Post a response:
(Continues from sub-heading SELECTIVE PERCEPTION in Part 4)That tells you how a well-functioning propaganda system works. People can believe that when we use the law upon the pedophiles (of all ages) or physically abusive people, we really observe the principle that abuses of young people should be met with prosecution to the fullest extent of the law. They don’t see what it would mean if those principles were applied to Establishment behavior. That’s a success of propaganda of quite a spectacular sort.REPRESENTING THE KIDSLet’s take a look at another success. If you look closely at the coverage of the child-abuse emotional outcry since its beginnings in the mid-seventies, you’ll notice that there are, by and large, a few striking voices missing.For example, there are the young people and their now grown-up fellows who have had positive experiences with intergenerational sex. They of course function mostly through the few marginal outlets set up that allow such views to be heard, because their views don’t survive within Establishment or "Conscious" circles. There’ve been tries, like the article by New York Men’s Movement activist Jeff Beane published in "Changing Men." But his attempt was met with so much hysteria that the magazine’s editors were forced to publicly apologize or else lose the "support" of the "feminist" Women’s Movement, led by such distractors as Nikki Craft. (30) Within these marginalized outlets, which encompass platforms ranging from publications to organizations--like the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) or the "Kanalratten" of Germany; they have voices, and they speak. (31) In years past some of the young people have marched openly and been active, in defiance of the hysterias, risking detainment, with these groups. They’ve written in these groups’ publications, too. One young dude by the name of "The Unicorn" wrote very capable columns and debate at the age of 11 and 12 for the NAMBLA Bulletin. (32) Then there was Bill Andriette, who’s now a spokesman for NAMBLA, and past editor of its Bulletin. Bill joined at 15, becoming quite active right away, including marching openly with the organization. But such young people have been rebuffed because Official Conclusion promoters have no interest in such truths. There’s been no reaction to this in the public record further than people suspecting that these people in such organizations were not really "young" and if they actually were, must’ve been brainwashed or in some nasty way forced to do appearances or something. At least that’s how a lot of people have imagined it. That’s kind of interesting, if you look at it. People trust the Legitimate Authorities so much that they can’t allow themselves to imagine that such unaccountables would threaten kids with rape or dangle them over cliffs, but if the hated minority tries to defend itself by allowing the young to speak, the hated minority must be forcing them somehow. Now, after twenty years, the media is starting to wonder what "the kids, themselves" have to say about these matters. We note that the time is perfect, now that people are "clever enough" to spot who is being threatened and coerced to appear, and who is speaking from their "own" voice. Of course, the people with Shared Values have to be very careful because they don’t want the babies to be hurt in any way. And you want to make sure they say the right words (they don’t seem to yet have been able to train patsies like John Crewdson, though I imagine they’re working on that one). Kids, those "little devils," can sometimes say the wrong things since they’re kind of shy and intimidated by adults... So far, we’ve gotten a bit where the kids are sitting in a classroom-type space with the appropriate professional leading them with the admissible language; then there’s a quick clip of a minority girl parroting it. "If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing."Little by little we’re seeing the media inserting kids’ "voices" into their fare--though if the children say something that doesn’t fit, the professionals ignore it (or edit it out) and hope no sickos got a tape of it. I saw something like this on a local Boston talk show where a lesbian teenager blurted a quickie about having an adult lover. The subject was coolly changed immediately. The voices that are allowed to be understood are those which tout the Desired Conclusions. Only a few voices of people who defend their positive experiences slip through, and when they do they’re either ignored or forbidden serious attention, or censored from ever discussing such topics again. Only within the framework of a few marginalized groups like the Kanalratten or NAMBLA, or the radical press, are such voices given serious credence. Many people of both sexes and all age ranges have made their voices heard here, but they’ve been largely met with silence. This can come across as slightly suspicious if you’re able to think critically about it. Why