COMENTÁRIO SOBRE AS DECLARAÇÕES DE UM SHEIKH

Este artigo, publicado na revista australiana, Quadrant, aparece no site

de Roger Sandall

Sexualizing everyday life

from Mann and Nabokov to Sheik al-Hilaly

Roger Sandall

My first question is this: was the mad Mufti right?

When Sheik Taj al-Din al-Hilaly said that half-clothed Australian women went around like “exposed meat” inviting rape there was an immediate uproar from all enlightened opinion. Unbelievable! How could anyone say such a thing? Shock-horror was general, and the ugly imagery confirmed a growing suspicion that our Islamic leadership is stuck in the Dark Ages.

But it’s less clear that the Sheik was entirely wrong. Perhaps he could even be seen as a kind of messenger bringing bad news. What he was complaining about, if we’re honest, was a process that has been going on so long, and has now gone so far, that it has become the water we swim in and the air we breathe: a sexually heightened moral environment far removed from any known culture in the past, in which everyday activities like buying a paper or visiting a supermarket continually present us with acres of erotica and exciting flesh—along with once forbidden instincts, thoughts, and desires now normalized and routine.

My second question is this: Has a moral tsunami left our middle classes, the erstwhile custodians of civil order and decency, in ruins? What has been the corrupting role we ourselves have played in this state of affairs—every one of us that is, from the sensation-mongering media at the bottom, to our most celebrated cultural paragons at the top? Recently the papers have been filled with scandalised reports of paedophilia in a surprising variety of milieus. Have the works of even our most gifted artists and exalted writers contributed to a climate in which this too has become inevitable? The Sheik’s comments were tasteless. His language was brutal. But can we truly say he was unprovoked?

Art and innocence

“The kingdom of art increases and that of health and innocence declines.”

So wrote Thomas Mann, and he knew what he was talking about. Moral degeneration and civilisational decline, he argued, come with the ascendancy of the modern artist and the subversive role of art in modern life, a doctrine fully explicit in his novella Tonio Kröger. There he tells us that today’s artists are estranged from life, pursue goals hostile to life, work continually to subvert and destroy the bourgeois firmament, and jeer when it comes tumbling down.

The weird thing is that nobody saw what was happening. The middle classes thought Communist revolution in Russia was out to ruin them—and it certainly made every effort to do so. But capitalism proved more easily debauched than overthrown, and the western bourgeoisie more vulnerable to moral than political subversion. The possibility that the libertine values of artistic bohemia might be more dangerous in the long run, however, never seems to have entered their giddy heads. Artists were exciting. Artists were creative. Artists were free and uninhibited, and art was a raison d’etre much more noble than trade and commerce. As part of this delusion the bourgeoisie came to believe that the counter-cultural creators of beautiful paintings and music must also have beautiful souls.

But this was nonsense. The so-called artist’s ‘gift’, wrote Thomas Mann, has dark roots in a poisoned psyche. “It is a very dubious affair and rests upon extremely sinister foundations.” The world should know that most artists today are sick in mind and spirit, a danger to decent people and heedless of the damage they cause. Plumbers and carpenters and other tradesmen were reliable friends. But artists were the enemy. And because he understood this so clearly, the eponymous Tonio Kröger (the character of a writer in the book who speaks for Mann himself) was embarrassed to find complete strangers sending him letters of praise:

…I positively blush at the thought of how these good people would freeze up if they were to get a look behind the scenes. What they, in their innocence, cannot comprehend is that a properly constituted, healthy, decent man never writes, acts, or composes…”

Literature is not a calling, it is a curse, believe me! It begins by your feeling yourself set apart, in a curious sort of opposition to the nice, regular people; there is a gulf of ironic sensibility, of knowledge, scepticism, disagreement, between you and the others; it grows deeper and deeper, you realize that you are alone; and from then on any rapprochement is simply hopeless! What a fate!

The rise of the paederaesthetic

If art increases as innocence declines, is it a matter of cause and effect? In that case Mann would seem to be supporting Rousseau’s view in the First Discourse that literature and the arts are actually making the world worse. It certainly sounds like that. In Mann’s view the writer stands in permanent moral opposition, sceptical and ironic and relentlessly gnawing away. Worse still: having found a role in Art he may have lost a useful role in Life. The sense of being set apart in an alien moral universe is overwhelming:

You can disguise yourself, you can dress up like an attaché or a lieutenant; you hardly need to give a glance or speak a word before everyone knows you are not a human being, but something else: something queer, different, inimical.

Sexually inimical too—or sexually perhaps most of all. “Is an artist a male, anyhow? Ask the females! It seems to me we artists are all of us something like those unsexed papal singers. We sing like angels; but…” Here Kröger/Mann breaks off. Perhaps from weariness or boredom. Perhaps also because the angelic songs of yearning can hardly be named for what they are. Readers of Death in Venice will however take his meaning. In that story the ageing writer Aschenbach lusts after the youth Tadzio, and the ironic sensibility so ably described, the scepticism, the irony, the extreme narcissism, is combined with the mysterious obsessions of the paedophile—such obsessions being those of the author himself.

* * *

Thomas Mann was a towering figure, intellectually in touch with the major currents of thought in his time, and to try and reduce him to his erotic interests would be ridiculous. His diaries for 1933 and 1934 reveal an observer whose understanding of European realities was second to none. Under the Nazis, he wrote, the Germans were becoming a “wretched, isolated, demented people, misled by a wild, stupid band of adventurers whom they take for mythical heroes.” In his entry for December 15, 1933, Mann reported Max Planck’s meeting with the Führer:

Planck had requested a personal interview with Hitler regarding anti-Semitic dismissals of professors. He was subjected to a three-quarter-hour harangue, after which he returned home completely crushed.

He said it was like listening to an old peasant woman gabbling on about mathematics, the man’s low-level, ill-educated reliance on obsessive ideas; more hopeless than anything the illustrious scientist and thinker had ever heard in his entire life.

Two worlds coming together as the result of the one’s rise to power: a man from the world of knowledge, erudition, and disciplined thought is forced to listen to the arrogant, dogmatic expectorations of a revolting dilettante, after which he can only bow and take his leave.

Stephen Spender wrote of the diaries that “Thomas Mann is a monumental figure of our time. Reading these journals one feels that this monument is made of very hard, resistant, almost cruel material: but under the surface there is a human being who, together with Freud, was the greatest human being this century.”

Under the surface, too, unmentioned by Spender, was a pederastic interest that pervades his work and accurately reflects his inclinations. There is far more to his stories than that. And we might note that he appears to have spent most of his life in chaste frustration. But with their adored ‘Hermes’ (and their slight and ridiculous women) the tales he spun probably helped to disinhibit, to condone, and to legitimise predatory behaviour that mothers with children can only regard with dread.

Mann and Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov once joked that if Lolita had been about a man and a boy he would have had no American publishing problems—and that this was considered a joking matter is almost as revealing as anything else to do with the book. It would of course be ludicrous to suggest a direct connection between the works of these authors and what is now going on in the media and the streets. The self-conscious complexities of literary style alone would exclude all but the most determined reader from the experiences Mann and Nabokov publicise.

Still, there it is, an unbudgeable fact of literary history: two of the most distinguished writers of the 20^th century, the most relentlessly cerebral and self-conscious writers, and the most academically admired and studied writers with whole shelves of earnest research devoted to their books, gave what I shall call “paederaesthetics”—the world of belief and feeling embodied in erotically idealised juveniles frankly treated as sexual prey—an important place. A widely used Simon & Schuster reader’s guide for college students from 1995 tells us that

Lolita, with its murder, paedophilia, sadism, masochism, and even hint of incest, clearly struck a nerve in our society by violating a number of its strongest taboos.

I’d have thought that any healthy society very reasonably should have taboos against murder, paedophilia, sadism, and incest. I am neither a prude nor a killjoy, yet rules against these things seem sensible to me. But the author of this student guide to Lolita apparently feels otherwise, suggesting, in accord with bohemian principles, that the proper function of literature is to overcome such taboos. And perhaps in the case of paedophilia it has succeeded.

The sexualising of everyday life

Our culture is deeply divided. Should we be in favour of public copulation or might that be OTT? If it’s okay for Paris Hilton to make a video of herself having sex and to share it about in cyberspace, why shouldn’t our very own Susie and Jim make one too? A glance at any newspaper shows how each libertine advance ratchets up another without anyone knowing where to stop.

A mass-market color supplement to Sydney’s Sun-Herald for October 29 2006 has the Hilton sisters on the cover, while inch-high yellow lettering shouts “Hedonism is Back, How to Party Celebrity Style”. The following 30 pages promote celebtrashery as a way of life.

Spectrum, a literary supplement of the Sydney Morning Herald edited and written largely by women, moves up a cultural notch and features a story about the female author “of a best-selling erotic novel”. This cites “a man who wishes women would make more noise in bed, and a divorcee in her 50s finding sex on the internet.” Reviews follow, a scene from the film Suburban Mayhem showing a chesty chick with thigh-high boots who, we are told, is “mistress of the SMS, and the local boys are her Praetorian Guard.” Reviewer Sandra Hall reports that “Wanna Fuck? is their call to arms” and that the young woman in question “usually obliges.”

Some relief from this brazen brutishness is provided by the writer Elizabeth Farrelly. Her essay “In search of a cure for paradise syndrome” questions the concept of illimitable human desires, and quotes Raymond Tallis’s thoughts on this subject. But only pages later there’s a full-colour cartoon of a pole dancer getting her rocks off—if that’s the expression I need. This illustrated a contribution by Mr David Marr.

Not wanting to unfairly target a single Sydney newspaper I looked at The Weekend Australian Magazine for November 11-12. The cover is a bold come-on for an article asking if it is right or wrong for women teachers to seduce male pupils. No particular moral stance is adopted, and a number of court cases are examined. Yet by only the second paragraph we are treated to a vivid description of a 37-year-old woman who “wound up in the front seat of her car giving one of her boys oral sex… His friends thought he was ‘a bit of a legend’. He let them in on juicier details, like her glasses fogging up.”

* * *

Now then. Let us stop for a moment and consider. Put yourself in the position of conventionally respectable immigrants from some traditional culture—Sri Lankan Buddhists, Colombian Catholics, Greek Orthodox from the Ukraine—who are used to certain standards of dress and decorum, who go to buy a weekend newspaper, and who are confronted with this sort of thing. We might also mention the good Rabbi and the pious Lubavitchers over my back fence, whose views of female decorum are in all important respects indistinguishable from the Sheik’s.

What conclusion can they possibly draw from the daughters of billionaires fornicating on the web, cries for more noise in bed, shouts of “Wanna Fuck?” from movie stars, a female pole dancer engaged in public masturbation, and Australian women teachers who seduce their pupils and provide them with oral sex? Sheik al-Hilaly may be a boor and a pest. He doubtless has a wider political agenda. But I ask you: if these are not examples of white western women aggressively calling for action, what exactly are they?

Philip Rieff has suggested that we ourselves are the counter-culture now. If that is true, with the values of bohemia saturating the mass media and barely distinguishable from those of the general populace, then we can probably find the reasons for the Mufti’s outburst by gazing thoughtfully in the nearest mirror.

