Chapter 13: Indoctucation by the Media-University Complex
 
 

1999 Version

1. Lies About Oppression

In a forest, one man with a chainsaw is heavily outnumbered by the trees -- but who has the real power? In a well-ordered liberal democratic society, typical individual members of the majority, or supposedly dominant, group have less power than do typical individual members of well-organised commercial and political pressure groups -- such as Politically Correct pressure groups.

Political Correctness is the dominant ideology amongst the indoctucated ruling strata in western countries. By using the term "indoctucated", I mean to simply that the education systems and media in western countries (the Media-University Complex, or MUC) have a strong subtext of indoctrination in certain values. Those people who graduate from higher educational institutions have been subjected to the greatest amount of MUC indoctucation, and are thus seen as fit to take control of the education, media, and government apparatuses that perpetuate this ideology.

The influence of the universities must not be overlooked. Universities are no doubt places which claim to, and actually do teach knowledge and skills. However, they are also places where social and political values are instilled into people -- by peer-group socialisation and political agitation, as well as by bias in the content and delivery of the actual courses.

To the extent that students are funded by state grants and lecturers are state employees, universities have a built-in bias towards regarding the State as provider and spender of money -- i.e. a basically left-wing viewpoint. To some readers, it may come as a shock to realize that it is possible to see the State principally as a collector of taxes, which is the way it tends to appear to the self-employed in particular, and private sector employees in general.

Thus students tend to travel through university and come out at the end of their journey with the clear message:

LEFT = GOOD; RIGHT = BAD.

The reason for this error was that the radio decision makers were politically correct, and knew that "right = bad." They also knew that coup d'etats were bad. It was therefore almost inevitable that they would describe any coup d'etat as "right-wing". In later broadcasts, they tended to change the description of this coup d'etat from "right-wing" to "conservative", which is only a slightly less misleading term.

Anyone who goes in fear (and it is a real fear for many middle-class people) of being labelled "to the right of Genghis Khan" should bear in mind that they can hold their polemical enemies at bay by suggesting that they are "to the left of Pol Pot."

Pot's Cambodia (Kampuchea) was also ruled via an ideology of Political Correctness, but the undeveloped state of the MUC in that country forced Pol Pot to use more direct and brutal methods to enforce his particular brand of Political Correctness. It is worth mentioning here that Pol Pot developed his ideas while studying at a French university.

There are three main problems with the MUC's politically correct designation of oppressed groups:

The first is who gets to do the designating? The Feminists got in at the ground floor of the designating process, and so they have made sure that women are one of the Designated Groups. But there was never any balanced public debate about whether men or women (or both?) should be "designated". I don't have any quarrel with the other Designated Groups -- however, some of them (e.g. lesbians/homosexuals and the disabled) seem to have achieved the status of "Designated Group" only as a result of an alliance with the more powerful Feminists. This gives homosexuals/lesbians and the disabled a self-interest in supporting Feminists politically.

The second problem is that the Designated Groups (women, ethnic minorities, the disabled, homosexuals, lesbians, and so on) become established PR agencies and lobbyists for their members. They have a sort of "gravitational" force which they exert on the Truth -- they bend the Truth in their direction. If this PR approach comes to dominate the media, ordinary people will know that every group has both good and bad points -- but the media will act as if no member of any of any designated group ever does anything wrong ! This sort of gulf between the official line and reality was a feature of Communist Eastern Europe, and of George Orwell's book "1984". The discrepancy between propaganda and truth in such countries is probably one of the main causes of right-wing reaction, when it occurs.

The third problem with Designated Groups, as discussed below, is that this approach to Human Rights creates another set of scapegoats -- the people who don't fit into any of the Designated Groups. The Establishment theory is that they are the ones who are rich and powerful in society -- but only some of them are rich and powerful. What about poor white males, for example ? Men and Whites are both politically incorrect if they assert their rights. Any semi-intelligent Feminist, on the other hand, can sling off at "White Males" and get away with it.

Although Feminists dominate the Establishment with their propaganda, Masculists have only a faint hope of being seen as a Left-wing protest group. This is because the Feminists are part of the Left-wing coalition of groups that forms the backbone of left-wing parties in western countries. This fact drives Masculists to find allies on the right, though not necessarily on the extreme right.

And there is also the problem that Political Correctness has become a political and economic cornucopia, with every conceivable group lining up to get its share of the political and financial bounty that is available from this cornucopia. Some disabled groups, such as the Deaf, are even starting to assert that their disability is a form of oppression by the able-bodied majority -- in order to cement their place in the Rainbow Coalition that wields such power over the media and government coffers.

The rich, heterosexual, Anglo-Saxon, able-bodied males connive in this resource-targetting process, because it salves their consciences. They have little fellow-feeling with poor, heterosexual, Anglo-Saxon, able-bodied males (PHAMs, for short), because they are competing with them. They have to have someone they can look down on, to show themselves how successful they are, and PHAMs fit the bill. It is not socially acceptable (in certain quarters, anyway) to look down on "disadvantaged groups", as defined by Politically Correct dogma.

PHAMs don't turn up as a group outside Congress or Parliament waving banners. But many probably feel that the designation process is unfair. No doubt they resent the way the Designated Groups use their "gravity" to bend truth and get favoured treatment.

In the Men's Movement, there is some resentment of the fact that the only category of men who can attract publicity and money for their health problems is homosexual men -- for AIDS research, publicity and treatment. It would be good if the Men's Movement could harness this homosexual political clout for the wider benefit of men's health in general. Unfortunately, homosexuals are seen by some Men's Movement activists as closely allied to the Feminists, and as hostile to the traditional family. There is also the problem of homophobia amongst some activists.

In addition, they probably resent well-off white males who take a politically correct line from feelings of guilt or because of their careers. Anyone who wants a university career or public service promotion has to sign their integrity away to the Devil of Political Correctness and ingratiate themselves with all the Designated Groups. This gives members of the Designated Groups blackmail power. Poor white males are, at times, liable to get fed up with this hypocrisy and unfairness, and that is where modern would-be Hitlers can be expected to draw their core support from.

Affirmative action (positive discrimination) involves quota systems for university enrolments, or public service jobs, etc.. Some liberals admit that this is unfair to individuals who would have just scraped in under an unbiased system, but who are of the wrong sex or race etc. to qualify for a quota. These liberals are in favour of this racist and sexist (etc.) system, because of its supposed long-term social effects -- and also because their own children are probably bright enough, or well enough connected, to get on OK in life anyway!

