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Empowering
Men:
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Sex, Lies &
Feminism by Peter Zohrab
Chapter 13: Indoctucation by the Media-University
Complex
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1999 Version
1. Lies About Oppression
In a forest, one man with a chainsaw is heavily outnumbered by the
trees -- but who has the real power? In a well-ordered liberal
democratic society, typical individual members of the majority, or supposedly
dominant, group have less power than do typical individual members of
well-organised commercial and political pressure groups -- such as Politically
Correct pressure groups.
Political Correctness is the dominant ideology amongst the indoctucated
ruling strata in western countries. By using the term "indoctucated",
I mean simply that the education systems and media in western countries
(the Media-University Complex, or MUC) have a strong subtext of indoctrination
in certain values. Those people who graduate from higher educational
institutions have been subjected to the greatest amount of MUC indoctucation,
and are thus seen as fit to take control of the education, media, and
government apparatuses that perpetuate this ideology.
2. The Bias in Universities
The influence of the universities must not be overlooked. Universities
are no doubt places which claim to, and actually do teach knowledge
and skills. However, they are also places where social and political
values are instilled into people -- by peer-group socialisation and
political agitation, as well as by bias in the content and delivery
of the actual courses.
To the extent that students are funded by state grants and lecturers
are state employees, universities have a built-in bias towards regarding
the State as provider and spender of money -- i.e. a basically left-wing
viewpoint. To some readers, it may come as a shock to realize that it
is possible to see the State principally as a collector of taxes, which
is the way it tends to appear to the self-employed in particular, and
private sector employees in general.
Thus students tend to travel through university and come out at the
end of their journey with the clear message:
LEFT = GOOD; RIGHT = BAD.
Here is an example of the influence of that subliminal message: In
the then Soviet Union, some years ago, there was a coup d'etat against
President Gorbachev by the Communist old guard. This was described by
some western1
newsreaders as a "right-wing coup". This description was, of course,
quite ludicrous, as the Communists were far to the "left" of Gorbachev.
The reason for this error was that the radio decision makers were
politically correct, and knew that "right = bad." They also knew that
coup d'etats were bad. It was therefore almost inevitable that they
would describe any coup d'etat as "right-wing". In later broadcasts,
they tended to change the description of this coup d'etat from "right-wing"
to "conservative", which is only a slightly less misleading term.
Anyone who goes in fear (and it is a real fear for many middle-class
people) of being labelled "to the right of Genghis Khan" should bear
in mind that they can hold their polemical enemies at bay by suggesting
that they are "to the left of Pol Pot."
Pot's Cambodia (Kampuchea) was also ruled via an ideology of Political
Correctness, but the undeveloped state of the MUC in that country forced
Pol Pot to use more direct and brutal methods to enforce his particular
brand of Political Correctness. It is worth mentioning here that Pol
Pot developed his ideas while studying at a French university.
3. Politically Correct Distortions
There are three main problems with the MUC's politically correct
designation of oppressed groups:
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The first is who gets to do the designating. The Feminists
got in at the ground floor of the designating process, and so they
have made sure that women are one of the Designated Groups. But there
was never any balanced public debate about whether men or women (or
both ?) should be "designated". I don't have any quarrel with the
other Designated Groups -- however, some of them (e.g. lesbians/homosexuals
and the disabled) seem to have achieved the status of "Designated
Group" only as a result of an alliance with the more powerful Feminists.
This gives homosexuals/lesbians and the disabled a self-interest in
supporting Feminists politically.
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The second problem is that the Designated Groups (women, ethnic
minorities, the disabled, homosexuals, lesbians, and so on) become
established PR agencies and lobbyists for their members. They have
a sort of "gravitational" force which they exert on the Truth -- they
bend the Truth in their direction. If this PR approach comes to dominate
the media, ordinary people will know that every group has both good
and bad points -- but the media will act as if no member of any designated
group ever does anything wrong! This sort of gulf between the
official line and reality was a feature of Communist Eastern Europe,
and of George Orwell's book "1984". The discrepancy between propaganda
and truth in such countries is probably one of the main causes of
right-wing reaction, when it occurs.
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The third problem with Designated Groups, as discussed below, is
that this approach to Human Rights creates another set of scapegoats
-- the people who don't fit into any of the Designated Groups. The
Establishment theory is that they are the ones who are rich and powerful
in society -- but only some of them are rich and powerful. What about
poor white males, for example ? Men and Whites are both politically
incorrect if they assert their rights. Any semi-intelligent Feminist,
on the other hand, can sling off at "White Males" and get away with
it.
Although Feminists dominate the Establishment with their propaganda,
Masculists have only a faint hope of being seen as a Left-wing protest
group. This is because the Feminists are part of the Left-wing coalition
of groups that forms the backbone of left-wing parties in western
countries. This fact drives Masculists to find allies on the right,
though not necessarily on the extreme right.
And there is also the problem that Political Correctness has become
a political and economic cornucopia, with every conceivable group
lining up to get its share of the political and financial bounty that
is available from this cornucopia. Some disabled groups, such as the
Deaf, are even starting to assert that their disability is a form
of oppression by the able-bodied majority -- in order to cement their
place in the Rainbow Coalition that wields such power over the media
and government coffers.
The rich, heterosexual, Anglo-Saxon, able-bodied males connive
in this resource-targetting process, because it salves their consciences.
They have little fellow-feeling with poor, heterosexual, Anglo-Saxon,
able-bodied males (PHAMs, for short), because they are competing with
them. They have to have someone they can look down on, to show themselves
how successful they are, and PHAMs fit the bill. It is not socially
acceptable (in certain quarters, anyway) to look down on "disadvantaged
groups", as defined by Politically Correct dogma.
PHAMs don't turn up as a group outside Congress or Parliament waving
banners. But many probably feel that the designation process is unfair.
No doubt they resent the way the Designated Groups use their "gravity"
to bend truth and get favoured treatment.
In the Men's Movement, there is some resentment of the fact that
the only category of men who can attract publicity and money for their
health problems is homosexual men -- for AIDS research, publicity
and treatment. It would be good if the Men's Movement could harness
this homosexual political clout for the wider benefit of men's health
in general. Unfortunately, homosexuals are seen by some Men's Movement
activists as closely allied to the Feminists, and as hostile to the
traditional family. There is also the problem of homophobia amongst
some activists.
In addition, they probably resent well-off white males who take
a politically correct line from feelings of guilt or because of their
careers. Anyone who wants a university career or public service promotion
has to sign their integrity away to the Devil of Political Correctness
and ingratiate themselves with all the Designated Groups. This gives
members of the Designated Groups blackmail power. Poor white males
are, at times, liable to get fed up with this hypocrisy and unfairness,
and that is where modern would-be Hitlers can be expected to draw
their core support from.
Affirmative action (positive discrimination) involves quota systems
for university enrolments, or public service jobs, etc.. Some liberals
admit that this is unfair to individuals who would have just scraped
in under an unbiased system, but who are of the wrong sex or race
etc. to qualify for a quota. These liberals are in favour of this
racist and sexist (etc.) system, because of its supposed long-term
social effects -- and also because their own children are probably
bright enough, or well enough connected, to get on OK in life anyway
!
The class that these liberals belongs to finds the rise of right-wing
extremism inexplicable. The reason it can't understand it is that
this class helps to bring about the right-wing extremism by its own
actions !
Political Correctness does have victims. The victims of Political
Correctness are the categories of people who are defined as "oppressors"
by that ideology. This is because the "oppressors" are turned into
scapegoats by Political Correctness, and they can be persecuted with
the blessing of the Establishment. I am not for one second denying
that these oppressors may indeed have been guilty of carrying out
some form of oppression. My point is that all groups tend to oppress
all other groups, if they have a chance, and Political Correctness
acts as a smokescreen for certain forms of oppression, by taking it
for granted that only particular scapegoat groups are capable of carrying
out oppression.
Ethnic majorities are much more reluctant to give away their rights
to ethnic minorities than men are to women. And I am not aware of
significant ways in which heterosexuals or able-bodied people are
actually discriminated against -- apart from being restricted in the
openness with which they can express their hatred or embarrassment
about such individuals, and being subjected to the emotional blackmail,
or career blackmail, or the harassment of "tests" of their attitudes
towards such individuals. Consequently, because machismo and chivalry
make men prone to give in to even the weakest of Feminist claims to
"victim" status, it is men -- most of all -- who are the victims of
MUC Political Correctness indoctucation in Western countries, in my
view.
Western "Human Rights" legislation often does not help much, in
practice, with Human Rights such as free speech, due process of law,
and so on. The New Zealand Human Rights Commission, for example has
a focus on "Designated Groups" -- sets of people who are assumed by
it to be oppressed or disadvantaged. The aims of this approach are
very commendable. The main aim is to avoid the situation where minority
groups are made into scapegoats, and oppressed by the majority. The
classic, prototypical, most (repeatedly) publicised case is, of course,
Nazi Germany.
Nazi Germany persecuted the Jews, but this does not mean that the
Jews were necessarily completely blameless in every respect. The Nazis
thought they were the Master Race -- but the Jews believed that they
were God's Chosen People. As far as I can see, both ideas are equally
racist. This does not in any way excuse that genocide, but it goes
some way towards explaining it. Some members of all ethnic groups
are racist, to some extent -- but it is only the racism of the dominant
white ethnic group in a western country which attracts much publicity
or self-flagellation.
