The Duterte Phenomenon

Rodrigo Duterte Pic: Rappler.com

The Duterte Phenomenon: the Philippines does politics a little differently.

This month the Philippines elected Rodrigo Duterte, a tough-talking maverick largely unknown outside his own country, as President.

The Western media has been completely wrong-footed by Duterte, and has even compared him to Donald Trump. But Duterte is a far more complex character and if he reminds me of any politician, it is Alex Salmond of Scotland’s SNP. The two men play the politics game very alike — something the rivals of both have come to rue.

Despite the ignorance of the outside world, Duterte is by no means an unknown quantity in the Philippines. Over the last four years, in my travels there, I have become used to the affection with which ordinary people — living hundreds of miles from his bailiwick — speak of him. He is ‘Rody’ or ‘Digong’ and in text, sometimes D30.

Duterte’s city, Davao on the southern island of Mindanao, is one of the three largest in the Philippines, with a population greater than several European nations. He has proven himself a skilled manager of the city’s finances over the decades of his rule. He has fought and won eleven elections — not a bad score for any political animal. While claims for the security and low levels of crime in Davao may be exaggerated, people there regard him as a true defender of the peace.

Gamesmanship

When one of the Vice-Presidential candidates, Alan Trillanes, put out a story, in the last days before the election, that Duterte had 17 million USD (equivalent) that he had not declared — a tricky matter for a career public servant earning less than 50,000USD per annum to explain — Duterte dealt with it in typical style, turning the story on its head and severely damaging his enemy when he, finally and after extracting the maximum of drama, released his accounts. This is no rookie at the game of politics, but a master.

In other ways too, Duterte’s gamesmanship is remarkable. All through last summer he dithered and denied. Yes, he would stand, then no, he wouldn’t. And again and again, for months. Some began to call him ‘flip-flop’ on social media. But the joke was on us, because by the time he finally announced that he was going to stand for President and filed his notification, only days before the deadline, millions of ordinary Filipinos were literally begging him to stand. You can’t buy that kind of electoral boost; Duterte did it with brilliant — if Machiavellian — manoeuvring.

Death Squads

Davao, Duterte’s city, is known to have freelance death squads, which have attracted the attention of the United Nations’ Commission for Human Rights. Thousands have been summarily executed by these thugs, usually because they had been denounced as criminals. Duterte, it is alleged, did nothing to stop these killings and, if anything, used them as political capital. Davao was safe, he claimed, because criminals are too frightened to operate in it.

Does Duterte order the killings? It’s unthinkable. For all his ‘man of the people’, tough-guy persona, he is a lawyer by profession and has repeatedly proven himself as such. That he would put himself in a position where he might be arrested and charged is so unlikely that it may be discounted; and there have been twenty years in which such charges could have been brought. The Davao Death Squads do exist; but the overwhelming likelihood is that Duterte has nothing to do with them — except to claim the credit for making his city safer.

Whether or not Duterte is innocent is of academic interest in any case, because the fact is that his Teflon coating has dealt with them. Knowing Duterte’s track record, investigators will go blind with paperwork before they get anywhere near the truth, by which time his presidency would likely be over. Duterte is now 71 and his life in politics is drawing to an end.

Enough of the man; but what has made the Philippines elect him? He won 38% of the vote in a multi-party election with 80%? turnout. (David Cameron would so wish.)

Election

In tactical terms, the establishment Liberal Party were completely blindsided by the candidacy of Senator Grace Poe. Poe is a foundling and had also acquired US nationality, at which time she renounced her Philippines one; so her candidacy faced a legal challenge. Presidents must be both Filipino by birth and Philippines citizens. Many believed that Poe would not be allowed to stand.

Grace Poe

However the Supreme Court, in a majority decision, upheld her right to stand. Poe, although relatively inexperienced and lacking real ‘star quality’, found herself pitted against the Liberal Party’s Mar Roxas, who is experienced, competent and has even less star quality.

Poe’s candidacy meant that these two were — belatedly — trying to win votes from exactly the same demographic. In a race of two lacklustre horses, each, in the end, took around half that vote.

Mar Roxas

That this left a hole as big as a house for Rody Duterte to charge through became obvious to many observers very soon but not, alack, to the Administration. While it is true that President Aquino did call, in the last week, for the parties to ‘come together’ to stop Duterte, what he meant was that Poe should stand down to let Roxas take her votes. This, unsurprisingly, did not persuade Poe. (Meanwhile other pundits were calling for Roxas to stand down for the same reasons — which cries were similarly ignored.)

The Philippines does not have a two-stage voting system such as in France, where the various candidates are thinned down to two in the first poll and the winner decided in the second. In the Philippines, there’s one vote and whoever gets the most votes wins. In a French-type system, Mar Roxas and Rodrigo Duterte would be facing off in another round and the chances are that Roxas, despite his blandness — I am always reminded of John Major; competent but dull — would win comfortably, assuming a majority of Poe’s voters switched to him. However, such is not the case.

The Reasons Why

In political terms, the impetuses for Duterte are complex. First is the ongoing civil strife, in the southern island of Mindanao especially. Aquino has supported the attempts of the Muslim minority there to extend the autonomous region they live in and deepen its powers.

Many Filipinos consider this unconstitutional, since the Philippines is a unitary state with no tradition of federalism, where all citizens are equally protected under the same law. They point, amongst other things, to the existence of non-Muslim tribal peoples living in the area that would be covered and insist that this arrangement would be contrary to their constitutional rights and protections.

Nevertheless, the negotiation of a separate law, the so-called ‘Bangsamoro Basic Law’ or BBL, was a major Aquino target and looked certain to be ratified, despite its unpopularity with the 95% of the citizenry who are not Muslim.

Then, in February 2015, a military assault was organised to capture a number of known terrorists hiding in the Moro region. It was carried out by members of the Special Action Force (SAF) who were really armed policemen rather than soldiers. They were ambushed and forty-four were slaughtered by gunmen from the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF). The fallen became instant martyrs and heroes, the ‘SAF 44’.

While blame for this catastrophic debacle fell on the shoulders of the Police General responsible, Alan Purissimo, Aquino was tainted both because he was seen as accommodating of the MILF — who overnight became pariahs — and because Purissimo was Aquino’s appointment. (As a result of the massacre, the BBL was not ratified.)

Duterte, whose city, Davao, is in Mindanao, is seen by many both on that island and elsewhere, as tough enough to deal with insurgents; and on the other hand, he has ‘lines’ of communication with several insurgent groups himself. Foreign observers should realise that low-level war and insurrection has been going on in parts of the Philippines, especially Mindanao but also Luzon and Visayas, since the Vietnam era. It was this that provided the justification for Marcos infamous dictatorship and the Martial Law era. Filipinos are inured to it, but heartily sick of it. It is a major reason why the tourist industry there lags so far behind, say, Thailand, despite the astonishing natural beauty. It is a sad fact that many in the Philippines have forgotten the realities of that time and see a ‘tough guy’, a benevolent dictator, as the best solution to the problems of insurrection, despite the fact that it has been tried and failed.

The next big issue is crime and particularly, drug-related crime. There is no question that drug trafficking is being used as a scapegoat for wider social ills and has allowed politicians — even Duterte — to sidestep them. However, the persistent, chronic level of crime throughout the Philippines is a major problem. That this is so is obvious by the sheer numbers of armed security guards. They are everywhere. Even small convenience stores have round the clock armed security and any bank branch will have at least three at the door. They will be armed with pepper sprays and batons but also with pistols and pump-action shotguns. That’s serious firepower right there; you don’t invest in protection like this without cause.

As well as this, there is a degree of public disorder related to alcohol. The Filipinos like to drink and when they do, they can be unruly. Compared to the Scottish ones I grew up in, Filipino towns, even late at night, are havens of peace and order; but there is a public perception that they are not.