Civility and common sense

Getting the balance right between the animal and the civil has been a problem since civilization began. It hasn’t been easy. There has been a perpetual strain between the puritan tendency and the libertine, in China, in Japan, in India, and in the West as well. Some cultures and some eras veered to the one; some to the other. Alexander Pope saw this perplexity as part of Man’s condition. Created half to rise and half to fall,

He hangs between, in doubt to act or rest;

In doubt to deem himself a God or Beast;

In doubt his mind or body to prefer;

Born but to die, and reasoning but to err;

Alike in ignorance, his reason such,

Whether he thinks too little or too much;

Chaos of thought and passion, all confused;

Still by himself abused or disabused…

For Europe’s educated classes the situation in the 18^th century may have been as near as we are likely to come to a secular world where mind and body, thought and passion, were in some kind of balance—the various worlds of Hume and Rousseau, of Gibbon and Voltaire, of the Baronne de Warens and the Marquise du Deffand—a world where both the conventional Johnson and the promiscuous Boswell could separately thrive and flourish.

* * *

Be that as it may, the usual way of dealing with this matter involved a common sense separation of realms. You didn’t publish entertaining accounts of oral sex provided by female teachers for their male pupils in family magazines. You didn’t have leading novelists advertising the joys of paedophilia. Though one should expect, in a free country, that such matters may be discussed and argued about—the pros (few) and the cons (many)—it has usually also been assumed that this would be constrained by a thoughtful choice of time, place, and occasion.

That’s where we seem to have gone wrong. An abandonment of the common sense rules to be found in hundreds of traditional cultures, and a foolish refusal to confine the sexual world to where it belongs, has led to its being indiscriminately mingled with everything else, 24/7. A burly Middle Eastern peasant in a nightshirt may seem an improbable source of moral guidance, yet in a way that’s what the outspoken Sheik really is—and he’s calling the shots as he sees them. But shooting the messenger is hardly the answer. Sheik Taj al-Din al-Hilaly and his followers are what they are. We are what we have fatefully become.

END

O DEBATE CONTINUA E ATINGE A CASA BRANCA

Para ler o que diz a 'oposição'

'Homosexuality Isn't Natural or Healthy'

Bush's Choice for Top Doc Compared Human Genitalia to Pipe Fittings and Said Homosexual Practices Can Cause Injury or Death

By JAKE TAPPER

June 7, 2007 —

President Bush's nominee for surgeon general, Dr. James W. Holsinger Jr., wrote a paper in 1991 that purported to make the medical argument that homosexuality is unnatural and unhealthy. Doctors who reviewed the paper derided it as prioritizing political ideology over science, and Democratic aides on Capitol Hill say the paper will make his confirmation hearings problematic, if not downright bruising.

Holsinger, 68, presented "The Pathophysiology of Male Homosexuality" in January 1991 to a United Methodist Church's committee to study homosexuality. (Read the paper here.) The church was then considering changing its view that homosexuality violates Christian teaching, though it ultimately did not do so. Relying on footnotes from mainstream medical publications, Holsinger argued that homosexuality isn't natural or healthy.

"A confirmation fight is exactly what the administration does not need," said David Gergen, a former adviser to Presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Clinton, who predicted the paper would cause a "minor storm" among Democrats on Capitol Hill.

"You have to wonder given the quality of some of the nominations that have gone forward recently, whether the selection group in the White House has gone on vacation," Gergen said. "There has been a growing criticism the administration favoring ideology over competence, and this nomination smacks of that."

White House Avoids Direct Response to Paper

In its response to the controversy Thursday, the White House avoided directly discussing the controversial paper.

"Dr. Holsinger has dedicated his life to the care of others and public service and his respect for all is evidenced by his actions and his career ," said White House spokesman Emily Lawrimore. "On numerous occasions, he has taken up the banner for under represented populations and he will continue to be a strong advocate for these groups and all Americans. Dr. Holsinger is a highly respected, well-qualified physician and educator. His impressive medical background, which includes leading one of the Nation's largest healthcare systems, decades of service in the armed forces, along with his commitment to combating childhood obesity, will serve him well as Surgeon General. We urge the Senate for a swift confirmation."

HHS: Paper Not Reflective of Holsinger's Thinking

But Holly Babin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Heath and Human Services -- the agency that will take the lead on trying to achieve Holsinger's confirmation -- insisted that the paper was by no means reflective of Holsinger's thinking.

"That paper was a survey of scientific peer-reviewed studies that he was asked to compile by the United Methodist Church, it's not that he was saying 'this is what I believe,'" Babin said. "It's a reflection of the available scientific data from the 1980s. It should be noted that in 1991, homosexuals were banned from the military and several years before that, homosexuality and Haitian nationality were considered risk factors for HIV/AIDS. Over the last 20 years, a clearer understanding of these issues has been achieved.

Asked about medical experts who disputed that Holsinger's paper expressed opinions timely in 1991 and pressed to explain what Holsinger's views on homosexuality are currently , Babin said, "we look forward to the confirmation process, where we can share Dr. Holsinger's qualifications and views."

Advocacy Groups Protest Nomination

Those answers will likely not quell the controversy. Critics say the paper certainly seems to be written from Holsinger's point of view.

Noting that Holsinger also belongs to a church that offers a ministry to "cure" gays of the sexual orientation, gay and lesbian rights advocates immediately protested Holsinger's nomination. "His writings suggest a scientific view rooted in anti-gay beliefs that are incompatible with the job of serving the medical health of all Americans," said the Human Rights Campaign in a statement. "It is essential that America's top doctor value sound science over anti-gay ideology."

Democrats will likely be sympathetic to such arguments. Holsinger's confirmation hearing, which has yet to be scheduled, will be heard by the Senate Health Committee, chaired by longtime gay rights advocate Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass. Members of the committee include three Democratic presidential contenders -- Sens. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., Chris Dodd, D-Conn., and Barack Obama, D-Illinois -- eager to prove their bona fides during the primary season to the gay and lesbian community.

Holsinger, a professor of preventive medicine at the University of Kentucky College of Public Health, did not return calls for comment.

When announcing his nomination on May 24, Bush said that as "America's chief health educator, [Dr. Holsinger] will be charged with providing the best scientific information available on how Americans can make smart choices that improve their health and reduce their risk of illness and injury."

What Holsinger's Paper Argues

Holsinger's paper argued that male and female genitalia are complementary -- so much so "that it has entered our vocabulary in the form of naming pipe fittings either the male fitting or the female fitting depending upon which one interlocks within the other." Body parts used for gay sex are not complementary, he wrote. "When the complementarity of the sexes is breached, injuries and diseases may occur."

Holsinger wrote that "[a]natomically the vagina is designed to receive the penis" while the anus and rectum -- which "contain no natural lubricating function" -- are not. "The rectum is incapable of mechanical protection against abrasion and severe damage ... can result if objects that are large, sharp or pointed are inserted into the rectum," Holsinger wrote.

The cardiologist details many different diseases gay men can catch, and several sexual practices they may engage in, including "anal eroticism," which can lead to injuries and even death. "From the perspective of pathology and pathophysiology, the varied sexual practices of homosexual men have resulted in a diverse and expanded concept of sexually transmitted disease and associated trauma ?"

In the context of the larger argument in his church as to whether homosexuality should be accepted, Holsinger presented a medical and scientific argument that anal intercourse was not natural.

"It is absolutely clear that anatomically and physiologically the alimentary and reproductive systems in humans are separate organ systems, i.e., the human does not have a cloaca," he said, referring to the posterior orifice that serves as the one opening for genital, urinary and intestinal tracts in amphibians, birds and reptiles. The surgeon general nominee wrote that "even primitive cultures understand the nature of waste elimination, sexual intercourse and the birth of children. Indeed our own children appear to 'intuitively' understand these facts."

A Political Agenda?

Professor Eli Coleman, Director of the Program in Human Sexuality at the University of Minnesota Medical School said that the paper seems to have a pre-1970s view of human sexuality. "I an't imagine that any scientific journal would be able to publish this material because of its very narrow views of homosexuality," he said.

In fact, if one of his students handed the paper in, Coleman would give it a failing grade, he said. "I find it rather outdated in terms of its scientific knowledge and also narrow in its view of homosexuality," Coleman said. "It concerns me because I think our public policy really should be based upon best available science."

"It's a totally faulty paper. The man doesn't know anything about human sexuality," said June M. Reinisch, Ph.D., director emeritus of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender & Reproduction. "There's clearly a political agenda in this paper. This is not a scientific paper."

Paragraph by paragraph, Reinisch said Holsinger presents faulty arguments. Many homosexuals do not engage in the sexual act he criticizes; 40 percent of heterosexuals do. "It seems to me he's arguing the only way reproduction happens is in a loving heterosexual environment which is of course not true," Reinisch said, noting artificial methods, rape and one-night stands.

Reinisch, who was director of the Kinsey Institute when Holsinger wrote this paper, said that if Holsinger "is going to come up with this position in 2007 I think I can clearly say that he is not qualified to be surgeon general."

Holsinger holds a doctorate in anatomy and physiology and an M.D. from Duke University. He spent much of his career working for the Veteran's Health Administration. From 2003 to 2005 he was Kentucky's secretary of the Cabinet for Health and Family Services.

Copyright © 2007 ABC News Internet Ventures

PATHOPHYSIOLOGY OF MALE HOMOSEXUALITY

PATHOPHYSIOLOGY OF MALE HOMOSEXUALITY

Prepared for the
Committee to Study Homosexuality of The United Methodist Church
by James W. Holsinger Jr., M.D.
Committee Member
January 14, 1991