What happens in Western countries is that ethnic minorities that
discriminate against each other on a routine basis in their countries
of origin join forces to assert their rights against the majority
in their adopted country. The majority in their new country of residence
lumps them all together as "Africans" or "Latin Americans", "Pacific
Islanders" or "Asians", so that is how they start thinking of themselves.
This also happens to other groups such as New Zealanders and Australians
abroad. They get lumped together as "Colonials", "Antipodeans", or
whatever, and so they end up playing down what divides them, and concentrating
on what they have in common. At home, on the other hand, these two
nations engage in continuous -- though mostly friendly -- rivalry.
The majority in a liberal democracy can exert its collective power
only at elections (once in three/four/five years), and at referendums.
And, even at elections, it cannot choose individual policies -- just
packages of policies, wrapped up in the manifestoes of particular
parties. Individual members of the majority can and do discriminate
against minorities in areas such as the job market, and so on -- but
individual members of minorities can and do also discriminate against
members of the majority and of other minorites, as well. Some minorities
have a higher average income than the majority does, in many countries,
and that gives those minorities behind-the-scenes power.
Between elections, it is the pressure groups, the media, the Bureaucracy,
the President or Prime Minister, Cabinet, the government Caucus and
the Congress or Parliament who have the real power. And Presidents,
Prime Ministers, and Cabinets, as we know, do not always act in accordance
with the manifestos that the electorate voted for them on.
It is true that members of minorities come across the dominance
of the values and symbols of the majority in many aspects of their
daily lives. Members of minorities tend to find this irksome, as they
find their own values and symbols more appealing and even superior
to those of the (to them) alien majority. This is the common experience
of expatriates of all types in all countries. Majorities also experience
much better-publicised mirror-image feelings toward the minorities
in their midst, of course.
4. What Is Oppression ?
Iris Young's book "Polity and Group Difference: A Critique of the
Ideal of Universal Citizenship" is an interesting discussion of some
fundamental issues, from a Feminist perspective. What tends to strike
me when I read such essays is not so much what is asserted, as the
unspoken assumptions hidden behind such words as "emancipatory", "oppressed",
etc.. These assumptions are what I am concerned to examine and question,
as much as the truth of the actual assertions made in Feminist writings.
What is interesting (indeed startling) about Iris Young is that
she is a Feminist who analyses (at least some of) her assumptions
in a lucid fashion.
"With equality conceived as sameness, the ideal of universal
citizenship carries at least two meanings in addition to the extension
of citizenship to everyone: (a) universality defined as general
in opposition to particular; what citizens have in common as opposed
to how they differ, and (b) universality in the sense of laws and
rules that say the same for all and apply to all in the same way;
laws and rules that are blind to individual and group differences."
(op.cit.,117)
Her criticism of the above philosophy is in some sense a retrospective
justification of a process which is already well under way in Western
countries -- a process which (I would argue) has led to injustices
towards men (among other groups). So it is a useful exercise to follow
the course of her argument and to evaluate it against the background
of the consequences of actually implementing the ideas she advocates.
Young's basic argument amounts to saying that universal citizenship
is all very well and good in itself, but it is not a panacea for all
social ills, though she does not express herself in these words. The
way she actually formulates her thesis is by claiming that certain
political tendencies (which she seems to consider flow from the notion
of universal citizenship) are "in tension with" other aspects of this
notion.
"First, the ideal that the activities of citizenship express
or create a general will that transcends the particular differences
of group affiliation, situation and interest has in practice excluded
groups judged not capable of adopting that general point of view;
the idea of citizenship as expressing a general will has tended
to enforce a homogeneity of citizens.... Thus I argue that the inclusion
and participation of everyone in public discussion and decision
making requires mechanisms for group representation. Second, where
differences in capacities, culture, values, and behavioural styles
exist among groups, but some of these groups are privileged, strict
adherence to a principle of equal treatment tends to perpetuate
oppression or disadvantage." (ibid, 118)
What Young argues for, in essence, is a pressure-group society
(a society composed of competing pressure-groups) -- the very opposite
of the "melting-pot" concept. She argues that, since some groups are
relatively privileged, and others are oppressed, a political structure
based on universality merely reinforces that inequality.
My strong reservations about her proposal are based on the facts
that
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this emphasis on groups diminishes the influence, power, and
significance of the individual;
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members of one or several pressure-groups representing the so-called
"oppressed" (e.g disabled Lesbian Feminist ethnic minority trade
unionists), possess more power than those who belong to no, or
few pressure-groups;
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there is no guarantee that those pressure-groups set up to represent
"oppressed" groups actually represent groups which are in fact
oppressed (e.g. Feminists have formed countless pressure-groups
on the dubious grounds that women are oppressed, yet there are
virtually no groups to represent men, who are genuinely oppressed);
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individuals, seeing everyone around them rediscovering their
ethnic roots, are compelled to become more ethnocentric than previously,
because the prime focus of political expression has become the
group -- particularly the ethnic group;
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people of mixed race who have lost touch with their cultural
roots become forced to assume rather artificial allegiances;
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encouraging such pressure-group politics accentuates the centrifugal
forces that are always present in every society and this pushes
societies down the road towards eventual civil discord and strife.
Politics is (or should be) the art of the possible, not the pursuit
of the ideal.
Young's argument depends heavily on the standard liberal/left consensus
(as expounded in Western universities) about the phenomenon of "oppression",
since a major thread of her basic argument against the notion of universal
citizenship is that society contains groups which are oppressed to
the extent that group members are unable to make their political influence
felt as much as members of other groups are able to do. It is refreshing
that she gives an explicit indication of what she means by that term:
"Briefly, a group is oppressed when one or more of the following
conditions occurs to all or a large portion of its members: (1)
the benefits of their work or energy go to others without those
others reciprocally benefiting them (exploitation); (2) They are
excluded from participation in major social activities, which in
our society means primarily a workplace (marginalization); (3) they
live and work under the authority of others, and have little work
autonomy and authority over others themselves (powerlessness); (4)
as a group they are stereotyped at the same time that their experience
and situation is invisible in the society in general, and they have
little opportunity and little audience for the expression of their
experience and perspective on social events (cultural imperialism);
(5) group members suffer random violence and harassment motivated
by group hatred or fear." (Young 1990,128)
Young (ibid) goes on to list the various groups in the United States
which she considers to be oppressed. The list is headed by women, and
includes various ethnic groups, plus gay men, lesbian women, the poor,
the working class, the aged, and the disabled.
The Miriam-Webster Dictionary defines "oppression" as "unjust or
cruel exercise of power or authority." Not all of Young's five criteria
genuinely isolate actual oppression. They are designed to fit the situation
of women in society, as she no doubt sees it to be. Her fifth criterion,
for example, is too loosely worded to be useful -- harassment comes
in various forms, both physical and verbal, and it is not true that
only the dominant groups in society are ever in a position to be able
to harass others.
Her second and third criteria, likewise, have a lot to do with women,
but little to do with oppression, as it is usually understood.
It is clear that (many) men are indeed oppressed by women, according
to Young's definition of "oppression". In terms of criterion (1), men
who fight in the front line in wartime, exposing themselves to fear,
physical and psychological privations, and the possibility of injury,
mutilation, paralysis and/or death, are being exploited and oppressed
by women.
This is so even if the men involved are volunteers, rather than conscripts,
as the social pressure to "be a man", in situations of national crisis,
can be very severe indeed. The situation is particularly clear-cut if
women have/had the vote in the country concerned, and so helped to vote
in the government that ordered the mobilisation of troops; if there
were women in the government that made the decision -- and especially
if women make up a majority of the electorate, or the Head of Government
or Head of State was a woman. In recent history, the Falklands War comes
to mind -- it came about when in Britain the Head of State, Head of
Goverment, and the majority of the electorate were all women.
The former state of Yugoslavia was western in its culture, but the
Civil War there between Serbians, Croats and Muslims has been fought
largely by men (of course !). There has been no sign of Feminists demanding
equality with men on the battlefield (of course !). There has also been
no sign of the women in the various communities being more willing than
their menfolk to adopt a Pacifist stance when attacked.
The only sign of women being involved in the fighting was one story
about a single woman sniper. A sniper, of course, is a relatively safe
(not to say cowardly) combattant -- even so, this woman was picked out
by the media because she was such an exception to the rule that only
men were doing the fighting. No doubt some of the press also had a hidden
pro-Feminist agenda, as well, and were trying to convey the visual impression
that women were doing some of the dangerous fighting -- without actually
putting that lie into words.
The case of Israel is often cited as one country where women are
conscripted alongside men. But there, too, it is the men who do the
most dangerous front-line fighting -- not the women.
Criterion (4) also applies to men, to varying degrees in many Western
countries. As a group, men in such countries are stereotyped by Feminists
and the MUC (Media University Complex) as potential rapists and murderers,
at that same time that their experience and situation as men is invisible
in the society in general, and they have little opportunity and little
audience for the expression of their experience and perspective on social
events (cultural imperialism), since there are no pressure groups which
represent men's interests.
