From: patricia@cco.caltech.edu (Patricia M. Schwarz)
Subject: Re: Shafarevich and National Academy
Organization: California Institute of Technology, Pasadena
Date: Sun, 6 Sep 1992 05:24:31 GMT


>>Maybe I should just say that to me, the constant level of violent crime
>>against women in the world feels like a slow and silent Holocaust.

>Patricia, please don't trivialize the term Holocaust. It refers to a
>sytematic extermination of a whole ethnic or religeous group. 

I'm sorry, but there are many parallels between atrocities against ethnic
and religious groups organized by governments or mobs, and those
seemingly unrelated "personal" atrocities that occur on a much wider scale
than I think you will allow yourself to believe.

*Police* organizations in America estimate that 25% of Ameriican women
are victims of domestic violence that is bad enough to require law enforcement
intervention. This is the *largest* cause of serious injury to women,
much larger than car accidents or other types of violent crime. And
domestic violence results in the largest number of *police* casualties,
most common type is when officer saves woman from brutal beating by
husband and husband shoots officer dead.

These same police organizations also estimate that 1 out of every two American women will at some time in her life wind up in a relationship with a man
who turns out to be violently abusive to her.

What is the connection with "Holocaust"? The social and political attitudes
necessary for us to turn a blind eye to this old and widely prevalent
systematic violence are similar to those that allowed so many people in
the world to turn a blind eye to the systematic extermination of Jews,
and also partly (more complicated) to the abuses of Russians by Stalin.

If someone is not regarded by society as being a full human member of that
society, but rather an object with diminished capacity for human feelings,
rational thought, creative impulses and etc, then members of that society
who otherwise consider themselves against "cruelty" and who are normally
capable of "kind" and "humanistic" behavior then have implicit permission
to beat, torture, imprison, rape, burn, and otherwise kill said individual.

After all, it was only "one of them" and they were acting in a way that
made them "deserve it."

How do you think it feels for me to look in the newspapers every day and
read about another five year old girl found raped and dead in a garbage
can? What about when my mother called the police when my father was
beating her almost to death and they told her they couldn't help her
BECAUSE SHE PROBABLY DESERVED IT and it was a private matter?

Multiply that times millions and millions.

To me, it feels pretty systematic. Woman = lesser being = okay to beat is
to me the same as Jew = lesser being = okay to exterminate.

And the same for Russians. Under Communism, individual == lesser being
compared to State = okay to exterminate.

This is how otherwise normal, rational people can comply with and
look at and accept atrocities ocurring right under their noses and
not be outraged. "They must have deserved it" by nagging their husband,
by conspiring to steal bread from good Aryan's mouths, to bankrupt
Germany, to wreck the property of the State and hold up progress in
the march towards Communism.

I was standing in the bright California sunshine one morning at a bus stop,
a fat teenager with glasses and stringy hair, and a very nice intelligent
handsome blond guy pointed a gun at me and forced me into his expensive
car and drove off and beat and tortured and raped me. Without snarling
and drooling like a maniac, but with the calm air of someone who felt he
had a perfect right to do it.

Just like Hitler thought he had the perfect right to kill Jews, and
Stalin thought he had the perfect right to kill Russians (plus all
other nationalities and especially Jews too.)

This does not at all trivialize the Holocaust. This tragedy belongs
not only to Jews but to all of us who are pushed out of the definition of
"human being" and about whom it is believed that the violence against
them was "deserved."

>Look, I totally commesurate with the trauma of your childhood when your
>father was beating up your mother. There are indeed many families where
>such atrocities are committed along with child abuse. there are probably
>millions of women who get raped. Just as there are millions of men killed
>by their governments in the name of war. These are all terrible crimes.
>But, except for war, they are perpetrated by by individuals against
>individuals. This is not a Holocaust. 

>Vlad

Ultimately every atrocity is committed by an "individual." To me, when
the Republican Party sends out a message that they have the right to
suggest that my deciding to have an intellectual career is ruining
the "family values" of the nation, then they are sending out the message
that women are not full human beings with the natural right to dignity
and self-determination. So they are implicitly condoing, aiding and abetting
atrocities against women. After all, if we would just be obedient mothers
then we wouldn't get hurt.

It's such a familiar message. It's recycled SO much in history.

If we recognize what we have in common, maybe some day everyone will
stand up for everyone else's human rights, and no one will stand by
and allow women or Jews or any other marginalized group to be abused.

-patricia@cco.caltech.edu

Newsgroups: talk.politics.soviet