The class that these liberals belongs to finds the rise of right-wing extremism inexplicable. The reason it can't understand it is that this class helps to bring about the right-wing extremism by its own actions!

Political Correctness does have victims. The victims of Political Correctness are the categories of people who are defined as "oppressors" by that ideology. This is because the "oppressors" are turned into scapegoats by Political Correctness, and they can be persecuted with the blessing of the Establishment. I am not for one second denying that these oppressors may indeed have been guilty of carrying out some form of oppression. My point is that all groups tend to oppress all other groups, if they have a chance, and Political Correctness acts as a smokescreen for certain forms of oppression, by taking it for granted that only particular scapegoat groups are capable of carrying out oppression.

Ethnic majorities are much more reluctant to give away their rights to ethnic minorities than men are to women. And I am not aware of significant ways in which heterosexuals or able-bodied people are actually discriminated against -- apart from being restricted in the openness with which they can express their hatred or embarassment about such individuals, and being subjected to the emotional blackmail, or career blackmail, or the harassment of "tests" of their attitudes towards such individuals. Consequently, because machismo and chivalry make men prone to give in to even the weakest of Feminist claims to "victim" status, it is men -- most of all -- who are the victims of MUC Political Correctness indoctucation in Western countries, in my view.

Western "Human Rights" legislation often does not deal with Human Rights such as free speech, due process of law, and so on. The New Zealand Human Rights Commission, for example has a focus on "Designated Groups" -- sets of people who are designated by Parliament as being oppressed or disadvantaged. The aims of this approach are very commendable. The main aim is to avoid the situation where minority groups are made into scapegoats, and oppressed by the majority. The classic, prototypical, most (repeatedly) publicised case is, of course, Nazi Germany.

Nazi Germany persecuted the Jews, but this does not mean that the Jews were necessarily completely blameless in every respect. The Nazis thought they were the Master Race -- but the Jews believed that they were God's Chosen People. As far as I can see, both ideas are equally racist. This does not in any way excuse that genocide, but it goes some way towards explaining it. Some members of all ethnic groups are racist, to some extent -- but it is only the racism of the dominant white ethnic group in a western country which attracts much publicity or self-flagellation.

What happens in Western countries is that ethnic minorities that discriminate against each other on a routine basis in their countries of origin join forces to assert their rights against the majority in their adopted country. The majority in their new country of residence lumps them all together as "Africans" or "Latin Americans", "Pacific Islanders" or "Asians", so that is how they start thinking of themselves. This also happens to other groups such as New Zealanders and Australians abroad. They get lumped together as "Colonials", "Antipodeans", or whatever, and so they end up playing down what divides them, and concentrating on what they have in common. At home, on the other hand, these two nations engage in continuous -- though mostly friendly -- rivalry.

The majority in a liberal democracy can exert its collective power only at elections (once in three/four/five years), and at referendums. And, even at elections, it cannot choose individual policies -- just packages of policies, wrapped up in the manifestoes of particular parties. Individual members of the majority can and do discriminate against minorities in areas such as the job market, and so on -- but individual members of minorities can and do also discriminate against members of the majority and of other minorites, as well. Some minorities have a higher average income than the majority does, in many countries, and that gives those minorities behind-the-scenes power.

Between elections, it is the pressure groups, the media, the Bureaucracy, the President or Prime Minister, Cabinet, the government Caucus and the Congress or Parliament who have the real power. And Presidents, Prime Ministers, and Cabinets, as we know, do not always act in accordance with the manifestos that the electorate voted for them on.

It is true that members of minorities come across the dominance of the values and symbols of the majority in many aspects of their daily lives. Members of minorities tend to find this irksome, as they find their own values and symbols more appealing and even superior to those of the (to them) alien majority. This is the common experience of expatriates of all types in all countries. Majorities also experience much better-publicised mirror-image feelings toward the minorities in their midst, of course.

Iris Young's book "Polity and Group Difference: A Critique of the Ideal of Universal Citizenship" is an interesting discussion of some fundamental issues, from a Feminist perspective. What tends to strike me when I read such essays is not so much what is asserted, as the unspoken assumptions hidden behind such words as "emancipatory", "oppressed", etc.. These assumptions are what I am concerned to examine and question, as much as the truth of the actual assertions made in Feminist writings.

What is interesting (indeed startling) about Iris Young is that she is a Feminist who analyses (at least some of) her assumptions in a lucid fashion.

"With equality conceived as sameness, the ideal of universal citizenship carries at least two meanings in addition to the extension of citizenship to everyone: (a) universality defined as general in opposition to particular; what citizens have in common as opposed to how they differ, and (b) universality in the sense of laws and rules that say the same for all and apply to all in the same way; laws and rules that are blind to individual and group differences." (op.cit.,117)

Her criticism of the above philosophy is in some sense a retrospective justification of a process which is already well under way in Western countries -- a process which (I would argue) has led to injustices towards men (among other groups). So it is a useful exercise to follow the course of her argument and to evaluate it against the background of the consequences of actually implementing the ideas she advocates.

Young's basic argument amounts to saying that universal citizenship is all very well and good in itself, but it is not a panacea for all social ills, though she does not express herself in these words. The way she actually formulates her thesis is by claiming that certain political tendencies (which she seems to consider flow from the notion of universal citizenship) are "in tension with" other aspects of this notion.

"First, the ideal that the activities of citizenship express or create a general will that transcends the particular differences of group affiliation, situation and interest has in practice excluded groups judged not capable of adopting that general point of view; the idea of citizenship as expressing a general will has tended to enforce a homogeneity of citizens.... Thus I argue that the inclusion and participation of everyone in public discussion and decision making requires mechanisms for group representation. Second, where differences in capacities, culture, values, and behavioural styles exist among groups, but some of these groups are privileged, strict adherence to a principle of equal treatment tends to perpetuate oppression or disadvantage." (ibid, 118)

What Young argues for, in essence, is a pressure-group society ( a society composed of competing pressure-groups) -- the very opposite of the "melting-pot" concept. She argues that, since some groups are relatively privileged, and others are oppressed, a political structure based on universality merely reinforces that inequality.

