It's long past Time to Be Honest About War and Rape

Image: Media Report of My Lai Massacre

It's Long Past Time to Be Honest About War and Rape
The two are intrinsically connected and always have been.

OHCHR: Rape: Weapon of War

• In the resolution ... the Security Council noted that “women and girls are particularly targeted by the use of sexual violence, including as a tactic of war to humiliate, dominate, instil fear in, disperse and/or forcibly relocate civilian members of a community or ethnic group.” The resolution demanded the “immediate and complete cessation by all parties to armed conflict of all acts of sexual violence against civilians.” ....

• Ultimately, however, the effectiveness of UN Resolution 1820 (2008) in reducing sexual violence and bringing its perpetrators to book will have to be gauged in places such as the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)--arguably the epicentre of sexual violence against women today—as well as Liberia and the Darfur region of Sudan.

NPR: In Kosovo, War Rape Survivors Can Now Receive Reparations. But Shame Endures For Many

• "They cannot bear the shame," she says. "But this is not just about compensation. It's also about their access to justice and the documentation of sexual violence as a war crime."

What is important for us to gather from the above article is that these terrible deeds were not done by Western Christians, and the culture in which it occurred was so backward that the victims were shamed by even their own husbands and relatives.

Same impression left here:

UNICEF: Sexual violence as a weapon of war

• Rape, identified by psychologists as the most intrusive of traumatic events, has been documented in many armed conflicts including those in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Cyprus, Haiti, Liberia, Somalia and Uganda.
• Systematic rape is often used as a weapon of war in 'ethnic cleansing'. More than 20,000 Muslim girls and women have been raped in Bosnia since fighting began in April 1992, according to a European Community fact-finding team. Teenage girls have been a particular target in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia, according to The State of the World's Children 1996 report. The report also says that impregnated girls have been forced to bear 'the enemy's' child.
• In some raids in Rwanda, virtually every adolescent girl who survived an attack by the militia was subsequently raped. Many of those who became pregnant were ostracized by their families and communities. Some abandoned their babies; others committed suicide.

Guess who perpetrated the rapes in post-war occupied Germany (pdf)?  "Mostly" the Russians, of course. The Americans were presumably angels by comparison.

From glancing through the above, one might surmise that there has been no involvement in rape by Western military at all. In Vietnam, for instance, you couldn't really call it rape, could you, when  -- from The Independent -- "many Asian women were also involved in prostitution". And it's not surprising that western media tend to focus on the wicked South Korean soldiers who took part in the Vietnam war, mentioning America only in the context of how warmly the US welcomed the children born as a result, presumably, of GI love affairs with Vietnamese women.

But what about My Lai?  It wasn't only razed by Americans in an obscene, sadistic, systematic bloodbath in which even infants were directly targeted; rape was an integral component of that horrific scene, and "officers took part" in the complete and utter physical and moral devastation of that little village.

From The Conversation: 

• What isn’t usually written about at My Lai are the rapes.
• While the exact number may never be known, the Americans raped at least several dozen women and girls, some as young as 12. And then murdered and mutilated many of them.
• Pham Thi Tuan, who lived in My Lai, told a documentary filmmaker, “Over there a naked woman who had been raped and a virgin girl with her vagina slit open. We don’t know why they behaved liked that.”

The "why" is that, according to CounterPunch: American Rape of Vietnamese Women was Considered “Standard Operating Procedure”.

• Comparing testimony from Vietnamese women and American soldiers, Gina Marie Weaver, in her book Ideologies of Forgetting: Rape in The Vietnam War, finds that rape of Vietnamese women by American troops during the US invasion of Vietnam was a “widespread”, “everyday occurrence” that was essentially “condoned”, even encouraged, by the military, and had its foundation in military training and US culture.  She explores why US rape in Vietnam was so common, and why this aspect of US behavior has been virtually “erased” from “narratives of the war”.  She stresses the issue is also important as rape in the US military continues at a high level today, having been mostly transferred away from foreign populations and onto female American soldiers.

But remember, the mainstream media told you that many Vietnamese women were prostitutes. And there's a documentary film sardonically titled "Hearts and Minds" that seems designed to verify the desired impression by showing a couple of less-than-suave young GI's in bed with apparently willing Vietnamese prostitutes -- young girls who, no doubt, needed to survive to feed their families due to everything else the Americans were inflicting on their homeland.  As if the war itself was not obscene enough!

Let's face it; if you can accept permission to slaughter human beings, including children and infants, then it's just a tiny step to include brutal rape. It's as old as the Old Testament -- besting other men in a fight-to-the-death and taking their women as well. Just one more weapon in the arsenal. A given. It happens in every war, always has, but nobody wants to talk about it unless the finger can be pointed elsewhere.

It's also a given that if your sweet, innocent young son goes off to fight for God and Country, there are things he will find himself doing that he will never be able to admit to a soul when he comes home, and he will probably drink too much or take drugs and/or beat up his wife and kids, or even end up hanging himself, because he's been ruined by war and become a scapegoat for the sins of many others like him.

In the Chakra system of meditation, taught in Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism, the centre of fear, anger, power and aggression resides near the tail bone -- the root -- and the centre of the sex drive is in the pelvis/sacral zone. Both drives, aggression and sex are intrinsically linked.

Not to be trite, but that's what "makeup sex" is all about. Lashing out is a release and also a turn-on for some (a lot of?) people.

BBC: How did rape become a weapon of war? 

• Women's bodies have become part of the terrain of conflict, according to a new report by Amnesty International.

Have "become"? How purposely naive! Always has been is more like it. And once again the real warring villains live on the other side of the world, where only "black", "brown" and "yellow" people are the perpetrators. Never the good "white" people of America, the UK, and Canada. Does Amnesty have to consider where its donors are located before writing a report?

​The National Post recently owned up that even Canadians raped German women! And the Brits, and the French -- but hastened to say that the Soviets were the worst offenders. It's so important these days to maximize Russian faults and downplay those of the West, and it's done without even the necessity of providing the actual, verified details.

Now, lest we forget Abu Ghraib (The NewYorker), and the perverted torture of male prisoners by stripping them naked and forcing them into bizarre sexual positions -- while taking triumphant photos of their abject humiliation, much as would a hunter with his quarry -- is a graphic indication of a hopelessly over-active root chakra and a complete breakdown of the integrity of the entire human entity.

The New Yorker couldn't bring itself to show more than a couple of photos, but they didn't mind describing the rest in detail.  The rapes of young Iraqi girls, and the sexual torture of Iraqi men and boys were most definitely "Made in America" - but didn't seem to want to know how far up the chain of command it went, leaving the common impression that it was probably just a "few bad apples", though Slate.com definitely thought otherwise: It was top down, stupid!