The Foreword to the New Zealand Human Rights Commission's "Equal
Employment Opportunities Manual" states that "Men who are not within
the target groups (the various ethnic and other minority groups) are
not included for special consideration in the manual." So any men who
wanted to claim that they were being disadvantaged, compared to women,
in some particular workplace, would not even be able to make that claim,
let alone prove their point.
You may think there is no way that men COULD be disadvantaged, but
they certainly could and are in fact being disadvantaged. There are
some professions, such as primary and pre-school teaching, where the
workforce is overwhelmingly female. With the current high unemployment
rate, you might think that the words "Equal Employment Opportunity"
might be interpreted as meaning that this should be evened up a bit,
by getting more young males into these professions.
Not a bit of it ! Because women have many pressure-groups, and men
have none, the policy of "equal employment", in some educational establishments,
at least, is interpreted as one of "proportional promotion" -- in other
words, trying to make sure that women outnumber men in management positions,
as well as in the workforce as a whole. It would seem to me to be a
fairer arrangement to have roughly equal numbers of men and women in
primary and pre-school management, as well as in the primary and pre-school
workforce as a whole.
I went to this Human Rights Commission once to complain about an
all-female courier firm that was reported in a newspaper as saying that
it would never hire men. I found out that I was not the first to have
made that complaint. But the lady I spoke to at the Commission thought
it sufficient to report that the firm said it had been misquoted.
However, she then went on to allude to the fact that male-dominated
managements sometimes interview women just for appearances' sake --
having no intention of hiring a woman at all. That may well be so, but
the implication of what she said was that she wasn't going to take very
seriously complaints against female-dominated firms for the reason that
some male-dominated firms were discriminating against women ! That is
not the unbiased approach one would expect of a taxpayer-funded Human
Rights Commission, and this bias is a result of men being an invisible
minority in Society.
Young's fifth criterion also applies to men: I know of men who have
been subject to (admittedly minor) random violence and harassment by
Feminazis (in a left-wing dominated workplace) who wanted to intimidate
potential Masculist activists and censor the expression of views such
as those expressed in the present book.
Young makes her alternative proposals explicit as follows:
"I assert, then, the following principle: a democratic public,
however that is constituted,
should provide mechanisms for the effective representation
and recognition of the distinct voices and perspectives of those
of its constituent groups that are oppressed or disadvantaged within
it. Such group representation implies institutional mechanisms and
public resources supporting three activities: (1) self-organisation
of group members so that they gain a sense of collective empowerment
and a reflective understanding of their collective experience and
interests in the context of the society; (2) voicing a group's analysis
of how social policy proposals affect them, and generating policy
proposals themselves, in institutionalized contexts where decision
makers are obliged to show that they have taken these perspectives
into consideration; (3) having veto power regarding specific policies
that affect a group directly, for example, reproductive rights for
women, or use of reservation lands for Native Americans." (ibid,
128-129)
The main problem with the above approach is, as Young admits, the
question of exactly how a society is to determine which groups are oppressed
or disadvantaged. She does provide a reasonable working definition of
the notion of oppression itself, but there remains the problem of the
lack of an objective mechanism which a given society can employ to determine
who this definition applies to in its own case.
Young is working within a Liberal/Left university context, where
there is a ruling consensus about who is likely to be the oppressor,
and who the oppressed, in a given society. This is an often simplistic
consensus, as no group is completely powerless, and any group is liable
to use what power it does have to carry out whatever level of oppression
it is capable of, in particular contexts. This consensus is also oppressive
in itself, since it makes it difficult, or even impossible for groups
which have not been awarded the much coveted "oppressed and disadvantaged"
label from convincing anyone of the seriousness of their claims to this
status -- particularly if the consensus has already stigmatised them
with the "oppressor" label.
Men, for example, would have great difficulty being accepted (on
the basis of claims that they are being oppressed by women) into the
"coalition of oppressed groups" (a.k.a "the Rainbow Coalition"), since
women have long been one of the cornerstones of this group, and have
won this status on the basis of claiming that men are oppressing ²
them ! Young's model of society is in tension with the
idea of such diametrical differences of world-view among oppressed groups
in one society.
5. Media Propaganda and Power
What is power ? Power is the ability to do what you want, and/or
to get other people to do what you want them to do. Some people might
make a distinction between these two sorts of power, by saying that
the ability to do what you want is "autonomy", and "power" has to do
only with relationships between people.
Unfortunately, perhaps, this is a rather naive viewpoint. Virtually
anything you want to do involves some competition with others, or some
minor or major decrease in their freedom of action or quality of life.
So you would have to be a very powerful person indeed to do anything
that you wanted, because a lot of these activities would run into actual
or potential resistance from other people. Socialisation, growing up
in Society, is largely about learning what the limits are on your autonomy/power.
The ancient Greek historian, Thucydides, had a very cynical (but
true !) definition of liberty. It went something like this: Liberty
is the ability to restrict the liberty of other people. Conventional
20th Century liberalism amounts, in practice, to seeking out oppressed
groups and increasing their autonomy. Unfortunately, this is usually
a somewhat mindless exercise, and what you end up with is a rump minority
of underprivileged people who fall into none of the categories that
get targeted for extra compassion and/or extra resources. When you look
at power in societies and states, you might want to make a distinction
between dictatorships and democracies. In a dictatorship, it might seem
that one person does whatever he/she wants. He/she has absolute autonomy/power.
That is not quite true. Dictators are lucky if they have even a brief
period when they can do absolutely whatever they like. Then they have
to start looking over their shoulder and under their bed for potential
threats to themselves and their country.
In order to combat these actual or potential threats, Dictators have
to be proactive. They have to form personal and international alliances.
They have to placate people, groups of people, and states, by doing
(some of) what they want. They also have to create and disseminate propaganda,
in order to persuade people to agree with them (using the news media,
amongst other tools).
Already, a dictatorship is looking somewhat more like a democracy,
though they are still nowhere near identical. The major difference,
of course, is the method of bringing about a change of government.
But the point of similarity between democracies and dictatorships
that I want to concentrate on here is the use of propaganda and the
news media. The News Media are very powerful. If there were various
sources of news, if they had very different viewpoints, and if they
all had an almost equal share of the "market", then the problem would
not be great.
In many countries, however, the vast majority of the population gets
its major news and political commentary from one single source: for
example, Television One's 6 O'Clock News and the subsequent "Holmes
Programme". If there has been some particularly shocking revelation
on that one hour of news and current affairs, then you can see it reflected
in the faces of the people you come across in the street the next day.
Television One thus seems to have tremendous power to select the
factors that it wants the voting public to take note of, and then to
put these factors across with the slant which will produce whatever
psychological effects the studio wants to produce.
TV3 Corporation is apparently owned by a Canadian Jewish businessman.
In the first couple of years of its operation, the Israeli Ambassador
used to appear on that channel (it seemed to me) much more often than
he did on Television One. I noticed him, because he was remarkably un-telegenic,
and because you don't see ambassadors interviewed on television very
often. Sometimes the topic had nothing to do with Israeli-New Zealand
relations, which is the only topic you'd expect him to be interviewed
on.
My point is not so much that he appeared too often on TV3, or not
often enough on Television One. My point is that this is a relatively
obvious pointer to the bias which must presumably be operating in much
more insidious ways on all television and radio channels and in all
countries all the time.
What is interesting about the Jews, in this context, is that they
are labelled "victims" in their role as a minority in Western countries
-- and so they get a good press there in that role. Indeed, they have
so much power that they are often able to suppress the dissemination
of anti-Semitic information. This has the consequence that we cannot
profit by the wisdom of the saying, "Those who do not learn from history
are condemned to relive it." Since Zionist activists do not allow us
uncensored access to information about every aspect of the German Nazi
Genocide of the Jews, and what led up to it, we can never really understand
what the causes were. Since we can't establish the causes, we can't
prevent it from happening again.
But Jews in Israel are seen as "oppressors" of the Palestinians,
and so they get a bad press in the West in that role ! I am sympathetic
towards Likud Party Prime Ministers (such as Benyamin Netanyahu) of
Israel, when they complain about anti-Israeli media bias. It's not so
much that I agree with his policies -- it's just that he, like Masculists,
comes up so often against the wall of simple-minded media bias that
he feels there's almost no point in fighting it head-on.
Another case in point is Bosnia, where the Western media has been
biased against the Serbs. Martin Bell was a famous BBC television reporter
who argued within the BBC against their official policy of neutrality.
He eventually left the BBC and went into politics. I heard him in an
interview referring to the Bosnian Serbs as the "Bad Guys". His intonation
made it clear that he meant to have "scare-quotes" around the phrase
"Bad Guys", but it is also clear that that was how the Western media
-- and hence the Western World -- actually saw the Bosnian Serbs.
People often say things like, "Knowledge is Power" or "Information
is Power", but they seldom seem to see that this applies to politics
as well as everywhere else. The Media -- particularly before the advent
of the Internet -- are/were at the control-levers of information. This
has gone to their heads, in many cases. Some of them have acquired star
status. They have seen populist or right-wing politicians criticise
the media, but these media people have been unable to become aware of
their own bias. This is because their bias is propped up by the philosophy
of Political Correctness, which gives them the courage of their convictions,
and bias.