My strong reservations about her proposal are based on the facts that
 

Young's argument depends heavily on the standard liberal/left consensus (as expounded in Western universities) about the phenomenon of "oppression", since a major thread of her basic argument against the notion of universal citizenship is that society contains groups which are oppressed to the extent that group members are unable to make their political influence felt as much as members of other groups are able to do. It is refreshing that she gives an explicit indication of what she means by that term:

"Briefly, a group is oppressed when one or more of the following conditions occurs to all or a large portion of its members: (1) the benefits of their work or energy go to others without those others reciprocally benefiting them (exploitation); (2) They are excluded from participation in major social activities, which in our society means primarily a workplace (marginalization); (3) they live and work under the authority of others, and have little work autonomy and authority over others themselves (powerlessness); (4) as a group they are stereotyped at that same time that their experience and situation is invisible in the society in general, and they have little opportunity and little audience for the expression of their experience and perspective on social events (cultural imperialism); (5) group members suffer random violence and harassment motivated by group hatred or fear." (Young 1990,128)

The Miriam-Webster Dictionary defines "oppression" as "unjust or cruel exercise of power or authority." Not all of Young's five criteria genuinely isolate actual oppression. They are designed to fit the situation of women in society, as she no doubt sees it to be. Her fifth criterion, for example, is too loosely worded to be useful -- harassment comes in various forms, both physical and verbal, and it is not true that only the dominant groups in society are ever in a position to be able to harass others.

Her second and third criteria, likewise, have a lot to do with women, but little to do with oppression, as it is usually understood.

It is clear that (many) men are indeed oppressed by women, according to Young's definition of "oppression". In terms of criterion (1), men who fight in the front line in wartime, exposing themselves to fear, physical and psychological privations, and the possibility of injury, mutilation, paralysis and/or death, are being exploited and oppressed by women.

This is so even if the men involved are volunteers, rather than conscripts, as the social pressure to "be a man", in situations of national crisis, can be very severe indeed. The situation is particularly clear-cut if women have/had the vote in the country concerned, and so helped to vote in the government that ordered the mobilisation of troops; if there were women in the government that made the decision -- and especially if women make up a majority of the electorate, or the Head of Government or Head of State was a woman. In recent history, the Falklands War comes to mind -- it came about when in Britain the Head of State, Head of Goverment, and the majority of the electorate were all women.

The former state of Yugoslavia was western in its culture, but the Civil War there between Serbians, Croats and Muslims has been fought largely by men (of course!). There has been no sign of Feminists demanding equality with men on the battlefield (of course!). There has also been no sign of the women in the various communities being more willing than their menfolk to adopt a Pacifist stance when attacked.

The only sign of women being involved in the fighting was one story about a single woman sniper. A sniper, of course, is a relatively safe (not to say cowardly) combattant -- even so, this woman was picked out by the media because she was such an exception to the rule that only men were doing the fighting. No doubt some of the press also had a hidden pro-Feminist agenda, as well, and were trying to convey the visual impression that women were doing some of the dangerous fighting -- without actually putting that lie into words.

The case of Israel is often cited as one country where women are conscripted alongside men. But there, too, it is the men who do the most dangerous front-line fighting -- not the women.

Criterion (4) also applies to men, to varying degrees in many Western countries. As a group, men in such countries are stereotyped by Feminists and the MUC (Media University Complex) as potential rapists and murderers, at that same time that their experience and situation as men is invisible in the society in general, and they have little opportunity and little audience for the expression of their experience and perspective on social events (cultural imperialism), since there are no pressure groups which represent men's interests.

The Foreword to the New Zealand Human Rights Commission's "Equal Employment Opportunities Manual" states that "Men who are not within the target groups (the various ethnic and other minority groups) are not included for special consideration in the manual." So any men who wanted to claim that they were being disadvantaged, compared to women, in some particular workplace, would not even be able to make that claim, let alone prove their point.

You may think there is no way that men COULD be disadvantaged, but they certainly could and are in fact being disadvantaged. There are some professions, such as primary and pre-school teaching, where the workforce is overwhelmingly female. With the current high unemployment rate, you might think that the words "Equal Employment Opportunity" might be interpreted as meaning that this should be evened up a bit, by getting more young males into these professions.

Not a bit of it! Because women have many pressure-groups, and men have none, the policy of "equal employment", in some educational establishments, at least, is interpreted as one of "proportional promotion" -- in other words, trying to make sure that women outnumber men in management positions, as well as in the workforce as a whole. It would seem to me to be a fairer arrangement to have roughly equal numbers of men and women in primary and pre-school management, as well as in the primary and pre-school workforce as a whole.

I went to this Human Rights Commission once to complain about an all-female courier firm that was reported in a newspaper as saying that it would never hire men. I found out that I was not the first to have made that complaint. But the lady I spoke to at the Commission thought it sufficient to report that the firm said it had been misquoted.

However, she then went on to allude to the fact that male-dominated managements sometimes interview women just for appearances' sake -- having no intention of hiring a woman at all. That may well be so, but the implication of what she said was that she wasn't going to take very seriously complaints against female-dominated firms for the reason that some male-dominated firms were discriminating against women! That is not the unbiased approach one would expect of a taxpayer-funded Human Rights Commission, and this bias is a result of men being an invisible minority in Society.

Young's fifth criterion also applies to men: I know of men who have been subject to (admittedly minor) random violence and harassment by Feminazis (in a left-wing dominated workplace) who wanted to intimidate potential Masculist activists and censor the expression of views such as those expressed in the present book.

Young makes her alternative proposals explicit as follows:

"I assert, then, the following principle: a democratic public, however that is constituted, should provide mechanisms for the effective representation and recognition of the distinct voices and perspectives of those of its constituent groups that are oppressed or disadvantaged within it. Such group representation implies institutional mechanisms and public resources supporting three activities: (1) self-organisation of group members so that they gain a sense of collective empowerment and a reflective understanding of their collective experience and interests in the context of the society; (2) voicing a group's analysis of how social policy proposals affect them, and generating policy proposals themselves, in institutionalized contexts where decision makers are obliged to show that they have taken these perspectives into consideration; (3) having veto power regarding specific policies that affect a group directly, for example, reproductive rights for women, or use of reservation lands for Native Americans." (ibid, 128-129)

Young is working within a Liberal/Left university context, where there is a ruling consensus about who is likely to be the oppressor, and who the oppressed, in a given society. This is an often simplistic consensus, as no group is completely powerless, and any group is liable to use what power it does have to carry out whatever level of oppression it is capable of, in particular contexts. This consensus is also oppressive in itself, since it makes it difficult, or even impossible for groups which have not been awarded the much coveted "oppressed and disadvantaged" label from convincing anyone of the seriousness of their claims to this status -- particularly if the consensus has already stigmatised them with the "oppressor" label.