Low-level crimes, which exist alongside much more rare and localised, but far more severe ones like ransom kidnapping and even piracy, are a constant niggle. Duterte’s promise, to clean it all up in six months, is like a breath of fresh air to a population sick to the back teeth of criminality. They know that the establishment has done nothing to curb it and the prospect of a new broom has proved very enticing.

Next, the age-old problem of Pilipino politics is that it is in the hands of a small number of wealthy and powerful clans. The Aquinos and the Marcoses are the best known of these, and historically, power has passed between them since the fall of the Ferdinand Marcos in 1986. This has, unfortunately, led to obvious cronyism, nepotism and political favour, as well as the public perception of massive criminality on the part of the political class itself: in other words, corruption. Just by being from outside the cabal of powerful families, Duterte is a threat to their convenient political arrangements. This alone was probably enough to secure the man millions of protest votes.

It is a sad truth that the Philippines has become synonymous with corruption. It is much more severe than in other southeast Asian nations and some believe it is a hangover from the Spanish colonial era. Whatever the cause, it is a major problem; look at the extent to which Filipinos bemoan it, even to a foreigner. You can hardly hop on a taxi from the airport but the driver will start talking about it.

This corruption exists not only at the highest but all levels of the bureaucracy. It ranges from unfinished — but paid for — public works programmes, through the millions allocated for disaster relief (example) which have vanished while thousands of victims, years later, are still living in refugee camps, to routine payoffs for traffic offences. The facts are that public servants are underpaid and have the power to augment their salaries through graft. So they do.

This has been going on or many years, however; why has it become an issue now?

Demographics

To answer this you have to look at demographics. The Philippines is seeing an exponential population explosion. While it does have indigenous manufactory and a huge agricultural sector, two other areas have grown up as a result of the numbers of young, relatively highly-qualified people. These are Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) and call-centre workers.

The former comprise everyone from maids to nurses, doctors, engineers and architects, and number around 2.3 million. The latter are by and large degree-level young people with excellent English. These two sectors contribute disproportionately to the economy and their power is growing. They constitute a new, moneyed and educated middle class.

While call-centre workers and other domestic professionals suffer the same levels of victimisation by corrupt officials as everyone else, they are inclined to be more articulate in their protest. If my own straw-polling as well as others is correct, a majority of these, by some way, were right behind Duterte. They have no memory of the Martial Law era under Ferdinand Marcos; they see a strong but fair leader, even one who might bend the rules here and there, as a force for good.

OFWs have for decades suffered at the hands off corrupt immigration and customs officials. Allegedly, their ‘balikbayan boxes’ — essentially duty-free gifts for those at home — are routinely pilfered and the contents presumably sold, or outrageous and unfounded ‘customs charges’ are applied — which can be unapplied on payment of a bribe.

The fury of the OFWs went full beast mode when a scam at the Philippines’ largest airport, NAIA, as well as others, was made public. Passengers going through the final security check would be detained and told that there was a live bullet in their baggage. Either the victim could pay a bribe or miss the plane. This became known as the ‘tanim-bala’ scam.

Several high-profile incidents like this last year, which, unusually, were publicised, opened a floodgate of resentment. The scammers’ mistake was in picking on a foreign traveller, a US citizen who was a missionary, and who not only refused to cough up, but went very public indeed, bringing the US Consulate into the case. Thus the can of worms was opened and we learned that for over two decades, police, security guards and baggage handlers had been extorting from thousands if not hundreds of thousands of passengers a year. And the most victimised group was, of course, the OFWs.

It turned out that of the detentions for ‘tanim-bala’ — that were actually recorded, and nobody knows how many were not — only 3% actually resulted in an investigation. In other words, in 97% of recorded cases, the victim coughed up the bribe, typically ten to twenty USD, and was released.

Despite over 50 of the staff at NAIA being suspended over this, it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. OFWs were incensed at a patrician, establishment Administration that was not only, they believed, corrupt in itself but connived with corruption at every level of the bureaucracy. And President Benigno Aquino III symbolised that corruption.

So when Rodrigo Duterte, the tough-talking, joking, affable but firm mayor from Davao, who comes across like everybody’s favourite uncle, wears jeans and checked shirts, lives in an ordinary house and drives an ordinary car, blasts in and says, ‘You leave it to me, I’ll sort this mess out,’ he is like a messianic superman, an answer to so many prayers. At last, someone who understands ordinary people and who is prepared to actually do something about their hardships. And a quirk in the Pilipino electoral system has allowed this maverick, this Lone Ranger brandishing metaphorical silver pistols and gunning for the bad guys, to break through.

Conspiracy Theories

We cannot know what will happen next. Social media is alive with a conspiracy theory that the establishment intends to oust Duterte and seize power again. The scenario goes like this: Duterte will impeached — for something — and Liberal Party Vice-President-elect Leni Robredo will take over. This despite Robredo’s impeccable history and her assurance that she will work with Duterte and not against him.

Leni Robredo

However, when did a conspiracy theorist ever heed facts or personal reputations?

This conspiracy theory, which has been stoked by the dictator Marcos’ son, ‘Bongbong’ who ran a close battle with Robredo for the VP slot, may have provoked Duterte into his first major political mistake, before he has even taken power. In defeat, Marcos has proven bitter and petulant, but his support is roughly contiguous with Duterte’s.

In the Philippines, the Vice-Presidency is a non-executive, ex-Cabinet position, without any portfolio at all. The Vice-President is elected completely separately from the President and may not be in the same party — indeed, the two might be arch-rivals.
At the same time the President has absolute power to appoint the Cabinet.

A statesman would have probably have given Robredo — a proven and accomplished politician — a portfolio and Cabinet post that would not have demeaned her…Foreign Affairs, for example, where Duterte is weak.

While he won the Presidency by a clear majority over his nearest rival, Duterte remains a minority President, with 62% of the population having voted against him. Bringing Robredo into his Cabinet would have been an olive branch to the majority who were defeated by the electoral system, while at the same time keeping her from getting into any mischief. I suspect Duterte would have liked to do that, but feared a backlash from his own supporters as a result of Marcos’ post-facto allegations of electoral foul play. That’s politics.

Is Duterte the Lone Ranger?

Notwithstanding what, on the face of it, appears to be an early slip, Rodrigo Duterte is a consummate politician. He knows exactly where every crack in the ice is and his great talent, apart from his ability to appeal to the public, has been in knowing how to skate within a hairsbreadth of them, always staying just on the safe side.

The Philippines remains, potentially, a vibrant and dynamic regional power, crippled by corruption, poverty and internal strife. It is a nation of young people and many of them are highly educated. It has vast natural resources and is, literally, a tropical paradise; not for nothing is it called the ‘pearl of the Orient’.

If Duterte can re-unite and revitalise this disparate and riven nation, then he might just be the Lone Ranger after all.

Rod Fleming on Google+

The post The Duterte Phenomenon appeared first on Rod Fleming's World.

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Why Islam Cannot Change

Islam cannot change because of an internal quirk that prevents it.

Why does Islam resist change and always revert to its barbaric, bloody, violent nature? The answer is because it has no choice.

Jews do not read the Bible as if it were literally true and in any case, the Bible is only one part of the foundation of their faith. The Torah, the body of literature at its centre, contains many other documents and traditions that inform Judaism. It is quite possible to be a Jew and at the same time an atheist, and as a matter of fact, many great Jewish thinkers and scientists, notably Albert Einstein, have been exactly that.

Practising Jews are expected to read the Bible but to make their own peace with God; and furthermore there is no promise of extra-terrestrial reward or punishment in Judaism. The reward for a life lived well is the return of the Promised Land — Israel.