In the former Yugoslavia, the Serbs and the Croats had virtually
the same spoken language (called "Serbo-Croat), but the Serbs wrote
in the Cyrillic alphabet (like the Russians and the Bulgarians), but
the Croats used the Roman alphabet. Whether this was cause or effect
(or both), I am not sure, but it is clear that the Serbs have had closer
relationships to Eastern Europe, and the Croats (to the extent that
the Cold War allowed them to) to Western Europe. This made it almost
inevitable that the Western media would have an anti-Serb bias -- which
was exacerbated by the fact that these media people were mostly based
in Sarajevo, which was in anti-Serb territory.
I am not excusing Serb atrocities. What I am saying is that the agenda
of the Serbs appeared to be to acquire independence from the Croats
and Muslims. The United Nations and the Media, dominated by Western
interests, decided on a contrary agenda of forcing the three parties
to live together in one country (Bosnia). Faced with the world community's
hostile agenda, it is not surprising that some Bosnian Serbs may have
acted like cornered animals.
2002 Version
CHAPTER 13
INDOCTUCATION BY THE MEDIA-UNIVERSITY COMPLEX
Lies About Oppression
In a forest, one man with a chainsaw is heavily outnumbered by the
trees – but who has the real power? In a well-ordered liberal
democratic society, typical individual members of the majority –
or supposedly dominant, group – have less power than do typical
individual members of well-organised commercial or political pressure
groups such as the National Organization for Women in the U.S. The silent
majority may be the majority, but its silence is its undoing.
Political Correctness is the dominant ideology among the indoctucated
ruling strata in western countries. By the term indoctucated, I mean
simply that the education systems and media in western countries (the
Media-University Complex, or MUC) have a strong subtext of indoctrination
in certain values. Those people who graduate from higher educational
institutions have assimilated the greatest amount of MUC indoctucation,
and are thus seen as fit to control the education, media, and government
apparatuses that perpetuate this ideology.
Initially, the Internet was a great liberating force and allowed men
to bypass media bias and disseminate their message directly to others.
However, as the institutions of the MUC have come online, they have
usually brought their Feminist biases and censorship with them. However,
much of the internet, in particular many of the Usenet newsgroups, is
still free of censorship and enables uncensored information –
both true and untrue – to be spread both widely and rapidly.
The free homepage site, Geocities – before it was taken over
by Yahoo – was very anti-male. I have long managed a Men's Rights
website there: www.geocities.com/peterzohrab and when a search engine
was first set up on Geocities I did a search for "Men's Rights,"
but the only hits I got on Geocities were Gay Rights sites. After I
complained about this on one of the Geocities forums, this problem was
fixed, because anyone could confirm it for themselves, but I had great
trouble even getting replies to my emails from Geocities whenever I
suggested a neighbourhood for men to balance Wellesley, the neighbourhood
set up just for women. And the email newsletter and website on internet
resources, the Scout Report, routinely features women's sites and has
only once featured a men's site - despite my protests. Even when it
listed a site on men's health, it was part of a site that was principally
about women !
Similarly, I was an early volunteer editor on the Open Directory (http://dmoz.org),
which has been the basis of the Netscape Directory, among others. I
applied to edit the category "Society/ Issues /Human Rights /Men's
Rights," to balance the category "Society /Issues/ Human Rights/
Women's Rights," but I was allocated the category "Society/
Men," without a word of explanation – obviously, they were
prejudiced against treating Men's Rights on the same basis as Women's
Rights. So I created the category "Society/ Men/ Men's_Rights"
(and various sub-categories), and managed to get Men's Rights and Women's
Rights established on an equal hierarchical footing by raising the issue
in the Editors' Forum.
With massive help from an activist in Los Angeles, I built up the
Men's Rights listings to over 1,100 urls. But the Editor of the Society/
Issues section copied an email to me in which he complained that the
Men's Rights section had many more urls than the Women's Rights section,
and that something needed to be done about it. I replied that I considered
his attitude hypocritical, unless he also tried to correct the contrary
imbalance in the world at large, where Men's Rights hardly featured
at all. Needless to say, he did not answer, the Open Directory found
a pretext to fire me as Editor, and the new editor chopped the number
of Men's Rights urls by at least half. The Women's Rights urls were
increased – so that, the last time I looked, the Women's Rights
urls outnumbered the men's. Such is equality in the Feminist world !
The Bias in Universities
We must never overlook the influence of the schools and universities.
Universities teach knowledge and skills, but they also instill social
and political values by peer-group socialisation and the political agitation
that occurs there, as well as through bias in the content and delivery
of the course materials.
For example, in 1987 I took a French course part-time at a university,
where we had to give a talk in French on one of a choice of topics,
including "the Situation of Women in New Zealand." Such a
topic implicitly assumes women suffer discrimination, and encourages
female students to complain about it in courses having nothing to do
with Women's Studies! Such bias is a routine feature of university courses.
These complaints, having the veneer of academic respectability, add
to Society's learned belief that women are oppressed in some way. I
asked to give a talk on "the Situation of Men in New Zealand",
which was not on the list, and was permitted to do that.
In 1999 at the same university, I took a course on Chinese civilization,
which involved writing three essays. Two included the position of women
in China as possible topics, but again, nothing about the position of
men in China. For the first of these essays, the female lecturer refused
me permission to write on men in China, so I wrote on women, but treated
it as a comparison of the positions of men and women in China. The second,
however, included the option of naming your own topic, and this time
I was allowed to write on men.
Interestingly, women experience this bias, too, especially in Women's
Studies courses. For example, a woman named Sonia shared with the New
Zealand Men for Equal Rights Association her experience of how she tried
to write about the abuse of boys. At first, they rejected her paper
as "not written from a woman-centered perspective," and only
accepted the paper after she escalated her complaint about the issue.
To the extent students are funded by state grants and lecturers are
state employees, universities have a built-in bias toward regarding
the State as provider and spender of money; i.e., a basically left-wing
perspective. To them, it may come as a shock to realize many, particularly
self-employed and private sector employees, see the State principally
as a collector of taxes. Self-employed men are probably the people who
pay the most taxes, relative to what they get back in benefits from
the State, and solo mothers, who later become pensioners and outlive
men, get the most benefits from the State, relative to the taxes they
pay.
Fortunately, the academics' left-wing bias is a trend rather than
an absolute. Some sections of academia, such as business colleges, tend
to be more conservative whereas others, such as Sociology departments,
are determinedly left-wing. I have even received an email from a Sociology
student who admitted that studying Sociology was tantamount to being
a Feminist – and his department was later restructured into a
School of "Sociology and Women's Studies" !
And it is the students in the less vocational, more left-wing subjects
such as Sociology, who are inclined to be more politically active than
those studying, say, business or engineering - and these Leftists often
end up with jobs in the bureaucracy, where their ethos plays a part
in how they differentially deal with men and women clients. These same
subjects are also the ones which deal with social policy issues, which
is why government social policies often end up more left-wing than the
views of their electorate as a whole would justify.
Thus many students are inculcated with one clear message:
LEFT = GOOD; RIGHT = BAD
Frequently the schools instill this doctrine very subtly, which magnifies
its power. Here is an example of how influential subtle and subliminal
messages can be: Several years ago in the then-Soviet Union, there was
a coup d'etat against President Gorbachev by the Communist old guard.
Some western news-readers described this as a "right wing coup."1
Ludicrous: those Communists were far to the left of Gorbachev. How could
the newsreaders make such a mistake? Because the radio decision makers
were politically correct and reasoned that right = bad, coup d'etats
are bad, therefore any coup d'etat must be right wing. In later broadcasts,
however, many changed their description from "right-wing"
to "conservative," a slightly less misleading term.
Many college-educated people fear the right-wing label because their
professors taught them left = good. Additionally, many middle-class
workplaces have a left/liberal atmosphere, so anyone with conservative
attitudes faces harassment, intimidation and discrimination and their
employer may even fire them for "anti pluralistic" sentiments.
For example, in my workplace I have been subjected to all sorts of physical
and psychological intimidation for having antiFeminist views. One alleged
Lesbian Feminist at my workplace, for instance, greeted me with a Nazi
salute when she saw me! And I received an email from a fellow-teacher
who compared me to Hitler because I had pro-men views (though he did
not cite any views or actions of myself or of Hitler that might make
us similar in any way !). I complained about this email to my union,
a secondary teachers' union, but I received no reply to my complaint.
If you suffer similar slurs, take heart – you can defend yourself
against those who accuse you of being "to the right of Genghis
Khan" by suggesting they are "to the left of Pol Pot."
Pot's Cambodia (Kampuchea) was also ruled via an ideology of political
correctness, but the undeveloped state of the MUC in that country forced
Pol Pot to use more direct and brutal methods to enforce his particular
brand of political correctness. It is worth mentioning here that Pol
Pot developed his ideas while studying at a French university –
see Pol Pot: A Biographical Essay, by David Le Sage and Sean Watson.
(www.eliz.tased.edu.au/ITStu97/polpot.htm) Pol Pot was a Leftist and
he was about as brutal as they come, so how can Left = Good? We can
only wonder what people who believe that are thinking.
