Sex sells… but who’s buying?

With all due apologies to Megadeth.

To answer the rhetorical question, though: why, of course, the little people who play Candy Land and the little people whose parents buy them Disney paraphernalia, who are too young to be able to think critically about what such corporations as Disney and Milton Bradley tell them about their bodies. This is one issue on which I agree wholeheartedly and unreservedly with mainline feminism - or, as Mark Shea (who is incredibly good about linking these stories; many thanks t’ ye, Mark) notes, ‘show me a culture that despises virginity, and I will show you a culture that despises childhood’.

I have an infant daughter, who is half-Chinese and has Chinese relatives and roots, and thus is already doomed to identify at least in part with a culture whose feminine ideal body image is already, if you will excuse the grossly litotic usage, on the petite side. From her dad, her genetics will practically ensure that she inherits a Bohemian body build, which is neither small nor fashionable. In addition, she will undoubtedly be exposed to globalising sexual culture which informs both boys and girls, through lifestyle pseudo-leftist ignoramuses like Li Yinhe (to give but one local example) working hand-in-hand with marketers of everything from lipstick to clothes to deodorant, that there is something intrinsically wrong with them if they can’t ‘get laid’ early or often enough. Thus, the commodification of sex is incredibly worrisome to me for a number of very personal reasons; the more so when it is targeted expressly and directly at very young girls!

As Peggy Orenstein writes:

There's ample evidence that the ever-narrowing standard of beauty creates vulnerability in our girls to low self-esteem, negative body image, eating disorders, poor sexual choices. Not to mention the negative impact fat-shaming has on overweight kids. I think a lot about something that Gary Cross, a historian of childhood, once told me: that toys traditionally have communicated to children our expectations of their adult roles. What are we telling girls we expect of them with this?

A conservative American Catholic takes Pope Francis seriously on free trade

Surprising, no? Well, perhaps not so surprising when the conservative American Catholic I am here referring to is named Patrick Buchanan:

"This is called slave labor," said Pope Francis.

The Holy Father was referring to the $40 a month paid to apparel workers at that eight-story garment factory in Bangladesh that collapsed on top of them, killing more than 400.

"Not paying a just wage ... focusing exclusively on the balance books, on financial statements, only looking at personal profit. That goes against God!"

The pope is describing the dark side of globalism.

Why is Bangladesh, after China, the second-largest producer of apparel in the world? Why are there 4,000 garment factories in that impoverished country which, a few decades ago, had almost none?

Because the Asian subcontinent is where Western brands — from Disney to Gap to Benetton — can produce cheapest. They can do so because women and children will work for $1.50 a day crammed into factories that are rickety firetraps, where health and safety regulations are nonexistent.

This is what capitalism, devoid of a conscience, will produce.

Please do read the entire article; it is a brilliant demonstration of a conservatism that actually seeks to conserve things of real value: people and communities and traditions. And it is a conservatism which, unlike so many other conservatisms in the United States, is clear-eyed about the threats capitalism and ‘free trade’, freed from any consideration of situated ethics, pose to all three of the above. Speaking as a left-winger, I believe we could stand to have more Pat Buchanans in this country.

EDIT: The death-toll in the Dhaka factory has risen to 580, with no indication of it being a final figure. A terrible tragedy, but a preventable one: we needn’t continue running in this ridiculous race to the bottom.

Pointless May Day video post - ‘The Almighty Power’ by Chinchilla

An oldie, but a goodie: churning, kinetic power metal with uniquely gritty tenor vocals courtesy of Thomas Laasch, and a distinctly working-class / anti-neoliberal / anti-greed lyrical bent - quite fitting for May Day and the Feast of St Joseph the Worker. Gotta love Udo Gerstenmeyer on this one - please do enjoy!

Online solidarity fund for the Hong Kong dockworkers

A recent update on the Hong Kong dockworkers’ strike - the Wobblies’ International Solidarity Commission has set up an online fund for overseas sympathisers to show their support for the strike, here. All funds raised go to the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions, which is providing logistics, getting out the message about the strikers’ demands and pulling their weight with politicians both in the Fragrant Harbour and beyond. Please do join us!

And, in somewhat related news...

Peter Hitchens writes, in praise of the Guardian:

A word of praise here for ‘The Guardian’ which has once again shown the value of a diverse and adversarial press. Earlier this week ‘The Times’ carried reports which suggested that there was now credible evidence that the Syrian government is using chemical weapons against the Syrian rebels. This view is pretty much shared by the BBC (which has in my view been running a disgraceful and unbalanced campaign for intervention in Syria for many months, way beyond the remit of its Charter obligations) and by many newspapers and politicians. Regular readers here will know that it’s not shared by me, but forget that for a moment and examine the matter for yourselves.