This, together with their historically tiny numbers and the historic and ongoing persecution they have suffered, has tended to make them very tolerant, except in matters of the land of Israel itself. For example, while lapidation remains a punishment specified in the Jewish Bible, the Christian Old Testament, it has not been carried out for over 2000 years, as far as we know.

Israel, nominally a Jewish theocracy, is actually a democratic secular state famously friendly towards its gay and transgender populations, despite the scriptural injunctions placed against them. Women — though still reviled by Orthodox Jews — are respected by mainstream Judaism and are regarded as fully equal to men within the State of Israel; as evinced by the numbers of women in its armed forces who have died defending it.

One of the reasons why Judaism is so reasonable is that there are contradictions in Scripture. It is impossible to equally believe everything this says when it directly contradicts itself, as well as observable reality. How could Jahweh possibly have created the sun three days after the Earth? Surely a day is a measure of solar movement? Oy vey, it makes no sense.

The result of this is that most mainstream Jews see Scripture as a guide rather than as a rigid rule-book. This has tended to soften their attitudes. Although there are extremist fundamentalists who do not take this view, they are a minority and have no real power. Mainstream Judaism is inclusive, tolerant and receptive to new ideas.

Let’s look at Christianity now before considering Islam

The Catholic Church Fathers recognised the internal conflicts in Christian texts right from the beginning. During the hundreds of years that it took to define the official ‘canon’ of the New Testament — that is, which of the over 100 then extant books would be included — several compromises were attempted to minimise these.

In the end, the Catholic Church took the view that the Bible was ‘revelatory’ and  had to be interpreted by the priesthood. This followed the time-honoured tradition of priestly interpretation of divine revelation, which everyone in the Roman Empire was familiar with. For hundreds of years, lay people were discouraged from reading the Bible themselves. Authority, in Catholicism, comes not directly from the words of the Bible, but from the priestly interpretation of them — this is called ‘dogma’. And dogma can be changed.

Catholics no longer burn people at the stake for witchcraft, insist that the Earth is flat or that the sun rotates around it. While it might take the Church centuries to make these changes, they do happen. The Catholic Church even accepts Evolution and Big Bang Theory — carefully rewriting them as ‘acts of God’. Not only is the Church aware of the problem of internal contradiction, it is aware of the contradiction between the Bible and what can be observed; it is no accident at all that a significant number of scientists have been Catholics, including Gregor Mendel, the ‘father of modern genetics’, who was a friar.

Protestantism, whether of the Lutheran or Calvinist type, specified that each man — and they did mean men — should read the Bible and find his own truth in it. While Protestant church leaders have never been shy to shout their own interpretations from the pulpit, the essence of Protestantism is that followers must reconcile the contradictions between life and scripture, and the internal contradictions within the texts, for themselves. This has led to a thoroughly disparate set of religious practices and the truth is that Protestants cherry-pick the Bible just as much as Jews and Catholics do. I see no queues to lapidate people for eating shrimps.

This means that, once again, most Protestants adapt to social change, to scientific knowledge and to technical developments. There are a few who deny their children medical help because of their religion, but even in religious states today, they are prosecuted.

Awareness of contradictions in the texts, and between the texts and life, then, are essential tools by which the ferocity of religions may be tamed. It allows them to be modernised in the light of new discoveries. There are always extremist fundamentalists, be they Hasidic Jews or the odious offspring of the even more repugnant Billy Graham, but they are not mainstream. They are fringe and they will stay that way.

 

Why is Islam different?

Islam, unfortunately, cannot do this, and that is why it is the most barbaric and most dangerous major creed today. Yet the Quran is even more riven with internal contradictions than the other Abrahamic texts. So how has Islam managed to remain so firmly rooted in its most barbarous and cruel form? How is it possible for Islamic clerics to claim, as they do, that the Earth does not rotate on its axis?

In the first place, Muslims believe that the words of the Quran are, literally, the words of Allah, the infallible creator of everything. These words are neither revelatory nor metaphoric: they are the literal truth. Secondly, Muslims believe that the prophet Mohammed was to be the last who would ever receive such heavenly wisdom. In other words, the Quran is the last, direct word of Allah, transmitted through the Angel Gabriel to Mohammed, and it will never, ever be changed.

So what about the internal conflicts? Unlike the Jewish texts or the Christian ones, the Quran is ostensibly the work of one man, who faithfully remembered every word told to him by Gabriel, the infallible agent of Allah, who is of course, himself infallible. Contradictions should be impossible.

Except Allah was, apparently, not infallible; indeed he made mistakes and this gave rise to a solution that has forever crippled Islam’s ability to evolve.

This is called the ‘doctrine of abrogation’. When Mohammed was — allegedly — receiving the good news from Allah via the Angel Gabriel, his followers noticed that, over the years, inconsistencies appeared. Mohammed — again allegedly — asked about this and Gabriel transmitted his question to Allah.

Allah’s response was to say that when he gave a verse that contradicted an earlier one, he took back or ‘abrogated’ the older one. In other words it ceased to be the current infallible word of Allah. Only the later one was. Since Allah is infallible, however, the verses remained in the Quran, since at the earlier time, they were the product of his infallible consciousness and so were current then.

So, Allah is infallible but changes his mind; but because the Quran is the last iteration of the word of Allah that will ever be given, according to Islam, then the last versions, whatever they are, are immutable for all time. They can never be changed.

Religiously sophisticated Muslims are generally very careful not to discuss the ‘doctrine of abrogation’ with non-Muslims; and the matter is made worse because the vast majority of the world’s Muslims have never read the Quran, since it is in Arabic and only that version is deemed appropriate for Muslims to study. (There are translations into vernacular tongues but Muslim scholars scoff at these.) The consequence is that many Muslims do not even know about abrogation. But it is core theology.

The ‘doctrine of abrogation’ means that there are no contradictions in the Quran, even though there are verses, or Suras, that contradict each other, because only the last one is valid. But how do we know which that is? The Quran is not ordered chronologically, but by the length of the texts. There is no way at all to know which came first, from the Quran itself. The only way you can find this out is by reading the Hadith, or the commentaries on the life of the Prophet, which explain when each Sura was ‘received’.

Authority in Islam is not from the Quran alone; it comes from the Quran and the Hadith together. The above shows how important it is to realise this. Furthermore, the doctrine of ‘Taqqiya’ instructs Muslims to conceal, lie and dissemble when dealing with non-Muslims, in the furtherance of the faith.

When discussing their religion with non-Muslims, clerics always talk about the Quran. They will quote verses from it left, right and centre. They never talk about the Hadith, for it is here that the true nature of Islam is revealed. The Quran is hopelessly self-contradictory and confusing, with no narrative structure at all. It is only by studying the Hadith that it becomes possible to contextualise and, therefore, understand the Quran and indeed, Islam itself.

Muslim clerics and scholars are perfectly well aware of this and would prefer that non-Muslims did not read and understand the Hadith; this is because doing so will reveal, amongst other things deeply harmful to the PR image of Islam, that the harshest, most cruel and most violent Suras are invariably the later ones: those that still have force and are ‘unabrogated’.

To understand why later Suras are violent and intolerant while early ones tend to be peaceful and accommodating, one must first comprehend that in the early part of his life, when he was seeking followers and was under scrutiny by the authorities at Mecca, where he lived, Mohammed was very conciliatory. This was because it was politically expedient to be. He had not enough followers to challenge the government and he feared that he might be punished if he were too aggressive. Mohammed had no interest in being executed as a troublemaker, and he lived in harsh times. So the Suras from this period tend to be ‘soft’.

After Mohammed and his followers, sure enough, had annoyed the people of Mecca such that they were expelled, they fled to Medina. Here, he and his merry band discovered banditry as a lifestyle and soon were getting rich by plundering camel caravans carrying trade goods. They then began taking whole towns and villages by force. Be under no illusions: these were not heroes taking from the rich to give to the poor. These were criminals robbing, raping, enslaving and killing to make themselves wealthy and more powerful. The Hadith explain all of this in only-too-gory detail.