One of the most blatant examples of academic Left-Wing bias I have
come across was from Nupedia – a project aimed at creating an
online encyclopedia of articles written by volunteers, and edited and
peer-reviewed by volunteers. I wrote an article on "Men's Rights"
for it, which (as I write these words), after many months and lots of
rewriting, still has not been officially accepted or rejected.
I had a substantial email correspondence with Professor Larry Sanger,
the founder, who is/was also my Editor. In one email (of 21 October
2000), he was very frank about the nature of universities and the people
who work in them. In it, he accused me of not taking seriously the "constraints"
that he regarded himself as working under. By this, he explained, he
meant that the "vast majority" of scholars are politically
"liberal" (meaning, of course, left-wing, rather than tolerant
of others' opinions), and that he didn't want to alienate the majority
of his potential academic contributors. Consequently, he wrote, he would
need to "balance" any article of "Men's Rights"
with a Feminist-inspired one – but the converse was not true:
i.e. he did not intend to balance every Feminist-inspired article with
a Men's Rights-inspired one. He explicitly admitted that there was a
double-standard, which he described as a “sad reality”.
Astonishingly, Nupedia has a non-bias policy, of which the above attitude
makes a complete mockery. I reprint the relevant section of the Non-Bias
policy below, with my amendments in bold type:
"Nupedia articles are, in terms of their content, to be unbiased
(except in regard to Feminism, and other "liberal" issues).
There may be respectable reference works that permit authors to take
recognizable stands on controversial issues, but this is not one of
them. This is, admittedly, a difficult ideal to achieve; but we feel
that, where bias can be detected, it can also be eliminated.
This question is a good (albeit not infallible) test of a lack of bias:
"On every issue about which there might be even minor dispute among
experts on this subject, is it very difficult or impossible for the
reader to determine what the view is to which the author adheres ("Liberal"
biases are to be regarded as imperceptible) ?"
This requires that, for each controversial view discussed, the author
of an article (at a bare minimum) mention various opposing views that
are taken seriously by any significant minority of experts (or concerned
parties) on the subject. In longer articles, of course, opposing views
will be spelled out in considerable detail. In a final version of the
article, every party (other than those not considered "liberal")
to the controversy in question must be able to judge that its views
have been fairly presented, or as fairly as is possible in a context
in which other, opposing views must also be presented as fairly as possible.
Moreover, if objections to any particular views are offered (which will
be an essential component to certain articles, e.g., those on philosophy
and public policy), the most serious or relevant objections to other,
opposing views must be offered as well (apart from "liberal"
views) . The reader should, ideally, be given the tools for deciding
the issue; or, failing that, the reader should be introduced to the
problems that must be solved in order to decide the issue.
On any controversial issue, it is usually important to state which views,
if any, are now (or were at some time) in favor and no longer in favor
(among experts or some other specified group of people). But even this
information can and should be imparted in such a fashion as not to imply
that the majority view is correct (unless it is a "liberal"
view), or even that it has any more presumption in its favor than is
implied by the plain fact of its popularity.
To present a subject without bias, one must pay attention not just to
the matters of which views and arguments are presented, but also to
their wording or the tone in which they are mentioned. Nupedia articles
should avoid describing controversial views, persons, events, etc.,
in language that can plausibly be regarded as implying some value judgment,
whether positive or negative, except when the judgment is on some relatively
innocuous matter and is virtually universal. It will suffice to state
the relevant (agreed-upon) facts, to describe various divergent views
about those facts, and then let readers make up their own minds about
what the correct views are...."
Politically Correct Distortions
There are three main problems with the MUC Establishment's politically
correct designation of oppressed groups:
1. Who decides who's oppressed?
2. How do the designated oppressed use the power this gives them?
3. What becomes of their scapegoats?
Who designates the oppressed? Who decides? Feminists? Why them? Feminists
got in at the ground floor of the designation process and they have
assured that women are among the foremost designated groups. But there
was never any balanced public debate about whether men or women (or
both or neither) should be "designated." Some of the other
designated groups (e.g., Lesbians, Homosexuals and the Disabled) seem
to have achieved the status of designated group only as a result of
an alliance with the more powerful Feminists. The Left/Liberal coalition
(which is prominent in such contexts as US Democratic Party conventions)
is basically an agreement between various designated groups to support
each other's political demands, on the whole. This gives Homosexuals
and Lesbians and the Disabled an interest in supporting Feminists politically.
In addition, Lesbians are prominent among the Feminist leadership.
The second problem is that designated groups (women, ethnic minorities,
the disabled, homosexuals, lesbians, and so on) become established PR
agencies and lobbyists for their members.
These agencies have a sort of "gravitational" force which
they exert on the truth, bending it in their direction. Thus their PR
dominates the media, which sometimes acts as if few women ever do anything
wrong, especially where domestic violence is concerned. This gulf between
the official line and reality was a feature of Communist Eastern Europe,
and of George Orwell's book 1984. The discrepancy between propaganda
and truth in such countries is probably one of the main causes of right-wing
extremism, when it occurs.
The third problem with Designated Groups, as discussed below, is this
that approach to Human Rights creates a set of scapegoats comprised
of people who don't fit into any of the designated groups.
The Establishment theory is that they are the ones who are rich and
powerful in society – but only some of them are rich and powerful.
What about poor white males, for example? Men and whites are both politically
incorrect if they assert their rights. Any semi-intelligent Feminist,
however, can sling off at white men and get away with it because white
men have become virtual devils.
The source of right wing extremism
The tendency to look for victims and designate them as an oppressed
group has even invaded the sphere of international relations. The Stratfor
web site (www.stratfor.com) discussed this in the article U.S. Overlooks
Underlying Causes of Asian Conflicts, August 13th, 1999:
This trend also places the foreign policy of the United States and
other nations in a position to be more easily manipulated by a good
PR campaign. Whoever appears to be the victim gets the support.
This is a media-driven phenomenon, as is its more pervasive counterpart
in domestic politics. Television studios package international issues
in aggressor/victim terms, the electorate believe the picture presented
them, and the politicians respond to pressures from their constituents.
That's how it works and Feminists know it.
Feminists dominate society with their propaganda. Of course, they
deny that and assert that the Right dominates. Yet, paradoxically, any
group which can convince the education system it is oppressed is allowed
by the media, educators and the government to disseminate its propaganda
as if it were God's Truth.
We see it in American and British television programmes all the time.
For example, on the American station ABC's Sunday Evening News, Monday
November 15th, 1999 (New Zealand time), they presented an item on "America's
Sons" (abcnews.go.com/onair/dailynews/americas_sons.html) which
listed three negative statistics about boys in the USA: they are more
delinquent than girls, commit more murders than girls, and then there
was a segment on boys and suicide. We might expect the third statistic
would be about how boys commit proportionately more suicides than girls,
but that would have put boys into the "victim" role, and in
the Feminist "male = bad, female = good" paradigm boys can't
be victimized more than girls. So what we actually got was a statistic
about how boys' suicides had increased by 112 percent, which Feminists
generally attribute to males' inability to cope with losing their power
over women and, therefore, the result of a masculine flaw rather than
victimization.
It's important not to be naïve about the media. Whoever the owners
may be, the biases of the individual reporters inevitably show through
unless they run directly counter to an important policy concern of the
owners. Journalists are predominantly left/liberal university graduates
who support Feminism. I believe that many journalists are deliberately
biased. Part of my evidence for this is a TV news clip, dating from
the 1960's, where Malcolm X calls on the media to deliberately make
Whites like and value Blacks through positive propaganda about Blacks.
He praises the power of the mass media, giving the example of how the
media were able to make the British love the Russians and hate the Germans
during World War II - and then hate the Russians and love the Germans
during the Cold War. No doubt Malcolm X was right – I'm sure that
modern US TV sitcoms, such as the Cosby Show, give you a much better
image of Black people than you got by reading Noddy books or Kipling's
“Just So Stories” in your childhood, for example.
The Left-Liberal journalists who were prepared to implement such a
policy are very likely to have applied it to other issues, such as Feminism,
since the Victim Coalition bracketed Blacks and Women together in their
propaganda. It is not clear if Malcolm X was inventing a new policy
or reflecting an existing practice amongst his friends in the media.
However, if this has been going on in parts of the media for forty years,
it is bound to have had an effect !
This support has been instrumental in helping make Feminism an Establishment
force in western countries, with a lot of taxpayer and private money
at its disposal, irrespective of the political inclinations of the top
bureaucrats and politicians. Feminists achieved this goal long ago in
western countries, and are in the process of using the United Nations
to penetrate the Third World. Proof of their growing power includes:
1.the number of women's groups operating in a given country;
2.the amount of government money they get;
3.the amount of media coverage they receive;
4.the number of Ministries of Women's Affairs (or the equivalent) operating
in western countries;
5.the number of Women's Studies courses paid for by public money;
6.the amount of Feminist-inspired legislation passed since World War
II;
7.the number of Affirmative Action programmes targeting women;
8.the way that schools slant the teaching of women's issues (as being
self-evidently justified).
Masculists seem to have little hope (or fear) of being seen as a Left-wing
protest group. This is because Feminists dominate the coalition that
forms the backbone of left-wing parties in western countries, thereby
forcing Masculists to seek allies on the right, though not necessarily
on the extreme right.