During the course of the meetings of the Committee to Study Homosexuality, biology has come to mean the nonpsychological causation of homosexuality. However, biology also means “the division of physical science which deals with organized beings or animals and plants, their morphology, physiology, origin, and distribution” (Oxford English Dictionary, 1971). I believe that we must seriously consider the scientific disciplines of anatomy (structure or morphology), physiology (function), pathology (abnormal anatomy), and pathophysiology (abnormal function). Not to do so would simply fail to be true to our charge as a committee. There is absolute consensus in the scientific community concerning the structure and function of the human alimentary [pertaining to the digestive tract] and reproductive systems. These two systems are absolutely separate since the human does not possess a cloaca. Reproduction can occur only by utilizing the reproductive system, requiring both the female ovum (egg) and the male sperm. Ova are fertilized naturally in the fallopian tubes of women following sexual intercourse by the sperm which transits through the vagina and uterus following release from the penis. Although artificial methods are available and used, the anatomy and physiology of humans have resulted in a natural means for conception. The structure and function of the male and female human reproductive systems are fully complementary. Anatomically he vagina is designed to receive the penis. It is lined with squamous epithelium and is surrounded by a muscular tube intended for penile intromission. The rectum, on the other hand, is lined with a delicate mucosal surface and a single layer of columnar epithelium intenuea primarily for the reabsorption of water and electrolytes. The rectum is incapable of mechanical protection against abrasion and severe damage to the colonic mucosa can result if objects that are large, sharp, or pointed are inserted into the rectum (Agnew, 1986). The anus and rectum, unlike the vagina contain no natural lubricating function. Thus insertion of unlubricated objects or inadequate dilation of the anus before insertion of a large object can result in tissue laceration. “The internal and external anal sphincters are elastic rings of muscle which generally remain tightly constricted except during defecation. The anal sphincters are also intended for material to pass through them in a direction that leads out of the body. When an attempt is made to insert something in the reverse direction, the muscles of the sphincter constrict” (Agnew, 1986). From the perspective of pathology and pathophysiology, the varied sexual practices of homosexual men have resulted in a diverse and expanded concept of sexually transmitted disease and associated trauma. “Four general groups of conditions may be encountered in homosexually active men: classical sexually transmitted diseases (gonorrhea, infections with chlamydia trachomatis, syphilis, herpes simplex infections, genital warts, pubic lice, scabies); enteric diseases (infections with Shigella species, Campylobacter jejuni, Entamoeba histolytica, Giardia lamblia, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, hepatitis non-A, non-B, and cytomegalovirus); trauma (fecal incontinence, hemorrhoids, anal fissure, foreign bodies, rectosigmoid tears, allergic proctitis, penile edema, chemical sinusitis, inhaled nitrite burns, and sexual assault of the male patient); and the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS)” (Owen, 1985). A study of sexually transmitted diseases in heterosexuals, bisexuals and homosexuals reported from Copenhagen in 1988 (Christopherson), demonstrated that the profile of diseases was strongly correlated to sexual lifestyle. “Amoebiasisa and giardiasis were found respectively in 31.9% and 13.8% of homosexuals. None of the heterosexuals had pathologic protozoa … Among males with homosexual partners, 14% had rectal infections. Gonococcal and chlamydial infections were equally frequent. Three percent had symptomatic anorectal herpes simplex infection and 11% anal warts…Urethral gonorrhea and/or chlamydia infections were diagnosed in 39% of heterosexuals compared to only 10% of homosexuals and bisexuals. Twelve percent of the homosexuals had untreated early syphilis, whereas syphilis was exceptional among heterosexuals. The total burden of infections expressed as the actual number of infections was largest among homosexuals, 40.4%, 22.4%, and 5.3% having one, two, and three infections respectively.” In addition to infection, trauma and tumors are the primary problems related to the anorectum in homosexual men. “Consensual penile-anal intercourse can be performed safely provided there is adequate lubrication. Few anorectal problems and no evidence of anal-sphincter dysfunction are found in heterosexual women who have anal-receptive intercourse. However, forceful anal penetration without lubrication against a resistant sphincter will result in abrasive trauma, causing fissures, contusions, thrombosed hemorrhoids, lacerations with bleeding, pain, and psychic trauma” (Bush, 1986). The most severe type of anorectal trauma follows fist fornication which during the 1970s was practiced by approximately 5% of the male homosexual population (Geist, 1988). It should be noted that this activity is occasionally practiced by heterosexual and lesbian couples. This technique of anal eroticism involves having the partner insert their hand and forearm into the rectum for erotic stimulation. “The insertion of such a large object as a hand or fist creates the potential for rupture of the rectum or severe damage to the anus or rectal walls” (Agnew, 1986). “Participants frequently use drugs to produce inhibition or relaxation, thereby clouding appropriate responses to painful stimuli. Injuries sustained in this sexual activity generally tend to be severer and account for most sphincter injuries, as well as a disproportionate number of the lacerations, perforations, and deaths seen in connection with anal eroticism” (Geist, 1988). In addition to infections and trauma, tumors are a definlte rlsk for homosexual men. “Homosexual behavior in men is a risk factor for anal cancer. Squamous-cell anal cancer is also associated with a history of genital warts, an association suggesting that papillomavirus infection is a cause of anal cancer” (Daling, 1987). Anal warts are commonly found among individuals who practice anal intercourse and only rarely found among heterosexuals practicing vaginal intercourse. “In one series of 260 homosexual men seen by proctologists, 134 (51.5 percent) had anal warts. They may occur anywhere in the anal-genital area but are particularly common in the anus of homosexual men” (Quinn, 1984). This infection appears to be correlated with the higher incidence of anal cancer in homosexual men. At our Boston meeting, we spent some time discussing the complementarity of the human sexes. Although one could gather from the discussion of the consultants in scripture, theology, and Christian ethics that there may be some lack of assurance that the human sexes complement each other, I believe that it is possible to argue succinctly from an anatomical (structure) and physiological (function) point of view that the human sexes are indeed complementary. It is absolutely clear that anatomically and physiologically the alimentary and reproductive systems in humans are separate organ systems; i.e., the human does not have a cloaca. Likewise it is clear that even primitive cultures understand the nature of waste elimination, sexual intercourse, and the birth of children. Indeed our own children appear to “intuitively” understand these facts. I think we should note that these simple “scientific” facts are the same in any culture — patriarchal or matriarchal, modern or primitive, Jewish or gentile, etc. The anatomic and physiologic facts of alimentation and reproduction simply do not change based on any cultural setting. In fact, the logical complementarity of the human sexes has been so recognized in our culture that it has entered our vocabulary in the form of naming various pipe fittings either the male fitting or the female fitting depending upon which one interlocks within the other. When the complementarity of the sexes is breached, injuries and diseases may occur as noted above. Therefore, based on the simplest known anatomy and physiology, when dealing with the complementarity of the human sexes, one can simply say, Res ipsa loquitur — the thing speaks for itself! January 14, 1991 BIBLIOGRAPHY Agnew, Jeremy, Hazards Associated with Anal Erotic Activity. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 15:307-314, 1986. Barone, James E. and Nealon, Thomas F., Jr., Management of Foreign Bodies and Trauma of the Rectum. Surgery,Gynecoloqv and Obstetrics, 156:453-457, 1983. Busch, David B. and Starling, James R., Rectal Foreign Bodies: Case Reports and a Comprehensive Review of the World’s Literature. Surgery, 100:512-519, 1986. Bush, Robert A., Jr., and Owen, William F., Jr., Trauma and Other Noninfectious Problems in Homosexual Men. Medical Clinics of North America, 70:549-566, 1986. Christopherson, Jette, et al, Sexually Transmitted Diseases in Hetero-, Homo- and Bisexual Males in Copenhagen. Danish Medical Bulletin, 35:285-8, 1988. Daling, Janet R., et al, Sexual Practices, Sexually Transmitted Diseases, and the Incidence of Anal Cancer. New England Journal of Medicine, 317:973-977, 1987. Eckert, William G., And Katchis, Steven, Anorectal Trauma. American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Patholoqy, 10:3-9, 1989. Elam, A.L., and Ray, V.G., Sexually Related Trauma: A Review. Annals of Emergency Medicine, 15:576-584, 1986. Geist, Richard F., Sexually Related Trauma. Emerqency Medicine Clinics of North America, 6:439-466, 1988. Patton, Harry D., et al, Textbook of Physiology, 21st ed., Philadelphia, W. B. Saunders Co., 1989, pp. 1263-1460. Quinn, Thomas C., and Holmes, King K., Proctitis, Proctocolitis, and Enteritis in Homosexual Men. IN: Sexuallv Transmitted Diseases, ed. by Holmes, King K., et all New York, McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1984, pp. 672-691. Torre, Carlo, Delayed Death from “Fisting.” American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology, 8:91, 1987. Williams, Peter L., et al, Gray’s Anatomy, 37th ed., Edinburgh, Churchill Livingstone, 1989, pp. 1369-77, 1424-47. Zinner, Stephen H . , Sexually Transmitted Diseases in Homosexuals. Chapter 8 , IN: STDs: Sexually Transmitted Diseases, New York, Summit Books, 1985, pp. 102-114.

COMPORTAMENTO SEXUAL E SAÚDE

SODOMY: A PUBLIC HEALTH RISK MEN: - A 1997 study in British Columbia found the life expectancy of men who engage in sodomy to be comparable to that of the average Canadian man in 1871. Researchers estimate that nearly half of the 20 year old men currently engaging in sodomy will not reach their 65th birthday.1 - Ninety-five percent or more of the AIDS infections among gay men result from receptive anal intercourse.2 - The risk of anal cancer "soars" by nearly 4,000% for men who have sex with men. The rate doubles again for those who are HIV positive. A Michigan homosexual newspaper admits there is no such thing as "safe sex" to prevent this "soaring" cancer risk. Condoms offer only limited protection.3 - Homosexual men face a significantly higher risk of HIV/AIDS, hepatitis, anal cancer, gonorrhea and gastrointestinal infections as a result of their sexual practices.4 - Men who engage in sodomy are 860% more likely to contract a sexually transmitted disease (STD), increasing up to 500% their risk of contracting HIV/AIDS. Men who commit acts of sodomy with men have large numbers of anonymous partners, which can result in rapid, extensive transmission of STDs. Control of STDs is a central component of HIV infection prevention in the United States; resurgence of bacterial STDs threatens national HIV infection prevention efforts.5 - Anal Human Papillomavirus (HPV) infection is nearly universal among HIV-positive homosexual or bisexual men and about 60% in HIV-negative men exhibiting the same sexual behavior.6 WOMEN: - Many innocent victims suffer the health consequences associated with sodomy as a result of blood transfusions, rape and having normal sexual relations with those who have committed unnatural relations with others. While men of all ages who commit sodomy with other men remain at an alarming risk, young bisexual men are said to be a significant "bridge" for HIV transmission to women.7 - Women who commit sex acts with other women face a significantly higher risk of bacterial vaginosis, breast cancer and ovarian cancer than heterosexual women.8 - The spread of Human Papilomavirus (HPV) is not prevented by condoms. The persons most susceptible to cancer associated with HPV are young women (under 20) and people who practice anal intercourse.9 - Women who engage in receptive anal sex are at a higher risk for contracting anal cancer. In fact, in the U.S. general population, anal cancer is more prevalent among women than men — between 1.5 and 2 times more common, perhaps because more women than men engage in receptive anal sex.10 - The following chart provides a broad synopsis of medical problems related to sodomy:11 Sex Practice: Potential Consequences: 1. Close Body Contact 1. Pubic lice 2. Scabies (mites) 3. Fungal Infections 2. Performer of Oral Sex 1. Oral gonorrhea 2. Oral lesions from herpes, HPV (warts), chancroid, lymhogranuloma venereum, or granuloma inguinale. 3. Nongonolococcal pharyngitis from chlamydia, other STD's 4. Syphilis 5. Hepatitis B 6. Enteric (intestinal) infections 3. Receptive Anal Intercourse 1. Traumatic proctitis 2. Rectal gonorrhea 3. Anal warts 4. HIV/AIDS 5. Nonspecific procitis (from chlamydia and other STDs) 6. Anorectal herpes 7. Anorectal syphilis 8. Hepatitis B 9. Rectal trichomoniasis 10. Lymphogranuloma venereum 11. Anorectal granuloma inguinale 12. Anorectal chancroid 13. Cytomegalovirus 14. Anorectal candidiasis 4. Receptive Manual-Anal Intercourse 1. Enteric (intestinal) infections 5. Receiver of Oral Sex 1. Physical abrasions 2. Bites 3. Herpes 4. Urethritis from various STDs 6. Insertive Anal Intercourse 1. Nongonococcal urethritis 2. Genital herpes 3. Molluscum contagiosum 4. Genital warts 5. Syphilis 6. Trichomoniasins 7. Epididymitis and/or proctitis 8. Fungal infections 9. Lymphogranuloma vencreum 10. Granuloma inguinale 11. Chancroid 12. Hepatitis B 13. HIV/AIDS 7. Oral-anal Intercourse 1. Enteric (intestinal) infections 2. Shigellosis 3. Campylobacter fetus (bacteria) 4. Enterogenic E. coli bacteria 5. Hepatitis (A, B, and others) 6. Amebiasis 7. Giardiasis 8. Salmonellosis 9. Enterobius vermicularis (parasite) 10. Oral warts 11. Oral gonorrhea 12. Syphilis 13. Lymphogranuloma venereum 14. Oral granuloma inguinale 15. Oral chancroid 16. HIV/AIDS 17. Herpes 18. Anorectal meningococcal infection 1. International Journal of Epidemiology, Vol 26, 657-661, "Modelling the Impact of HIV Disease on Mortality in Gay and Bisexual Men."" 2. Michael Fumento, "AIDS: Are heterosexuals at Risk?" Commentary 84, (November, 1987) pp. 22-23. 3. Between the Lines, "Anal Cancer and You," Sept. 29, 2000. 4. Medical Institute of Sexual Health, "Health Implications Associated with Homosexuality," 1999. 5. Centers for Disease Control, "Resurgent Bacterial Sexually Transmitted Disease Among Men Who Have Sex With Men," September 10, 1999. 6. Infectious Disease News, "Because of HPV, anal cancer screening indicated for certain high-risk groups," October, 1997 7. Manila Bulletin (Philippines), "Bisexuals Serve as 'Bridge' Infecting Women With HIV," July 30, 2000 8. Medical Institute of Sexual Health, "Health Implications Associated with Homosexuality," 1999. 9. WebMD Forum: "HPV and Cervical Cancer with John R. Diggs, Jr., M.D.," April 7, 2000. 10. Infectious Disease News, "Because of HPV, anal cancer screening indicated for certain high-risk groups," October, 1997 11. DG & Altman Ostrow, "Homosexual Behavior and Sexually Transmitted Diseases." New York: McGraw Hill, 1990. pp. 61-69. Family Policy Network: http://familypolicy.net/us

CASO PARA RIR? OU MATA MESMO?