Men, for example, would have great difficulty being accepted (on the basis of claims that they are being oppressed by women) into the "coalition of oppressed groups" (a.k.a "the Rainbow Coalition"), since women have long been one of the cornerstones of this group, and have won this status on the basis of claiming that men are oppressing ²them±! Young's model of society is in tension with the idea of such diametrical differences of world-view among oppressed groups in one society.

What is power? Power is the ability to do what you want, and/or to get other people to do what you want them to do. Some people might make a distinction between these two sorts of power, by saying that the ability to do what you want is "autonomy", and "power" has to do only with relationships between people.

Unfortunately, perhaps, this is a rather naive viewpoint. Virtually anything you want to do involves some competition with others, or some minor or major decrease in their freedom of action or quality of life. So you would have to be a very powerful person indeed to do anything that you wanted, because a lot of these activities would run into actual or potential resistance from other people. Socialisation, growing up in Society, is largely about learning what the limits are on your autonomy/power.

The ancient Greek historian, Thucydides, had a very cynical (but true!) definition of liberty. It went something like this: Liberty is the ability to restrict the liberty of other people. Conventional 20th Century liberalism amounts, in practice, to seeking out oppressed groups and increasing their autonomy. Unfortunately, this is usually a somewhat mindless exercise, and what you end up with is a rump minority of underprivileged people who fall into none of the categories that get targeted for extra compassion and/or extra resources. When you look at power in societies and states, you might want to make a distinction between dictatorships and democracies. In a dictatorship, it might seem that one person does whatever he/she wants. He/she has absolute autonomy/power.

That is not quite true. Dictators are lucky if they have even a brief period when they can do absolutely whatever they like. Then they have to start looking over their shoulder and under their bed for potential threats to themselves and their country.

In order to combat these actual or potential threats, Dictators have to be proactive. They have to form personal and international alliances. They have to placate people, groups of people, and states, by doing (some of) what they want. They also have to create and disseminate propaganda, in order to persuade people to agree with them (using the news media, amongst other tools).

Already, a dictatorship is looking somewhat more like a democracy, though they are still nowhere near identical. The major difference, of course, is the method of bringing about a change of government.

But the point of similarity between democracies and dictatorships that I want to concentrate on here is the use of propaganda and the news media. The News Media are very powerful. If there were various sources of news, if they had very different viewpoints, and if they all had an almost equal share of the "market", then the problem would not be great.

In many countries, however, the vast majority of the population gets its major news and political commentary from one single source: Television One's 6 O'Clock News and the subsequent "Holmes Programme". If there has been some particularly shocking revelation on that one hour of news and current affairs, then you can see it reflected in the faces of the people you come across in the street the next day.

Television One thus seems to have tremendous power to select the factors that it wants the voting public to take note of, and then to put these factors across with the slant which will produce whatever psychological effects the studio wants to produce.

TV3 Corporation is apparently owned by a Canadian Jewish businessman. In the first couple of years of its operation, the Israeli Ambassador used to appear on that channel (it seemed to me) much more often than he did on Television One. I noticed him, because he was remarkably un-telegenic, and because you don't see ambassadors interviewed on television vey often. Sometimes the topic had nothing to do with Israeli-New Zealand relations, which is the only topic you'd expect him to be interviewed on.

My point is not so much that he appeared too often on TV3, or not often enough on Television One. My point is that this is a relatively obvious pointer to the bias which must presumably be operating in much more insidious ways on all television and radio channels and in all countries all the time.

What is interesting about the Jews, in this context, is that they are labelled "victims" in their role as a minority in Western countries -- and so they get a good press there in that role. Indeed, they have so much power that they are often able to suppress the dissemination of anti-Semitic information. This has the consequence that we cannot profit by the wisdom of the saying, "Those who do not learn from history are condemned to relive it." Since Zionist activists do not allow us uncensored access to information about every aspect of the German Nazi Genocide of the Jews, and what led up to it, we can never really understand what the causes were. Since we can't establish the causes, we can't prevent it from happening again.

But Jews in Israel are seen as "oppressors" of the Palestinians, and so they get a bad press in the West in that role! I am sympathetic towards Likud Party Prime Ministers (such as Benyamin Netanyahu) of Israel, when they complain about anti-Israeli media bias. It's not so much that I agree with his policies -- it's just that he, like Masculists, comes up so often against the wall of simple-minded media bias that they feel there's almost no point in fighting it head-on.

Another case in point is Bosnia, where the Western media has been biased against the Bosnians. Martin Bell was a famous BBC television reporter who argued within the BBC against their official policy of neutrality. He eventually left the BBC and went into politics. I heard him in an interview referring to the Bosnian Serbs as the "Bad Guys". His intonation made it clear that he meant to have "scare-quotes" around the phrase "Bad Guys", but it is also clear that that was how the Western media -- and hence the Western World actually saw the Bosnian Serbs.

People often say things like, "Knowledge is Power" or "Information is Power", but they seldom seem to see that this applies to politics as well as everywhere else. The Media -- particularly before the advent of the Internet -- are/were at the control-levers of information. This has gone to their heads, in many cases. Some of them have acquired star status. They have seen populist or right-wing politicians criticise the media, but these media people have been unable to become aware of their own bias. This is because their bias is propped up by the philosophy of Political Correctness, which gives them the courage of their convictions, and bias.

In the former Yugoslavia, the Serbs and the Croats had virtually the same spoken language (called "Serbo-Croat), but the Serbs wrote in the Cyrillic alphabet (like the Russians and the Bulgarians), but the Croats used the Roman alphabet. Whether this was cause or effect (or both), I am not sure, but it is clear that the Serbs have had closer relationships to Eastern Europe, and the Croats (to the extent that the Cold War allowed them to) to Western Europe. This made it almost inevitable that the Western media would have an anti-Serb bias -- which was exacerbated by the fact that these media people were mostly based in Sarajevo, which was in anti-Serb territory.

I am not excusing Serb atrocities. What I am saying is that the agenda of the Serbs appeared to be to acquire independence from the Croats and Muslims. The United Nations and the Media, dominated by Western interests, decided on a contrary agenda of forcing the three parties to live together in one country (Bosnia). Faced with the world community's hostile agenda, it is not surprising that some Bosnian Serbs may have acted like cornered animals.

