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-- Could the Fundamentalist oppression of sexuality have contributed to the prison S&M..
Could the Fundamentalist oppression of sexuality have contributed to the prison S&M..
...scandal?
I believe this author could have really touched on one of the cultural manifestations that contributed to the prison abuse scandal.
http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet...7/TPColumnists/
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America's fundamental sin of abuse By RICK SALUTIN Friday, May 7, 2004 - Page A21 I thought of the Fox network's Bill O'Reilly when I heard about the recent prisoner abuses in Iraq. Not because of the normal abuse you get on his show. But I was on The Radio Factor With Bill O'Reilly last week and in the intro to our discussion he referred often to The Globe and Mail as left-wing. I said I had to defend it against that charge, since The Globe has always been a conservative, business paper here. Oh, come on, he scoffed, noting that the Globe is "secular." We sparred and it was only when he repeated the term that I realized that in the United States, the main political divide now runs between Christian fundamentalism and "secularists." I said I was grateful for this insight: that the U.S. may be the only nation that defines politics in such religious terms. Since the Taliban, anyway, muttered a friend. I'd say this kind of religiosity is now the biggest difference between us. It's amazing how many Americans drop into conversation, references to their faith, or ask about yours. Forty-six per cent call themselves born-again. In Canada, an evangelical group claims 12 per cent, but even those are not self-described; they are extrapolated from a dubious poll. The U.S. is a country that has "creationist" theme parks to offset dinosaur theme parks. Seriously. When George Bush met with families who lost members in Iraq, he proudly told them he was praying for them. But he's the President. He could do something, not just pray. George Monbiot, in The Guardian, says 15 per cent of Americans hold a fundamentalist view by which the state of Israel must expand to its biblical borders in order to set off a cosmic battle during which believers will be taken to Heaven naked (the Rapture). They may comprise 33 per cent of Republicans, including Attorney-General John Ashcroft and House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. Those voters are heavily courted by the Bush team and they demand conflagration rather than peace as policy goals in the Mideast. (For the record, I don't really consider this kind of mindset so much a matter of religion -- a broad category that includes the worldview of the Dalai Lama -- as a mythical or magical way of thinking about reality, like Lord of the Rings or Dungeons & Dragons.) But what's the connection to prisoner abuse in Iraq? Well, a striking aspect of that abuse has been a persistent sexual quality. It is not torture in the sense of thumbscrews or the rack. It has been about nakedness, domination, humiliation, coerced masturbation. It's like porn. "He's getting hard," PFC Lynndie England reportedly shouted out at one point. And Christianity has always had a tortuous relation with sexuality. Think of ongoing abuse by Catholic priests; or Mel Gibsons's Passion, which blends, as Christopher Hitchens says, homoeroticism and brutality. U.S. Christianity is especially convoluted, from the sexual puritanism depicted in Arthur Miller's The Crucible to the national moralistic orgies over Bill Clinton's affairs. Now the core of the U.S. volunteer army is poor southern and/or rural youth, like Jessica Lynch. They come from the heartland of revivalist religion in the U.S., home base for sexual agonizers and self-dramatizers like televangelists Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker. It is never surprising when sex gets entangled with faith, patriotism, and everything else in this context. Still, I am surprised by the un-Christian attitude of George Bush and other U.S. leaders toward those who got caught. "A group of kids from Virginia," a defence attorney called them. They were told they were going abroad to fight naked, ahem, evil, and that rose petals, not bombs, would be thrown at them. Now they are dismissed as bad, un-American apples. Why won't anyone in power admit that U.S. policy, in interaction with local forces, helped create this mess, including these low-level offenders? Listen to our own Prime Minister echo that puritanical rigidity: "We have to remember that our values are why we are fighting terrorism . . ." As if some Western values might not be part of the problem. The military is "attempting to have these six soldiers atone for its sins," said the same attorney. That catches it: all religion, all the time. |
Re: Could the Fundamentalist oppression of sexuality have contributed to the prison S&M..
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| Originally posted by DaveSZ As Salutin has pointed out, there is a third rail of US politics that is separate from simple left/right economics. If you read the Texas GOP platform it's blatantly obvious that it was written by fanatics who believe that a Holy War must be created in the Middle East for Jesus to return. Since the early 80's the Fundamentalists have begun ingrafting themselves into the machine of government (as Jefferson warned us against), and are now in complete control of the Federal government, short of the US Supreme Court. |
Re: Re: Could the Fundamentalist oppression of sexuality have contributed to the prison S&M..
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| Originally posted by MisterOpus1 I certainly agree with your assertion, though I'm not sure about the article itself. Salutin brought out an interesting angle to the tortures with sexual oppression in fundamentalism, but I think most folks would agree that he's stretching things a bit to reach such a far-fetched conclusion. I know it's merely an opinion of his, but I would like stronger premises to support such notions. Still, it's an interesting (and scary) angle. |
Re: Re: Could the Fundamentalist oppression of sexuality have contributed to the prison S&M..
