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| Egypt Views The Abyss Again |
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| Protecting Their Women, of Course |
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This is Dark Cloud on Wednesday, December 21, 2011. I say it's time, this Christmas, for the American Left, with whom I am often in agreement, to stand up and admit their continuing if unintended tolerance for misogyny is due to cowardly situational ethics. It's also long past time for the American Right to subject itself to the Christianity it talks about. In the mid 1920's, a war damaged British writer took a job in Egypt teaching English. Egypt, at that time, had a King and was center in the battle within Islam for cultural and national supremacy. Predictably, it was the cosmopolitan Egyptian elite that represented the nation to the world, and they had come to think of themselves as European, and wanted Egypt to be a European nation, as had Cleopatra, the Greek queen who bedded Caesar. This was what scared conservative Islam, and gave rise to the Islamic Brotherhood. Many educated Egyptians thought that in twenty years - which turned out to be the middle of World War 2 - women would hold all the power in Egypt, because they were better educated in general and seemed to have more energy and were in the process of shucking off traditional roles and not just being complacent housewives. The writer was Robert Graves, and although irony dripped from his writing, he did seem to feel, in general, that was the general inclination and Egypt would become a modern nation. Today, after being clobbered by upstart Israel and poisoned by the insistence on overpopulation demanded by their patriarchal and retarded religious elders, Egypt stands again on the verge of rise or rapid descent. It overthrew a more or less benevolent tyrant (as such go) and crook and was the first major bloom in the Arab Spring, although not the first revolt. The Army that allowed Mubarak to be thrown out is now fearing that the basis for its power is at risk. Supposedly secular, the Army is influenced by the regressive arm of Islam, still as patriarchal as Mormons, Catholics, and Baptists, and fears that if it looks like it favors the West, it will suffer civil war and the demotion of Egypt. That's a valid concern, but the brutality and anger of the army sadistically beating up Egyptian women in the streets for the world to see shows a more basic horror, one that afflicts all Islamic nations and not a few Christian ones. They fear women, and they fear sex. It was only one hundred years previous, not long after Graves was in Egypt, that Britain gave women the vote, nine years after the US in 1919. During the time of the Suffragettes, heroic Anglo Saxon men in England and here, including men of the cloth, beat the living Jesus out of women marching or protesting and killed not a few. When women, arrested for wanting to, you know, vote like an adult in a nation dedicated to freedom, went on hunger strikes, the most sadistic procedures of forced feeding were implemented, amounting to torture. Rather than give them the vote. Can't have that. Even the most Alpha of males can react like a frightened, moronic child when his perception of the appropriate roles for others is in flux. You see it in the Tea Party today, although they largely tend to the Omega end of the scale. Today, mere domestic violence results in mandatory arrest. I've said before the only time I was actually scared in jail was the anger so many men had against women they supposedly loved. Imagine their compassion for women they didn't know or were not attracted to? That cleared up a lot of things for me. And so I say it's time, this Christmas, for the American Left, with whom I am often in agreement, to stand up and admit their continuing if unintended tolerance for misogyny is due to cowardly situational ethics. It's also long past time for the American Right to subject itself to the Christianity it talks about but cannot walk. This stems from both cowardice and the continuing idiocy that all cultures are of equal value, and therefore we must respect and tolerate misogyny and worse in others. There is no safety in saying that our own culture has been guilty of much the same, and recently, and that therefore only those who are without sin can throw stones. Christ - remember him? - didn't show much respect for his own culture and peers when he shamed men from stoning a helpless woman, which the law then allowed. Nor should we, in our enemies, our neighbors, our family. Merry Christmas. |
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