O artigo aqui reproduzido trata da questão levantada no meu comentário n'O Insurgente ao post de Pedro Sette Câmara, 'Bem No Alvo'. Explica em mais pormenor porque o comportamento da maioria dos homosexuais constitui um perigo para eles próprios e para a saúde pública.

STRATEGY in the TRENCHES

The following was written as a response to a response to an email on hate-crime laws.

If you are one who supports homosexuality as a legitimate lifestyle, please tell the public just what that lifestyle entails. The attached *.pdf article gives a shot at it. Also available in *.html at http://theroadtoemmaus.org/RdLb/22SxSo/BroSx/Html/Strtgy1pg.htm

The article notes sexual behaviors typical of homosexual persons:

Around 99% of homosexual males engage in oral sex;

91% engage in anal sex;

82% engage in 'rimming', touching the anus of one's partner with one's tongue and inserting the tongue into the anus;

22% engage in 'fisting', inserting one's fist into the rectum of the partner;

23% engage in 'golden showers', urinating on each other;

4% engage in 'scat', the eating of feces, and in 'mud rolling', rolling on the floor where feces have been deposited.

These above figures are from one of the largest studies on the subject by two homosexual authors, not by rigid, right-wing, fundamentalist Christians.

Some, perhaps all, of these listed behaviors are being taught openly in Massachusetts public schools to children as young as 14, and maybe younger -- proving that all this is not just about what happens in someone's bedroom. It is about what happens in lots of public places.

Visit http://www.article8.org/ and http://www.parentsrightscoalition.org/ for more details. Search, e.g., for 'fistgate'.

The goal of homosexual activists is that of Alfred Kinsey and SIECUS, unlimited sexual freedom cradle-to-grave.

I understand that homosexual persons engage in many activities other than these, but it is only the sexual behaviors that are in question.

Love is not an issue between us, neither is compassion or inclusiveness, if defined consistently with the law and grace of God. Only specifically sexual behavior. I applaud that homosexual men form choirs, have clubs, eat meals together, and love each other. I love my father and my brothers, and they love me. None of those is the issue at stake if they are not sexualized.

Clarity always favors truth, unclarity always favors falsehood. The public must have clarity on the item homosexual persons want the public to approve (in this case homosexual behavior) or the public discussion cannot proceed (and has not proceded) either rationally or compassionately.

So please tell the public whether these are the behaviors you understand to be more or less typical of homosexual persons. If this list is not accurate, please supply the public with the accurate list, and explain why the two authors noted above gave us this one (for starters).

And, please tell the public which of these behaviors you think God wants to bless, and which you think the Church ought to bless.

If the above list is accurate, can you tell the public what the health consequences are of relating sexually in these ways?

And concerning hate-crime laws, the law is engineered to make it illegal to have an honest discussion of the issues. One cannot challenge the homosexual agenda without having the enforcing gun of the law pointed at one. That is commandeering the law of the land in a treasonous manner -- to subvert our constitution and the most precious aspect of a democratic republic -- the protection by law of open, honest, uncoerced public discussion of public issues. The homosexual agenda is all about public policy, and hardly at all about one's bedroom.

If the facts show that I am wrong, I will change my mind.

I offer a challenge to homosexual supporters: You and I are on opposite sides of the homosexual issues. But if the evidence should show that God approves of homosexual behavior, and that that is a safe way to engage sexually, then I will stand with you. On the other hand, if the evidence should show that God does not approve of such behavior, or that such behavior is health-eroding, not health-promoting, I ask, would you be willing to reconsider your position?

You can read much more at http://theroadtoemmaus.org/EM/ShpMl/WinSxWrs.htm

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

SOBRE A FALSA CLIMATOLOGIA

THE GLOBAL WARMING SCAM (Reprinted from Melanie Phillips’ Diary, by permissio and with thanks)

You know how we’re told sixty times per minute that man-made global warming is no longer just a theory but it’s now demonstrable fact, and that anyone who contradicts this is clinically insane because there’s a consensus of all scientists that it’s happening and only about 2.5 scientists on the entire planet disagree and they’re in the pay of Big Oil anyway so we can forget about them; and so the debate is TOTALLY OVER, says the BBC, which has been told that it is authoritatively by Very Important Scientists, so that the ‘impartial’ and ‘objective’ BBC says that it no longer needs to give us a balanced argument about climate change because there just isn’t any reputable scientific opposition to the proven facts about seas rising and ice melting and hurricanes happening, all because of the human race and its foul and filthy habits of combustibles, cars and capitalism?

Well, read this remarkable article in Canada’s National Post by R. Timothy Patterson, professor and director of the Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Centre, Department of Earth Sciences, Carleton University. This is what Prof Patterson says:

In a series of groundbreaking scientific papers starting in 2002, Veizer, Shaviv, Carslaw, and most recently Svensmark et al., have collectively demonstrated that as the output of the sun varies, and with it, our star’s protective solar wind, varying amounts of galactic cosmic rays from deep space are able to enter our solar system and penetrate the Earth’s atmosphere. These cosmic rays enhance cloud formation which, overall, has a cooling effect on the planet. When the sun’s energy output is greater, not only does the Earth warm slightly due to direct solar heating, but the stronger solar wind generated during these “high sun” periods blocks many of the cosmic rays from entering our atmosphere. Cloud cover decreases and the Earth warms still more. The opposite occurs when the sun is less bright. More cosmic rays are able to get through to Earth’s atmosphere, more clouds form, and the planet cools more than would otherwise be the case due to direct solar effects alone. This is precisely what happened from the middle of the 17th century into the early 18th century, when the solar energy input to our atmosphere, as indicated by the number of sunspots, was at a minimum and the planet was stuck in the Little Ice Age. These new findings suggest that changes in the output of the sun caused the most recent climate change. By comparison, CO2 variations show little correlation with our planet’s climate on long, medium and even short time scales. In some fields the science is indeed ‘settled.’ For example, plate tectonics, once highly controversial, is now so well-established that we rarely see papers on the subject at all. But the science of global climate change is still in its infancy, with many thousands of papers published every year. In a 2003 poll conducted by German environmental researchers Dennis Bray and Hans von Storch, two-thirds of more than 530 climate scientists from 27 countries surveyed did not believe that ‘the current state of scientific knowledge is developed well enough to allow for a reasonable assessment of the effects of greenhouse gases.’ About half of those polled stated that the science of climate change was not sufficiently settled to pass the issue over to policymakers at all. Solar scientists predict that, by 2020, the sun will be starting into its weakest Schwabe solar cycle of the past two centuries, likely leading to unusually cool conditions on Earth. Beginning to plan for adaptation to such a cool period, one which may continue well beyond one 11-year cycle, as did the Little Ice Age, should be a priority for governments. It is global cooling, not warming, that is the major climate threat to the world, especially Canada.

When you’ve digested that, allow your gaze to settle mid-text on the list of previous Post articles in its series about the ‘deniers’, the scientists who are outside this fabled ‘consensus’ on global warming. Read those articles and you will discover, as did to his astonishment the journalist who wrote them and who had previously accepted the ‘consensus’ as true and settled fact, that more and more of the most distinguished names in climate science around the world are saying that the theory is total junk — and who, moreover, have given devastating evidence of the way the global warmers have falsified the evidence to create an entirely spurious, anti-scientific and deeply dishonest panic.

There’s this article, for example, about Duncan Wingham, Professor of Climate Physics at University College London and Director of the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling.

Last summer, Dr. Wingham and three colleagues published an article in the journal of the Royal Society that casts further doubt on the notion that global warming is adversely affecting Antarctica. By studying satellite data from 1992 to 2003 that surveyed 85% of the East Antarctic ice sheet and 51% of the West Antarctic ice sheet (72% of the ice sheet covering the entire land mass), they discovered that the Antarctic ice sheet is growing at the rate of 5 millimetres per year (plus or minus 1 mm per year). That makes Antarctica a sink, not a source, of ocean water. According to their best estimates, Antarctica will ‘lower [authors’ italics] global sea levels by 0.08 mm’ per year.

Then there’s this article on Christopher Landsea of the Atlantic Oceanographic & Meteorological Laboratory. Chair of the American Meteorological Society’s committee on tropical meteorology and tropical cyclones and a recipient of the American Meteorological Society’s Banner I. Miller Award for the ‘best contribution to the science of hurricane and tropical weather forecasting’, Landsea was a lead author on the subject for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — until he discovered that that the IPCC was falsley stating that global warming was causing hurricanes to happen. He wrote:

Where is the science, the refereed publications, that substantiate these pronouncements? What studies are being alluded to that have shown a connection between observed warming trends on the earth and long-term trends in tropical cyclone activity? As far as I know, there are none.

But since the IPCC

seems to have already come to the conclusion that global warming has altered hurricane activity and has publicly stated so. This does not reflect the consensus within the hurricane research community

Landsea resigned.

Then there is this article on Professor Paul Reiter, head of the Insects and Infectious Disease Unit at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, an officer of the Harvard School of Public Health, a member of the World Health Organization’s Expert Advisory Committee on Vector Biology and Control, and lead author of the Health Section of the U.S. National Assessment of the Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change. This was his experience with the IPCC’s handling of his special area of expertise:

In one of the IPCC’s most egregious errors, in its Second Assessment Report chapter on human population health, it created the scare — repeated by scientists with a popular following such as David Suzuki — that global warming could lead to 80 million additional cases of malaria per year worldwide. The IPCC scientists’ ‘glaring ignorance’ dumbfounded Prof. Reiter and his colleagues. For example, the IPCC claimed that malarial mosquitoes cannot ordinarily survive temperatures below 16C to 18C, not realizing that many tropical species do and that many temperate species survive temperatures of –25C. Likewise, IPCC scientists didn’t know at what altitudes mosquitoes can be found. As Prof. Reiter testified to a U.K. parliamentary committee in 2005, ‘The paucity of information was hardly surprising: Not one of the lead authors had ever written a research paper on the subject! Moreover, two of the authors, both physicians, had spent their entire career as environmental activists. One of these activists has published “professional” articles as an “expert” on 32 different subjects, ranging from mercury poisoning to land mines, globalization to allergies and West Nile virus to AIDS. Among the contributing authors there was one professional entomologist, and a person who had written an obscure article on dengue and El Nino, but whose principal interest was the effectiveness of motorcycle crash helmets (plus one paper on the health effects of cellphones).’