would the entire media business ignore such views when they’re so charged with Protecting Children? Or maybe they’re skeptical, because they’re clever enough to realize that the pedophile will go to huge lengths, "will wait years,"--while working within the law (in the case of NAMBLA activists) for more than ten years of intense scrutiny by police, politicians, and everybody else--just to fool us so that they can get their mouths on a kid’s genitals legally. It may be something to think about, and you can’t help wondering about these opposition voices. Take a look at the national media and see how much you can find about the boylove or girl-love opposition as it has been covered since the emotional outcry broke out in the mid-70’s. And note the frame it has been kept in;--while the acceptable and preconceived view is always a constant. Note the descriptions, read between the lines, compare it with how the media frames historically hated groups. What clues can you find? ...You should be doing this already with every other subject if you’re catching on at all. Malcolm X said it exactly: "If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing." Right from the start of the US organization called NAMBLA (with its pilot the Boston-Boise Committee), experiences outside the accepted frame have been kept carefully marginalized with a double-edged sword: if kids dared not to cooperate with authorities they could be detained or dealt with brutally as described earlier, and if they dared to speak out they’d be met with silence; if their older friends spoke in their absense, it was an obvious ruse to fool gullible citizens. If you look at NAMBLA and read their position papers, you’ll note that they’ve taken up some quite detailed and far-reaching stances in terms of the rights of young people. And you can start to see that they’ve been working for more than ten years because they don’t want neither their sexual orientations laid waste or do they want kids to be stuck in the "prison garden of childhood." What they want is to have their views objectively perused and their experiences honestly considered. They want to educate people about the benevolent nature of sexuality in general, between all kinds of people, and they want to show how consent laws do more harm than good. That’s the wrong view and therefore they’re out. We aren’t allowed to openly peruse their ideas, in fact we are quite well pressured not to even covertly peruse their ideas, since in the hysteria, anyone caught with witch books can be guilty ‘til proven innocent, and you might not have the energy for that. If you want to find out about some of these alternative views, you can either go to a university special collections library (in a state where readers are protected from being put on f.b.i. lists is preferable--i.e. don’t go to Louisiana) or try the radical press. Such views are not easily found, but they’re less controlled than mainstream sources and they say something. (33) This is a spectacular achievement of propaganda. First, that part of the voices of the very people--the young especially--who are directly affected by the emotional outcry are completely excluded, and second, that nobody notices it. That’s interesting too. It takes a really deeply indoctrinated population not to notice that we’re not hearing the voices of the very people whom the "Child Protectors" are supposedly protecting and not asking the question, WHY?--and finding out the obvious answer: because the young people with positive experiences have thoughts independent of the "more intelligent members of the community;" they directly understand that the Accepted Conclusions are lopsided and that artificial constructs like age have little to do with reality. Therefore they’re out. REASONS FOR THE EMOTIONAL OUTCRY?Let’s take the question of the reasons for the emotional outcry. Reasons were offered for the emotional outcry. The reasons are: aggressors against young people cannot be rewarded and agression must be reversed by the quick resort to a Tougher Stand, such as tougher laws, official torture techniques, and increased business Expert direction. That was the reason for the emotional outcry. There was basically no other reason advanced. Can that possibly be the reason for the emotional outcry?I won’t insult your intelligence by running through the facts, but the fact is that those arguments could be refuted in two minutes by a literate young dude. However, they’ve never been refuted. Take a look at the media, the liberal commentators and critics, the people who testified at the Senate sub-committee hearings on aggression upon young people and see whether anybody questioned the assumption that our trusted "authorities" stand up to those principles. Have US Experts opposed their own aggression upon young people and insisted on prosecuting all the people in on these violences in order to reverse it? Has the Science or Business Community funded any investigations? Where