An Endangered Species

The Reason Behind The British State's Institutionalised Prejudice Against Men.
By Philip Jones 5th May 2009.

I have written previously and with great foreboding on how government interference in people's lives is increasing at an alarming rate. In the UK this micromanaging of human affairs has over the past decade taken on a very sinister aspect, as the `social engineers` planners and managers, with their army of programmed social workers, invariably armed with a signed and sealed mandate from Brussels via Westminster, intrude into the most private and personal regions of individual liberty and privacy.
The question ‘When did you stop beating your wife?’ is a well known rhetorical device to illustrate the impossible situation in which whatever answer someone gives traps them into an admission of guilt.
It now appears that the British Government has updated this snare for the modern era with the question: ‘When did you stop getting beaten by your husband?’ Doctors and midwives are being told to ask all pregnant women if they are being abused by their husbands or boyfriends.
It doesn't take an Einstein to work out the implications of this behemoth of political correction. British Society now presumes that all men are inherently bad? One has to wonder what construct of human government polices pregnancy and seeks to convert doctors and midwives into `state snoopers` in such an inappropriate and intrusive manner, invading and brutalising that which is sacred and private between a man and his wife?
To aggressively probe women about their men's behaviour, without evidence of any wrongdoing, is invasive and oppressive, and breaches our fundamental right to a private life. It tramples over that very presumption of innocence, upon which historically, we British have depended upon to guarantee being able to go about our daily business without state interference and harassment, this being the very essence of a free society.
But it also raises deeper questions. How have we slid so quiescently into such an authoritarian political culture? How has it been so easy to mount such a direct assault on natural justice, men and family life? How have we allowed our values to be turned upside down? And why are we so silent when lies and distortions are presented as facts?
Just consider the premise behind this pregnancy abuse directive. The government seeks to justify it by saying that 30 per cent of domestic violence is triggered by pregnancy. This may indeed be so; and clearly, violence against a pregnant woman is an ill earnestly to be avoided.
But in itself, that statistic is meaningless. For it obviously does not mean there is a risk of violence to pregnant women overall. Only a small minority of women ever suffer violence at the hands of their menfolk. But the number of these cases has been hugely exaggerated by spurious figures compiled by feminist ideologues, claiming that one in every four women suffers from domestic violence.
The idea that a quarter of all women have been assaulted in this way is outrageous. This figure has been taken from deeply unreliable research which does not stand up to serious scrutiny. Some of it has been extrapolated from self-selected samples of individuals in battered women’s hostels. The rest is derived from research of a dubious quality, in which women are interviewed but men are not.
Even worse, the premise that men are the sole perpetrators and women always their victims is simply false. Dozens of studies have shown categorically that in domestic incidents, violence is initiated by men and women equally. Moreover, much male victimisation is hidden because many men are too embarrassed to admit to having been assaulted by a woman to report their injuries.
I accept that women tend to come off worst in such encounters because men are physically stronger. But that’s not the point. The demonisation of men as violent aggressors with women merely their passive victims is just not the case.
In the UK, even the Home Office’s own respected research unit reported recently that equal numbers of men and women said they had been assaulted by a current or former partner. Yet the same Home Office chooses to ignore or even deny such findings.
It points instead to the fact that around 100 women a year are killed by men in domestic incidents (along with about 50 men killed by women). But it does not follow that the murder of a woman by her husband or lover results from sustained domestic violence in that household - the assumption behind the question that doctors and midwives must now ask.
Many, if not most, murders of women in the home are one-off episodes of violence in which the man suddenly loses control, often due to jealousy. It is not unusual in such cases for the man to kill not just the woman but the children, and even himself, too.
Moreover, if one is looking at the main perpetrators of violence within the home, it is a fact that most child deaths happen to be caused by women. But if doctors or midwives were accordingly to view all pregnant women with suspicion, we would rightly regard this as intolerable. So why is a similar assumption about male violence justified?
Also significant is the fact that most women victims of domestic violence are assaulted or killed by men to whom they are not married. This is almost certainly because of the greater instability in unmarried relationships. So if the government really wanted to isolate the potential for abuse, it should surely be requiring doctors and midwives to ask pregnant woman whether they are married to the father of their child - and if not, place both woman and child on the ‘at risk’ register.
Just imagine, though, the outcry if anyone were to propose this. The Home Office itself has previously acknowledged that marital breakdown is a ‘key risk factor’ in domestic violence. Yet the government has nevertheless promoted the false belief that all relationships are equal in value. By thus encouraging transient relationships, it has almost certainly helped foster a culture in which domestic violence is more likely to occur. So why is it, on the one hand, apparently encouraging unfettered behaviour which leads to violence, while on the other taking intrusive measures to prevent it?
Ordo Ab Chao (Order Out Of Chaos) And The Hegelian Dialectic.
Ostensibly at least, here lies the key paradox at the heart of the regime's broader social programme. At the same time that it wants to police pregnancy in order to supposedly stamp out the ill of domestic violence, it is licensing a range of behaviour which is socially destructive and which will cause increasing chaos, harm and distress -all under the guise of trying to control it.
