To Die, to Sleep, No More

 To Die, to Sleep, No More

© 2021 Ross Williams

1991. I'm in my third semester of sociology grad school. The seminar is Gender Studies. I'm in a class dominated by mainstream feminists. We're discussing a first-person account of ritual infibulation written by a woman from [I recall] Sudan twenty years after the fact.

She was nine years old. Her day was filled with chores – hauling water, milking and otherwise tending her family's goats, scouring the local bushes for whatever berries could be found on them before other children did, and cooking whatever was available. One morning, her twelve year old sister went off with her father, a few village elders and the local shaman, leaving her to do all the chores herself – her brothers were all off playing because they were, y'know, boys. ...and where “playing” consisted of learning to hunt, building things, digging trenches for irrigation and collecting wood and dried camel shit for the stove. The sister came back later that day, tired and weak, with a goat of her own – a nanny, so as to start her own flock and become a valuable wife in four or five years – and was given three days to stay in bed, chore-free.

How, the nine year old girl wondered, did her sister ever get so lucky? How, the nine year old girl wondered, could she herself get in on such a good deal? A goat and four straight days away from chores. Mind-numbing, tedious, hot, tiring chores.

The nine year old pestered her parents about it. And pestered. And pestered. And when her parents could take no more pestering, her father assembled some elders and the local shaman and walked her down to the witch doctor hut where she was strapped down to a plank, knees as far apart as they would go. There she was cut and parts of her sliced off, and she was sewn back together with animal sinew. She lost a lot of blood and could not walk without pain and yet had to walk back home as soon as she could stand, leaving a trail of blood all the way. She did indeed get her own nanny goat, and she did get that day and the next three off from her chores, but she didn't completely heal for weeks. Even after she healed, she would get the constant burning and itching of urinary tract infections which continued to the day she – twenty years later – wrote her first-person account.

She married seven years after this event, at the age of 16, to a man in his late twenties or early thirties. He had been selected by her father and insisted on bedding her several times a week. Sex was excruciatingly painful and thoroughly unpleasurable as her vulva had been sewn nearly shut at the age of nine. Naturally, she got pregnant. Child birth at the age of 17 caused her vulva to shred, and she lost consciousness. She woke up in a rudimentary hospital in a nearby city where she had been treated by a western doctor who advised remediating surgery to relieve as many effects as possible of the genital mutilation given her eight years before.

The newborn – a daughter – had remained in the village and was presented to the father, who secured a wet nurse but otherwise kept his complete distance. The author of this account stayed in the nearby city and got several surgeries which alleviated some of the issues, but not all. After several months she finally got her daughter. The two left the village behind and eventually wound up in Europe where the author learned to read and – obviously – write, and where the daughter would be exempt from the ritualistic mutilation given to girls in eastern sub-Saharan Africa.

In the class discussion of this account, all of us were sickened, but most of the women, and an alarming number of the men – those who characterized themselves as mainstream feminists – were scandalized. Not only was it horrible that girls were sexualized before the [western] age of consent, veritably pimped into child-bridehood, and saddled with 100% of the work they were willing to regard as domestic chores. It was barbaric that while they were being sexualized, everything that made their sexuality meaningful was ripped – literally – away from them. These girls were compelled to be nothing but child-bearing automata for their male-dominated culture.

Most of the women, and an alarming number of the men, concluded that this event typified the treatment women around the world get from any patriarchal society... and all societies are patriarchal. It is especially true in western societies, they claimed. It happens “all the time”.

A few women and most of the men in class – those who did not consider themselves mainstream feminists – scoffed at this assertion, some [like me] rudely laughing out loud at the misty-eyed outrage being shouldered in proxy by feminists half a world away from this barbarity. All the time? Seriously? When was the last time you heard about infibulation occurring in, say, Peoria Illinois? Denver Colorado? Even in traditionalist jerkwater Amarillo Texas?

The reply was profoundly irrational. “Just because you don't hear about it doesn't mean it doesn't happen!”

Great, let's set rationalism and the scientific method back a thousand years by insisting critics disprove a negative assertion rather than proponents proving that what they say is true. Let's force medical science once again to prove that epilepsy is not caused by evil spirits invading a christian's soul.