Then there’s Dr Claude Allegre. In 1967 Dr Allegre became director of the geochemistry and cosmochemistry program at the French National Scientific Research Centre; in 1971, he became director of the University of Paris’s Department of Earth Sciences; in 1976, he became director of the Paris Institut de Physique du Globe. He is an author of more than 100 scientific articles, many of them seminal studies on the evolution of the Earth using isotopic evidence, and 11 books. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the French Academy of Science. Dr. Allegre was among the 1500 prominent scientists who signed ‘World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity,’ a highly publicized letter stressing that global warming’s ‘potential risks are very great’ and demanding a new caring ethic that recognizes the globe’s fragility in order to stave off ‘spirals of environmental decline, poverty, and unrest, leading to social, economic and environmental collapse.’ He was therefore part of the fabled Consensus. But now look at what Dr Allegre is saying, as a result of looking at the evolving scientific evidence:

His break with what he now sees as environmental cant on climate change came in September, in an article entitled ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ in L’ Express, the French weekly. His article cited evidence that Antarctica is gaining ice and that Kilimanjaro’s retreating snow caps, among other global-warming concerns, come from natural causes. ‘The cause of this climate change is unknown,’ he states matter of factly. There is no basis for saying, as most do, that the ‘science is settled.’… Calling the arguments of those who see catastrophe in climate change ‘simplistic and obscuring the true dangers’, Dr. Allegre especially despairs at ‘the greenhouse-gas fanatics whose proclamations consist in denouncing man’s role on the climate without doing anything about it except organizing conferences and preparing protocols that become dead letters.’

If I were part of the man-made global warming ‘consensus’, right now I’d be fingering my professional collar.

ANTI-SEMITISM AS A DISEASE OF THE SOUL

VINTE CONSIDERAÇÕES SOBRE UMA DOENÇA DA ALMA

O anti-semitismo como defeito moral e intelectual

TWENTY PROPOSITIONS ABOUT A DISEASE OF THE SOUL

Anti-semitism as a moral and intellectual defect

Publicado primeiro em O INSURGENTE do 25 de Abril de 2007

First published in O INSURGENTE on April 25, 2007

Now available here with English translation

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1. O anti-semitismo, como qualquer outra obsessão xenófoba é uma doença da alma, porque corrói e subverte os nossos sentimentos de solidariedade humana.

Anti-semitism, like any other xenophobic mania, is a sickness of the soul because it corrodes and undermines our feelings of human solidarity.

2. O anti-semitismo, porém, é a pior dessas doenças porque é a mais antiga e a que mais estragos e sofrimento têm causado tanto às vítimas como aos perseguidores.

Anti-semitism is, however, the worst of these sicknesses because it is the oldest and the one which has caused the most damage both to its victims and to its authors.

3. O preconceito contra os judeus tem a sua origem no ódio persistente da sociedade pré-industrial ao capitalismo.

Prejudice against the Jews originates in the persistent hatred of pre-industrial society for capitalism.

4. Os judeus, tendo sido expulsos da sua terra pelos romanos como castigo pela sua revolta contra o império, espalharam-se por todo o mundo conhecido e sobreviveram através do comércio.

The Jews, having been expelled from their land by the Romans in punishment for revolting against the empire, spread all over the known world and survived through trade.

5. Sendo um povo em que todos eram alfabetizados, foram muito bem sucedidos nos negócios.

Being a literate people they were very successful in commerce.

6. Sendo um povo monoteísta e com as suas sagradas escrituras tinham um cimento poderoso para conservar a sua identidade e as ligações entre as suas comunidades.

Being a monotheist people with their divine scriptures they had a powerful cement for conservating their identity and links among their communities.

7. Os camponeses de maneira geral odeiam e invejam os mercadores e os intrusos.

Peasants generally hate and envy traders and intruders.

8. Os nobres improdutivos e dedicados à caça e à guerra sempre procuraram empréstimos onde havia dinheiro, quer dizer entre os judeus.

Unproductive nobles devoted to hunting and war always sought loans where there was money, that is to say among the Jews.

9. O devedor de maneira geral não gosta do credor.

The debtor generally dislikes the creditor.

10. A melhor maneira de liquidar as dívidas era de incitar os camponeses (que também tinha as suas próprias dividas) a pilhar os bens dos judeus e correr com eles. Daí a frequência dos pogroms.

The best way to liquidate debts was to incite the peasants (who also had their own debts) to plunder and expel the Jews. Hence the frequency of pogroms.

11. Foi o próprio Marx quem disse que os judeus sentiram no capitalismo como peixes na água.

Marx himself said that the Jews took to capitalism like ducks to water.

12. Foi o florescimento do capitalismo que trouxe a emancipação dos judeus.

It was the flowering of capitalism that brought emancipation to the Jews.

13. O saudosismo dos tempos medievais pré-capitalistas anda muitas vezes em paralelo com o anti-semitismo.

Nostalgia for the pre-capitalist Middle Ages often goes hand-in-hand with anti-semitism.

14. A expulsão dos judeus da península ibérica foi uma das principais causas da decadência das outrora grandes potências: foi a expulsão da sua classe média. Quem veio a beneficiar foram os países baixos e a Inglaterra.

The expulsion of the Jews from the Iberian Peninsula was one of the main causes of the decay of the two once-great powers: it signified the expulsion of its middle class. Those who benefited were the Netherlands and England.

15. As contribuições materiais, morais, culturais e científicas dos judeus para o progresso de humanidade, proporcionalmente ao seu número excedem de longe as contribuições de qualquer outro povo.

The material, moral, cultural and scientific contributions made by the Jews to the progress of humanity in proportion to their humber far exceeds that of any other people.

16. A doença do anti-semitismo, quando encontrada em gente culta tem geralmente a sua origem no sentimento de inveja e a consciência de mediocridade. São estes impulsos atávicos que explicam o histerismo antijudaico dos islamistas.

The disease of anti-semitism, when encountered among educated people usually has its origin in a sentiment of envy and consciousness of mediocrity. These atavistic impulses explain the anti-Jewish hysteria of islamists.

17. A expressão anti-anti-semitismo é um nonsense. O que existe é a aversão ao anti-semitismo, uma posição perfeitamente fundamentada e partilhada por todas as pessoas sensatas. O que não quer dizer que seja desejável que essa aversão fosse traduzida em legislação. Não se pode legislar sobre os preconceitos ou a imbecilidade.

The expression anti-anti-semitism is nonsense. What exists is aversion to anti-semitism, a perfectly justified position and one that is shared by all people of good sense. Which is not to say that it is desirable that this aversion be translated into legislation. It is impossible to legislate about prejudice and imbecility.

18. Em toda a parte os judeus são os melhores imigrantes, com a mais baixa taxa de criminalidade e das mais altas de produtividade.

Jews everywhere are the best immigrants, with the lowest rates of criminalitiy and the highest of productivity.

19. Israel é uma pequena ilha ocidental e de progresso num oceano medieval.

Israel is a tiny island of the western world in a medieval ocean.

20. O dever de todas as pessoas de bem é de defender Israel e o seu povo.

It is the duty of all people of good will to defend Israel and its people.

PRUDENTIAL RELATIVISM

Prudential Relativism and the Problem of Ignorance

Roger Sandall

(Talk at Warrane College Easter Seminar on “Relativism and Human Rights”, April 7 2007.)

What do I mean by Prudential Relativism? To start with, what I have in mind is the old adage “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.” In Nero’s time, presumably, some visitor to Rome failed to do as the Romans did, and ended up thrown to the lions. That it is prudent to trim one’s ethical sails to the wind was the conclusion quickly drawn by his surviving friends—and they were not just being opportunistic. Prudence is admittedly only a contingent virtue, what Immanuel Kant might have called a “maxim”, not an imperative, but in certain contingencies it may indeed help you survive.

Next, what do I mean by “the problem of ignorance”? Here we might also put ourselves in Rome in Nero’s time. And also in the shoes of a visitor. The year is about 50AD. Let’s say our visitor has just arrived in Rome from some barbarous place like Siberia or Scotland, he has not heard the aforementioned famous adage, he is deeply ignorant, and so he asks someone along the Appian Way: What DO the Romans do? Let us also assume that this visitor has heard about the lions, and he wants desperately to do the right thing. Trouble is, he doesn’t know what the right thing is.

Something like this same problem of ignorance arises today, and arises in numerous contexts in our multicultural world, when we have newcomers from cultures A and B and C who quite simply don’t know what the right thing in the host culture is. Originally, say 50 years ago, most immigrants wanted to know what the right thing was and made efforts to find out. Recently, however, another complexity has been added, with entire government departments set up to tell them that their thing is the right thing, whatever sort of a thing it might be, and they should do their thing willy-nilly, and, indeed, that they have an internationally certified human right to do so... But of course that’s another story. Or not really the story I’m telling here.

So back to my argument… which involves a little thought experiment trying to compare and contrast a pure condition of ethical knowledge, on the one hand, and of ethical ignorance, on the other, and trying to see how and when prudential relativism becomes a part of our moral environment.

First, let’s imagine a small village in the jungle where everyone knows the rules. Or a medieval village in the 12^th century. In this ethical universe there are three absolutely binding commands: do not lie, do not kill, and do not paint graffiti on your neighbor’s walls. Not only are they absolutely binding, everyone knows them, everyone respects them, and everyone obeys them. Just as economists propose states of perfect equilibrium between economic demand and economic supply, what I am here proposing is a state of stable equilibrium in which ethical demand (the law) is in perfect equilibrium with ethical supply (lawful human conduct). And this could of course be any small and virtuous community in times gone by.

[Or for that matter it might be a monastic community today. I saw an ABC documentary about New Norcia in WA last evening. They have a Benedictine monastery there, and this kind of closed religious community exemplifies the sort of indissoluble combination of law and conduct I am talking about, where rules that are known are dutifully and invariably performed.]

But now let us consider the opposite case. Not a universe of knowing ethical agents in stable equilibrium. Instead, a situation where nobody knows what the rules are—and chaos threatens. A primeval tribal world where man is wolf to man. A world so unstable that at any moment the air may become thick with arrows, spears, clubs, flying stones and profanity. Not a village, either—and certainly not a monastery—but a path through no-man’s land in the jungle. So there is territorial uncertainty too: nobody is quite sure whose turf it is. This sort of situation is found not only in parts of the Persian Gulf, as we have seen in the past few days, where marine boundaries are notoriously hard to see: it can also be found in parts of the Amazon and in places like Papua New Guinea, when tribesmen of one group encounter men of another group, and are uncertain about each other’s rules of engagement.

* * *

But first a little digression… There’s a recent book on ethics by the very aggressive unbeliever Anthony Grayling with the challenging title “What is Good?” This is a perfectly reasonable question, with a lineage going back to Socrates and I suppose before him too, and it’s just the sort of question academics love to ask. But in the primeval world another question of much greater urgency must usually be dealt with first—especially if you are on the trail, and you dimly see a party of strange warriors with bows and arrows coming toward you.