Compounding the problem facing men is that political correctness has
become a political and economic cornucopia for the victim coalition,
with every conceivable group lining up to get all the political and
financial bounty they can. Some disabled groups are even starting to
assert that their disability is a form of oppression by the able-bodied
majority -- an attempt to cement their place in the coalition that wields
such power over the media and government coffers.
The rich, heterosexual, Anglo-Saxon, able-bodied males connive in
this resource targeting process because it both salves their consciences
and gets them laid. Nor do they feel compelled to aid poor, heterosexual,
Anglo-Saxon, able-bodied males (PHAMs, for short), because they are
competing with them for status, money, and sex. PHAMs don't turn up
as a group outside Congress or Parliament waving banners. But many feel
that the designation process is unfair and resent the way designated
groups use their "gravity" to bend truth and get favoured
treatment.
In the Men's Movement, there is some resentment of the fact that the
only category of men who can attract publicity and money for their health
problems are homosexuals – for AIDS research, publicity and treatment.
It would be good if the Men's Movement could harness this homosexual
political clout for the wider benefit of men's health in general. Unfortunately,
homosexuals are seen by some Men's Movement activists as both closely
allied to the Feminists and hostile to the traditional family.
There is also the problem of homophobia among many Fathers' Rights
activists - often expressed as a concern for traditional family values.
For example, the Men's Centre North Shore, in Auckland, New Zealand,
has refused to treat AIDS as a men's health issue according to a letter
I received from a disappointed member of that organisation. And "Mankind",
the United Kingdom Men's Movement, has associated itself with UK Muslims
combatting the infiltration of homosexual values into Society. Sometimes
it seems as if one has a choice between Leftists who approve of killing
unborn babies, and Rightists who approve of discriminating against -
or beating up - homosexuals. On the other hand, homosexuals are also
wary of being associated with Men's Rights groups because they fear
how their Feminist (especially Lesbian Feminist) allies would react.
This affects academics and public servants, as well, since anyone
who wants a university career or public service promotion has to sign
their integrity away to the Devil of political correctness and ingratiate
themselves with all the designated groups. (That has been my experience,
but it would take another book to tell the whole story!) This gives
members of the designated groups significant blackmail power. But it
also feeds a growing anti-Left sentiment.
Liberals find this right-wing feeling inexplicable. They don't understand
how they help propagate right-wing extremism by their own actions! Poor
white males are, at times, liable to get fed up with this hypocrisy
and unfairness, and that is where modern would-be Hitlers can be expected
to draw their core support from. (See www.backlash.com/book/cycle.html
for similar insights). Affirmative action ("positive" discrimination)
involves quota systems for university enrollments, public service jobs,
etc. Some liberals admit this is unfair to individuals who would have
just scraped in under an unbiased system, but who are of the wrong sex
or race to qualify. Yet they favour this racist, sexist system because
they've got what they want from life, their own children are bright
enough or well enough connected to get on okay in life, and because
of its imagined long-term social effects.
Politically Correct Distortions
But political correctness does have victims: those people whom the
MUC define as "oppressors," thereby making them into scapegoats,
persecuted with the blessing of the Establishment. I am not for one
second denying that some of these people may indeed have been guilty
of carrying out some form of oppression. My point is that all groups
tend to oppress all other groups, given the chance. Political correctness
acts as a smokescreen for certain forms of oppression by taking it for
granted only particular scapegoat groups are capable of oppression.
Ethnic majorities are much more reluctant to make concessions to ethnic
minorities than men are to women – i.e., men need women in a way
that ethnic majorities don't need minorities – so the situation
of women is not identical to that of ethnic minorities.
Western "human rights" legislation, in practice, does not
always help much with issues such as free speech, due process of law,
and so on. The New Zealand Human Rights Commission, for example has
a focus on "Designated Groups" – i.e. groups recognized
by the Establishment as oppressed or disadvantaged. Their aims are very
commendable: to prevent anyone oppressing and scapegoating minority
groups. The classic, prototypical, most repeatedly publicised case of
such oppression is, of course, Nazi Germany. The Nazis, who thought
they were the Master Race, persecuted the Jews and other groups. Certainly
most of us agree that the Nazis were very bad, but in the left/liberal
paradigm of "oppressor = bad, oppressed = good," this meant
Jews were presumed by definition to be good.
But some Jews believe they are God's Chosen People; and how different
is this from the Nazis believing they were the Master Race? As far as
I can see, both ideas are equally racist. This in no way excuses the
Nazis, but it adds much needed perspective: every ethnic group has members
who are racist. Today, however, only the racism of members of the white
majorities in western countries attracts much publicity or self-flagellation.
For example, when I was teaching Mandarin, the national language of
China (the World's most populous nation) in New Zealand, a country of
fewer than 4 million inhabitants, I seemed to be the only one who thought
that my job was language-teaching. Everyone else (from the local Cantonese
community, who usually didn't even know Mandarin, to export-oriented
farmers, to retired diplomats, to the business community) thought that
my job was being deferential to Chinese people. Even the Laotians and
Eurasians I knew seemed to think that they were my boss !
However, I worked in the same building as the Indian High Commission,
and I found that the Indians I came across there had a different attitude:
on occasions when I was having a difference of opinion with my Chinese
colleagues, I suddenly became very popular with these Indians - I don't
know if this was because there were some Indians on the staff of my
school who took an interest in such things.
What happens in western countries is that ethnic minorities, whose
members routinely discriminate against one another in their countries
of origin, join forces to assert their rights against the majority in
their adopted country. This majority lumps them all together as "Africans"
or "Latin Americans," "Pacific Islanders" or "Asians,"
so that is how they start thinking of themselves. This also happens
to other groups such as New Zealanders and Australians abroad. They
get lumped together as "Colonials," "Antipodeans,"
or whatever, and so they end up playing down what divides them and concentrating
on what they have in common. At home, on the other hand, these two nations
engage in continuous – though mostly friendly – rivalry.
The majority in a liberal democracy can exert its collective power
only at elections (i.e., once in three, four, or five years), and at
referendums. And even at elections it cannot choose individual policies
– just packages of policies, wrapped up in the manifestoes or
platforms of particular parties. Those parties may or may not actually
implement particular parts of their manifestoes once in power. So the
majority is not very powerful in any purely electoral way.
Individual members of the majority can and do discriminate against
minorities, but individual members of minorities can and do also discriminate
against members of the majority and of other minorities, as well. In
New Zealand, for example, an ethnically South Asian Race Relations Conciliator,
Mr. Rajen Prasad, ruled that Maoris had discriminated against two White
students in a Polytechnic course in 1998. This must have upset Maori
members of the governing coalition, because the Race Relations Conciliator
had his budget cut and has been unable to follow up complaints since
that time - at least, I think that is the explanation for his failure
to reply to a letter in which I complained about discrimination by some
Asians !
Also, in many countries Asian minorities (like the Jews and the Armenians
in certain countries) often have a higher average income than the majority,
and that gives those minorities behind-the-scenes power (which is part
of what makes minorities such as the Chinese, Jews, and Armenians unpopular
in some countries). Again, I have experiences along those general lines
which it would take another book to relate. Ethnic sources tell me the
Jews are the most powerful ethnic lobby in the USA (after the African-Americans).
An Iranian who had once been a US resident also claimed the Jews control
the media in the States. Are they anti-Semitic, or simply telling the
truth as seen through eyes unclouded by white guilt?
Between elections, it is the pressure groups, the media, the government
bureaucracy, the President or Prime Minister, Cabinet, the government
Caucus and the Congress or Parliament who have the real power. And Presidents,
Prime Ministers, and Cabinets, as we know, do not always keep the promises
that got them elected.
True, members of minorities experience the dominance of the values
and symbols of the majority in many aspects of their daily lives. Many
find this irksome, even oppressive, as they find their own values and
symbols more appealing and even superior to the (to them) alien majority.
This is the common experience of expatriates of all types in all countries.
Majorities also experience much better-publicised mirror-image feelings
toward the minorities in their midst, of course.
In short, political correctness provides a simplified, stereotyped
view of the relationship between minorities and majorities. Being action-oriented,
it requires good guys and bad guys, so it can help the good guys and
punish the bad guys. In the politically correct scheme of things, majorities
are bad guys and minorities are good guys. End of story – except
we have promoted women from majority to minority status, so they can
be good guys, too.
Oppression and Pluralism
One of the fundamental principles of Western culture, of course,
is Pluralism, which presumes competing interests. However, it may be
that the excesses of Feminism will inspire another look at the virtues
and vices of Pluralism. The Feminist view of oppression is simplistic
in the extreme. In her book Polity and Group Difference: A Critique
of the Ideal of Universal Citizenship, Iris Young argues that, since
some groups are relatively privileged while others are oppressed, a
political structure based on universality merely reinforces that inequality.
She makes a case for a pressure-group society (a society composed of
competing pressure-groups) – the very opposite of the "melting-pot"
concept.