2002 Version

CHAPTER 13
INDOCTUCATION BY THE MEDIA-UNIVERSITY COMPLEX

Lies About Oppression

In a forest, one man with a chainsaw is heavily outnumbered by the trees – but who has the real power? In a well-ordered liberal democratic society, typical individual members of the majority – or supposedly dominant, group – have less power than do typical individual members of well-organised commercial or political pressure groups such as the National Organization for Women in the U.S. The silent majority may be the majority, but its silence is its undoing.

Political Correctness is the dominant ideology among the indoctucated ruling strata in western countries. By the term indoctucated, I mean simply that the education systems and media in western countries (the Media-University Complex, or MUC) have a strong subtext of indoctrination in certain values. Those people who graduate from higher educational institutions have assimilated the greatest amount of MUC indoctucation, and are thus seen as fit to control the education, media, and government apparatuses that perpetuate this ideology.

Initially, the Internet was a great liberating force and allowed men to bypass media bias and disseminate their message directly to others. However, as the institutions of the MUC have come online, they have usually brought their Feminist biases and censorship with them. However, much of the internet, in particular many of the Usenet newsgroups, is still free of censorship and enables uncensored information – both true and untrue – to be spread both widely and rapidly.

The free homepage site, Geocities – before it was taken over by Yahoo – was very anti-male. I have long managed a Men's Rights website there: www.geocities.com/peterzohrab and when a search engine was first set up on Geocities I did a search for "Men's Rights," but the only hits I got on Geocities were Gay Rights sites. After I complained about this on one of the Geocities forums, this problem was fixed, because anyone could confirm it for themselves, but I had great trouble even getting replies to my emails from Geocities whenever I suggested a neighbourhood for men to balance Wellesley, the neighbourhood set up just for women. And the email newsletter and website on internet resources, the Scout Report, routinely features women's sites and has only once featured a men's site - despite my protests. Even when it listed a site on men's health, it was part of a site that was principally about women!

Similarly, I was an early volunteer editor on the Open Directory (http://dmoz.org), which has been the basis of the Netscape Directory, among others. I applied to edit the category "Society/ Issues /Human Rights /Men's Rights," to balance the category "Society /Issues/ Human Rights/ Women's Rights," but I was allocated the category "Society/ Men," without a word of explanation – obviously, they were prejudiced against treating Men's Rights on the same basis as Women's Rights. So I created the category "Society/ Men/ Men's_Rights" (and various sub-categories), and managed to get Men's Rights and Women's Rights established on an equal hierarchical footing by raising the issue in the Editors' Forum.

With massive help from an activist in Los Angeles, I built up the Men's Rights listings to over 1,100 urls. But the Editor of the Society/ Issues section copied an email to me in which he complained that the Men's Rights section had many more urls than the Women's Rights section, and that something needed to be done about it. I replied that I considered his attitude hypocritical, unless he also tried to correct the contrary imbalance in the world at large, where Men's Rights hardly featured at all. Needless to say, he did not answer, the Open Directory found a pretext to fire me as Editor, and the new editor chopped the number of Men's Rights urls by at least half. The Women's Rights urls were increased – so that, the last time I looked, the Women's Rights urls outnumbered the men's. Such is equality in the Feminist world!

We must never overlook the influence of the schools and universities. Universities teach knowledge and skills, but they also instill social and political values by peer-group socialisation and the political agitation that occurs there, as well as through bias in the content and delivery of the course materials.

For example, in 1987 I took a French course part-time at a university, where we had to give a talk in French on one of a choice of topics, including "the Situation of Women in New Zealand." Such a topic implicitly assumes women suffer discrimination, and encourages female students to complain about it in courses having nothing to do with Women's Studies! Such bias is a routine feature of university courses. These complaints, having the veneer of academic respectability, add to Society's learned belief that women are oppressed in some way. I asked to give a talk on "the Situation of Men in New Zealand", which was not on the list, and was permitted to do that.

In 1999 at the same university, I took a course on Chinese civilization, which involved writing three essays. Two included the position of women in China as possible topics, but again, nothing about the position of men in China. For the first of these essays, the female lecturer refused me permission to write on men in China, so I wrote on women, but treated it as a comparison of the positions of men and women in China. The second, however, included the option of naming your own topic, and this time I was allowed to write on men.

Interestingly, women experience this bias, too, especially in Women's Studies courses. For example, a woman named Sonia shared with the New Zealand Men for Equal Rights Association her experience of how she tried to write about the abuse of boys. At first, they rejected her paper as "not written from a woman-centered perspective," and only accepted the paper after she escalated her complaint about the issue.

To the extent students are funded by state grants and lecturers are state employees, universities have a built-in bias toward regarding the State as provider and spender of money; i.e., a basically left-wing perspective. To them, it may come as a shock to realize many, particularly self-employed and private sector employees, see the State principally as a collector of taxes. Self-employed men are probably the people who pay the most taxes, relative to what they get back in benefits from the State, and solo mothers, who later become pensioners and outlive men, get the most benefits from the State, relative to the taxes they pay.

Fortunately, the academics' left-wing bias is a trend rather than an absolute. Some sections of academia, such as business colleges, tend to be more conservative whereas others, such as Sociology departments, are determinedly left-wing. I have even received an email from a Sociology student who admitted that studying Sociology was tantamount to being a Feminist – and his department was later restructured into a School of "Sociology and Women's Studies"!

And it is the students in the less vocational, more left-wing subjects such as Sociology, who are inclined to be more politically active than those studying, say, business or engineering - and these Leftists often end up with jobs in the bureaucracy, where their ethos plays a part in how they differentially deal with men and women clients. These same subjects are also the ones which deal with social policy issues, which is why government social policies often end up more left-wing than the views of their electorate as a whole would justify.

Thus many students are inculcated with one clear message:

LEFT = GOOD; RIGHT = BAD

Many college-educated people fear the right-wing label because their professors taught them left = good. Additionally, many middle-class workplaces have a left/liberal atmosphere, so anyone with conservative attitudes faces harassment, intimidation and discrimination and their employer may even fire them for "anti pluralistic" sentiments. For example, in my workplace I have been subjected to all sorts of physical and psychological intimidation for having antiFeminist views. One alleged Lesbian Feminist at my workplace, for instance, greeted me with a Nazi salute when she saw me! And I received an email from a fellow-teacher who compared me to Hitler because I had pro-men views (though he did not cite any views or actions of myself or of Hitler that might make us similar in any way!). I complained about this email to my union, a secondary teachers' union, but I received no reply to my complaint.