You'd think these tear-stained trollops would be grateful for the English – a western culture people – who colonized large parts of eastern sub-Saharan Africa and, upon learning of this barbaric practice, made infibulation a criminal offense. Infibulation was virtually eliminated in Kenya, Tanzania and Rhodesia, though it has come back with a vengeance after the English divested themselves of their colonial holdings and turned the politics back to the original inhabitants. This is especially true in the newly communist Rhodesia, rebranded as Zimbabwe.

“European colonization destroyed native culture, and no good whatsoever came out of it!”

...native culture that you are denouncing as barbaric. So western culture is good when it delays the sexualization of children until the age you think is proper, but when it makes a crime out of a practice that we all recognize as barbaric, demeaning and dangerous to life and health, it's bad because it was done through 'colonization'. Do you listen to yourselves?

“When males are sexualized it is for the sole purpose of preying on female sexuality. When females are sexualized it is for the sole purpose of serving male sexuality. Sexuality is masculinized; it is patriarchal. It causes harm, disease and early death to women. Besides, even if western women aren't mutilated exactly like this, they are mutilated in other ways. Emotionally. Spiritually.”

And femaleness has thus been reduced from a biological reality to a psychological religion.

2021. Mainstream feminism which once held that the sexualization of pre-pubescent, pubescent and recently post-pubescent girls to be patriarchal obscenity now celebrate the public, feminine sexualization of girls of all ages. Mainstream feminism which once held that the sexualization of boys was simply to rape women now celebrate – encourage, groom – the sexualization of boys, but only as girls, thus feminizing male sexuality.

Mainstream feminism which once held that the genital mutilation of girls through ham-fisted amateur surgery was barbaric now promote the genital mutilation of boys through chemical castration.

Mainstream feminism which once held that the masculinization of sexuality was an intrinsic, patriarchal harm to not merely women but to society as a whole now hold that the feminization of sexuality is an intrinsic benefit to not merely men but to society as a whole.

Mainstream feminism which once declared that men who thought they were better than women simply because they were men were benighted pigs now believe that women who think they are better than men simply because they are women are enlightened scholars.

Mainstream feminism which once deplored the long-term manifestations of women enduring infibulation – painful non-orgasmic sex that must be coerced from a husband, nearly constant UTIs, and an increased risk of death during childbirth – now dismiss out of hand the similar long-term consequences of what is optimistically regarded as “male-to-female transsexuality” – the nearly universal consignment of the male's sex life to faux-female fetish porn, faux-female prostitution or being a male homosexual whether he wants to be or not, the nearly constant pseudo-genital infections resulting from what is laughably referred to as “gender reassignment surgery”, and the 41% suicide rate of MTF 'transsexuals'.

Pointing out their hypocrisies does no good. Mainstream feminism of 2021, as a social manifestation of the political insensibility it is derived from – “progressive” [ironic term] socialism – does not recognize hypocrisy as an intellectual failing. It is, in practice, lauded for its sensitivity and inclusiveness. It should be pointed out, though, that the only ones it sensitively includes are the morons disconnected from reality, those who think that imposing barbarity upon me here and now is perfectly acceptable because someone who bears a resemblance to me did something barbaric to someone bearing a resemblance to them... long ago and/or far away.

One day the woke will either wake up, or they will die in their sleep. I don't care which. In either event, make it soon. We cannot survive this lunacy for much longer.

The High Cost of Fantasy Fulfillment

 

The High Cost of Fantasy Fulfillment

©2021 Ross Williams

A bipartisan effort has been underway for some time to turn the longest war in US history into a latter-day Hundred Years War. As of October of 2021 – four months from this keyboard tapping – the United States will have been undertaking military activities in Afghanistan for 20 solid years. The presidency of Donnie Combover, in 2018, set the stage for ending this engagement, to which democrats and their Never-Trumpet establishmentarian allies raised holy hell. Their primary criticism of the Trumpian withdrawal plan was that it was Trumpian. It defied their previous claims of his being a saber-rattling, war-mongering neocon.