That question is, “What is Safe?” Having first established What is Safe, you can draw up a chair beside the fire, and get out the port, and discuss “What is Good?” later.

End of digression. Now it happens that a recent BBC documentary about West Papua actually showed a situation of primeval uncertainty of the kind I was talking about a moment ago. And to cut a long story short, when they had overcome their initial fear and suspicion—we’re talking about different tribal groups intermittently at war—each man embraced his opposite number, hugging him firmly, and smiling determinedly, smiling incessantly, smiling desperately and smiling non-stop. Because that was the safe thing to do. They were obviously reluctant to stop hugging each other, because it was only while being hugged that they felt secure.

Not having a common language in which to explain their particular ethical systems, or comfortable chairs in which to sit around arguing after dinner about “What is Good?”, they resorted to the universal symbolism of the embrace, and the friendly facial signification of the smile. All this, as I think I said, was in West Papua, where they also produced a continuous sound a little like an unbroken ululation, “wa-wa-wa-wa-wa”, on and on and on, a vocal reiteration to strengthen the expressive symbolism of the smile. It was not clear to me whether they did or did not have a common language; but both parties did understand that “wa-wa-wa-wa-wa” was a friendly noise, and that as long as you kept it up you meant well and would come to no harm.

* * *

Here we might add an anecdote from the past. This one from Mexico 500 years ago. Cortes and his chaplain Father Olmedo were on their way to conquer the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, when along the way they came to a large and impressive Indian town. Cortes was not a conquistador for nothing: and he didn’t mess about when it came to conversion. Through his all-purpose Indian factotum, mistress, and interpreter Marina, he informed the Indian governor of the town—the ‘Cacique’—that human sacrifice was atrocious, that the stench near the sacrificial pyramid was disgusting, that the Indian idols were contemptible, and that the Indians were sunk in iniquity of the darkest and foulest kind. He had a statue of the Virgin Mary ready, and was about to climb the pyramid and place it on top. Prescott tells us that

The Cacique listened with civil, but cold indifference. Cortes, finding him unmoved, turned briskly round to his soldiers, exclaiming that now was the time to Plant the Cross! They eagerly seconded his pious purpose (but at this point) Father Olmedo, with better judgment, interposed.

He represented that to introduce the Cross among the natives, in their present state of ignorance and incredulity, would be to expose the sacred symbol to desecration, so soon as the backs of the Spaniards were turned.

The only way was to await patiently the season when more leisure should be afforded to instil into their minds a knowledge of the truth.

Prescott writes approvingly that

the sober reasoning of the good father prevailed over the passions of the martial enthusiasts.

I think we may take it for granted that Father Olmedo was in some sense sympathetic with the modern ideal of human rights. Certainly he felt that Aztec human sacrifice was a denial of just about everything human—or divine—that you can think of. He certainly did not believe that when in Mexico you should do as the Mexicans did. But, at the same time, he saw that a too peremptory policy would be counterproductive. The Indians were “ignorant”, and until their understanding and “knowledge” were improved, they could hardly be expected enthusiastically to embrace the faith. At the same time we can see that Cortes, although he clearly understood the horrors of Aztec human sacrifice, could himself be said to be deeply ignorant of many aspects of a civilization that had a number of other and more meritorious features.

* * *

What conclusions about “prudential relativism” can we draw from all this? From the examples of this moral dichotomy? On the one hand the closed village or closed community where there is perfect knowledge of a particular ethical universe, and everyone knows how to behave. On the other hand, the more open and anarchic condition of dangerous ignorance we have now in many places, resulting in a state of deep ethical uncertainty, instability, and inevitable compromise.

Well, I suppose the first and obvious thing to say is that most of us live today somewhere in between these two worlds, compromising one way or another. I fear there’s no going back to the world of solidary unity, of symmetrically matching belief and conduct, of the medieval village or the jungle tribe. All of us today—especially as we move from one country and one continent to another—find ourselves from time to time having to follow that wise travel advisory: “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.” As an initial guide, as a precautionary rule, it is prudent to do so, and, moreover, it may be regarded as basically safe.

On the other hand, it would be entirely erroneous to draw the conclusion drawn by professional relativists that different truths, different views, different values and different laws, are all “equally valid”—Aztec human sacrifice alongside the teachings of Jesus—and that this ridiculous dogma of ethical equivalence constitutes a rule we should all respect today.

Once again, only intellectuals in universities could ever believe this sort of thing. Father Olmedo knew it was rubbish. And every Papuan tribesman knows it is rubbish too. For consider what happened in the tribal situation I described. They did not in fact behave as if man is wolf to man. Both sides tacitly recognised the universal value of human life to human individuals; each side recognised that they had a common interest in survival, whatever his particular tribal beliefs; no man wanted to die unprepared, unconfessed, “unhouseled” and far from home. Both sides probably included men with families they wanted to see again.

Looking a little more closely at the Papuan case, what probably happened was a compromise of a deeply human kind. On the one hand the tribesmen would have had the normal human instincts of qualified benevolence toward other men—even other men who may have trespassed on their territory. Aboriginal tribes had a keen sense of tribal territory: a keen sense of mine and yours. But transcending this were the sentiments emphasized by David Hume, who thought that human nature was much the same the world over (a view I, and I suspect most old-time Aborigines, happen to share). So if there was a severe drought and food shortage across wide areas of the Australian desert, Aboriginal territorial “rights” might be relaxed somewhat to allow the occasional starving or thirsty stranger to eat and drink.

On the other hand, in addition to a qualified benevolence of the sort Hume understood as universal, there would also be an element of calculation of a more harsh and Hobbesian kind, and a rational estimate of the costs and benefits of dealing civilly with strangers. We might note that, in the case of the Papuan tribes in the BBC movie, where both were in a kind of ethical no-man’s land, the men resorted to a universal language. They were smiling, hugging, and making reassuring friendly noise—wa wa wa wa wa. In this way they were communicating with each other, stranger to stranger, creating a safe environment where, whatever their differing beliefs about God and creation and the answer to the philosophical question “What is Good?”, they could live for the time being safely side by side.

* * *

90% of the anthropologists you hear from are relativists of one kind or another. But to me the really interesting thing has always been that although there is indeed an amazing diversity of customs and beliefs, this variety is only superficial. Overall, the human picture is one where universals, categorical imperatives if you like—respect for truth (do not lie), respect for property (do not steal, or paint other people’s houses with graffiti), and respect for life (do not kill)—are an underlying moral foundation that can usually be found everywhere, in every culture, whatever the visibly colourful diversity of dress and cuisine displayed.

Roger Sandall é autor do The Culture Cult e o seu site é aqui

VACLAV KLAUS SOBRE AMBIENTALISMO

UMA VOZ LUCIDA NO MEIO DA CACAFONIA
Extracto do discurso do Presidente da República Checa Vaclav Klaus perante a comissão American Congressional Committee on Energy and Commerce em Março deste ano.
See: http://www.vaclavklaus.cz/klaus2/asp/clanek

The so called climate change and especially man-made climate change has become one of the most dangerous arguments aimed at distorting human efforts and public policies in the whole world.

My ambition is not to bring additional arguments to the scientific climatological debate about this phenomenon. I am convinced, however, that up to now this scientific debate has not been deep and serious enough and has not provided sufficient basis for the policymakers’ reaction. What I am really concerned about is the way the environmental topics have been misused by certain political pressure groups to attack fundamental principles underlying free society. It becomes evident that while discussing climate we are not witnessing a clash of views about the environment but a clash of views about human freedom.
As someone who lived under communism for most of my life I feel obliged to say that the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity at the beginning of the 21st century is not communism or its various softer variants. Communism was replaced by the threat of ambitious environmentalism. This ideology preaches earth and nature and under the slogans of their protection – similarly to the old Marxists – wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central (now global) planning of the whole world.

The environmentalists consider their ideas and arguments to be an undisputable truth and use sophisticated methods of media manipulation and PR campaigns to exert pressure on policymakers to achieve their goals. Their argumentation is based on the spreading of fear and panic by declaring the future of the world to be under serious threat. In such an atmosphere they continue pushing policymakers to adopt illiberal measures, impose arbitrary limits, regulations, prohibitions, and restrictions on everyday human activities and make people subject to omnipotent bureaucratic decision-making. To use the words of Friedrich Hayek, they try to stop free, spontaneous human action and replace it by their own, very doubtful human design.
The environmentalist paradigm of thinking is absolutely static. They neglect the fact that both nature and human society are in a process of permanent change, that there is and has been no ideal state of the world as regards natural conditions, climate, distribution of species on earth, etc.

They neglect the fact that the climate has been changing fundamentally throughout the existence of our planet and that there are proofs of substantial climate fluctuations even in known and documented history. Their reasoning is based on historically short and incomplete observations and data series which cannot justify the catastrophic conclusions they draw. They neglect the complexity of factors that determine the evolution of the climate and blame contemporary mankind and the whole industrial civilization for being the decisive factors responsible for climate change and other environmental risks.

By concentrating on the human contribution to the climate change the environmentalists ask for immediate political action based on limiting economic growth, consumption, or human behavior they consider hazardous. They do not believe in the future economic expansion of the society, they ignore the technological progress the future generations will enjoy, and they ignore the proven fact that the higher the wealth of society is, the higher is the quality of the environment.

The policymakers are pushed to follow this media-driven hysteria based on speculative and hard evidence lacking theories, and to adopt enormously costly programs which would waste scarce resources in order to stop the probably unstoppable climate changes, caused not by human behavior but by various exogenous and endogenous natural processes (such as fluctuating solar activity).

Thanks to Melanie Phillips for this link. See her comments at: http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary/?p=1544

COMO DESCONSTRUIR UMA NAÇÃO

COMO DESCONSTRUIR UMA NAÇÃO

por Patrícia Lança

Mais sobre o Reino Unido

Publicado n'O Insurgente de 27 de Fevereiro de 2007

O PRIMEIRO ALVO do multiiculturalismo da extrema-esquerda britânica não foi a imigração mas a classe operária indígena. Aproveitando as marcadas diferenças de classe que existiam tradicionalmente na Inglaterra, os sociólogos esquerdistas dirigiram a sua militância ao ensino básico e secundário. Na formação de professores para as escolas do Estado, a atenção principal deixou de ser a preparação na matéria a ensinar. Agora o que importava era transformar as atitudes dos candidatos a professor. Eram acusados de pertencerem a classe média e serem preconceituosos. Tinham que mudar. A sua tarefa não era de inculcar os modos da classe média nos alunos. Não deviam corrigir nem a gramática, nem o vocabulário, nem as maneiras dos alunos. Gritar e falar alto, interromper, chamar nomes, e todo o resto que o professor tradicional não tolerava, agora tornou-se aceitável.

Porque, diziam os professores de Sociologia da Educação, era assim a cultura da classe operária. Tentar mudar o que os alunos aprendiam em casa constituía uma forma de repressão inadmissível numa democracia. Quanto a corrigir os hábitos ou a fala dos imigrantes das Caraíbas, nem pensar. Até era bom que os manuais escolares fossem escritos em crioulo. Esta iniciativa naufragou nas rochas da diversidade dos dialectos das várias ilhas, facto que os sociólogos só constataram mais tarde.