If you suffer similar slurs, take heart – you can defend yourself against those who accuse you of being "to the right of Genghis Khan" by suggesting they are "to the left of Pol Pot." Pot's Cambodia (Kampuchea) was also ruled via an ideology of political correctness, but the undeveloped state of the MUC in that country forced Pol Pot to use more direct and brutal methods to enforce his particular brand of political correctness. It is worth mentioning here that Pol Pot developed his ideas while studying at a French university – see Pol Pot: A Biographical Essay, by David Le Sage and Sean Watson. (www.eliz.tased.edu.au/ITStu97/polpot.htm) Pol Pot was a Leftist and he was about as brutal as they come, so how can Left = Good? We can only wonder what people who believe that are thinking.

One of the most blatant examples of academic Left-Wing bias I have come across was from Nupedia – a project aimed at creating an online encyclopedia of articles written by volunteers, and edited and peer-reviewed by volunteers. I wrote an article on "Men's Rights" for it, which (as I write these words), after many months and lots of rewriting, still has not been officially accepted or rejected.

I had a substantial email correspondence with Professor Larry Sanger, the founder, who is/was also my Editor. In one email (of 21 October 2000), he was very frank about the nature of universities and the people who work in them. In it, he accused me of not taking seriously the "constraints" that he regarded himself as working under. By this, he explained, he meant that the "vast majority" of scholars are politically "liberal" (meaning, of course, left-wing, rather than tolerant of others' opinions), and that he didn't want to alienate the majority of his potential academic contributors. Consequently, he wrote, he would need to "balance" any article of "Men's Rights" with a Feminist-inspired one – but the converse was not true: i.e. he did not intend to balance every Feminist-inspired article with a Men's Rights-inspired one. He explicitly admitted that there was a double-standard, which he described as a “sad reality”.

Astonishingly, Nupedia has a non-bias policy, of which the above attitude makes a complete mockery. I reprint the relevant section of the Non-Bias policy below, with my amendments in bold type:

"Nupedia articles are, in terms of their content, to be unbiased (except in regard to Feminism, and other "liberal" issues). There may be respectable reference works that permit authors to take recognizable stands on controversial issues, but this is not one of them. This is, admittedly, a difficult ideal to achieve; but we feel that, where bias can be detected, it can also be eliminated.

This requires that, for each controversial view discussed, the author of an article (at a bare minimum) mention various opposing views that are taken seriously by any significant minority of experts (or concerned parties) on the subject. In longer articles, of course, opposing views will be spelled out in considerable detail. In a final version of the article, every party (other than those not considered "liberal") to the controversy in question must be able to judge that its views have been fairly presented, or as fairly as is possible in a context in which other, opposing views must also be presented as fairly as possible. Moreover, if objections to any particular views are offered (which will be an essential component to certain articles, e.g., those on philosophy and public policy), the most serious or relevant objections to other, opposing views must be offered as well (apart from "liberal" views) . The reader should, ideally, be given the tools for deciding the issue; or, failing that, the reader should be introduced to the problems that must be solved in order to decide the issue.

On any controversial issue, it is usually important to state which views, if any, are now (or were at some time) in favor and no longer in favor (among experts or some other specified group of people). But even this information can and should be imparted in such a fashion as not to imply that the majority view is correct (unless it is a "liberal" view), or even that it has any more presumption in its favor than is implied by the plain fact of its popularity.

To present a subject without bias, one must pay attention not just to the matters of which views and arguments are presented, but also to their wording or the tone in which they are mentioned. Nupedia articles should avoid describing controversial views, persons, events, etc., in language that can plausibly be regarded as implying some value judgment, whether positive or negative, except when the judgment is on some relatively innocuous matter and is virtually universal. It will suffice to state the relevant (agreed-upon) facts, to describe various divergent views about those facts, and then let readers make up their own minds about what the correct views are...."

There are three main problems with the MUC Establishment's politically correct designation of oppressed groups:

1. Who decides who's oppressed?

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2. How do the designated oppressed use the power this gives them?

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3. What becomes of their scapegoats?

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The second problem is that designated groups (women, ethnic minorities, the disabled, homosexuals, lesbians, and so on) become established PR agencies and lobbyists for their members.

These agencies have a sort of "gravitational" force which they exert on the truth, bending it in their direction. Thus their PR dominates the media, which sometimes acts as if few women ever do anything wrong, especially where domestic violence is concerned. This gulf between the official line and reality was a feature of Communist Eastern Europe, and of George Orwell's book 1984. The discrepancy between propaganda and truth in such countries is probably one of the main causes of right-wing extremism, when it occurs.

The third problem with Designated Groups, as discussed below, is this that approach to Human Rights creates a set of scapegoats comprised of people who don't fit into any of the designated groups.

The Establishment theory is that they are the ones who are rich and powerful in society – but only some of them are rich and powerful. What about poor white males, for example? Men and whites are both politically incorrect if they assert their rights. Any semi-intelligent Feminist, however, can sling off at white men and get away with it because white men have become virtual devils.

The tendency to look for victims and designate them as an oppressed group has even invaded the sphere of international relations. The Stratfor web site (www.stratfor.com) discussed this in the article U.S. Overlooks Underlying Causes of Asian Conflicts, August 13th, 1999:

This trend also places the foreign policy of the United States and other nations in a position to be more easily manipulated by a good PR campaign. Whoever appears to be the victim gets the support.

Feminists dominate society with their propaganda. Of course, they deny that and assert that the Right dominates. Yet, paradoxically, any group which can convince the education system it is oppressed is allowed by the media, educators and the government to disseminate its propaganda as if it were God's Truth.

We see it in American and British television programmes all the time. For example, on the American station ABC's Sunday Evening News, Monday November 15th, 1999 (New Zealand time), they presented an item on "America's Sons" (abcnews.go.com/onair/dailynews/americas_sons.html) which listed three negative statistics about boys in the USA: they are more delinquent than girls, commit more murders than girls, and then there was a segment on boys and suicide. We might expect the third statistic would be about how boys commit proportionately more suicides than girls, but that would have put boys into the "victim" role, and in the Feminist "male = bad, female = good" paradigm boys can't be victimized more than girls. So what we actually got was a statistic about how boys' suicides had increased by 112 percent, which Feminists generally attribute to males' inability to cope with losing their power over women and, therefore, the result of a masculine flaw rather than victimization.