The later Suras are much more violent and warlike in reflection of this confidence and faith in violence. By this time, Mohammed was a successful brigand, plundering and killing any he challenged. Conciliation was yesterday but today was fire and sword. The Hadith identify which Suras these are.

When pressed, Muslim apologists will always quote the early Suras, even though they know perfectly well that these have been ‘abrogated’. They are recognised as the words of Allah, but they have been cancelled out. So the fact that these may contradict later, violent Suras is irrelevant, since they are no longer the official word of Allah with effect today.

Despite their protestation that these early, abrogated Suras show the gentle side of Islam, to the Westerner unfamiliar with the cult, the same apologists will exhort Muslims to follow the later, ‘hard’ Suras precisely because these have not been abrogated and are thus the effective word of Allah.

There is absolutely no internal contradiction within the Quran, because in all cases of conflict, only the latest Sura is given any value; the others have been abrogated, or, as we have seen, been ‘taken back’ by Allah and replaced. Only the last remains valid. One simply has to identify which is the later Sura on any given disagreement and then the point is settled.

What this means is that Islam has as its underlying principles violence and warfare, to the ends of increasing the individual wealth of Muslims and expanding the territory under the control of this benighted cult and, worse, that these are permanently locked in forever. This is because the last Suras were ‘received’ by Mohammed when he was a successful warlord and leader of a band of armed killers. To call it a ‘religion of peace’ reveals the speaker as either a blatant liar or as ignorant of Islam. Unfortunately there are many of both.

Most of the world’s Muslims do not speak or read Arabic, although they may be able to recite large parts of the Quran. They do so without understanding a word of it, but this is no matter since it is the sound of Arabic being chanted that pleases Allah. And even if they can read Arabic, the Quran is nonsensical without study of the Hadith.

Islam recognises that this is a problem, so it trains Arabic-speaking clerics, well versed in the Hadith, to preach to the masses.

Islam in retreat – Stealth Jihad

Now you need to understand another issue that Muslims do not like to talk about. In 1683 the bloody tide of Islamic conquest in Europe was turned back by the defeat of the Ottoman hordes at the Siege of Vienna. The liberating forces were led by the Polish King Jan Sobieski, who not only led the biggest cavalry charge in history, but without whom the whole of Europe would have been plunged into darkness and you would not be reading this. (The Poles have never received adequate thanks for literally saving our bacon.) The Enlightenment, perhaps the most vaunted product of post-Renaissance Western culture, would have been snuffed out.

Thanks to the courage of the Poles, in defeating an enemy many times their numbers, over the next century the Muslim world was fractured and the faith itself was menaced by new empires — nearly all Christian.

Jihad is a powerful word in Islam. Up until the defeat at Vienna, it had unquestionably referred to the armed struggle to conquer more territory. While Islam was at its lowest ebb after the triumph of Europe, it was altered to emphasise a ‘spiritual struggle’. But this was pure convenience. The mullahs and clerics looked to the Hadith and saw that when Mohammed was under threat in Mecca, he preached peace and tolerance. So after the fall of their own empires, this is exactly what the clerics did themselves.

Muslims are permitted, when they are so outnumbered that armed rebellion would wipe them out, to live in peace with their neighbours. This has been called ‘Stealth Jihad’. This phase of jihad is indeed a spiritual rather than an armed struggle. It reflects Mohammed’s early years in Mecca, when he and his followers were powerless and at the mercy of the other people in the city. In cases like this Muslims, following the example of Mohammed, should pray and live devout lives, lying low and preparing themselves for the time when their numbers are such that they can resume the armed struggle.

Stealth jihad is what the Muslim world reverted to after the defeat of its armies, but it must be realised that this can only ever be a temporary situation. The resumption of armed struggle is inevitable, a prerequisite of faith. Islam exists to conquer the world and make it Arabic; this can never be changed. When Islam is being complaisant, it is only because it is gathering strength.

It should be clear now that Stealth Jihad is not a softening of Islam at all, but simply a defensive measure. But remember, most Muslims do not speak Arabic and few are really familiar with the Quran, let alone the Hadith. The responsibility of deciding which message Muslims should follow, or even hear, falls on the clerics. For over 200 years they focussed on the moderate, non-violent — but at the same time abrogated — Suras.

A return to violence

Today, empowered by the wealth born of the developed world’s thirst for oil, encouraged by the appalling obsequiousness of Western governments and positively bolstered by the sheer stupidity and ignorance of the ‘regressive left’, the clerical class that once preached the early Suras and encouraged the population to be calm, to submit to the power of others and to cause no trouble, are again preaching the Medina Suras — the ones that exhort violence and armed jihad.

It is vital to realise, right now, that so-called Islamist extremists are not: they are simply preaching the words and will of Allah now in force, which are contained ONLY in the later, unabrogated Suras. They are preaching the ‘true’ version of Islam, the later version, which is, throughout, bloody and violent and exhorts Muslims to kill, enslave and extort non-believers. The cult these men (always men) preach is not extremist within the context of Islam. In fact it is the only true form; and it is to this that all Muslims must revert when they are strong enough to do so without risking extermination. Armed jihad and global conquest are not fringe extremism in Islam: they are its core values.

With absolutely no contradictions in the Quran, which the simple yet diabolical mechanism of ‘abrogation’ ensures, there can be no debate and so, no modernisation. When Muslim scholars argue, they are not doing so over the issue of which Suras are more valid. They only have to look in the Hadith to establish this. They are instead nit-picking over the nuances of meanings of words, or obscure calligraphs in texts. They know what Islam is about; there is no argument there. It is established, permanently, with no opportunity for alteration. And its end is world conquest.

The ‘gentle face’ of Islam is a sham, a ruse designed to persuade an unwary enemy, ignorant of the truth, that Islam will not spread war and violence; that it is peaceful and may be trusted.

This is an illusion. While individual Muslims may indeed be peaceful and trustworthy, they are the fringe. I celebrate those like Maajid Nawaz, who risks his life every day to try to soften Islam; but in a way, men such as he are the extremists, in an Islamic context, for they are furthest from the established doctrinal basis of the cult. That is why they are so viscerally hated by other Muslims. While we must — rightly — be thankful for good men such as he, it is not possible to be optimistic about the chances they have of successfully taming this monster.

In the next in this series I will look in detail at the different forms of jihad and what they mean.

 

See also: http://ift.tt/1TZUo4e

Rod Fleming on Google+

The post Why Islam Cannot Change appeared first on Rod Fleming's World.

Related posts:

1. Muslims we Must Support: Maajid Nawaz
2. A watershed month
3. Southern Baptism

The Man Who Would Be Queen

This book caused its author to be accused of child abuse and to receive death threats. Why?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Man Who Would Be Queen

Revisiting the untouchable; J Michael Bailey’s seminal book after 13 years.

The Man Who Would Be Queen (TMWWBQ) sparked huge controversy when it was published. The furore it caused, while small in focus, was spectacular in its incandescent rage at the author. This was categorically different from the conservative reaction to works of other controversial authors like D H Lawrence, or even Vladimir Nabokov’s deeply unsettling study of male attraction to pubescent girls, where the hostility was principally against the work; not so here. It was J Michael Bailey in person who was vilified.

And to cap that, TMWWBQ is not a work of fiction, but of popular science. It is well written, in non-scientific language, is easy to read and deeply sympathetic to its subject. So what on Earth happened, to provoke a furious backlash which included entirely spurious attempts to end Bailey’s career, personal slurs and threats of violence against him? His attackers accused him of sexually molesting his children; not even Salman Rushdie had to put up with that over The Satanic Verses.