For his part, President Pro Tem Sniffy P deFile is continuing President Cheeto's ambition of discontinuing the Afghan War in the face of criticism from the same crowd of establishmentarians as well as the pro-Trump faction of republicans, ...who denounce the move as “withdrawal the wrong way”. Leaving now, they claim, would consign Afghanistan to bitter tribal and sectarian civil war. As evidence, they cite as a national security risk the military gains made by the Taliban in areas recently vacated by US forces.

This criticism is, naturally, correct. But as I have to remind people over and over and over [and over] again: you don't get points for being correct. You get points for being pertinent. The previous 5,000 years of Pashtun history were not the sunshine and daisies that these critics need it to have been for their criticism to mean a single god damn. Nothing the US could do would prevent Afghanistan from diving head first into a tribal and sectarian civil war the moment we left.  Nor has anything the US did prevented their attempts to beard the US lion every chance it got.  So let's just get the hell over our geopolitical messiania right now and save ourselves the time, trouble, lives and money it would cost to pretend otherwise.

Nation-state warfare, as I pointed out earlier, is for the purpose of ass-kicking the belligerents who go out of their way to misbehave to the point where the only reasonable recourse is to kick their ass. It is not for rehabilitation. Every single person who demands that the US remain in Afghanistan indefinitely is making, to one degree or another and whether they know it or not [and usually not], an argument for militaristic rehabilitation of foreign peoples. The notion that geopolitical rehabilitation is even possible from the outside is contradicted by the entire course of human history. Those who propose US foreign policy based upon it are either psychotic or retarded. They are absolutely without foundation in military doctrine.

Critics of US withdrawal from Afghanistan believe, in short, that continuing our military presence, painting targets on the backs of our soldiers, spending another few trillion dollars per decade on building and rebuilding and re-rebuilding infrastructure for the locals that those locals are only too happy to destroy out from under themselves will obtain a political victory in a land that has never seen a political victory of the type we desire. Like I said: psychotic or retarded.

The ineffectual counter-argument is, “Yabbut, yabbut... what happens when they get done with their civil war, consolidate their power and logistics, and take another swing at us? They've done it before, and if left to their own devices, they'll do it again.”

To which the reply is: once again you are correct. But you still don't get points for being correct. You still only get points for being pertinent. By remaining in a nation where three-fourths of the population hates us and attempting to obtain a political victory through militarism among a people who do not recognize political loss as a legitimate factor in military struggles, they have been taking multiple swings at us every year in any event. It doesn't matter whose devices they are left to – ours or theirs. They WILL be taking swings at us; they HAVE been taking swings at us. Why make it easier by standing next to them? Why spend the money building shit for them that they are going to destroy next month?

They pissed us off by coming here twenty years ago, knocking down our really tall buildings and just generally making assholes of themselves. We went there and kicked their asses for it. We broke their shit and killed their people. The function of war is to break shit and kill people, period. We should have left immediately after.

But, brainless sympathy junkies that too many of us are, we stayed there to pick them up out of the dust, we spent a few trillion dollars rebuilding the shit we broke and building new shit besides, and we did it all with quivering chin and puppy dog eyes ...as if that would convince them that taking another swing at us would be unwise. We did it because too many of us believe war is all about rehabilitating belligerent geopolitical assholes. And because we stayed, we lost soldiers needlessly, and money foolishly in a twenty-year Carnival From Hell shooting gallery where the ducks on the conveyor shoot back. We played whack-a-mole with moles burying IEDs.

In the long run – which is the ambition of responsible foreign policy – the United States would be far better off having left Afghanistan in mid-2002 [and, for what it's worth, Iraq in late 1991, and again in mid-2003], and daring the belligerent assholes to try it again. We would have saved the lives of hundreds of US soldiers, and countless trillions of US dollars [read: countless Chinese Yuan] even if the belligerent assholes did try it again and we'd had to go back to kick their belligerent ass once more.

The national security risk that leaving Afghanistan creates already exists, and it's been enjoying the target-rich environment of deployed US soldiery. It is made possible by the re-establishment of foreign infrastructure provided by US taxpayers [and Chinese hegemonists only too happy to watch our pointless profligacy]. Stay or go, that part of the world is a national security risk to everyone else.

The only meaningful question is: how many soldiers, how much time and effort, and how many dollars are we willing to spend to pretend that providing geopolitical assholes a comfortable and modern base of operations keeps us safe from geopolitical assholes.