NOW, the National Organization for Women, is once again so busy attacking the Bush administration over abortion rights for pampered and protected American women that it simply has no time to deal with or acknowledge real acts of inhumanity committed against women. My reading today began by touching upon the grotesquely exploitative sex trafficking in Europe, especially Germany:
German Chancellor Andrea Merkel visits the
United States today. She is currently facing increasing opposition from NGOs, government leaders, human-rights advocates, and faith-based groups to
Germany’s open acceptance of brothels and sex huts. The issue has been brought to a point by well-publicized efforts to expand this industry when
Germany hosts the World Cup this June. Estimates are that over 40,000 women, many from the Eastern bloc and
Russia, will be trafficked into the German cities hosting soccer games in order to meet the demand promised, and manufactured, by the sex industry. Even now, before the games, authorities claim that as much as 80 percent of those women who will work as prostitutes are foreign, and have been coerced or beguiled into thinking they were coming to
Germany for jobs in restaurants and clubs.
What's really awful about this type of sex trafficking is that the language of feminism has been used to justify this exploitation. We're told that sex workers are empowered and that they're simply selling a valuable commodity that they're fortunate enough to possess in a market that's willing to buy. While the few women who earn massive amounts of money as high paid prostitutes may be able to make the "power" argument with a straight face, the actual fact is that most of the East European and Asian women in the sex trade are slaves, no more and no less. Their lives are appallilng examples of poverty, abuse, disease and degradation. And NOW is strangely silent. A search at their website does reveal random articles about "trafficking," but that's not their front page story: the front page is committed to such modern feminist wonders as raising the minimum wage (apparently they want fewer jobs for low skilled women); cancer research; emergency contraception; loving your body; and lots and lots of attacks on the War.
Speaking of those attacks on the war, let's focus a little bit on another segment of Iraqi society that benefitted from the war: Iraqi women. Here's A. Yasmine Rassam, writing into today's Opinion Journal, and cutting through the anti-War fecal matter regarding how Saddam was such a hero to Iraqi women:
Some radical feminists and anti-war liberals have very short memories. It's just three years after Saddam Hussein's ouster and some would have us believe the tyrant was in fact a protector of women's rights in Iraq. That Iraq under Saddam actually had progressive, pro-women policies that are now being "rolled back" thanks to the Bush administration.
***
Anti-war revisionist liberals and radical feminists alike are trying their best to come up with comparisons of the Saddamist and post-Saddamist eras in Iraq with the aim of discrediting the historic liberation of Iraq from Saddam Hussein in 2003. With Iraqi women they think they have found a seemingly incontrovertible argument since Saddam, according to his apologists, was a "secular" ruler who gave liberal rights to women.
***
Much of the anti-war propagandists' defense of Saddam as a champion of women's rights rests on his willingness to allow women to vote (for him), drive cars, own property, get an education and work. What they choose to ignore, however, is the systematic rapes, torture, beheadings, honor killings, forced fertility programs, and declining literacy rates that also characterized Saddam's regime. A few examples can only begin to illustrate the cruelty and suffering endured by thousands of Iraqi women.
One torture technique favored by Saddam's henchman and his sons involved raping a detainee's mother or sister in front of him until he talked. In Saddam's torture chambers women, when not tortured and raped, spent years in dark jails. If lucky, their suckling children were allowed to be with them. In most cases, however, these children were considered a nuisance to be disposed of; mass graves currently being uncovered contain many corpses of children buried alive with their mothers.
During Saddam's war with Iran, nearly an entire generation of Iraqi men were killed, injured or captured, leaving a dearth of men of military age in Iraqi society. As a result, Saddam launched "fertility campaigns" that forcibly administered fertility drugs to school girls as young as 10 in an effort to drive up the population rate.
After the Gulf War–particularly after crushing the Shiite and Kurdish uprisings of 1991–Saddam reverted to tribal and "Islamic" traditions as a means to consolidate power. Iraqi women paid the heaviest price for his new-found piety. Many women were removed from government jobs and were not allowed to travel without the permission of a male relative. Men were exempted from punishment for "honor" killings–killings carried out on female relatives who had supposedly "shamed" their family. An estimated 4,000 women died from honor killings in the ensuing years. By 2000, Iraqi women, once considered the most highly educated in the Middle East, had literacy levels of only 23%.
Under the pretext of fighting prostitution in 2000, Saddam's Fedayeen forces beheaded 200 women "dissidents" and dumped their head on their families doorsteps for public display. These women obviously lost whatever "rights" granted to them once they got in Saddam's way.
Only people blinded by their irrational hatred of a legally, democratically elected political leader could fling themselves into bed with a sadistic dictator and trumpet the humanity of his "feminist" policies. It's days like this that I'm ashamed to be a woman.
There’s a difference of goals in this case. The maximum priority of NOW is to gain power, presumably justified because with power then they can initiate “change”. But in reality, that’s not a very good plan for governance or policy.
Power can be used for many things, and the thing is, it takes a lot of wisdom to use power well for certain things. Sledghamming a cookie batter to form cookies is… counter-productive. Too much power, you get a blow up, too little and you get nothing but waste products.
NOW’s maximum priority should be the safety of women, and all their planning and assets should be diverted towards that goal. This is not an idealistic suggestion, it is a realistic analysis of problem solving. If you want power, then naturally you will try to solve the problem of not having power. What happens when protecting women is part of the reason you don’t have power, because you won’t support dictators that rape women for sport? Then it is logical to go for the dictators, to get power, and then reinvert it and say with power we can protect women. Does that seem ethical to you? Perhaps not, but it is logical.