The campaign against Bailey, coordinated by a small group of internet bullies, amounted to nothing more or less than a blatant attempt at censorship associated with a virulent personal attack on the author. It’s time, now, to revisit this book and see why it caused such a storm in a latte cup.

The book begins with a general overview of the scientific understanding of male homosexuality, firstly by describing the life of a young, highly feminine cross-dressing boy called ‘Danny’ (not his real name.) Danny began to show feminine behaviour and to cross-dress when he was three years old; his mother came to Bailey for help.

In Part Two it progresses to describe femininity in adult male homosexuals and contrasts this with masculinity in the same group. At the end of this section, Bailey briefly discusses the known history of male homosexuality. He introduces the ideas of ‘transgender homosexuality’ on one hand, in which although both partners are born male, one plays a woman in all manners including appearance, comportment and in sexual intercourse — that is to say, she is penetrated; and on the other hand ‘egalitarian’ homosexuality, where both parties are masculine in appearance and comportment.

The former is the norm across the world and was the only model until the 20th century, while the latter appeared in Western culture, specifically the USA, in the 1960s and has been spread by contact since. Bailey makes the important point that in the former, only one partner is actually homosexual, since she is born male but desires masculine men, while her partner desires women and plays a masculine sexual role, whereas in the latter, both are homosexual because both desire men and appear to be men.

He makes the accurate assessment that transgender homosexuals, since they are attracted to straight men, who are therefore attracted to femininity, are naturally driven to appear to be as feminine as possible. On the other hand, egalitarian homosexuals, themselves attracted masculinity, appear to be very masculine themselves. This is sometimes called ‘clone’ homosexuality. The author then poses questions about how Danny’s adult life might proceed in view of all of this.

In Part Three, the book discusses persons born male who desire to become women, in the light of the preceding parts. Bailey calls these individuals ‘transsexuals’ and makes it clear that this is a broad church that is not limited merely to those persons who wish to undergo or have undergone Genital Reconstruction Surgery to reconfigure their male genitalia into facsimiles of female ones.

He discusses the popular ‘brain sex’ idea, which posits that male-to-female (mtf) transsexuals are ‘women trapped in men’s bodies’ and notes that there is no evidence to support this; and in any case, he asks, how does anyone know what it feels like to be someone else?

Bailey explains that there are actually two different types of male-to-female (mtf) transsexual. This had been noted almost a hundred years earlier by the German psychologist Magnus Hirschfeld and repeatedly confirmed by later scientists. None, however, had been able to explain this difference.

He then describes the research carried out by Dr Ray Blanchard, which explains these differences by showing that there are two distinct profiles of people born male who wish to become women. These profiles have nothing in common save that the subjects are born male and become women; the differences between them are enormous, and Blanchard’s research, for the first time, explained these differences in proper scientific studies. This is the foundation of the modern science of transsexualism.

This section is illustrated by descriptions, again sensitively handled, of the lives of several transsexuals of both types. It is quite clear from the writing that these examples are meant to serve only as examples.

The two types, Bailey explains, are ‘homosexual transsexual’ or HSTS, and ‘autogynephilic transsexual’ or AGP. Bailey explains that HSTS are uniquely attracted to masculine men, whereas AGPs, at least before transitioning, are heterosexual. (Some appear to be ‘asexual’ but this is resolved in Blanchard’s work.)

The core motivation for HSTS is a powerful desire for straight, masculine lovers; HSTS may have numerous gay friends but they are not attracted to them. This, Bailey explains, is a relatively easy orientation to understand. HSTS transsexuals are naturally feminine boys who desire men. If they think they can be successful as women, they are likely to at least try to follow this path. Everything they do from the point they decide to transition is in order to make themselves more attractive. This, after all, whether feminists approve or not, is what most young women do.

(HSTS do not take hormones and have surgeries in order to become more ‘like women’ but to become more beautiful women.)

On the other hand, the core motivation for autogynephilic transsexualism is ‘a man’s propensity to be attracted to the idea of himself as a woman’. While it is a very complex sexuality and concomitantly rare, autogynephilia, like HSTS, is rooted in male sexuality; it could hardly be rooted in any other type.

Blanchard identified three distinct sexualities of autogynephilic men. These were heterosexual, the majority, who retained their normative male attraction to women and never or rarely had sex with men; bisexual, who began experimenting with sex with men after transition or while ‘dressed’; and ‘analloerotic’, those for who no other person was needed for romantic or sexual satisfaction. (These last are sometimes called ‘asexual’ but this is erroneous; just ‘being women’ is a sexual release for these men.)

To complicate matters even more, autogynephilia may manifest in four different manners: transvestic, in which the subject is stimulated by cross-dressing; behavioural, where the stimulus comes from doing ‘womanly’ things such as knitting; physiological, where the attraction is to female bodily functions like menstruation (AGP men may wear sanitary pads and urinate in them, for example); and anatomic, where the subject is aroused by the thought of having a woman’s body parts such as a vagina.

When it is realised that these four manners may occur individually or in conjunction with each other and that they affect the three types of autogynephile, the complexity of this condition, and the incisiveness that Blanchard showed in identifying the cause of them all, autogynephilia, are obvious.

So what causes autogynephilia? Put simply, this is an ‘Erotic Target Location Error’. Instead of the subject being romantically attached to a person outside of themselves, they are attracted to a pseudo-personality created within their own minds who is a facsimile of a woman. (She has to be since they are gynephilic, or attracted to women.) As the condition advances, this pseudo-personality is strengthened through sexual reward until it overwhelms the male host. At this point the subject experiences feelings of great psychological unease as the created pseudo-woman now in control rejects her male body.

(This is so different from the ‘gender dysphoria’ that HSTS experience that some HSTS reject the term.)

HSTS typically present while still young, often in their teens and rarely over the age of thirty, while AGPs, on average, present much later, with a median age of 43. This has allowed some AGPs to claim that the only difference is one of age at presentation; but Blanchard debunks this.

At the same time, thanks to the internet and social media, there is significantly more overlap in age now than when Blanchard was researching, so it is possible to compare the types side by side; they are completely different. HSTS are extremely feminine and have no difficulty ‘passing’ as women; indeed they often, themselves, claim they are ‘useless at being men’. AGPs, even when younger, find it difficult to be feminine at all, and those who transition later in life may really struggle.

Bailey observes, ‘There is the rare exception, but for the most part, autogynephilic transsexuals aspire (with some success) to be presentable, while homosexual transsexuals aspire (with equivalent success) to be objects of desire.’ (Note, however, that HSTS are interested in attracting straight male lovers and are in direct competition with natal women for them; AGPs, in the main, are not.)

Bailey, as a clinician, is equally sympathetic to both types and makes it clear that both should be treated fairly. Having made the case that male homosexuality is almost certainly genetic (a research area he continues to work in,) Bailey then makes the case that autogynephilia, while distinct from homosexual transsexualism, may also be genetic in origin and run in families. If true it would therefore be a discrete, genetically-dependent orientation in itself.

‘Gender dysphoria’ is a deeply-felt discomfort with their male physical attributes, associated with both types of mtf transsexual. Indeed it is the clinical diagnosis upon which a referral for surgery must be based, and this has caused some considerable confusion.

In talking to many HSTS transwomen, as I have, both online and in person, it is quite clear that they do not suffer gender dysphoria in the way that AGPs do. For the latter, this is a deep and unsupportable loathing of their male organs, triggered by the collapse of their male persona under onslaught from their pseudo-feminine one.

Most HSTS have no such issue with their organs, they have an issue with being beautiful, so that they may compete with natal women and be accepted as sexual partners by straight men — who are the only men they are interested in. If winning such a man means losing the penis, so be it.

