Tell me again how the SNP ‘lost’…

It’s been two months since the Independence Referendum in Scotland, and the results are now becoming clear. The initial analysis, that the SNP ‘lost’, is no longer sustainable.

While the result was a majority in favour of staying within the disUnion, at least for the present, this has not constituted a defeat for the SNP. To understand this, we need to look at the campaign in a broader context.

In the first place, it was never, and will never be ‘one referendum will settle it for good’. The September referendum was one event in a long sequence, all of which, for over a hundred years, have loosened the ties of the disUnion over Scotland. The September vote should be seen in the context of this ongoing journey; it was just another stage in a process and one which shows support for independence to be far higher already than the Westminster political class were suggesting twelve months ago. Like the odious George Robertson’s claim that ‘a Scottish parliament would kill the SNP’, those statements, of how the referendum would put an end to Scotland’s journey to nationhood now look very hollow. Perhaps it is no surprise that the English media and their subsidiaries in Scotland are glossing over those words now, just as they gloss over Robertson’s

Devolution is a process, not an event, and the end-point of that process is independence. The real question the most recent referendum set was not ‘will Scotland be Independent’ but ‘will Scotland be Independent now’.

Many observers saw Cameron’s acceptance of a referendum, formalised as the Edinburgh Agreement, as a canny move by a duplicitous politician to kick the issue into touch. It was too early for a ‘yes’ vote, and Cameron was banking on the ‘no’ vote being overwhelming and the Unionist parties triumphant on the back of that. So he agreed to it – and he did have a choice in this – as a political move against the SNP. Most Unionist commentators believed that Alex Salmond had been outmanoeuvred, and lost no time saying so.

Did Cameron’s tactic have the result he desired? To answer that we need to look at what actually happened and the aftermath.

Roughly 400,000 more Scots voted ‘No’ than voted ‘Yes’. However, a large contingent of these – more than enough to swing the vote – were pensioners. That means that the ‘No’ side depended on a generation born before 1949. These people grew up in the aftermath of the Second World War, when Britishism was rejuvenated and, to be fair, the British State had made an attempt to create a fair and egalitarian society.

This is a perishable resource. Younger people voted overwhelmingly for ‘Yes’ and would do so again. The ‘No’ side has a far worse enemy that Alex Salmond to contend with: time will inexorably thin the rank of this constituency and weaken its power. Young people today – my children, for example – see that war as ancient history; it does not tug on their emotions.

At the same time, the attractiveness of the British State has vanished. From being an inclusive, if often ill-directed, social state, it has now become the epitome of the most rabid form of capitalistic and patriarchal free-for-all, with the weakest and poorest in society punished and the richest and most powerful rewarded. It is a horrible state and naturally repulsive to the Scots. There is no chance of this being changed by Westminster, and the continuing social injustice will go on playing for Scottish nationalism.

The SNP has attracted over 60,000 new members since September, making it not only the largest party by far in Scotland but a major UK party. It now has over 80,000 members while the Labour party, understandably coy about its embarrassing statistics, is estimated to have no more than 13,500 Scottish members.

Repeated polls since September show that this is no hypothetical advantage. Because even the most brain-dead Tory knew that flooding Scotland with their yapping poodles was practically guaranteed to cause huge numbers of Scots to vote ‘yes’, they left the main thrust of campaigning to the Labour Party, which is as a result now known as the ‘Red Tory’ party.

So how has the referendum played for the Tories’ stooges? If voters vote as they say they will, the Labour Party (in Scotland) may be reduced to four Westminster MPs in next year’s UK General Election. One might have thought a party that had ‘won’ a referendum might do a little better than that, and while voting reality probably means that Labour will scrape a few more seats, it may well find itself reduced to a dozen or so Westminster MPs rather than the forty it currently contributes as lobby-fodder. So is that a ‘win’ for Labour?

In terms of personal approval the SNP’s political leaders, principally outgoing leader Alex Salmond and incoming Nicola Sturgeon, have ratings that Westminster politicians can only dream of. They are overwhelmingly seen as doing a good job. On the other hand, the Labour Party (in Scotland) is in leadership meltdown.

Johann Lamont threw in the towel spouting angry and justified rhetoric about how Labour (in Scotland) was a ‘branch office’. To replace her, London Labour has flown in Jim Murphy, a Red Tory of pure crimson hue, who has supported most major Tory (the blue ones with the weird accents) policies including austerity measures, the Iraq invasion, Trident and many others. He will certainly win the leadership position – Labour is not a democratic party and the powers in London will ensure that he does – but he is not ‘evolved’ to be a peacemaker or healer.