“First, the ideal that the activities of citizenship express
or create a general will that transcends the particular differences
of group affiliation, situation and interest has in practice excluded
groups judged not capable of adopting that general point of view; the
idea of citizenship as expressing a general will has tended to enforce
a homogeneity of citizens.... Thus I argue that the inclusion and participation
of everyone in public discussion and decision making requires mechanisms
for group representation. Second, where differences in capacities, culture,
values, and behavioural styles exist among groups, but some of these
groups are privileged, strict adherence to a principle of equal treatment
tends to perpetuate oppression or disadvantage.” (ibid, 118)
What strikes me about this is not so much what the author says as
her unspoken assumptions hidden behind such words as "emancipatory"
and "oppressed." These assumptions are what I want to examine
and question, as much as the actual assertions that Feminists make.
Her ideas amount to the retrospective justification of a process which
is already well underway in western countries – a process which
(I would argue) has led to injustices against men (among other groups).
So it is useful to follow the course of her argument and evaluate it
against the background of the consequences of actually implementing
the ideas she advocates.
Young's basic argument is that universal citizenship is all well and
good in itself, but it is not a panacea for all social ills, though
she does not come right out and say this in so many words. Rather, she
formulates her thesis by claiming certain political tendencies (those
she believes flow from the notion of universal citizenship) are "in
tension with" other aspects of this notion. My strong reservations
about her proposal are based on the following facts:
1.This emphasis on groups diminishes the influence, power and significance
of the individual;
2.Members of one or several pressure-groups representing the so-called
"oppressed" (e.g. disabled Lesbian Feminist ethnic minority
trade unionists), possess more power than those who belong to no, or
few pressure-groups;
3.There is no guarantee that the pressure-groups set up to represent
"oppressed" groups actually represent groups which are in
fact oppressed (e.g. Feminists have formed countless pressure-groups
on the dubious grounds that women are oppressed, yet there are relatively
few groups to represent men, who also have a case to be considered oppressed);
4.Individuals, seeing everyone around them rediscovering their ethnic
roots, are compelled to become more ethnocentric than before because
the prime focus of political expression has become the group –
particularly the ethnic group;
5.People of mixed race who have lost touch with their cultural roots
are forced to assume rather artificial allegiances - emphasising one
part of their ancestry, at the expense of other parts;
6.Encouraging such pressure-group politics accentuates the centrifugal
forces that are always present in every society and this pushes societies
toward civil discord and strife.
Young's argument depends heavily on the standard liberal/left consensus
(as expounded in western universities) about the phenomenon of oppression,
since a major thread of her basic argument against the notion of universal
citizenship is that society contains groups which are oppressed, in
the sense that group members are unable to make their political influence
felt as much as members of other groups are able to do.
According to Young, a group is oppressed when one or more of the following
conditions occurs to all or a large portion of its members: (1) the
benefits of their work or energy go to others without those others reciprocally
benefiting them (exploitation); (2) They are excluded from participation
in major social activities, which in our society means primarily a workplace
(marginalization); (3) they live and work under the authority of others,
and have little work autonomy and authority over others themselves (powerlessness);
(4) as a group they are stereotyped at that same time that their experience
and situation is invisible in the society in general, and they have
little opportunity and little audience for the expression of their experience
and perspective on social events (cultural imperialism); (5) group members
suffer random violence and harassment motivated by group hatred or fear."
(Young 1990,128)
Young (ibid) goes on to list the various groups in the United States
which she considers oppressed. The list is headed by women, and includes
various ethnic groups, plus gays, lesbians, the poor, the working class,
the aged, and the disabled.
The Miriam-Webster Dictionary defines "oppression" as "unjust
or cruel exercise of power or authority." Not all of Young's five
criteria genuinely isolate actual oppression. They are designed to fit
the situation of women in society, as she sees it. Her fifth criterion,
for example, is too loosely worded to be useful – harassment comes
in various forms, physical, verbal, emotional and mental, and it is
not true only the dominant groups in society are ever in a position
to harass others. Her second and third criteria, likewise, have a lot
to do with women, but little to do with oppression as it is usually
understood.
Indeed, by Young's definition many women oppress men. In terms of
criterion (1), men who fight in the front line in wartime, exposing
themselves to fear, physical and psychological privations, and the possibility
of injury, mutilation, paralysis and/or death, are being exploited and
oppressed by women. The situation is particularly clear-cut where women
have/had the vote in the country concerned, and so helped to vote in
the government which ordered the mobilisation of troops; if there were
women in the government who made the decision – and especially
if women make up a majority of the electorate, or the Head of Government
or Head of State is a woman. In recent history, the Falklands War comes
to mind – it came about when in Britain the Head of State, Head
of Government, and the majority of the electorate were all women. The
majority of those who died were men.
The former state of Yugoslavia was western in its culture, but the
civil war there between Serbians, Croats and Muslims was fought largely
by male conscripts (of course). There has been no sign of Feminists
demanding equality of compulsory military service with men on the battlefields
there. Feminist demands regarding military service are generally limited
to the right to a career in the military for women who volunteer. Compulsion
is only for men, as far as Feminists are concerned. Moreover, there
has also been no sign of the women in the various communities being
more willing than their menfolk to adopt a pacifist stance when attacked.
The only sign of women being involved in the fighting was one story
about a single woman sniper. A sniper, of course, is a relatively safe
combatant – even so, this woman was picked out by the media because
she was such an exception to the rule that only men were doing the fighting.
No doubt some of the press also had a hidden pro-Feminist agenda, and
were trying to convey the visual impression that women were doing some
of the dangerous fighting – without actually putting that lie
into words. The case of Israel is often cited as one country where women
are conscripted alongside men. But there, too, it is the men who do
the actual front-line fighting – not the women.
Young's Criterion 4 (cultural imperialism) also applies to men, to
varying degrees in many western countries. As a group, men in such countries
are stereotyped by Feminists and the MUC (Media University Complex)
as potential rapists and murderers – not to mention child-abusers
and wife-beaters ! At the same time their experiences and situation
as men are invisible to society in general. They have little opportunity
and little audience for the expression of their experiences and perspectives
on social events (cultural imperialism), since there are relatively
few pressure groups which represent men's interests.
The Foreword to the New Zealand Human Rights Commission's "Equal
Employment Opportunities Manual" states "Men who are not within
the target groups (the various ethnic and other minority groups) are
not included for special consideration in the manual." So any men
wanting to claim they were being disadvantaged, compared to women in
some particular workplace, would not even be able to file their claim,
let alone prove it.
But can men be disadvantaged? Yes, they can: keep in mind there are
some professions, such as primary and preschool teaching, where the
workforce is overwhelmingly female. There are many men who would rather
teach children than work as a carpenter on a dangerous construction
site. One reason they don't, of course, is that the pay is better for
working in the construction industry. The pay is better for the purely
economic reason that no one would work in such a dangerous, unglamorous
job, otherwise – not because women's work is undervalued, as Feminists
claim. Also, women force men to focus on money more than job-satisfaction
because most women prefer to date, mate and marry men with money –
not men with satisfying, though low paying, careers.
Has Equal Opportunity equalized opportunities?
In this context, I went to this Human Rights Commission to complain
about an all-female courier firm that was reported in a newspaper as
saying they would never hire men. As it turned out, I was not the first
to complain, but the woman I spoke to at the Commission thought it sufficient
to report that the firm said it had been misquoted.
However, she went on to claim that male-dominated management in some
companies sometimes interview women just for appearances' sake –
having no intention of hiring a woman at all. That may well be, but
the implication was that she wasn't going to take very seriously complaints
against female-dominated firms for that reason, as if two wrongs make
a right! That is not the unbiased approach one would expect of a taxpayer-funded
Human Rights Commission, and this bias is a result of men being an invisible
minority in society. I have corresponded with the Human Rights Commission
on various matters since then, and I am certain it is nothing more or
less than a Feminist power-base.
Young's fifth criterion (suffering random violence and harassment
) also applies to men: I have been physically attacked and harassed
by Feminazis (in a female-dominated and left-wing dominated workplace)
who wanted to intimidate a potential Masculist activist and to censor
the expression of views such as those expressed in the present book.
Feminist proposals
Young makes her alternative proposals explicit as follows:
“I assert, then, the following principle: a democratic
public, however that is constituted, should provide mechanisms for
the effective representation and recognition of the distinct voices
and perspectives of those of its constituent groups that are oppressed
or disadvantaged within it. Such group representation implies institutional
mechanisms and public resources supporting three activities: (1)
self-organisation of group members so that they gain a sense of
collective empowerment and a reflective understanding of their collective
experience and interests in the context of the society; (2) voicing
a group's analysis of how social policy proposals affect them, and
generating policy proposals themselves, in institutionalized contexts
where decision makers are obliged to show that they have taken these
perspectives into consideration; (3) having veto power regarding
specific policies that affect a group directly, for example, reproductive
rights for women, or use of reservation lands for Native Americans.”
(ibid, 128-129)
The main problem with the above approach is, as Young admits, the
question of exactly how a society is to determine which groups are oppressed
or disadvantaged. She does provide a working definition of the notion
of oppression itself, but there remains the problem of the lack of an
objective mechanism which a given society can employ to determine who
this definition applies to in its own case.