(Bailey is pessimistic about the extent to which GRS improves a transwoman’s chances of winning and keeping a straight male partner, a pessimism which I share.)

Throughout, Bailey avoids inflammatory language and, while this is not a science textbook, writes in a very neutral manner, presenting the observed facts and explaining the scientific theories, but leaving the reader to draw conclusions.

The book is not perfect and this in part is because it was published over a decade ago. Where it falls down most is where there was least scientific research. In addition, the author tends to extrapolate from the US experience to the global one, which is unsupported. He somewhat assumes that the US milieu can be regarded as a ‘standard of normativity’ when in fact, many observers would regard it as a very peculiar one indeed, informed by some deeply unpleasant Anglo-Saxon prejudices.

For example, the author clearly regards the idea that ‘Danny’ should grow up to be a gay man, rather than a transsexual woman, as a good outcome. He acknowledges that this must mean Danny suppressing his femininity, and does remark that if he grew up in a milieu less prejudiced than the US, he would probably be transsexual. But he makes no attempt to argue that US culture should be changed, meaning that boys like ‘Danny’ must continue to suppress their true natures, however hard that might be. (Today, social change means that there would be a much greater chance that ‘Danny’ would indeed grow up to be transsexual, even in the USA.)

Notwithstanding these points, which Bailey might well view differently today anyway, The Man Who Would Be Queen is, overall, an excellent book. It lays out the science of transsexualism in a clear and easily understood manner and thus provides what Ray Blanchard, who finally nailed it, never did: an accurate and factually correct lay person’s guide. As someone reasonably familiar with a significant number of gays and transsexuals, I would say this book is a very useful primer and explains a great deal that would otherwise be mysterious.

All in all, it is well written, contains much insight, treats its subjects with great respect and manages to preserve their dignity, even when describing practices that most people would be surprised by. It is not at all prurient or lascivious and maintains a consistent good humour throughout: so why on Earth did it cause so much trouble?

While The Man Who Would Be Queen discussed several different types of sexuality and the individuals who have them, only one of these groups showed any negative reaction to the book at all. Gay men and HSTS transwomen were largely silent. (I have explained Blanchard to many HSTS transwomen; all were suspicious at first but very quickly recognised themselves in his description.) The only group that objected to the book at all was a small number of AGP activists, most of whom were themselves academics.

This is surprising because academics, while frequently scathing about each other’s conclusions, are usually very careful to avoid any kind of ad hominem attack; but the very opposite happened here.

While some AGP activists did try to debunk Blanchard, whose research informed much of the book, they were unsuccessful. Perhaps the most convincing was by Dr Madeline Wyndzen, who argued a reasonable case based on the statistical methodology used but was, in the end, unable to refute the core findings.

In any case, Blanchard did not write this book and it was the book that caused the anger; J. Michael Bailey wrote it. Because of all of this, he, rather than Blanchard was the target of what Dr Alice Dreger called a ‘narcissistic rage attack’. A classic case of ‘shoot the messenger’.

The attack on Bailey was shocking for its intensity and its personal nature. Although an investigation by Northwestern University, where Bailey is a professor, fully vindicated him and an excellent rebuttal of the attacks was written by Dreger, there is no doubt that a small group of people in positions of responsibility, including senior academics, colluded to attempt to ruin Bailey’s career and destroy his private life. Thankfully they failed but this reflects no credit on the perpetrators whatsoever.

The attempt to discredit both Ray Blanchard and Michael Bailey was not on scientific grounds, but on personal ones. Yet, and despite there being no credible evidence to refute Blanchard, to this day, many autogynephile activists and even a few HSTS ones (who should know better) claim that his typology is ‘out of date’ or ‘debunked’.

Nothing could be further from the truth. While some of the terminology has been (unnecessarily) modified in certain publications, the core ideas, that there are two distinct types of male-to-female transsexualism, that both are rooted in male sexuality, and that individuals in one group are strongly attracted to men, while the others are attracted to the idea of themselves as women, have become the de facto scientific consensus. Despite constant misinformation from AGP activists, Blanchard’s typology remains the basis of the APA’s understanding of transsexualism, along with that of the WHO and other psychological and psychiatric bodies across the globe.

Nuttbrock et al, in 2009, attempted to debunk Blanchard in a large scale study in New York and ended up confirming it. MRI tests on separate and controlled groups of HSTS by Rametti et al. on one hand and on AGPs by Savic and Arver on the other, in 2011, clearly demonstrate major differences between HSTS and AGP brains, directly confirming the prediction Blanchard made in 1995. An attempt, by Dr Charles Moser, to suggest that autogynephilia exists in natal women was thoroughly rebutted by Dr Anne Lawrence, but did have the effect of provoking an update of the diagnostic tool in use.

Today, the principal researcher into autogynephilia is Lawrence, herself AGP, who has amassed many narratives from other autogynephiles that fully support Blanchard, which she also does. This, of course, has also made her a target for attack, despite the thorough and painstaking nature of her research and the fact that she is herself autogynephilic.

The attacks on Bailey were both academically disgraceful, the more so because senior academics prosecuted them, and fundamentally anti-science. They attempted to force the acceptance of an unsubstantiated explanation that lacked any independent support, while properly designed, supported, peer-reviewed scientific research, as Blanchard’s was, had to be rejected; just because they said so.

Worse, when it became impossible to break the science, they used the tactics of politicians, rather than scientists. They attempted to shout down a perfectly well developed and executed piece of research and to destroy the lives of those who proposed it. When all else failed they resorted to simple defamation, character assassination, accusations of child abuse, personal insult and innuendo and even death threats. Nobody could be in any doubt that this was an atrocious way to behave. Why did they do it? Because they had no evidence to refute Blanchard.

This is no different from the anti-science mindset of climate change denialism. It is no different from the anti-science preaching of extremist religious fundamentalists who deny the science of evolution or how the universe came to be; the wilfully ignorant point of view that because one believes something, it must be so, irrespective of whether it is true or not.

Well, the Earth is not 6,000 years old and Darwin was right. Science is the only credible means we have to explain natural phenomena, and to deny it because it might harm the interests, or hurt the feelings, of some people, is unacceptable. That such a position is held by some claiming to be scientists themselves is egregiously so. For those people to then collude in a pack attack on others with whose ideas they disagreed is beyond the pale.

In the thirteen years since this celebrated storm in the latte cup, further research has vindicated Blanchard. No serious scientist now subscribes to the ‘brain sex’ notion and the consensus is firmly that there are two distinct conditions that lead to male-to-female transsexualism, both rooted in male sexuality. The politically-correct myth that transsexuals are ‘women born in men’s bodies’ has been debunked, not once, but time and again.

This has not prevented autogynephile activists from continuing to promote it, to the detriment of HSTS transsexuals and of course, women; so persuasive have they been that many lay persons apparently believe that the only way to be a ‘real’ woman is to have been born with a penis. To this end they continue to use the same tactics as they used against Bailey: misrepresentation, traduction, quote-mining, bullying, character assassination, threats of violence, defamation and flat lying.

Blanchard himself no longer researches in the area of transsexualism, but was on the editorial board for the most recent revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. J Michael Bailey has returned to an earlier fascination and recently collaborated in research which re-examined, using pairs of identical twins, the idea that homosexuality might be genetic and innate, and showed the affirmative. His contribution to studies in the field of human sexuality remains important. Anne Lawrence continues to publish and contribute to the actual science of transsexualism — rather than the socio-political nonsense that is all too prevalent.

The Man Who Would Be Queen, in summation, then, is a well-written and enjoyable book that explains the science of transsexualism in everyday language, citing real examples of real people. It is a must-read for anyone interested in this subject. The book makes it possible to understand the phenomena of people like Bruce ‘Caitlyn’ Jenner (AGP) and Janet Mock (HSTS), and why they are so obviously so different.