The divisions within his own party are huge and are ripping Labour (in Scotland) apart – and Murphy is the very lad to ensure that they complete the task. He is the perfect face of the Red Tory, and encapsulates everything that is hated by legions of solid Scottish left-wingers about the post-Blair party, one which has thrown out all interest in socialism or even social justice.

For a socialist in Scotland, Labour now has no ground. It has been outflanked to the left by both the SNP and the Scottish Socialists and on the environment – never a Labour strong point – by the Greens, which are all feeling the benefit as disaffected former Labour supporters depart. At the same time it has been identified as just another version of Toryism. If this is what they call ‘winning’ we would love to see what ‘losing’ might be – and likely we yet shall.

But enough of the Labour party (in Scotland.) Their woes are grave but they are not alone. What about the rump of Slimy-Say-Anythings? The pollsters predict disaster here too, and Scotland may well soon be a ‘Liberal’-free zone. This is not an unrealistic scenario, nor is it one that could come quickly enough. Their leadership must quake in terror, looking at disaster in the polls and a pledge by many in the SNP to wipe them off the political map – a pledge they are well capable of fulfilling. It really does not look as if the referendum was a ‘win’ for them either.

The Tories (the official blue ones, not the red ones) have neither suffered nor benefited. Otherwise an irrelevancy in Scottish politics, they doubtless represent a solid anti-Independence minority. But their numbers are low and they are pathologically hated by most Scots. In UK terms they cannot muster but one MP and even at Holyrood, were it not for the arcane voting system that favours minorities, the Tory Party would be like Banquo’s ghost – an unwelcome but ineffectual phantom of a long-gone reality. Nope, don’t think it was a ‘win’ for them either.

In terms of the ongoing independence project, the SNP has emerged triumphant from the September referendum. Their party membership has quadrupled, their projected share of the vote has soared and their leaders’ approval ratings are sky high. They now completely dominate the political debate in Scotland, despite the efforts of the Unionist media to pretend otherwise – media which itself has come under heavy fire. One shakeout of the referendum will almost certainly be the closure of some of the Unionist titles.

The fact is that the SNP is well placed to hold another referendum any time it likes and its leaders have now made it clear, officially, that, for example, should England vote to leave the EU, or if Westminster drags its feet in the transfer of power, that is exactly what they will do. At the same time, the now departed leader Alex Salmond has articulated the threat behind that reality – Unilateral Declaration of Independence. In other words, Scotland would just walk away. What would Westminster do? Send in the troops? Refuse to use Scottish electricity? Deploy gunboats to seize oil-rigs? Ban the sale of whisky in England? Send the nearly one million Scots working and living in England and upon whom the English economy depends, back to Scotland?

Tell me again how the SNP ‘lost’…

Rod Fleming on Google+

The post Tell me again how the SNP ‘lost’… appeared first on Rod Fleming's World.

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Why America is the World’s Rape Capital

The face of an American Hero: Michael L. Stucky Jr, who walked free, having served less than a year in custody, after raping two teenage girls, one 13 and the other 15. Pic courtesy Dakota County jail

It is a perhaps surprising fact that more women are raped in the United States every year than anywhere else in the world, at least on the basis of recorded data.

Even if, as is almost certainly the case, rape is grossly under-reported in countries like Pakistan and India, also rape hotspots, this still leaves the shocking truth that a woman is raped in the US once every six minutes. And this figure is probably low, because under-reporting is also a problem in the US.

How can it be that this capital of Western civilisation, the ‘world’s policeman’, the defender of liberty and justice, is so appallingly hostile to women?

The answer lies in the social structure and history of the US itself and there are three main parts to it.

The first is the sexual objectification of women. Within American culture this is made worse because within it, women are seen not just as sexual objects, but sexual targets. Young men are brought up to believe that the conquest of such targets will establish their ‘manhood’. This is important, because it will allow them to fit into the pack-based society of American males. To make matters worse, men are taught that there are certain types of women whose conquest brings more status than others. Generally speaking, this has to do with stereotypes of female beauty.

American men are frequently seen on the Internet discussing the notion that status in women is marked by their looks, while status in men is marked by their salary level. Thus, less well-off men will have to make do with less (stereotypically) beautiful women while their bosses get the babes. Men who can’t compete in the salary stakes yet who are seen with high-ranking target women, are routinely described as ‘shooting above their level’ – in other words, they are upsetting the system. These men themselves may even become targets, this time of violence, by other males who regard them as acting unfairly.

This sexual competition is massively stressing for American men. One way that this stress may be relieved is through rape. Frequently, stress-relief attacks like this are followed by ‘slut-shaming’ in which the victim is blamed, because of her comportment or attire, for her own rape. ‘Nice girls don’t act like that, because is sends inappropriate signals to men’, this says.