Its proposals to deregulate gambling, for example, will turn our cities into tawdry sleaze-pits: magnets for crime and corruption which will increase gambling addiction and in particular the misery of the poor in rising rates of poverty, debt, ill-health and family breakdown. It almost defies belief to hear ministers breezily condoning the fact that casino operators intend to bribe local authorities to grant planning permission for their expanding gambling empires.
The deregulation of gambling is all of a piece with its proposals for all-night drinking, which will merely exacerbate our already rising rates of drunken disorder, violence and crime. Even more extraordinary is the government’s relaxation of controls over soft drugs, despite overwhelming evidence of the harm they do not just to individuals but to society.
In addition, the government is flirting with the idea of ‘zones of tolerance’ for prostitution, despite the fact that these would become magnets for sex tourism and trafficking, creating seedy centres for drug-taking and other associated crimes.
Moreover, all-night drinking, gambling and clubbing - with its attendant culture of drug-taking - are heavily promoted as the basis for the regeneration of our cities. Economic prosperity is thus being pursued through the active and official marketing of vice.
In all this, ministers are systematically taking apart the outstanding social reforms of the late Victorians, who were driven by liberal and religious motives to improve society and thus elevate the human condition. This great movement of conscience to attack moral and social degradation was rooted in the Methodism which gave rise to the Labour party, and which it is now so comprehensively betraying.
For it is licensing, legitimising and promoting behaviour considered socially harmful while actively attacking married family life, the premier institution of social order. This onslaught on the family is far broader than the obsession with domestic violence, or the rigging of rape trials by weighting the burden of proof against the defendant to get more convictions.
It has used the welfare system to redefine the family as woman and child with a man as an optional extra. It undermines parental authority by providing contraceptives and abortions to under-age girls without their parents’ knowledge. And it is using the gay rights agenda to spearhead the movement to give equal rights and recognition to sexual relationships outside marriage and destroy altogether the very idea of norms of behaviour.
This is no accident. It is because ministers - many of whom have never grown out of their sixties attitudes - have absorbed the revolutionary philosophy of that decade first promoted by the Italian communist thinker Antonio Gramsci. He said that the liberal-democratic societies of the west could be overturned through the subversion of their morality and culture, in which the moral beliefs of the majority would be replaced by the free-for-all practiced by all those who transgressed those norms.
These would form a ‘coalition of oppositional groups’ which would capture all society’s institutions - schools, universities, churches, the media, the legal profession, the police, voluntary groups -and make sure that this intellectual elite all sang from the same subversive hymn-sheet.
These ideas penetrated intellectual life and shaped a generation of thinkers.The outcome was an assault on morality through a coalition of minorities promoting ‘victim culture’ in which minority demands trump majority values; an assault on the nation through multiculturalism and the wrecking of education; an assault on men and marriage through extreme feminism.
It was a process once memorably dubbed by the American senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan as ‘defining deviancy down’. Whereas previously there was intolerance of unmarried mothers or homosexuality and stigma over divorce, there is now ruthless enforcement of the doctrine that all lifestyles are morally equivalent and intolerance instead of anyone who objects.
The obsession in government with ‘equal opportunities’ -which radiates outwards to other establishment institutions like the police or judiciary - is in reality an agenda to enforce minority values over those of the majority and pillory anyone who dissents.
And dissent is stamped upon - not least because, when deviant behaviour becomes viewed as normal, normal behaviour inevitably becomes treated as deviant. So, for example, sexual encounters where a woman may have second thoughts afterwards is suddenly defined as ‘date rape’. And the traditional family, that bastion of security and safety, becomes stigmatised instead as a fetid stew of child abuse, marital rape and violence against women.
As a result of decades of propaganda, intimidation and spinelessness, the ‘long march through the institutions’ urged by revolutionary thinkers has been achieved. The evidence is on display all around us: academics producing crooked research projects, zealot feminist civil servants in the Home Office, or judges whose hearts bleed for burglars rather than their victims and permit the demands of gypsies to ride roughshod over the planning laws that bind the rest of us.
Wittingly or unwittingly, such people are helping promote an agenda for legislating against virtue and in favour of vice; against self-restraint and for irregularity; against domestic order and for disorder. It is a corruption of our traditional values. The demonising of men as potential rapists, child abusers and woman-beaters is a crucial part of that agenda, and the lamentable questioning of pregnant women but its latest manifestation.
There is no doubt in this writer's mind that the UK Government is actively participating in a calamitous and treacherous game of `Hegelian Dialectics` with the lives of it's own citizens and the security and wellbeing of the whole nation. More simply put, create the problem, incite the reaction, impose the solution, and their solution always seems to include elements which erode more of our ancient rights and personal freedoms, and increases government control over our lives. The unfathomable chaos, injustice and the rapid retreat from reason we see everywhere, and which has resulted in the bewilderment and demoralisation of a whole nation has been planned and orchestrated during top secret meetings held under `Chatham House` rules and in the Masonic Lodges from whence came the motto `Order Out Of Chaos`.
Ref: Melanie Phillips : All Must Have Prizes.
Problem Reaction Solution is a term coined by David Icke.
http://nord.twu.net/acl/dialectic.html What is the Hegelian Dialectic by Niki F. Raapana and Nordica M. Friedrich
http://catholicinsight.com/online/features/article_882.shtml The Frankfurt School
http://www.chathamhouse.org.uk/ The Royal Institute For International Affairs.