This is important because if such an action could be proven, the USA, Britain and France could get round the difficulty that the UN Security Council will not currently permit intervention in Syria, thanks to the vetoes of Russia and China. Moscow and Peking both feel their goodwill was abused in Libya, where an operation said to be aimed at protecting civilians ended in the overthrow of the Gadaffi state (and its replacement, as it happens, with a lawless chaos, which nobody mentions).

Also, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, as I have pointed out before, has a shrewd feeling that the trend towards over-riding national sovereignty could one day soon be used to overthrow him and his government. Russia is unique in the modern world in not being a global superpower, but in having enough military, economic and diplomatic power to continue to behave as a sovereign nation. This was Britain’s position till the unhinged Suez episode of 1956. After that, we became a sycophantic client of the USA, which showed its gratitude for our loyalty by ushering us brusquely into EU servitude, and backing Irish nationalist revolts against our internal national authority. What a terrible tangle this gets us into, especially when EU and US interests don’t coincide.

I don’t know if Mr Putin cares about what would probably happen to Syria if the rebels won, though if he doesn’t, he should. I fear for the Christian and Alawi minorities if Sunni Muslim radicals, backed by Sunni Saudi Arabia and Sunni Turkey, take over. And who knows what would then happen in precarious Lebanon, where the Shia Muslim Hizbollah would then be in a very sensitive position, deprived of a major ally, presumably next on the Saudi target list, yet still powerfully armed and well-trained?

And then there is Shia Iran - Syria’s principal ally and Saudi Arabia’s principal hate-object ( and probably the real target of all this fuss) . Much could follow from an Assad defeat, and much of it could involve violence and danger. It is time people realised that the Sunni-Shia split, in which Syria is embroiled whether she likes it or not, is now a more dangerous fault-line in the Middle East than the stalemated Arab-Israeli conflict.

...

[A]nyone reporting on such things is entitled to his feelings. More, we should be glad that [Antony Loyd, reporter for The Times] is engaged, and ready to risk himself in the general cause of revealing the true face of the world.

But his editors at home need to be cooler and more dispassionate, especially when so much is at stake.

...

[I]t strikes me that President Assad would need to be exceptionally stupid to use chemical weapons. They are tricky things to use anyway, unstable, hard to transport, apt to decay in storage, unsafe for their users as well as for their victims. That, rather than international convention, is the reason why they have been used so rarely since they were introduced in the 1914-18 war. Mainly designed to be used on battlefields (where by forcing the use of cumbersome and hot protective clothing they can gravely hold up an advancing army) they would provide him with little advantage in the sort of urban war he is fighting. He knows perfectly well that their use would be the pretext for a Western intervention.

On the other hand, the rebels, many of whom aren’t much nicer than Mr Assad, would see many advantages in suggesting to outside observers that such weapons had been used.

I have no idea of the truth, but I would examine the evidence on that basis, and informed by the knowledge we all gained during the Iraq war run-up, that governments don’t always tell the truth.

The entire article is worth reading. I myself feel none too sanguine, to say the very least, about entrusting the fate of the Christians of Syria and the Christians of Iraq who ended up in that country - not to mention the Alawites - to the government of Turkey, which less than a hundred years ago on the selfsame ground so cavalierly butchered a million and a half Christians from elsewhere in their own territory, and then has consistently and continuously lied about it upon the world stage. Much, much less am I comfortable with entrusting their fate to the Saudis, though they are somewhat further off geographically. And Mr Hitchens is perfectly right, of course, that the Shia-Sunni split in the region is potentially far more important to understand than the Arab-Israeli one, especially since Israel and the Salafist or Salafist-sympathising states are finding common ground on this issue in particular.

Medz Yeghern

A terrible tragedy and a new and brutal chapter in the history of humanity opened ninety-eight years ago, when the Young Turk administration of the Ottoman Empire began slaughtering its Armenian population under the guise of conscription into the First World War. On the 24th of April, 1915, the Ottoman Empire rounded up between 235 and 270 Armenian scholars in the capital and later deported them and had them murdered. The Armenian population within the Empire as a whole, having been suspected by the Turkish government of collaborating militarily with the Russians, were first conscripted into forced labour and then variously burnt alive, drowned en masse, gassed, deliberately infected with typhus or forced to march in the Syrian desert until they dropped dead of exhaustion, dehydration and starvation. The Armenian genocide killed off roughly three out of every four Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire; out of a population of two million, one and a half million perished. This was essentially the first modern genocide of the twentieth century - and stands out as an action taken by a militantly secular and nationalist government against an unarmed Christian minority (one belonging, in point of fact, to the first officially-Christianised nation).