Young works within a liberal/left university context, with a ruling
consensus about who the oppressors and oppressed are in a given society
– i.e., the victim coalition of women, homosexuals, ethnic/racial
minorities, and the disabled. This is an often simplistic consensus,
as no group is completely powerless, and any group is liable to use
what power it does have to carry out whatever level of oppression it
is capable of, in particular contexts. This consensus is also oppressive
in itself, since it makes it difficult for groups which have not been
awarded the much coveted "oppressed and disadvantaged" label
from persuading anyone of the seriousness of their claims to this status
– particularly if the consensus has already stigmatised them with
the "oppressor" label.
Men have great difficulty being accepted (on the basis of claims they
are being oppressed by women) into the "coalition of oppressed
groups" (a.k.a., the victim coalition), since women have long been
one of the cornerstones of this group and won their status on the basis
of claiming men oppress them! Yet, as we have seen, men are oppressed
in terms of three of Young's five criteria: exploitation, cultural imperialism,
and suffering violence and harassment.
Media Propaganda and Power
At the beginning of this chapter, we talked about the power of one
man with a chainsaw in a forest. In the previous section, we talked
about oppression, which is one type of misuse of power by one person
or group, to the detriment of another person or group. Power is what
politics is all about, and all issues surrounding men's and women's
rights have to do with power.
So, what exactly is power? Power is the ability to do what you want,
and/or to get other people to do what you want them to do. Some people
might make a distinction between these two sorts of power by saying
the ability to do what you want is "autonomy," and "power"
has to do only with relationships between people. Unfortunately, perhaps,
this is a rather naïve viewpoint. Virtually anything you want to
do involves some competition with others, or some minor or major decrease
in their freedom of action or quality of life. So you would have to
be a very powerful person indeed to do anything you wanted, because
a lot of these activities would run into actual or potential resistance
from other people.
Socialisation is largely about learning what the limits are on your
autonomy/power. Catharine MacKinnon and other Feminists talk about this
in the context of gender as a means of limiting women's power. However,
her arguments are one-sided and superficial, as is routinely the case
with Feminist writers. Exactly how powerful was the young man drafted
into the Vietnam War, while his sisters and girlfriend were safe at
home attending Women's Studies courses and the like? Men and women are
both socialised to accept limits to their power, and the myth of the
all-powerful male is one the Feminists have carefully built up to attract
sympathy for women.
The ancient Greek historian, Thucydides, had a very cynical (but valid)
definition of liberty. It went something like this: Liberty is the ability
to restrict the liberty of other people. This is equivalent to denying
the validity of win-win analyses of political change – in other
words, there are always winners and losers.
By this interpretation, for example, the USA is the freest country
on Earth – being the most free from inhibitions from outside forces
on its foreign policy, and also being the most able to impose its interpretation
of moral issues upon the world as a whole. Conversely, Russia is unable
to enforce its interpretation of moral issues even in its own backyard
(e.g., Bosnia and Kossovo), if its interpretation differs from that
of the USA. Russia has had to bow to the economic power of the USA,
who would not be willing to help Russia in its economic weakness were
Russia too independent in the line it took on Kossovo, for example.
And, also in Kossovo, the Serbs were once "free" to oppress
the Albanians and to protect the gypsies, but (at time of this writing)
the Albanians have become "free" to oppress the Serbs and
the gypsies.
Conventional 20th Century liberalism amounts, in practice, to seeking
out oppressed groups and increasing their autonomy. The classic example
of this was the Treaty of Versailles, which ended the First World War
and redrew the map of Europe along largely ethnic lines – breaking
up the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Unfortunately, when this formula is
applied to internal politics, what you end up with is a rump minority
of underprivileged people who fall into none of the categories targeted
for extra compassion and/or resources. The other groups are all organised
and have the ear of the media and the politicians, leaving this rump
disorganised, unempowered, virtually disenfranchised and at the mercy
of the "liberated" minorities, in political terms. In other
words, the victim coalition gained liberation by enslaving the silent
majority.
Suddenly, our democracies begin to look more like dictatorships. In
a dictatorship, it might seem that one person does whatever he/she wants
and has absolute autonomy/power. That is not quite true. Dictators are
lucky if they have even a brief period when they can do absolutely whatever
they like. Then they have to start looking over their shoulder and under
their bed for potential threats to themselves and their country. To
combat these actual or potential threats, Dictators have to be proactive.
They have to form personal and international alliances, placate people,
groups of people and states. They also have to create and disseminate
propaganda to persuade people to agree with them (using the news media,
among other tools).
What distinguishes a dictatorship from a democracy? The major difference,
of course, is the method of bringing about a change of government. Julius
Caesar, Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler are well-known examples of
European dictators whose rule ended violently. Caesar was extremely
popular with sections of his people. It was the elite, rather than his
lesser subjects, who found it necessary to assassinate him – even
though by then they were too late to restore the republic.
But the point of similarity between democracies and dictatorships
I want to concentrate on here is the use of propaganda and the news
media. The news media are very powerful, as Goebbels knew. He was aware
of the need to conceal the "art" of the media professional
from the audience by using historical analogies rather than making blatant
political propaganda. Similarly, the modern western media propagandizes
by choosing what to cover and what questions to ask, rather than by
being blatantly biased in the presentation of what it does cover. The
problem for politically incorrect causes such as Men's Rights has been
how to get covered at all.
If there were various sources of news, if they had very different
viewpoints and if they all had an almost equal share of the "market,"
the problem would not be great. In many small countries, however, the
vast majority of the population gets its major news and political commentary
from one single source. Cable television and satellite television, with
their dozens of channels were rare on the international scene until
fairly recently. Regardless, the western mass media expresses few points
of view, especially on prime-time television. Political correctness
dominates because that is the mindset of most journalists.
What is particularly interesting about the Jews, in this context,
is how they are labeled victims in their role as a minority in western
countries – and so they get very little negative press from journalists
who fear being branded anti-Semitic. Indeed, they have so much power
they are often able to suppress the dissemination of information on
the Nazi Genocide that they disagree with. The Armenians have no comparable
power to suppress Turkish Revisionism that denies the Turkish Genocide
of the Armenians, for example. But, as the saying goes, "those
who do not learn from history are condemned to relive it." Since
Zionist activists do not allow us uncensored access to information about
every aspect of the German Nazi Genocide of the Jews and what led up
to it, we can never really understand what the causes were. If we can't
establish the causes, how can we prevent it from happening again?
But Jews in Israel are seen as "oppressors" of the Palestinians,
and so they get some bad press in the West for that role! I am sympathetic
towards former Likud Party Prime Ministers (such as Benyamin Netanyahu)
of Israel when they complained about anti-Israeli media bias. It's not
so much that I agree with their policies – it's just that they,
like Masculists, come up so often against the wall of simple-minded
media bias that they feel there's almost no point in fighting it head-on.
Another case in point is Bosnia, where the western media has been
biased against the Serbs. Martin Bell was a famous BBC television reporter
who argued within the BBC against their official policy of neutrality.
He eventually left the BBC and went into politics. I heard him in an
interview referring to the Bosnian Serbs as the "bad guys."
His intonation made it clear he meant to have scare-quotes around the
phrase, but it is also clear that that was how the western media –
and hence the western world - actually saw the Bosnian Serbs.
People often say things like "Knowledge
is Power" or "Information is Power," but they seldom
seem to realize this applies to politics as well as to everything else.
The Media – particularly before the advent of the Internet –
controlled information. This seems to have gone to their heads, in many
cases. Some media people have acquired star status. They have seen populist
or right-wing politicians criticise the media, yet they are not aware
of their own bias.
Another example is the well-known Feminist author, Susan Faludi. According
to Laura Taflinger,
"Faludi thinks a journalist's job is to create social change
by educating people and taking the time to investigate things. A journalist
needs to be passionate about a cause, she says."
In the former Yugoslavia, the Serbs and the Croats had virtually the
same spoken language (called "Serbo-Croat"), but the Serbs
wrote in the Cyrillic alphabet (like the Russians and the Bulgarians)
while the Croats used the Roman alphabet. Whether this was cause or
effect (or both), I am not sure, but it is clear the Serbs had closer
relationships to eastern Europe, and the Croats (to the extent the Cold
War allowed) had closer relationships to western Europe. This made it
almost inevitable that the western media would have an anti-Serb bias
– which was exacerbated by the fact that these media people were
mostly based in Sarajevo, in anti-Serb territory.
I am not excusing Serb atrocities. But the agenda of the Serbs appeared
to be to be independent from the Croats and Muslims. The United Nations
and the media, dominated by western interests, decided on a contrary
agenda of forcing the three parties to live together in one country
(Bosnia). Faced with the world community's hostile agenda, it is not
surprising how some Bosnian Serbs may have acted like cornered animals.
Conclusion
With a few exceptions, the Feminist viewpoint now dominates the main
news sources throughout the USA, Canada, Europe, Australia, South Africa,
and New Zealand. This gives them the kind of influence that borders
on the power to dictate what we read, see and hear on the subject. This
raises the question, what has become of our democratic ideals?
Any person or political movement that aspires to fight the values
that have been absorbed into the bosom of the Politically Correct needs
to understand the power of the Media University Complex and the way
it carries out its indoctucation. The PC scenario we live within is
Orwellian in its disregard and contempt for truth. Hence, this book.
Like all wars, the Sex War will be won by proceeding from analysis to
strategy, from strategy to tactics, and from tactics to action.
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Latest Update |
25 February 2019 |
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