are the made-for-TV docu-drama producers? Did they promote an emotional outcry? Did they prosecute anyone to the fullest extent of the law? No, they’ve carried on generations of "Professional Helpfulness." It hasn’t been very pretty during these many years. You had these institutionalized human beings working long hours to keep the children on the Proper Track, whether recommending psyciatric hospitalizations, therapy sessions, or dividing up families whose younger or older members might decide to resist the authority of the State, such as in matters of alleged sexual abuse. I’m talking about hundreds of thousands of people, maybe millions, who have had to be kept on the Proper Track and fit into the preconceived Scientific Conclusions. Great numbers of kids called "weirdos" because of the side-effects of neuroleptic drugs like Ritalin, or "faggots" by strategic police, parents and peers. Myriad numbers of kids believing they must be "sick" or somehow less able than their peers because their authority figures felt they weren’t behaving "normally." Thousands of kids each year thoroughly humiliated, intimidated and victimized into swallowing the Proper Conclusions that the various pleasures they felt at the hands of sincerely loving adults was "abuse" of THE WORST KIND. We continued with this "Professional Helpfulness" and ended up with ample reward for the aggressors. They are given legitimacy in the press, advancements in their careers, and the power to continue to carry out their helpfulness in schools, juvenile psychiatric prisons, delinquent units, "boot camps," and other spaces being designed for young people’s future "time out." Where is this principle that we uphold? Again, it’s young dude’s play to demonstrate that those couldn’t possibly have been the reasons for the emotional outcry, because we don’t uphold those principles. But nobody said anything--that’s what’s important. And nobody bothered to point out the conclusion that follows: NO REASON WAS GIVEN FOR MAKING THIS EMOTIONAL OUTCRY. None. No reason was given for this emotional outcry that couldn’t be refuted by a literate young dude in about two minutes. That again is the hallmark of a totalitarian culture. It ought to frighten us, that we are so deeply totalitarian that we can be driven to such hysteria without any reason being given for it and without anybody noticing some young people’s requests or caring. It’s a very striking fact. A lot of talk in the gay and lesbian press and other alternative culture media have ventured upon the ideas of people remembering how they felt when they were young and some of the experiences they had. Gays and lesbians particularly, have sometimes spoken candidly of ages like 7, 10, or 12 when they had sexual feelings for adults. Other adults often discuss memories of doing things that it is believed kids aren’t competent to do, like driving cars, saving lives, breaking sophisticated computer codes, or accomplishing "incredible" physical and mental feats alone. In one book, noted educator John Holt tells of two boys, ages about 4 and 5, whom "managed to live and survive for several years, in a large city, ...in the midst of great poverty and deprivation--all by themselves." (34) If you do a little looking into the history of this country and others you can also find that there’s quite a lot about kids being quite competent. For instance, it wasn’t uncommon for 13-year-olds to marry and raise families or head out west alone in search of fortunes. And for ages, young people have sailed oceans independently, commanded naval vessels, and governed populations. They’ve joined adults in wars and have often been maimed, tortured, and killed, as well as decorated right along with adults. For instance, in Israel (backed by "phenomenal" U.S. aid) troops regularly torture, maim and kill children who are participating in the Palestinian Resistance. Kids as young as 5 or 7 are "deterred" in this way. (35) Yet our benevolent mainstream press has never connected these realities of recorded and remembered history with the current challenges facing society and its spoken passion for justice. Instead, they continue their busy focus on the negative angle of kids’ "incompetency," thus promoting more an atmosphere of bashing and destructiveness than sincere empowerment. In such a hostile and condescending image, young people become more like a burdensome "superpet" than the people they are. (36) Those who’ve caught on to these developments have often figured they were the only ones, or at least in a tiny minority. And the other people out there who’ve heard only mainstream accounts have been inclined to believe these statements about the abuse epidemic as totally Legitimate, though sometimes wondering why no one ever says anything of what they remembered from their experiences. Together with those who did catch on in part, they say, "I’m alone, but that’s what I think." Suppose they knew that they weren’t alone, that other people