afraid of being taken to task by their elders.

The new European values say that violence is bad regardless of its attribution. That only savages kill and relish a victory over an enemy. But when the traits of the fighter and the warrior are rooted out, then you are left with a nation of sheep. Ready for the taking. Europe has made itself safe enough to attract a southern and eastern breed of wolf. Lupine immigrants whose values are genuinely atavistic and who eagerly feed on nations of sheep.

That is the problem with locking up combative instincts and confiscating guns. Sooner or later you will need them. The world is not a hothouse, it is an ongoing struggle for land, life and resources. Countries do not exist because the UN mandated it, but because their people fought and died to make it so. Teach the people to be sheep, and the countries will not long survive their first encounter with the wolves. The American violent now atavism frowned on by the elites of the EUSSR is what stood between them and the wolves. It may end up doing that again before another centuries comes to its end.

The hue and cry over bullying carries an echo of that same fussiness. A philosophy in denial about human nature. Every defense against oppression ultimately becomes its own force of oppression. Books of regulations can be a far more ruthless form of oppression than a punch in the face. And a bureaucracy charged with rooting out modes of behavior quickly becomes the worst bully of all.

But the real danger of such a system is the learned helplessness that it teaches. When you are taught that it is better to submit than to fight, better to come over to the other point of view than stand up for your own, and better to be agreeable than make a fuss no matter what is being done to you-- then you are being taught to be a victim. People who think this way cannot be members of a free society, only frightened people looking for someone to protect them. They are victims looking for a predator. And a society of victims will attract predators.

The editor of the French left wing paper, Libération, wrote of "this base, uncomfortable joy, unprecedented in a democracy, that blew yesterday over the streets of New York." But such joy is rooted in democracy. The French ought to know that better than anyone else. Or has Monsieur Demorand completely forgotten the words of his own national anthem, that speaks of triumphantly watering the fields of France with the "impure blood" of her enemies. Freedom, national and personal freedom, is fought for by men and women who are not only willing to die for it, but are willing to kill for it. Not with the mechanical distance of bomber pilots, but the violent passion of human beings who refuse to submit to their enemies.

No democracy will survive for long without that "uncomfortable joy". It will either be consumed by the wolves from without or from within. The hothouse society is a nation of wimps. Easily bullied, always looking to some authority, some international law for its protection. When it is struck, then it takes refuge in its own moral superiority for not resorting to violence. Eventually it forgets how to hate and remembers only how to fear.

For a nation not to be bullied, its people must know how to stand up to bullies. Not to go along with them. Not how to understand their point of view. Or how to run and tell someone in authority about them. But how to fight back against them and win.