It's important not to be naïve about the media. Whoever the owners may be, the biases of the individual reporters inevitably show through unless they run directly counter to an important policy concern of the owners. Journalists are predominantly left/liberal university graduates who support Feminism. I believe that many journalists are deliberately biased. Part of my evidence for this is a TV news clip, dating from the 1960's, where Malcolm X calls on the media to deliberately make Whites like and value Blacks through positive propaganda about Blacks. He praises the power of the mass media, giving the example of how the media were able to make the British love the Russians and hate the Germans during World War II - and then hate the Russians and love the Germans during the Cold War. No doubt Malcolm X was right – I'm sure that modern US TV sitcoms, such as the Cosby Show, give you a much better image of Black people than you got by reading Noddy books or Kipling's “Just So Stories” in your childhood, for example.

The Left-Liberal journalists who were prepared to implement such a policy are very likely to have applied it to other issues, such as Feminism, since the Victim Coalition bracketed Blacks and Women together in their propaganda. It is not clear if Malcolm X was inventing a new policy or reflecting an existing practice amongst his friends in the media. However, if this has been going on in parts of the media for forty years, it is bound to have had an effect!

This support has been instrumental in helping make Feminism an Establishment force in western countries, with a lot of taxpayer and private money at its disposal, irrespective of the political inclinations of the top bureaucrats and politicians. Feminists achieved this goal long ago in western countries, and are in the process of using the United Nations to penetrate the Third World. Proof of their growing power includes:
 

Masculists seem to have little hope (or fear) of being seen as a Left-wing protest group. This is because Feminists dominate the coalition that forms the backbone of left-wing parties in western countries, thereby forcing Masculists to seek allies on the right, though not necessarily on the extreme right.

Compounding the problem facing men is that political correctness has become a political and economic cornucopia for the victim coalition, with every conceivable group lining up to get all the political and financial bounty they can. Some disabled groups are even starting to assert that their disability is a form of oppression by the able-bodied majority -- an attempt to cement their place in the coalition that wields such power over the media and government coffers.

The rich, heterosexual, Anglo-Saxon, able-bodied males connive in this resource targeting process because it both salves their consciences and gets them laid. Nor do they feel compelled to aid poor, heterosexual, Anglo-Saxon, able-bodied males (PHAMs, for short), because they are competing with them for status, money, and sex. PHAMs don't turn up as a group outside Congress or Parliament waving banners. But many feel that the designation process is unfair and resent the way designated groups use their "gravity" to bend truth and get favoured treatment.

In the Men's Movement, there is some resentment of the fact that the only category of men who can attract publicity and money for their health problems are homosexuals – for AIDS research, publicity and treatment. It would be good if the Men's Movement could harness this homosexual political clout for the wider benefit of men's health in general. Unfortunately, homosexuals are seen by some Men's Movement activists as both closely allied to the Feminists and hostile to the traditional family.

There is also the problem of homophobia among many Fathers' Rights activists - often expressed as a concern for traditional family values. For example, the Men's Centre North Shore, in Auckland, New Zealand, has refused to treat AIDS as a men's health issue according to a letter I received from a disappointed member of that organisation. And "Mankind", the United Kingdom Men's Movement, has associated itself with UK Muslims combatting the infiltration of homosexual values into Society. Sometimes it seems as if one has a choice between Leftists who approve of killing unborn babies, and Rightists who approve of discriminating against - or beating up - homosexuals. On the other hand, homosexuals are also wary of being associated with Men's Rights groups because they fear how their Feminist (especially Lesbian Feminist) allies would react.

This affects academics and public servants, as well, since anyone who wants a university career or public service promotion has to sign their integrity away to the Devil of political correctness and ingratiate themselves with all the designated groups. (That has been my experience, but it would take another book to tell the whole story!) This gives members of the designated groups significant blackmail power. But it also feeds a growing anti-Left sentiment.

Liberals find this right-wing feeling inexplicable. They don't understand how they help propagate right-wing extremism by their own actions! Poor white males are, at times, liable to get fed up with this hypocrisy and unfairness, and that is where modern would-be Hitlers can be expected to draw their core support from. (See www.backlash.com/book/cycle.html for similar insights). Affirmative action ("positive" discrimination) involves quota systems for university enrollments, public service jobs, etc. Some liberals admit this is unfair to individuals who would have just scraped in under an unbiased system, but who are of the wrong sex or race to qualify. Yet they favour this racist, sexist system because they've got what they want from life, their own children are bright enough or well enough connected to get on okay in life, and because of its imagined long-term social effects:

But political correctness does have victims: those people whom the MUC define as "oppressors," thereby making them into scapegoats, persecuted with the blessing of the Establishment. I am not for one second denying that some of these people may indeed have been guilty of carrying out some form of oppression. My point is that all groups tend to oppress all other groups, given the chance. Political correctness acts as a smokescreen for certain forms of oppression by taking it for granted only particular scapegoat groups are capable of oppression.

Ethnic majorities are much more reluctant to make concessions to ethnic minorities than men are to women – i.e., men need women in a way that ethnic majorities don't need minorities – so the situation of women is not identical to that of ethnic minorities.

Western "human rights" legislation seldom deals with issues such as free speech, due process of law, and so on. The New Zealand Human Rights Commission, for example has a focus on "Designated Groups" – i.e. groups recognized by the Establishment as oppressed or disadvantaged. Their aims are very commendable: to prevent anyone oppressing and scapegoating minority groups. The classic, prototypical, most repeatedly publicised case of such oppression is, of course, Nazi Germany.
The Nazis, who thought they were the Master Race, persecuted the Jews and other groups. Certainly most of us agree that the Nazis were very bad, but in the left/liberal paradigm of "oppressor = bad, oppressed = good," this meant Jews were presumed by definition to be good.

But some Jews believe they are God's Chosen People; and how different is this from the Nazis believing they were the Master Race? As far as I can see, both ideas are equally racist. This in no way excuses the Nazis, but it adds much needed perspective: every ethnic group has members who are racist. Today, however, only the racism of members of the white majorities in western countries attracts much publicity or self-flagellation.

For example, when I was teaching Mandarin, the national language of China (the World's most populous nation) in New Zealand, a country of fewer than 4 million inhabitants, I seemed to be the only one who thought that my job was language-teaching. Everyone else (from the local Cantonese community, who usually didn't even know Mandarin, to export-oriented farmers, to retired diplomats, to the business community) thought that my job was being deferential to Chinese people. Even the Laotians and Eurasians I knew seemed to think that they were my boss!