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| Originally posted by MisterOpus1 I certainly agree with your assertion, though I'm not sure about the article itself. Salutin brought out an interesting angle to the tortures with sexual oppression in fundamentalism, but I think most folks would agree that he's stretching things a bit to reach such a far-fetched conclusion. I know it's merely an opinion of his, but I would like stronger premises to support such notions. Still, it's an interesting (and scary) angle. |
This article was obviously written by someone who doesn't really understand American culture. While people overseas like to toss around the term "fundamentalist" with regards to American religion, I think that word sometimes is intended to mean any level of religion whatsoever. To paraphrase MisterOpus1, nice idea, but this guy needs to do a better job of backing up his assertions.
This piece by Charles Krauthammer is pretty interesting, and looks at sex from another angle:
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This war is also about sex Charles Krauthammer Washington Post May 7, 2004 WASHINGTON -- On Sept. 11, America awoke to the great jihad, wondering: What is this about? We have come to agree on the obvious answers: religion, ideology, political power and territory. But there is one fundamental issue at stake that dares not speak its name. This war is also about -- deeply about -- sex. For the jihadists, at stake in the war against the infidels is the control of women. Western freedom means the end of women's mastery by men, and the end of dictatorial clerical control over all aspects of sexuality -- in dress, behavior, education, the arts. Taliban rule in Afghanistan was the model of what the jihadists want to impose upon the world. The case the jihadists make against freedom is that wherever it goes, especially America and Europe, it brings sexual license and corruption, decadence and depravity. The appeal of this fear can be seen in the Arab world's closest encounter with modernity: Israel. Israeli women are by far the most liberated of any in that part of the world. For decades, the Arab press has responded with lurid stories of Israeli sexual corruption. The most famous example occurred in the late 1990s when Egyptian newspapers claimed that chewing gum Israel was selling in Egypt was laced with sexual hormones that aroused insatiable lust in young Arab women. Palestinian officials later followed with charges that Israeli chewing gum was a Zionist plot for turning Palestinian women into prostitutes, and ``completely destroying the genetic system of young boys'' to boot. Which is why the torture pictures coming out of Abu Ghraib prison could not have hit a more neuralgic point. We think of torture as the kind that Saddam practiced: pain, mutilation, maiming and ultimately death. We think of it as having a political purpose: intimidation, political control, confession and subjugation. What happened at Abu Ghraib was entirely different. It was gratuitous sexual abuse, perversion for its own sake. That is what made it, ironically and disastrously, a pictorial representation of precisely the lunatic fantasies that the jihadists believe -- and that cynical secular regimes such as Egypt and the Palestinian Authority peddle to pacify their populations and deflect their anger and frustrations. Through this lens, Abu Ghraib is an ``I told you so'' played out in an Arab capital, recorded on film. Jihadists, like all totalitarians, oppose many kinds of freedom. What makes them unique, however, is their particular hatred of freedom for women. They prize their traditional prerogatives that allow them to keep their women barefoot in the kitchen as illiterate economic and sexual slaves. For the men, that is a pretty good deal -- one threatened by the West with its twin doctrines of equality and sexual liberation. It is no accident that jihadists around the world are overwhelmingly male. It is very rare to find a woman suicide bomber. And when you do, like the young woman who blew herself up in Gaza killing four others last January, it turns out that she herself was a victim of sexual subjugation -- a wife accused of adultery, marked for death, who decided to die a martyr rather than a pariah. But die she must. Which is what made one aspect of the Abu Ghraib horrors even more incendiary -- the pictures of American women soldiers mocking, humiliating and dominating naked and abused Arab men. One could not have designed a more symbolic representation of the Islamist warning about where Western freedom ultimately leads than Thursday's Washington Post photo of a uniformed American woman holding a naked Arab man on a leash. Let's be clear. The things we have learned so far about Abu Ghraib are not, by far, the worst atrocities committed in war. Indeed, they pale in comparison with what Arab insurgents have done to captured Westerners, and what Saddam Hussein did to his own people. The American offenders should surely be judged by our standards, not by others'. By our standards, these were egregious violations of human rights and human dignity. They must be punished seriously. They do not, however, reflect the ethos of the American military, which has performed with remarkable grace and courage in Iraq, or of American society. The photographs suggest otherwise. Which is why the abuse at Abu Ghraib is so inflammatory and, for us and our cause, so damaging. It re-enacted the most deeply psychologically charged -- and most deeply buried -- aspect of the entire war on terror, exactly as bin Laden would have scripted it. |
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| Originally posted by imokruok To paraphrase MisterOpus1, nice idea, but this guy needs to do a better job of backing up his assertions. |
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