like themselves thought it, like a connected network of unschoolers, sexual freedom advocates, or a youth-run independent press syndicate. Suppose they knew that this was not an ulteriorly-motivated network, that in fact these people--in their networks--supporting the rights and freedom of younger people to be taken seriously and empowered genuinely, were in fact a sincere body. Suppose that they knew that the various establishment devices such as the media and the Rightful Leaders had not been cooperating in the least with these voices since well before the mid-seventies. Suppose that people had known that these alternative positions were legitimate and did incorporate young people themselves who wanted to be heard. Wouldn’t it be exactly the kind of thing that any rational person who genuinely cares about the young as fellow human beings would want to deeply think about and look into? That’s what we try to do for more "everyday" problems facing kids: if there’s an impassioned argument we try to find out what’s going on and channel the high emotion towards a just solution fit for both parties. Suppose these things had been known. You can make your own guesses, but I would assume that a lot more people would have spoken out. Here you have the great successes of propaganda. Probably few people have caught on to all of this even though they might’ve been tuning themselves in to "Questioning Authority" on other terms. But from the beginning, people didn’t connect their experiences with these other ideas. Remember, they’d only caught on to part of what was going on in the 1960’s. Therefore it was possible to proceed with the strategy without opposition. In other countries there has been a good deal of discussion about whether compromise would work. And in the cases of Canada, Spain, France Holland, and Germany such comprimises have worked to varying degrees. All these modern nations have some form of "age of consent" under 16. They aren’t perfect yet, in terms of broader possibilities for the young’s true potential, but at least they’re making rational headway. In one case, in Germany, there was a system where the judge chose to send an adult whom was convicted of nonviolent coercive acts, to the local child-love sexual freedom group as part of his rehabilitation. (37) These kinds of developments are interesting since they incorporate the rational approach towards a constructive future of the crime-doer. It’s kind of interesting to see these developments especially when we learn that such countries have undergone much political pressure to conform to U.S. standards of "help." (38) These truths are not discussed in the U.S. media, and it is crucial for a well-functioning propaganda system that they NOT be discussed. That enables politicians to say that if our country did not have these Tough New Laws and special police "Pedo Squads" and sex abuse hotlines to help annonymous people turn in "suspicious" neighbors, we wouldn’t be the foremost nation on the Earth that truly cares about its young. They can say that and no citizen would get up and say that if I had had the power, kids would’ve been empowered much more sincerely not only today, but twenty years ago, because there were opportunities then that I would have pursued and young people would have been really protected without driving so many to despair, violence, drug abuse, therapeutic dependence and suicide. No citizen would say that because of the fear that was tapped into them from the very beginning. A few people said these things, like Harry Hay and Allen Ginsberg, but the number of people who took such a position is so marginal that it’s virtually nonexistent. Given the fact that almost no citizen would say these things, the politician is free to make their statements. It shows that the manufacture of consent is working. Last comment about this. We could give many examples, you could make them up as you go along. Take the idea that child-lovers are monsters molesting the World’s Children, committing "soul murder" on them that keeps them messed up for the rest of their lives--widely believed, in the U.S., and not unrealistically. It has been drilled into people’s heads over and over again: They’re stealing the Children; they’re trying to taint their Purity with their sickening predatory impulses; they’re recruiting for the next generation of child-rapists. All kinds of messages which resemble the messages played against scapegoats of history--witches, Native Americans, the "insane," Communists, the gays--messages so similar to those coming out of the Church of yesteryear in a style that gave an outlet to people’s frustrations about real problems that must not be changed, at least not as quickly as they could be changed. That’s so typical of so many other emotional outcries now "understood" in every "conscious" circle today. So why hasn’t anyone "connected the dots" to begin seeing a full picture? Why do people keep on making the same kinds of mistakes