To date, only 19 countries other than Armenia have officially recognised the great crime which began in 1915 as a genocide: Uruguay, the Soviet Union (and later Russia), Cyprus, Canada, Lebanon, Belgium, France, Greece, Italy, the Vatican, Switzerland, Argentina, Germany, the Netherlands, Slovakia, Lithuania, Poland, Venezuela, Chile and Sweden. Of the states of the United States, 43 of them recognise the Armenian Genocide.

Turkey and Azerbaijan still officially deny the Armenian Genocide; moreover, Turkey’s government has made concerted and sustained attempts to systematically bribe academics outside Turkey (particularly in the United States) to lend a patina of academic legitimacy to their denialist position, and they have been doing this for the past eighty years at least.

The two main political currents in Turkey - the aforementioned militantly secular nationalism, alongside the political Islamic movement which has found a ready constituency outside Istanbul - much as they may loathe, disdain and oppose each other (for reasons which puzzle me, since political Islam in Turkey in particular has been compromised by the Young Turks’ insistence that Islam is a materialist doctrine, which has made Turkish Islam as a whole far more susceptible to the embrace of global capitalism, NATO-lunacy and a misguided Europhilia), still as a first principle align themselves, theologically, politically and philosophically, against the synthesis of Biblical religion with Socratic-Platonic philosophy which marks the whole of apostolic Christianity. And thus they both still define themselves over-against the first nation ever to promote that synthesis.

Dear readers, do remember Armenia this week.

Off the mark – taking aim at two recent New Statesman articles

Normally, the New Statesman sets a very high standard for reporting. I have an incredibly high respect for Mehdi Hasan and John Pilger, for example, and Nelson Jones is usually quite good at discussing religious topics, though he does retain his own angle with which I am not always in agreement. But two recent articles in particular struck me for their intellectual dishonesty and dearth of critical depth – one by Agata Pyzik on FEMEN (which I myself criticised in a recent blog post), and one by Andrew Zak Williams defending the New Atheists (whom I likewise criticised in the selfsame blog post).

With Ms Pyzik’s article, I am more than somewhat sympathetic, though her arguments in it were still shallow enough to disappoint, since she fails to address some of the most serious concerns about FEMEN raised by their critics, and more damnably fails to take seriously the implications of FEMEN’s public image and stance even within the very socio-political context (that of post-Communist Eastern Europe) which she deems so important. First off, what she gets right, she gets very much right: women in Eastern Europe do tend to pull really short straws. Where I live – in Baotou, Inner Mongolia – the Russian minoriy are not accorded a very high respect, to say the very least. The lucky and affluent amongst them who come here to study often want to stay here and find a Chinese husband, whom, as they are often aware, will treat them with greater respect than men back home do. The not-so-lucky ones end up in brothels – prostitution here is a common enough problem that one of my co-workers, having been mistaken for a Russian, was outright propositioned as one on the street. She is also absolutely right on the money in identifying the cause in the transition from communism to post-communism. This is important for points I make below.

Now let’s get to what Ms Pyzik gets wrong. First off, it is far from clear that either FEMEN’s goals or its targets are suitable even to their own context (with which, having lived in Kazakhstan and having taken a long-standing interest in Eastern European affairs, I have some experience). Why do I say this? Well, let’s have a look at Ms Inna Shevchenko’s own words: she is fighting a ‘war’ (as she herself puts it) in which her primary targets are ‘the three principle manifestations of patriarchy: religion, the sex industry and dictatorship’, and which pits ‘traditionalism against modernity, oppression against freedom, dictatorship against the right to free expression’.

Especially within an Eastern European context – and being from an Eastern European country herself Ms Pyzik is certainly aware of this – this sort of platform is nonsensical. FEMEN are importing a tradition of bourgeois feminism which is a foreign element in the Russophone sphere, and this renders their programme marginal at best, and counterproductive at worst. This is demonstrated best by how the sex industry in Russia came about – it was the post-communist transition which rendered women so vulnerable to exploitation. Under the gangster capitalism which followed shock therapy, in which industries were chopped up and sold at bulk rate prices to foreign interests, the jobs many working-class women held simply vapourised. Suddenly paupers in a system controlled by a handful of oligarchic kleptocrats, they were left with precious few alternatives but the sex industry. The sex industry was at its most powerful only after the Soviets had broken the power of the institutional Church, and only after the Soviets themselves had disintegrated, leaving an open field for the self-proclaimed advocates of ‘freedom’ to turn the entire country into an economic and social wasteland. The sex industry was far from the result of a traditionalist patriarchy, as it were, but the result of a wholly modern one.