Quite who is deciding what ‘nice girls’ actually do is never quite clear and the object, in any case, is to legitimise the act of rape itself. But this is nonsense: nothing a woman could ever do, including walking down the street stark naked, might ever justify rape – yet this is exactly the argument that is put.

The second parameter is violence itself. Lee Marvin once pointed out that American culture is based on violence and that for Americans, violence is the first response, not the last resort. Perhaps ironically, as one of the screen’s legendary violent heroes, Marvin was well qualified to make this observation. The culture is founded on the violent acquisition of territory and the genocide of those who lived there, the violence of slavery, the shocking violence of the Civil War, the routine racial violence and rape.

Violence is so deeply entrenched in American culture that it becomes insidious. Its acceptance as the background to the culture renders it almost invisible. Indeed, it is promulgated through the cultural concept of the American Hero.

The cinema portrays the American Hero as a violent, reactive man who defeats his enemies to win the girl. This meme is taken up in literature and music, indeed all across the culture. And naturally so; art only reflects culture, and the violence of American culture is an exact metaphor for the reality of American life and reinforces it.

The third element is social conformism. It is easy for the outsider, not experienced in the reality of American culture, to imagine that this is a free and tolerant society where ‘anything goes’. People point to the gay scenes in New York and San Francisco as illustration of this. But these examples totally distort the reality, which is that non-conformists congregate in these cities because if they were to be true to themselves anywhere else they would lose their homes and jobs or be beaten or even killed – just for not being like others.

Ask any gay American and they will support this, and it is true across the board; atheists in much of America live in constant fear and real danger because their neighbours would harm them if they could.

This even happens in so-called ‘liberal’ areas like California, where making statements that criticise the misogynistic cult of Islam, for example, will be met with accusations of racism. If someone like Ben Affleck can demonstrate the level of hostility and repressed violence that he did towards Sam Harris on a television show, where his actual responses were constrained, how do we imagine people like him would behave in real life? That’s right – even being ‘liberal’ is something Americans would beat and kill others in the name of.

This level of violence and total intolerance of any differing point of view is routinely observed in the comments sections of numerous Internet sites. The worst are the most popular, such as YouTube, but even on photography sites I have seen searing and offensive attacks on atheists, for example. There is no doubt what the authors of such comments would do in real life if they could. Even were they to suggest that they only behave so badly in the anonymity that the Internet provides, their contribution adds to the overwhelming, choking atmosphere of violence that is endemic to the culture. It gives sanction to real violence by the violence of its own rhetoric.

At the same time, bullying in American schools persists to a level which would be considered appalling in most European countries but which is thought a normal part of life, a rite of passage, in America. Here is where gays will first be beaten, in order to try to ‘turn them normal’. Here is where atheists will be beaten and ostracised. Here is where transgender children, at a most sensitive stage of their lives, be beaten, made miserable, and taught that they are ‘freaks’ with no place in society. Here is where anyone who challenges the conformist society first be made to suffer pain and humiliation. And all so that they will just stop being themselves and instead, conform.

American culture, then, is one in which women are treated as sexual targets, to be conquered by men; a culture in which violence is actually revered as a heroic quality; and one in which any deviation from the patriarchal social norm is to be suppressed violently.

Even when rapists are reported, caught and brought to trial, their sentences are lenient to the point of the laughable. – witness two cases this year: that of Austin Smith Clem, 25, who repeatedly raped his neighbour’s daughter, beginning when she was 14 and was sentenced to no prison time. Or Michael L. Stucky Jr., who was sentenced to time served after raping two girls, one aged 13 and the other 15. There is no punitive sanction in these sentences and they could hardly be lighter.

Rape is not about sex. It is about the use of violence to dominate and control others. (I discuss this in my forthcoming book, ‘Why Men Made God’, co-written with Karis Burkowski.) It is about status and control, in the first place over the women, but also over other men in the particular, and the domination of society by the patriarchy in general.

The culture uses rape to reinforce its own values, of the celebration of violence and rigid conformity to a patriarchal social code. Rape is so routine in the United States that it is de facto tolerated and even lauded as a natural reaction of a red-blooded young American male exposed to what the patriarchy considers to be the intrinsic immorality of women.

This is why American men rape so many women. Violence – of which rape is an extreme form – is sanctioned by the society they live in, in order to ensure the furtherance of that society and its violent culture. Being a violent hero is a good thing and raping is just a part of that, to by punished by a light rap on the knuckles for the sake of form and so that those pesky feminists don’t complain.

For the patriarchy, all women are rape targets, and worse, they themselves invite their own rapes, just by being women. At the same time, anyone who refuses to conform to the society’s rigid codes of behaviour is a target for violence and invites their own beating and murder, just by showing that they are different.

Rod Fleming on Google+

The post Why America is the World’s Rape Capital appeared first on Rod Fleming's World.

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