Thus assuming NOW isn’t full of incompetent 70 IQ retards, they should see the logic as well, and will follow it (does follow).
The ends justify the means. To dissasemble that, it means basically that certain goals require certain means to produce, and certain goals require that certain means not be used. For example, the classic save the village by destroying it could be an example of a goal you want to do by a means you cannot use to do the goal with. It can also go the other way, sometimes the goal requires you to destroy the village to save it.
It depends upon what your specific goal is. If your goal is to save the village from a nuclear strike, then if bombing it will help, that is a way to save the village by destroying it. If your goal is to save the village from war and what not, then bombing it is perhaps counter-productive.
If NOW’s ends are women’s rights, then anything that violates women’s rights they must not do and anything that supports women’s rights, freedoms, and life should be supported (Bush) as Book pointed out.
So to follow the logic, and one must always follow the logic down the yellow brick road to its ultimate conclusion, NOW’s ends are not women’s rights. Analytically speaking, NOW’s ends are power, unbridled power. Because theirs is not a means to an end, it is not the power given to the President to safeguard the Constitution from all enemies foreign or domestic and to protect the American people. It is a power onto itself, an end onto itself philosophically speaking. The end justifies itself, and is not justified by any means other than itself.
If you wanted to free the oppressed people of Afghanistan, the power of the American military is thus bridled by the goal itself. The purpose of that power is to free the oppressed people of Afghanistan. What is the purpose of the power of NOW? To what goals, conditions, and limitations is NOW’s power restricted by? What is NOW not willing to do in the pursuit of power?
Ruthlessness is defined by me as seeking and accomplishing all or any means in order to accomplish your Goal, whatever your goal may be. Thus ruthlessness is not a virtue, so much as it is a strength of character. Thus even villains have strengths, and weaknesses. The Democratic Party and NOW are quite ruthless, that is why I believe they won’t let much of anything stand in their way.
The Founding Fathers faced a similar problem. How do you give government power and make sure the government uses that power for the purpose you intended it to use it for, instead of abusing power and using it to create a tyranny?
One of their solutions is to put most of the power into the hands of the people, where it is diffused, and allows minorities as much protection as the majority. If the people have the guns and the knowledge/wisdom in how to use them, then the government will have a hard time abusing the power the people has given them. Guns is not a power the people will relegate as a government monopoly, therefore the government must show its madness to take the guns to take ultimate power, yet it can’t take ultimate power without showing its teeth in taking the guns. And if they show their teeth early on, their chances for ultimate success is not good. Catch 22.
NOW and the Democrat Party’s pursuit of power is tempered by the fact that violence is not their mainstay. Democracy is a disease that infects the trait of pacifism and decadence into its practitioners. Trading strength for stability, vitality for wisdom, etc. (Democracy works for Iraq because it’s balancing the Ph) All you have to do to know what NOW and the Democrat party can become, is to look at the Muslim Jihad grassroots movement by the mullahs. Politically very powerful. Very good organization skills. They have a mandate from the people, they have a list of their policies, Shariah Law. They believe their righteousness to be just. Their effectiveness? Quite effective given that the press bows down to their desires and demands.
The Founding Fathers were always faced by this problem. To get good governance and to protect people, you must organize. But if you organize, you run into the problems with leaders in that organization setting goals that are INCOMPATIBLE with the aims of democracy and the rights of the people. (Ceos found company, his successor ruins it)
It is one of the reasons why the Founding Fathers said government was a necessary evil. Evil is defined by choice, and people in leadership positions will always, ALWAYS, choose something that is evil in one way or another. NOW’s simply a lite version of that fact.
People don’t truely understand why power corrupts. Power corrupts simply because to do anything, you need power. So it is very easy to say that if you can get ALL power, then you can do Anything. Not true, but that doesn’t stop people like the Democrats and NOW from trying.
Power is the same as military force, in a broader guise. The military requires intelligence and wisdom to win wars, not just brute force. Power mandates the same thing, if you are to use power to accomplish any of your goals. The same problem arises. If you seek the brute force approach, as the Democrats, Mullahs, iranians, and NOW seeks, then you will always always believe that a bigger military hammer of force will solve your problems.
Some might decry the humanitarian problems of war and brute force violence, but the real problem is that it doesn’t work. (bigger hammer approach) When things don’t work, there is such a thing as Chaos being birthed. Chaos kills more people than any focus directed beam of destruction or power. (Vietnam boat people)
That’s about it.
Not long ago, there was a case of a woman in Germany who was going to loose her (either welfare or unemployment benefits–I forget) because she chose to turn down a perfectly acceptable job as a sex worker (i.e. prostitute). I’m not sure how it eventually turned out but it provides a wonderful example of the law of unintended consequences and illustrates the sad state of affairs in German society.
NOW is stuck back then.
[...] [Read more and discuss:] Social Networking:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. [...]
I saw that news Kevin as well
I tend to think if that happened in the US, I could google “US prostitute scandal” and there would be like a million hits. Hard to find it now.
Here’s a link:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/01/30/wgerm30.xml
Nothing in life is free. I tend to think socialists don’t get that. Orwell at least understood that everything in life had a price, minor or small. But orwell was old school socialism, back when Socialism meant something. Sorta like back when Unions meant something.
thx for link, archiving it on my blog so I don’t lose it again. It’s a great object lesson to pound people with all the time. They want examples, I’ll give em examples.