For one thing, it is worth note that the Russian Orthodox Church (including such clerics as Fr Vsevolod Chaplin) stood in the middle of this as a bulwark for restoring social justice and putting some brakes on the runaway neoliberalism which had led to the explosion of the sex industry. For another thing, the sort of religious organisations which FEMEN deems ‘patriarchal’ and ‘traditional’ (and therefore regards as enemies) – notably the Roman Catholic Church and the various Orthodox Churches of Eastern European countries – are actually at the very forefront of the campaign to end human trafficking and help its victims to resume normal and healthy lives. One of the biggest networks actively fighting against sex trafficking around the globe is COATNET, which is affiliated with Caritas International – a network of Roman Catholic charities, and one of the most prominent members of COATNET is the Romanian Orthodox Church. The single largest and most-respected organisation in Russia working to combat sex trafficking and the sex industry, the Angel Coalition, maintains active ties with the Russian Orthodox Church on a grassroots level.

Thirdly, with regard to Russian politics, to claim to be against the sex industry and dictatorship, and then turn around and oppose Putin and only Putin, is laughably naïve. I tend to think my options for voting ‘realistically’ in the United States are bad, but our country’s got nothing on Russia. Aside from Putin, you’ve got the old-guard Communists under Zyuganov (the next-most powerful electoral bloc after Единая Россия), then you’ve got the scary-racist Nationalist Right represented by Zhirinovsky and Limunov, and then you’ve got Яблоко and the СПС, the intellectual heirs of the people who drove the getaway car for the shock therapists and the gangsters who came after them. Not a pretty picture at all – and FEMEN and their ideological allies are often seen as enablers of all of the above, the Stalinists, the racists and the neoliberals. Certainly symbolically, FEMEN’s actions should be subject to this sort of scrutiny, particularly in light of the way they took a chainsaw to a cross erected as a monument to the victims of Stalin.

Ms Pyzik subjects FEMEN to critique for going out of their depth and failing to understand the regional limits of their action. Understandable, since such an interpretation would be more sympathetic. I think it could be interpreted, however, that they have the exact opposite problem: they’re out of their depth at home, and perhaps they expect to find more sympathy by attacking fashionable targets abroad – like the Pope (whom they ought to see as an ally in the fight against the sex industry), and like European Muslims. What their followers and what their leader, Ms Shevchenko, said about European Muslims was not only crude, it was deliberately cruel and demeaning (if you think they are being oppressed, why do you go around calling them ‘stupid’?), and it had shades of the logic used by rapists to justify themselves.

The second article, that by Mr Williams, I have very little sympathy with whatever, because it hoists itself quite soundly and quite repeatedly on its own rhetorical petard that ‘nuance and allegations of bigotry make strange bedfellows’. Apart from its own self-righteous and petulant whingeing about how hard the New Atheists have it, never able to catch a break from being criticised (wait, isn’t that the point of having a ‘civilised debate’?), it’s rather laughable that this article uses practically every cheap demagogical trick in the book to make Islam into a vast undifferentiated Other in ways which the likes of the late Edward Said might put into his next book as textbook examples of orientalist thinking. Further, no one I noticed who criticised Sam Harris for saying what he did about racial profiling and nuclear first-strikes – myself included, here – is denying that ‘a religion that harbours such extremes has some explaining to do’. It is merely that we are holding the nouveau atheists and Islam to the same standard.

Let’s take a moment to look at the most brutal tyrannies of our day: North Korea, Turkmenistan, Burma, Zimbabwe and Saudi Arabia. Two of them – North Korea and Turkmenistan – are explicitly atheist, and Zimbabwe has no official religion at all. Burma’s state religion is Buddhism, which still for reasons which downright baffle me still enjoys broad exemption in the West from any discussions of religious extremism – Harris and Dawkins (though not Hitchens, let’s give him points for consistency) are notably silent on that score. Only one of these dictatorships – Saudi Arabia – is Muslim. It is very far from clear that Islam is truly any graver a threat to constitutional order in government, or any more amenable to irrational dogmatism, than is either atheism or Buddhism.

Even – or perhaps we should say especially – Islamic states like Iran are amenable to a robust realist critique. Even if they were pursuing nuclear weapons, a nice little claim which our government likes to trot out every now and again only for an anticlimactic failure to produce anything resembling proof, their reasons for doing so would be entirely prudential, given the gigantic stockpiles of nukes held by two particular not-so-neighbourly neighbours.

And Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens themselves have ‘some explaining to do’, regarding the war in Iraq and its execution. Harris is a torture apologist, there is no getting around it, and he has also made the written claim that the intentions of the Iraq War were purely noble and altruistic. And Hitchens was one of the most influential figures in swaying much of the liberal intelligentsia to support Bush’s murderous folly. They have no room to complain when it comes to irrational support for acts of gratuitous and senseless violence.

EDIT: Looks like I wasn’t the first to the punch on this one. Here is a brilliant takedown of Williams’ article - far better than mine was. Bravo, good sir!