While not itself a scientific textbook it is an accurate and readable primer that points the reader in the direction of the peer-reviewed research, on which it is based, with an excellent bibliography. While I disagree with the author that growing up as a feminine gay man is a better outcome for a gender non-conforming boy than becoming a transwoman, the book would still be helpful for parents of such children.

However, it would be of especial interest and help to those who have, in their families, autogynephilic transsexuals, particularly women whose husbands have announced that they intend to transition, as well as the sons and daughters of such men.

Rod Fleming on Google+

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The Genie of Aspiration

The thing about aspiration is that it’s a tough genie to get back into its bottle.

This must be the conclusion of any mythical, dispassionate, possibly extra-terrestrial viewer when examining the current state of political affairs in the disUnited Kingdom. Less than two years ago a referendum was held which was explicitly intended to slay the nationalist monster for once and for all — sentiments reflecting those of the spectacularly unforesightful George Robertson when this whole journey began and his party found itself obliged to offer Scots a parliament of their own. Yet the genie is far from banished and if anything is more bumptious than ever.

The ‘wee pretendy parliament’ just growed and growed and now its roars — if still distant and ill-understood — have begun to frighten the gentle people of the far south, the colonial overlords of the disUnited Kingdom. Yes, frighten: for the first time since Churchill sent tanks and troops to quell the people of Glasgow, the English establishment has been rattled by events in Scotland.

For them the Scots’ discontentment is a profound mystery, one which they will probably never grasp. For the southern English, the Union is indeed a great thing. It achieved most that it was intended to. It established a militarily secure platform upon which the British Project — to make the world England — could be built and for centuries that project was a success; the Anglo-Saxon patriarchy was spread across the globe by it, taking, somewhat unfortunately, all the prejudice and insecurity of the English middle class with it.

Then again, for the southern English — and not a few Scots who have joined them — London and the south-east of England is the finest place in the world to live. It is a land of fabulous opportunity where all one has to do is work hard and one’s personal streets will be paved with gold. And they are not mean with their largesse: why anyone, from whatever uncultivated backwater of the disUnited Kingdom, may move to London and there spend their days serving the Great British Project, to the betterment — so their apologists attest — of all. Why, look at the money these people can send back to their poor relatives still living in frightful places like Inverurie or Campbeltown.

And this arrangement ideally suits the southern English who are approaching the end of their working days. London’s economic primacy over the disUnited Kingdom means that they can sell their ridiculously overpriced two-bedroom maisonettes and with the money thus liberated, buy a manor in Dunkeld or Aberfeldy. After all, the poor indigenes of these places have not the resources to compete. And if they should complain, then they must come to London, where they may, after a lifetime of slavery to the British Project,  earn enough to buy homes for themselves in the places they were born and raised. That is the free market. Yes, the system is equitable and works for the benefit of all.

Look you, the English even build roads and railways so that the impoverished Scots can travel south to where they should be, and there serve the British Project. How could anyone complain or deny this generosity?

Scotland is useful though; it gives the southern English a place to put their nuclear weapons. In truth these will never be used and represent an extravagance of obscene proportions, as well as being illegal. But they are the Imperial sabre that allows the English to pretend that ‘Britain’ is still a world player and that Vladimir Putin really gives a monkey’s what the Great British Prime Minister thinks. Once it was Nelson’s navy, now it is a fleet of submarines equipped with the most horrific killing systems the patriarchy has ever invented. Plus ca change…And in return, taxpayers (who are, of course, all English, since the Scots are all feckless spongers) even give poor Scottish peasant farmers actual real money to work on these obscenities. The fact that if anything ever goes wrong, those peasants will become irradiated flying mince, along with most of the rest of the Scots, is neither here nor there; it is not as if it were London, after all.

Meanwhile, the British Home Office decides who may enter the disUnited Kingdom, in order to protect the interests of everyone in it…or at least, the interests of the south-east of England. But then, the Scots clearly have not the competence to make such decisions: they weren’t born in England, poor things. And since the whole point of the British Project is to make everywhere England, then this too is reasonable and logical.

This is what our space-alien visitors might think, reading the crop of English and Unionist media in the run-up to the Scottish election next month. The Scots are a miserable, ungrateful shower who should be glad of the crumbs of English largesse that drop into the squalid, sordid swamp they live in. England’s generosity and magnanimity towards this backward, miserable wasteland to the north is unsurpassed and ongoing. How dare the Scots protest it?

But then our aliens, being scientists, as they must be to have got this far, would have to take another sample. They would come to Scotland and there they would hear a very different story.

The Scots do not, in the main, want an opportunity to compete for stratospheric wealth. They just want a comfortable life, thank you. The Scots do not hanker for the fair vistas of Tottenham or Islington; they prefer their own cities. The South Downs pale when compared to the Lairig Ghru and beaches? Who would choose Brighton over the magnificent strands of Scotland?

Scots do not appreciate that their children are priced out of living where they grew up and they certainly do not accept that it should be necessary for a person, well qualified and prepared to work hard, to have to go to another country in order to find a decent job.

The Scots, in the main, do not seek to pretend that they can dominate world affairs; by and large they would be happy to play a constructive role in Europe –although their ability to do so must, of course, be decided by the English. They do not respond warmly to the rattle of imperial sabres, partly because those sabres have been used, all too often, on the Scots themselves; but also because they do not covet militaristic glory.

Scots abhor injustice, discrimination and the kind of divide between rich and poor that apparently delights the hearts of their southern neighbours (and, at least till now, masters.) They are intrinsically an egalitarian lot, contemptuous of airs and graces and mocking of hereditary – or otherwise – titles. One of the greatest compliments a Scot can pay is that a person is ‘unassuming’. Their reaction to inequality is to try to make the system more fair and distribute wealth more equitably, rather than blame those trapped in poverty by it.

For a marriage to work, both partners must share a great deal in common. That which divides them – and there is always something – must be far less than that which draws them together. In many marriages, what binds the couple is their children, usually conceived in the early days. Frequently the desire to have children is the motivation for marriage. Then they have to be brought up and this implies a commitment to do so. It is no surprise that so many marriages come to an end – often amicably – when that responsibility is discharged. There is not enough in common left to make up for the differences and people do change over the years.

For the disUnited Kingdom, what bound the unlikely and disparate partners together was not children, but the British Project – making the world England, by force. For centuries this was a success and on it was built the empire upon which, famously, ‘the sun never set’.

Well that sun did, in the end, set. There is no British Empire now. It is defunct and while the world still suffers the consequences of its imposition, the disUnited Kingdom has little power to influence the global future. The British Project has run its course. It is the subject of academics and historians. Britain remains economically important but militarily it is spent. Even the operation that wrested the Falklands back from an invader, only thirty years ago, could not now be carried out by the British armed forces. The child of the disUnion, the British Project, is not only grown but has lived and died while those that begat it still sup at the same table, one of them increasingly aware of how little now brings them together and how much divides them, while the other blithely hums ‘Rule Britannia’ and fills in The Times’ crossword. ‘Eight letters, a cold place of discontent and strife…oh yes, Scotland.’

The disUnion is dead. It is defunct. It has hopped the twig, kicked the bucket, passed away, gone tits-up. It is like those marriages lived in cold sufferance of each other, where the parties stay together because it is familiar and they fear change. Our aliens, if they did not know the history behind it, would be asking themselves why on Earth two partners so completely different in so many ways would ever have come together in a union of any kind.

That is why, in the Scottish case, the aspirational nationalist genie cannot be put back into the bottle. It is an idea whose time has come. It will not go away and in the end, Scotland will be independent, one way or another. It is really up to the English, now and alongside their Unionist stooges in Scotland, to decide how much ill-feeling they wish to leave behind once the inevitable parting of the ways arrives.