over and over and over again? Notice that this is not all that different from what John Kelloggs did with the the help of the "more intelligent members of the community" in tapping into Church-roused fears and ignorances about sexuality, when they succeeded in manufacturing their "legitimacy" in the eyes of a public who had to stop their babies from "abusing themselves." The techniques are maybe more sophisticated, with television and lots of money going into Public Relations, but it’s pretty traditional. I think the issue, to come back to my original comment, is not simply about the first images that come to our minds, like those of messed-up aggressors--it’s much broader. It’s whether we want to live in a society that really practices justice for all of its people or whether we want to live under what amounts to a form of self-imposed totalitarianism; with the various bewildered herd factions marginalized, directed elsewhere, terrified, screaming empty slogans, fearing for the lives of their young--and the young afraid of affectionate touch--and all admiring with awe the Rightful Leaders who keep saving them from the ever-heightening violence. While the "rational" sectors goose-step on command and repeat the slogans they’re supposed to repeat and justice deteriorates more and more. We all, policing each other, end up serving as obedient enforcers, hoping that the Business Community is going to reward us for following their agendas. These are the choices. That’s the choice that you have to face. The answer to those questions is very much in the hands of people like YOU and ME. NOTES:(includes "For More Information" below)30) Jeff Beane’s article appeared in issue #23 of "Changing Men" 31) For info on the "Kanalratten": PF 3133; 1 Berlin; 30; Germany. Publishes German language "Autonomer Frauenkalender." A similar group in Germany, called the Indianner Kommune, is closely allied with the Kanalratten, and has run an authentic activism despite increasing hysteria, since 1972. See address in "For More Information." 32) See columns by "The Unicorn" (Jesse Calvacca, who outed himself in "Out" magazine) in NAMBLA Bulletins around 1984. For photo documentation of youth activists, see: A Witchhunt Foiled p.p.8,11,41; and The Boston Sex Scandal by Mitzel (group photo of March on Washington). 33) Radical press titles like "FPS"(paper of Ann Arbor Youth Liberation in the 70’s), "Anarchy, A Journal of Desire Armed" (#19-38), "EIDOS." For info about f.b.i. in libraries, see among others, the "Library Journal" Feb.1’91 p.54. 34) See ESCAPE FROM CHILDHOOD, The Needs and Rights of Children by John Holt; Holt Associates; 1972; p.p.6,7. 35) Necessary Illusions p.208 36) John Holt coined this word. 37) See "PAN" magazine, now defunct, but available at research libraries like the Labadie Collection, Homodok and Anna Blaman Huis. (see info below) 38) See "highlights" p.4 of "The Canvas, Newsletter of the Grassroots Party of Minnesota" for info on d.e.a. pressure "to adopt a more prohibitionist stance." See also Regarding Proposed Changes by Stanley, p.p.14-16. FOR MORE INFORMATION:Excellent research libraries where many mentioned rare titles including FPS (and CHIPS), PAN, and boy/girl-love movement publications include: the Labadie Collection, 7th Floor, of the University of Michigan’s main graduate library in Ann Arbor; the Homodok library at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands; and Anna Blaman Huis in Leeuwarden (Netherlands).Activist attorney Lawrence A.Stanley’s book may be purchased through Ophelia Editions, P.O.Box 2377 NY,NY 10185. He also publishes an informative "newsletter" titled "Uncommon Desires." Indianner Kommune: Postbox 810361, D8500, Nuremburg Germany; phone: (010)49 911266786. Publishes "Newsletter For Our English-Speaking Friends"; hosts activist bicycle trips and involves young people in authentic empowerment. Since 1977, Holt Associates has published wide-ranging literature on Unschooling, including the national newsletter "Growing Without Schooling." Also sells Escape From Childhood and vital books by Grace Llewellyn, as well as info challenging "learning disorders." Free catalog: 2269 Massachusetts Ave. Cambridge, MA 02140 (617)864-3100. Anarchy magazine: E-mail: anarchy@panix.com EIDOS, the huge adult sexual freedom paper: Brenda Loew; p.o.box 96 Boston, MA 02137-0096 E-mail: EIDOS4SEX@aol.com http://web.archive.org/web/20010306183539/http://www.eidos.org/ Victims of Child Abuse Laws (VOCAL): 7485 E.Kenyon Ave. Denver, CO 80237 or (303)233-5321 NAMBLA p.o.box 174 Midtown Sta. NY,NY 10018 http://web.archive.org/web/20010306183539/http://www.nambla.org/ THE GUIDE To Gay Travel, Entertainment, Politics & Sex, p.o.box 593 Boston, MA 02199 http://web.archive.org/web/20010306183539/http://www.guidemag.com/ Oh, I didn't correct the spelling or grammar errors. My bad... Anyway, interesting, don't you think? Any comments? M. And just who could be this "Chuck Dodson". The Shadow knows.... |