O fim das sanções
O mais fácil então era simplesmente desistir de ensinar inglês à esta gente difícil. Paralelamente com o laissez faire na sala de aulas, houve o total abandono da aplicação de sanções. Deixou de haver qualquer tipo de castigo. Os ingleses, antes peritos na deplorável prática de castigos corporais, deixaram simplesmente de punir mesmo os piores abusos. Quando um professor era agredido fisicamente só restava a sua expulsão. Quarenta anos da prática desta filosofia nas escolas britânicas agora deram o seu fruto. Os piores números de insucesso escolar da Europa; hooliganismo de crianças nas ruas, a tal ponto que os adultos têm medo das crianças e dos adolescentes; as cidades à noite cheias de jovens agressivos e bêbedos; e um governo desesperado a produzir novas leis que visam, em vão, ensinar respeito. As mudanças de comportamento provocadas pelas políticas delirantes da esquerda foram muitas. Entre elas dois pequenos mas desagradáveis fenómenos: a generalização dos hábitos de urinar e de cuspir na rua. Antigamente isto só acontecia, diziam os ingleses, no outro lado da Mancha. Agora são os ingleses que ficam surpreendidos com a boa educação dos continentais.

Evidentemente que estou a referir as escolas do Estado (onde leccionei durante uns dez anos e sei do que estou a falar). Os colégios particulares (chamados, com essa típica perversidade britânica, “public schools”), muitas vezes internos, beneficiaram com a degradação do ensino estatal. As elites, incluindo muitos ministros de Tony Blair, continuam a enviar os filhos para os colégios particulares. E são estes que continuam a ter maiores possibilidades de entrar no ensino superior e nas melhores universidades. É assim a ‘sociedade sem classes’ do New Labour. E foi esse o modelo de ensino que o Portugal de Abril escolheu.

A chamada filosofia de educação que inspira os educratas que impuseram esta política educativa em diversos países ocidentais, incluindo PORTUGAL, é analisada no texto IN DEFENCE OF REASON. Clicar neste tíitulo na caixa do Arquivo ao lado direito.

SOCIALISMO AFRICANO NO SÉCULO XVIII

Fantasias socialistas

É salutar para a nossa própria auto-estima ler, de vez em quando, sobre as fantasias absurdas elaboradas por pessoas com fama de estudiosos, e cujas obras continuam a ser recomendadas nas faculdades anglo-americanas, e não só. Uma dessas figuras é Karl Polanyi (não confundir com o irmão, o admirável Michael Polanyi). Karl converteu-se cedo ao marxismo e dedicou a vida académica à pregar as virtudes do planeamento económico. A obsessão subiu-lhe à cabeça e transformou um homem inteligente num fantasista sem escrúpulos. Reproduz-se no Portolani Special um texto do antropólogo heterodoxo, Roger Sandall, tirado do seu livro The Culture Cult, e também publicado no seu site do mesmo nome: http://www.culturecult.com/farce/dahomy.htm

Amazing Dahomey

From "What Karl Polanyi found in Dahomey", Chapter 5 of The Culture Cult.

(By kind permission of Roger Sandall)

The role of state officials

The famous economist Karl Polanyi believed in the need for strong, centralized, state-managed economies. He promoted this in much of his writing, and toward the end of his life made a remarkable discovery-that the arrangements to be found in ancient, blood-stained, slave-trading, war-making West African Dahomey (now Benin) amounted to a wisely ruled Welfare State. He described its features in a book, Dahomey and the Slave Trade, and we describe below some of the things Polanyi thought he had found.

*

Right from the start he assumes that in 18^th-century Dahomey economic activity only takes place because it is "implemented by state officials", all the way from the king at the top down to the subsistence farmers planting their crops. It is a fact of common observation that interference by the state in the decision-making of small farmers about what to plant and when has time and again produced disasters. In Russia, China, Cambodia, and Ethiopia famines resulted. Yet Dahomey was spared such misery: it had only one recorded famine throughout its history. How could this be?

According to Polanyi the reason is not what you'd expect-that its rulers had the good sense to leave the farmers alone. Instead it was because the king and his ministers were telling them what to do. "The King of Dahomey enforces cultivation over all his dominions", he quotes approvingly from a 19th-century source, while "the permanent administration of agricultural affairs was in the hands of the 'Minister of Agriculture', the Tokpo". Beneath him were other administrative assistants, and "it was the duty of the agricultural officials to insure a balanced production of crops and adjust resources to requirements. If there was overproduction or underproduction of any crop, the farmers were ordered to shift from one crop to another."

No-one knows how far Dahomey's bureaucracy actually succeeded in achieving any of these goals. But Polanyi clearly believes that it did, seizes enthusiastically on any evidence of "an extensive apparatus of planning and administration", and jubilantly hails the taxes imposed to provide state revenue. He is particularly excited by a report that when the king was "about to set a new price for pigs" (did the Royal Personage have nothing better to do?) "a complicated system of controls was set in motion". The slaughter of sows, the movement of livestock, and both production and transportation, were monitored by state officials throughout the land.

Of hoes, Amazons, and IBM

Could a peasant who wanted a hoe just sit down and make one? No way. "Twelve forges throughout the country were designated to make hoes; and production of hoes was limited to these forges, each of which was under the watchful eye of an official charged with supervising production." Polanyi sees nothing wrong in the king having some 4,000 women attached to the court, 2,000 of them wives and the rest a regiment of female soldiers known in the literature as the "Amazons". That "people of rank engrossed the major part of the women" was not a worry, since other women were appointed by the king to provide sexual services to the public at large. Plainly, no detail of public welfare was overlooked. Security was attended to by a system of state spies.

But how were numerical records kept of all the taxes paid, the numbers of livestock, the men available for the annual war, of births and deaths and marriages? Here we come to Polanyi's remarkable claim that Dahomey possessed a system of enumeration representing, for its time, "an advance in communication comparable to IBM". It seems that when a citizen wanted to count he put pebbles one by one into raffia bags, the annual census-taking conducted before the slave-raiding wars being the main occasion for this, and the time when hundreds of bag-carriers bearing pebbles converged on the capital.

Because there was no way of indicating percentages of a total, each tally in the census-of women, of men, of male and female births during the year, of male and female children below the age of thirteen, of male and female deaths from natural causes during the year, of deaths in war, of the number of captives taken, and finally the number of slaves available for sale (a secondary matter compared to the number of captive "heads" or prisoners for sacrifice to the ancestral gods)-was conveyed independently in separate bags of pebbles.

As one tries to visualise the lines of porters toiling uphill under the blazing African sun, day after day and week after week to the capital city, with their burdensome raffia bags slung from their shoulders, and the innumerable pebbles they must contain . . . it is impossible not to become suspicious. Perhaps Herskovits did too. The arithmetic itself seems odd. And where are the earlier reports corroborating the account Herskovits obtained in the 1930s? There are none. To his credit Herskovits admits to finding "the system of bureaucratic control" he describes as "bordering on the fantastic". And when one considers all the complications it is not surprising to find it has been described by another authority on Dahomey as "almost incredible".

Cut the "almost". It was indeed entirely incredible. About the kindest thing that can be said about Karl Polanyi's credulity is that only someone of the type set before us in Peter Drucker's biographical note, with "a naive belief in the cunning, cleverness, and foresight of our rulers", filled with that sacred hate of the market system so admired by his wife, convinced of the impending downfall of modern capitalism, and simple-minded enough to see pebble-counting with raffia bags as analogous to the achievements of IBM-only someone like this could have possibly fallen for it in the first place.

Academic delusions

But let us try and be sympathetic. Consider the ageing scholar's situation in New York. Sitting in his "tiny faculty apartment on Morningside Heights, each of its grimy and ill-maintained rooms piled from floor to ceiling with books and pamphlets, articles and letters", never having done an actual day's fieldwork in Africa in his life, and with everyone talking up its prospects, it was perhaps understandable for him to wildly idealize this 18th century state so long ago and far away-a despotic kingdom set before us as a model for the modern age. Seldom can the delusions of romantic primitivism have put a man so completely out of touch.

When Karl Polanyi moved west from Hungary he carried some of the worst ideological baggage of eastern Europe with him. He never learnt to appreciate the principles of democratic government which defended his existence. He never understood the economy which fed him, and gave him the freedom to work. While Michael Polanyi deepened our understanding of civilization in The Logic of Liberty, Karl Polanyi was preparing a book which might have been called The Logic of Slavery.

In one place he casually mentions that after a military victory 4,000 captives were sacrificed to Dahomey's gods. How would Polanyi have felt if he had witnessed these killings? He was hardly a family man, but his relationship with his daughter seems to have been close. What would he have thought of the training procedure for future Dahomeyan executioners, where girls and boys were given knives to hack at the heads of their living victims?

In the 18th century thousands of slaves and prisoners were killed each year in Dahomey. At the only place in his book where he shows any concern about this Polanyi writes that "admittedly, acts of repulsive cruelty, religious mass murder, and endemic techniques of treachery in the political field were the accompaniment of its high achievements. Nevertheless, Dahomey's was an unbreakable society, held together by bonds of solidarity over which only naked force eventually prevailed."

That only naked force could break this culture is presented as its vindication. As much might be said of Hitler's Germany. Such are the priorities of those who believe that the primitive moral claims of solidarity outweigh all others-simple humanity included.

Referências em Roger Sandall, The Culture Cult, Designer Tribalism and Other Essays

Ibid, pp 38-39

Ibid, p 46

Ibid, p 51

W. J. Argyle, The Fon of Dahomey, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1966, p 94. A somewhat fuller description of the census tallies, and of the circumstances in which Herskovits got his data, may be found in Roger Sandall, "Herskovits' Last Day in Dahomey", Anthropology Today, Vol. 15 No 6, December 1999, pp 18-20

Peter F. Drucker, Adventures of a Bystander, p 138

Karl Polanyi, Dahomey and the Slave Trade: an Analysis of an Archaic Economy, p 9

In West Africa scarcely imaginable brutalities were routine. Visiting Benin in the1860s, Sir Richard Burton saw a slave lashed to a keg of dynamite and blown up. "'When he descended,' Burton wrote, 'his brains were beaten out with clubs and sticks, even the women and children joining in the pastime gleefully, as boys killing a rat.'" In Mary S. Lovell, A Rage to Live: a Biography of Richard and Isabel Burton, Little, Brown and Company, 1998, p.389

EURABIAN NIGHTS

EURABIAN NIGHTS*

An essay on 'integration'

By Srdja Trifkovic**

France
THOUSANDS OF YOUNG Muslims, armed with clubs and sticks and shouting, ‘Allahu akbar!’ riot and force the police to retreat. Windows are smashed; stores are looted; cars are torched. Europeans unlucky or careless enough to be trapped by the mob are viciously attacked, and some are killed. The scene could be Mogadishu in the aftermath of Pope Benedict’s Regensburg address; or Tripoli during the Danish cartoons fury; or Karachi, Kabul, Gaza, and countless other cities in Dar al-Islam heartland, on any number of occasions. Yet a year ago, such scenes were unfolding, for weeks on end, in places with such names as Clichy-sous-Bois, Argenteuil, and La Courneuve. The trouble in the banlieus finally ended, as various Muslim ‘community leaders’ had claimed, only when various levels of French officialdom quietly accepted that there were defacto no-go areas within the country, mini-Islamistans run by the dominant local majority. Mon Clichy a moi, c’estça! ‘just about sums it up, on the official website of Clichy-sous-Bois, whose population is 80 per cent Muslim. In practice, this means that local groceries refrain from selling wine, and young Muslim men feel emboldened to use violence against ‘sluts’ women who do not follow Islamic ways. Many more French-born Arab girls wear the hijab today than did so a year ago. It is their protection against mutilation and gang rape. Failing to do so makes them fair game for both. A knife slash across the scarfiess girl’s cheek from the lip to the ear is especially common and known as a ‘smile’.

