Julian Assange, women's rights, and the depth of corruption

Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, has been issued an international arrest warrant over trumped-up charges of rape. The two women who made these charges have repeatedly said that the sex was consensual and are continuing to say that the sex was consensual. Meanwhile most real victims of rape not only do not get justice, but are aggressively silenced, beaten, called whores and sluts and nutcases, and are not only disbelieved by the courts but in many cases are accused of making false lawsuits and sued for vast sums of money or put themselves behind bars.

Of the many women I know who have been raped, only one got her rapist in jail. There is a very simple reason for this state of affairs. The women who are likely to get raped - women from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, women who are socially disempowered, women who do not have stable family situations, women who cannot afford a good lawyer - are not given credibility in court. With the exception of a few heroic and brilliant women who have been able to manage a strong and informed legal stance while coming from a profoundly disempowered position, the women who do get credibility in court are either women living protected lifestyles or women who know how to lie. The first group is not likely to get raped by strangers; it is more likely to get raped by their families, who are protected by community loyalty and family reputation from having their crimes revealed. The second group is not likely to get raped, period, but is frequently quite effective at screwing innocent men and women.

These are the same women who like to destroy the careers of Chinese immigrants for telling them that they look pretty, but silence their own American sisters when their American conservative husbands are viciously battering them and raping their kids. These are the same women who in their youth like to have consensual sex with young black men and when found out get them convicted of rape, but when their daughters report that their own white conservative Southern husbands are raping them tell their daughters not to use such words as rape in the house. These are the same women who like to attach themselves to multi-millionaires and then screw them in a divorce court for half their fortune, but when another woman is trying to leave a severely brutal relationship tell her and everyone else that she is a lying nutcase and a traitor who is destroying the family or alienating her children from their father.

There are of course men - many men - involved in this as well. These men themselves commit severe brutality against their wives and more severe abuse against their children; but when someone outside one's group is accused of the most minor things or most falsely, jump howling for his blood. On one side, in the liberal cultures, we see defined as abuse things that very few people elsewhere see as abusive and that a vast majority of people practice - things that are found to a much greater extent and intensity in any business, any community, any military or police force, any medical or legal or academic group, and the vast bulk of marital relationships. On the other side, we see people who see ongoing severe brutality (and in many cases incest) as normal marital business and believe that any man who does not practice such things is a sissie, a coward, a communist or a fag. The second group sees men in liberal cultures who get accused of abuse as not abusers at all but rather as pussywhipped liberal idiots. But that does not prevent them from crying bloody murder when it suits their purposes to do so, then going back to their home to whiplash their wives, rape their daughters, and intimidate both at gunpoint, murdering many more than anyone cares to admit.

This level of dishonesty must not have been easy to achieve. And yet these same people then go on and claim that they have - values, integrity, honesty, honor - and that the rest of the world does  not. These are the same people who then claim that they are America and that the majority of America is not, then say that they value democracy; who use lies, fraud and corruption to impose on America an illegal regime and claim that they respect the Constitution; who stomp on women's heads and claim that they respect women; who murder a million Iraqi citizens on false pretext and claim that they are honest peaceful Americans who have respect for life. What those people actually are, is known to any woman who tried to get herself and her children away from brutality and sexual abuse practiced by members of their communities, as much as it is known to anyone who has studied their political practices for any length of time.

You may call this hate speech. Guilty as charged. If you are not outraged by corruption this deep, then it is you that have the problem. And while there are many people who want to solve this problem through - positive thinking, love, positive example, self-esteem, forgiveness, personal relationship with Jesus, or tending to one's own garden, none of these begin to address the problem. What we have seen historically is this: That any knowledge achieved, any work done, any goodwill extended, only empowers the corrupt in being more corrupt. So how rich it is that these people are now using feminist arguments against the person who has exposed some of their practices, even as they use  family-values or Tea Party or Fatherhood Foundation or Christian-Right or "winner-and-loser" or personality-psychology or community-loyalty or you-are-responsible-for-your-suffering or how-can-you-trust-your-perceptions-you-crazy-bitch arguments against anyone in their communities who see what is happening or who is at the receiving end of real abuse practiced by the supposedly upstanding members of these communities. The people who get abused and the people who see what is happening are not the ones with the problem, and it is preposterous that they be the ones having to change themselves to adapt to the color of the corrupt. It is the corrupt that need to be changed. And I don't mean raising their self-esteem or teaching them positive thinking or imparting to them the counseling or psychological or "self-empowerment" and "consciousness-raising" knowledge that they, in their typical lying fashion, then invert, pervert and use against everyone else, including of course the "liberal" academia, the "dirty" hippies, the "godless" liberals, or the "Satanist" Buddhists and New Age "freaks" who came up with or gave them the knowledge in the first place.

Julian Assange is one of the day's true heroes, who exposed corrupt misdeeds of the military - misdeeds done at your expense and in your name. But the corruption goes many times deeper than that. What Julian Assange has shown is a slice of the character of the American Right. What has found him, is an even more monstrous aspect of the same character.