 

Rod Fleming on Google+

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Stand up and be counted

My partner, a TS woman

I am in a relationship with a transsexual (TS) woman. This places me in a position of responsibility, because my girlfriend, like all her sisters, is in danger. TS women are abused, insulted, and disrespected; but worse, they are beaten, falsely arrested, harassed by authorities that should protect them and frequently murdered.

This means that men like me must stand up and be counted.

Although on the surface, things are getting better, the improvements are largely cosmetic and there are misconceptions still. Many of these confuse the public understanding of what TS women are, for they are all too often conflated with fetishistic transvestites like Bruce ‘Caitlyn’ Jenner, who claim to be ‘transgender’, or, on the other hand, with ‘gay men’. The former — a tiny minority — have so dominated the media that it has become commonplace to think of a TS as being a middle-aged man in a dress with a wife and children. Nothing could be further from the truth: true transsexuals (Blanchard HSTS) are never attracted to women, because their feminine sexuality is what makes them TS; and they are clearly not men.

Most of the trans-attracted men I know are not gay. Essentialist issues like the nature of genitalia do have validity; for example in the lesbian rejection of fetishistic transgenderists, neatly symbolised by the ‘Cotton Ceiling’ fiasco. But trans-attracted men are less concerned about this essentialism than about gender. This probably has to do with differences in male and female sexuality. Whatever, men like me do not see the presence of a penis on our lover as making her any less of a woman. Gender, not genitalia, makes the girl.

‘Gay’ may be acceptable as a term of inclusion, but not when social conservatives use it as a term of abuse or the regressive Left to enforce conformity to their notions, and both of these are commonplace.

LGB people cannot simply ‘claim’ trans-attracted men as part of LGB. We’re not. We do not accept a role or position within that umbrella because we are not part of it.

Trans-attracted men, whether it is liked or not by either right-wing social conservatives or ‘left-wing’ homonormative orientation police masquerading as ‘Queer Theorists’, are straight. That’s it, and we will not be lectured to by academic refugees from reality who tout their philosophising as if it were fact from the ivory towers of tenure that they occupy.

I don’t give two hoots what religionard or other ignorant conservatives think of me or call me; but the attempts from within the LGB community to call me something I am not are alienating, and while this does not damage me, it damages my partner, and others like her, by also alienating potentially supportive men and by driving love between men and women into the shadows.

Jelly’s first boat ride

Furthermore, we see through it; this claim is asserting that TS women are a category of gay man. That is pure essentialism. What we find attractive are gender markers, not sex ones. We find pretty faces, sexy smiles and nice legs hot and they turn us on. Lesbian feminists may bitch that TS women, in their pursuit of conventional feminine beauty and complete adoption of feminine gender, betray feminists who would like to see gender removed altogether; but since most ordinary women pursue exactly the same gendered path as TS women, it is unfair — and probably pointless — to single the latter out.

The essentialist claim that trans attracted men are not ‘straight’ is a deliberate attempt to bring such individuals under the control of gender-conforming mainstream gay culture and ultimately to erase their distinct identity altogether, in order that they may be put in their places amongst the rank and file of cloned homonormativity. Most such men would laugh this off, the notions of the LGB ‘community’ not being of any importance to us, but denying the legitimacy of their partners is a direct attack on the very existence of TS women. We, the straight partners and lovers of TS women, do not accept this attack, nor will we have any part of it.

This attempt to erase a group of individuals because they do not conform to essentialist notions neatly illustrates the iron-fisted totalitarianism of ‘identity politics’ which says that one may adopt any identity one likes, as long as the authority group approves of it; and, of course, the most despised ‘identity’ of all is that of straight white man.

It is not to be wondered at that this diseased mindset comes from the United States of America, the most rigidly conformist culture in the developed world. It demonstrates that ‘identity politics’ is nothing more than group coercion and the suppression of the individual. The relentless attempt to shoehorn people into ‘identities’ that someone else thinks they fit — regardless of their own desires — tells us all we need to know about ‘social liberty’ in that benighted place.

For far too long we have heard how TS women must change to accommodate society’s prejudices. Reparative therapies have been inflicted on them with the support of religiously-motivated quacks like Paul McHugh, and Ken Zucker tried to condition TS teenagers into gay boys, to set them up for a lifetime of miserable self-denial. Meanwhile the mainstream gay culture looked the other way or even abandoned TS women.

They are routinely beaten, harassed and killed, and, when heteronormative religion and culture is taking a break from abuse, they are erased and their lived experience colonised by fetishistic transvestites, those ghastly simulacra of women. And when Jim Fourrat denounced TS women as ‘crazy queens who would destroy the way gays lived their lives’, he articulated the underlying truth about ‘gay men’: that they are no more than women in denial, desperate to hang on to their tattered comfort-blanket of pretence.

As one true TS going under the name of ‘Androphile’ put it, ‘If gender transition was easier, we would see way less gay men and more androphilic {true} transsexuals. The frustrated desire of a gay man permeates his life. All gay men are effeminate but ALL gay men despise femininity. Now, you will turn around and say that you know effeminate gay men in relationships. Those are not relationships. Those are compromises to be less lonely. There is a difference between what people want and what people get. Effeminate gays (ALL GAYS are effeminate) would love to have a straight, alpha male penetrate them, but, because they can’t get him, they fool themselves into thinking that they’ll be content with another effeminate butch queen.’

The truth of this is born out in any visit to south-east Asia, where huge numbers of TS women are highly visible. Where transition is easy and TS women have a social space they can colonise, they are obvious.

The confection of lies and fantasy that is Western ‘gay culture’ is exactly what Fourrat was trying to protect, and he was right: the very existence of true TS women and straight men who love them undermines the whole concept of the ‘gay’ movement, which is, as another TS put it, all about ‘women pretending to be men in order to have sex with other women pretending to be men’. Why would someone do such a thing except for relentless social pressure to conform? And how bitter must it make a ‘gay man’, as he watches his married partner grow bald and fat and his ill-fitting suits wear out just as his own do, to see a beautiful TS woman living exactly as he would have wished to, if only, if only…?

At the same time as the ‘gay’ male movement was throwing TS women to any wolves it could find, the Western face of ‘transgender’ has been hijacked by fetishistic cross-dressing men like Bruce Jenner. These are not true transsexuals, but because they are loudmouthed male bullies who know how to manipulate the media, they have all but erased those who are, at least in the broader public consciousness. This has only served to drive true transsexuals in the West further underground and, consequentially, thousands of men who are attracted to them to seek their partners outside the West, where the vile duopoly of ‘gay men’ and fetishistic transvestites has not succeeded in erasing true transsexuals.

Within the rigidly homonormative Western ‘LGB’ culture of today, feminine men and masculine women are ostracised in favour of a bizarre narcissism where everyone loves a clone of themselves. Because this culture sees TS women and their lovers as something they are not, it expects them to sign up and be erased. At the same time, male autogynephilic transvestites, who remain heteronormative, heterosexual men under their dresses, deliberately shame trans attracted men for their desires, as if these horrors were attractive to us in any way at all.

We don’t want to be a part of that and we shall not; we will not be subsumed into the clone mentality of mainstream homonormative LGB culture, nor will we be shamed for loving the women we do by a group of 100kg linebackers in frocks swinging Vuitton handbags and sporting size 15 heels.

People will just have to accept true TS women and those of us who are attracted to them, as we are. That means it is up to us, the men who love and support them, to fight alongside our partners for recognition and fairness.

Transsexual women have a long history, going back to before the invention of writing, and persist in all cultures, everywhere. They are not going anywhere, nor are their lovers. Learn to live with us and stop trying to fit us into boxes of your invention, and we’ll get along just fine.

Rod Fleming on Google+

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3. Challenging Autogynephilia