Dutch Christian Democrat minister thinks sharia demand should be met
The demand for communal self-rule is not new, and it will be made with increasing frequency in the future. Most of the 25 million Muslims in Western Europe already consider themselves autonomous, a community justifiably opposed to the decadent host society of infidels. This demand is but the first step: it will lead to the clamouring for the adoption of sharia within segregated Muslim communities and, finally, for the imposition of sharia on the society as a whole. Europe’s elite class is prepared for this challenge. Dutch Justice Minister Piet Hem Donner a Christian Democrat sees the demand as perfectly legitimate and argues that sharia could be introduced ‘by democratic means’. Muslims have a right to follow the commands of their religion, even if that included some ‘dissenting rules of behaviour’. ‘It is a sure certainty for me: if two thirds of all Netherlanders tomorrow would want to introduce sharia, then this possibility must exist. Could you block this legally? It would also be a scandal to say “this isn’t allowed!” The majority counts. That is the essence of democracy.’

Sweden shows tolerance
The same ‘essence’ was reiterated in similar terms last July by Jens Orback, the Swedish Integration (sic) Minister, who declared in a radio debate: ‘We must be open and tolerant towards Islam and Muslims because when we become a minority, they will be so towards us.’ Yes, when we become a minority; the fact that, four months later, both Orback and his Social Democratic government remain in power aptly illustrates Sweden’s political and cultural scene.
Until a generation ago, Sweden was one of the safest and most law-abiding countries in the world. Today, in the southern city of Malmö, the authorities are no longer able to deal with crime among Muslim immigrants, 90 per cent of whom are on welfare. They make up one third of the city’s 300,000 people; at the city’s Rosengrad School, of 1,000 students, only two were Swedes last year. ‘If we park our car it will be smashed so we often have to go in two vehicles, one just to protect the other’, says policeman Roif Landgren. Both vehicles are needed to escort Swedish ambulance drivers into certain neighbourhoods. Robberies of all sorts increased by 50 per cent in 2004 alone, with gangs of young Muslims specializing in mugging old people visiting the graves of relatives. Thomas Anderberg, head of statistics for the Malmö police, reported a doubling of ‘rapes by ambush’ in 2004. Nearly all of the increase is caused by Muslim men raping Swedish women. Next door in Norway and Denmark, two thirds of all men arrested for rape are ‘of non-western ethnic origin’ the preferred euphemism for Middle Eastern and North African Muslims—although they account for under five per cent of their residents. The number of rapes in Oslo in the summer of 2006 was twice that of the previous summer. All ‘gang rapes’ in Denmark in 2004 were committed by immigrants and refugees.
Swedish courts are adapting by introducing sharia principles into civil cases. An Iranian man divorcing his Iranian wife was ordered by the high court in the city of Halmestad to pay Mah, r Islamic dowry ordained by the Koran as part of the Islamic marriage contract.

The British model
In the judicial sphere, Britain has gone even further, legitimizing sharia compliance even in criminal cases. A key tenet of sharia is that non-Muslims cannot try Muslims, or even testify against them; and this has been upheld by Peter Beaumont, QC, senior circuit judge at London’s Central Criminal Court, the Old Bailey. Before the trial of Abdullah el-Faisal, a preacher accused of soliciting the murder of ‘unbelievers’, Judge Beaumont announced that, ‘for obvious reasons, members of the jury of the Jewish or Hindu faith should reveal themselves, even if they are married to Jewish or Hindu women, because they are not fit to arbitrate in this case.’ (One can only speculate what would be the reaction if equally ‘obvious reasons’ were invoked in an attempt to exclude Muslims from the trial of BNP Chairman Nick Griffin for ‘Islamophobia’.)

The legitimization of sharia has also penetrated culture—both high and popular. In the Autumn of 2005, British audiences enjoyed a widely acclaimed production of Tamburlaine the Great, Christopher Marlowe’s 16th-century classic. Few noticed, however, that several irreverent references to Muhammad had been deleted. An essential scene in the play, in which the Koran is burned, became the destruction of ‘a load of books’ relating to any culture or religion. Director David Fan and Simon Reade, the Old Vic’s artistic director, said that, if they had not altered the original, it ‘would have unnecessarily raised the hackles of a significant proportion of one of the world’s great religions’. Both agreed that the censored version, produced partly with public funds, was better than the original, making the play more powerful and relevant. The British Council sacked one of its press officers, Harry Cummins, for publishing four articles in The Sunday Telegraph. British Muslims took exception to his observation that Muslims had rights to practice their religion in the United Kingdom that were not enjoyed by Christians in the Islamic world, ‘even though these Christians are the original inhabitants and rightful owners of almost every Muslim land’. His cardinal sin was to note that ‘it is the black heart of Islam, not its black face, to which millions object’. Abdul Ban, deputy secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain, welcomed Cummins’ firing but expressed ‘dismay’ that the publishing company had not taken action against the editor of The Sunday Telegraph as well. Public funds were also used to build state-of-the-art senior housing in London’s East End. This housing is to be reserved strictly for Muslim ‘elders’—English and other white pensioners need not apply. Sirajul Islam, in charge of social services at the local borough of Tower Hamlets, responded to the journalists’ questions about racial and religious equality by stating that a ‘one size fits all’ approach to public services was no longer acceptable in 21st-century Britain: Tower Hamlets is fortunate to have a diverse mix of communities, and the council strives to ensure that its services are responsive to the differing and changing needs of its residents.’

That these and other misfortunes are befalling Britain under ‘New Labour’ is perhaps to be expected, but the revamped Tory Party hardly offers an alternative. David Cameron’s colleague, Francis Maude, claims that immigration has been ‘fantastically good’ for the United Kingdom. Such inanities are light years away from Churchill’s warning over a century ago that: ...no stronger retrograde force exists in the world’ than Islam... Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science—the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome.

One quarter of German teen-agers are Muslim
In Germany, Muslim immigrants already account for about one quarter of all teenagers and ten percent of the population as a whole. But mention ‘integration’ to Evelyn Rahie, a teacher in Wedding, a predominantly Turkish suburb of Berlin, and she will murmur, ‘disintegration, more likely,’ with a sad smile. Her students’ Muslim parents routinely demand the separation of girls and boys in sports and take their children out of biology classes. Most students speak poorer German than immigrant children did 20 years ago. Their extracurricular activities are limited to attending Koran classes, and many speak only Turkish or Arabic at home.
The growth of digital television has made a host of Turkish and Arabic-language channels available, intensifying language problems and nurturing identities that are informed more by the situation in Lebanon, Gaza, or Iraq than by the events in Paris, Berlin, or London. Millions of Muslim youths all over Europe live in a parallel universe that has very little to do with the host country, toward which they have a disdainful and hostile attitude.

Italy follows suit
The elite class responds to hostility with ever-greater inclusiveness. Giuseppe Pisanu, Italy’s former minister of the interior, who is responsible for controlling the country’s borders, declared three years ago that the high fatality rate of North African illegals on the high seas en route to Sicily was ‘a dreadful tragedy that weighs on the conscience of Europe’. His reaction was paradigmatic of the utopian liberal mind-set. If ‘Europe’ should feel guilty that people who have no right to come to its shores are risking their lives while trying to do so illegally, then only the establishment of a free passenger ferry service between Africa and Southern Europe with no passport or customs formalities required upon arrival, and a free shuttle to Rome or Milan would offer some relief to that burdened conscience. Now that Sr Pisanu and his boss, Silvio Berlusconi, have been replaced by a leftist government even more deeply committed to tolerance and diversity, this solution may finally become a reality. The tangible results in Italy are as devastating as the moral and spiritual ones. In Venice, the invaders have taken over the Piazza San Marco. In Genoa, the marvellous palazzi that Rubens so admired have been seized by them ‘and are now perishing like beautiful women who have been raped’. In the late Oriana Fallaci’s native Florence, a huge tent was erected next to the cathedral to pressure the Italian government to give immigrants ‘the papers necessary to rove about Europe’, and to ‘let them bring the hordes of their relatives’ to Italy.

As Fallaci described it: A tent situated next to the beautiful palazzo of the Archbishop on whose sidewalk they kept the shoes or sandals that are lined up outside the mosques in their countries. And along with the shoes or sandals, the empty bottles of w4er they’d used to wash their feet before praying. A tent placed in front of the cathedral with Brunelleschi’s cupola and by the side of the Baptistery with Ghiberti’s golden doors Thanks to a tape player, the uncouth wailing of a muezzin punctually exhorted the faithful, deafened the infidels, and smothered the sound of the church bells ... And along with the yellow streaks of urine, the stench of the excrement that blocked the door of San Salvatore a! Vescovo: that exquisite Rornanesque church (year 1000) that stands at the rear of the Piazza del Duomo and that the sons of Allah transformed into a shithouse.
Europe is increasingly populated by aliens who physically live there but spiritually belong to the umma. They do not want to ‘adapt’ to Florence or any other new abode they conquer; offended and intimidated by beauty and order, they instinctively want to remake it in the image of Anatolia, Punjab, or the Maghreb. Their influx, made possible by the Pisanu malaise, is making the transformation irreversible.

A century ago, Pisanu’s class shared social commonalities that could be observed in Monte Carlo, Carlsbad, or Paris, depending on the season. Their lingua franca was French. Englishmen, Russians, and Austrians shared the same outlook and sense of propriety, but they nevertheless remained rooted in their national traditions, the only permanent vessels in which Weltanschauung could be translated into Kultui Today’s ‘United Europe’, by contrast, does not create social and civilizational commonalities except on the basis of wholesale denial of old mores, inherited values, and ‘traditional’ culture. It creates a cultural similarity that has morphed into the dreary sameness of antidiscriminationism.

Secular theocracy rules Europe
The Continent is ruled by a secular theocracy focused on the task of reforming and reshaping the individual consciences of its subjects. The fruits are greeted with haughty arrogance by Tariq Ramadan, professor of Islamic studies at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, and a grandson of Hasan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. Ramadan insists that Muslims in the West should conduct themselves not as hyphenated citizens seeking to live by ‘common values’ but as though they were already living in a Muslim-majority society and were exempt on that account from having to make concessions to the faith of others. Muslims in non-Muslim countries should feel entitled to live on their own terms, Ramadan says while, ‘under the terms of Western liberal tolerance’, society as a whole should be obliged to respect that choice. If such respect continues to be extended, by the end of this century, there will be no ‘Europeans’ who are members of ethnic groups that share the same language, culture, history, and ancestors and inhabit lands associated with their names. The shrinking populations will be indoctrinated into believing or else simply forced into accepting that the demographic shift in favour of Muslim aliens is actually a blessing that enriches their culturally deprived and morally unsustainable societies. The ‘liberal tolerance’ and the accompanying ‘societal obligation’ that Tariq Ramadan invokes are key. ‘No other race subscribes to these moral principles’, Jean Raspail wrote a generation ago, ‘because they are weapons of self-annihilation’. They need to be understood and discarded. The upholders of those principles must be removed from all positions of power and influence if Europe is to survive.

* Published by permission of The Salisbury Review, London, where it appeared in June,2007. **Srdja Trifkovic is Foreign-affairs editor of Chronicles, and the author, most recently, of Defeating Jihad