However, I worked in the same building as the Indian High Commission, and I found that the Indians I came across there had a different attitude: on occasions when I was having a difference of opinion with my Chinese colleagues, I suddenly became very popular with these Indians - I don't know if this was because there were some Indians on the staff of my school who took an interest in such things.

What happens in western countries is that ethnic minorities, whose members routinely discriminate against one another in their countries of origin, join forces to assert their rights against the majority in their adopted country. This majority lumps them all together as "Africans" or "Latin Americans," "Pacific Islanders" or "Asians," so that is how they start thinking of themselves. This also happens to other groups such as New Zealanders and Australians abroad. They get lumped together as "Colonials," "Antipodeans," or whatever, and so they end up playing down what divides them and concentrating on what they have in common. At home, on the other hand, these two nations engage in continuous – though mostly friendly – rivalry.

The majority in a liberal democracy can exert its collective power only at elections (i.e., once in three, four, or five years), and at referendums. And even at elections it cannot choose individual policies – just packages of policies, wrapped up in the manifestoes or platforms of particular parties. Those parties may or may not actually implement particular parts of their manifestoes once in power. So the majority is not very powerful in any purely electoral way.

Individual members of the majority can and do discriminate against minorities, but individual members of minorities can and do also discriminate against members of the majority and of other minorities, as well. In New Zealand, for example, an ethnically South Asian Race Relations Conciliator, Mr. Rajen Prasad, ruled that Maoris had discriminated against two White students in a Polytechnic course in 1998. This must have upset Maori members of the governing coalition, because the Race Relations Conciliator had his budget cut and has been unable to follow up complaints since that time - at least, I think that is the explanation for his failure to reply to a letter in which I complained about discrimination by some Asians!

Also, in many countries Asian minorities (like the Jews and the Armenians in certain countries) often have a higher average income than the majority, and that gives those minorities behind-the-scenes power (which is part of what makes minorities such as the Chinese, Jews, and Armenians unpopular in some countries). Again, I have experiences along those general lines which it would take another book to relate. Ethnic sources tell me the Jews are the most powerful ethnic lobby in the USA (after the African-Americans). An Iranian who had once been a US resident also claimed the Jews control the media in the States. Are they anti-Semitic, or simply telling the truth as seen through eyes unclouded by white guilt?

Between elections, it is the pressure groups, the media, the government bureaucracy, the President or Prime Minister, Cabinet, the government Caucus and the Congress or Parliament who have the real power. And Presidents, Prime Ministers, and Cabinets, as we know, do not always keep the promises that got them elected.

True, members of minorities experience the dominance of the values and symbols of the majority in many aspects of their daily lives. Many find this irksome, even oppressive, as they find their own values and symbols more appealing and even superior to the (to them) alien majority. This is the common experience of expatriates of all types in all countries. Majorities also experience much better-publicised mirror-image feelings toward the minorities in their midst, of course.

In short, political correctness provides a simplified, stereotyped view of the relationship between minorities and majorities. Being action-oriented, it requires good guys and bad guys, so it can help the good guys and punish the bad guys. In the politically correct scheme of things, majorities are bad guys and minorities are good guys. End of story – except we have promoted women from majority to minority status, so they can be good guys, too.

One of the fundamental principles of Western culture, of course, is Pluralism, which presumes competing interests. However, it may be that the excesses of Feminism will inspire another look at the virtues and vices of Pluralism. The Feminist view of oppression is simplistic in the extreme. In her book Polity and Group Difference: A Critique of the Ideal of Universal Citizenship, Iris Young argues that, since some groups are relatively privileged while others are oppressed, a political structure based on universality merely reinforces that inequality. She makes a case for a pressure-group society (a society composed of competing pressure-groups) – the very opposite of the "melting-pot" concept.

“First, the ideal that the activities of citizenship express or create a general will that transcends the particular differences of group affiliation, situation and interest has in practice excluded groups judged not capable of adopting that general point of view; the idea of citizenship as expressing a general will has tended to enforce a homogeneity of citizens.... Thus I argue that the inclusion and participation of everyone in public discussion and decision making requires mechanisms for group representation. Second, where differences in capacities, culture, values, and behavioural styles exist among groups, but some of these groups are privileged, strict adherence to a principle of equal treatment tends to perpetuate oppression or disadvantage.” (ibid, 118)

Young's basic argument is that universal citizenship is all well and good in itself, but it is not a panacea for all social ills, though she does not come right out and say this in so many words. Rather, she formulates her thesis by claiming certain political tendencies (those she believes flow from the notion of universal citizenship) are "in tension with" other aspects of this notion. My strong reservations about her proposal are based on the following facts:
 

Young's argument depends heavily on the standard liberal/left consensus (as expounded in western universities) about the phenomenon of oppression, since a major thread of her basic argument against the notion of universal citizenship is that society contains groups which are oppressed, in the sense that group members are unable to make their political influence felt as much as members of other groups are able to do.

According to Young, a group is oppressed when one or more of the following conditions occurs to all or a large portion of its members: (1) the benefits of their work or energy go to others without those others reciprocally benefiting them (exploitation); (2) They are excluded from participation in major social activities, which in our society means primarily a workplace (marginalization); (3) they live and work under the authority of others, and have little work autonomy and authority over others themselves (powerlessness); (4) as a group they are stereotyped at that same time that their experience and situation is invisible in the society in general, and they have little opportunity and little audience for the expression of their experience and perspective on social events (cultural imperialism); (5) group members suffer random violence and harassment motivated by group hatred or fear." (Young 1990,128)

Young (ibid) goes on to list the various groups in the United States which she considers oppressed. The list is headed by women, and includes various ethnic groups, plus gays, lesbians, the poor, the working class, the aged, and the disabled.

The Miriam-Webster Dictionary defines "oppression" as "unjust or cruel exercise of power or authority." Not all of Young's five criteria genuinely isolate actual oppression. They are designed to fit the situation of women in society, as she sees it. Her fifth criterion, for example, is too loosely worded to be useful – harassment comes in various forms, physical, verbal, emotional and mental, and it is not true only the dominant groups in society are ever in a position to harass others. Her second and third criteria, likewise, have a lot to do with women, but little to do with oppression as it is usually understood.

Indeed, by Young's definition many women oppress men. In terms of criterion (1), men who fight in the front line in wartime, exposing themselves to fear, physical and psychological privations, and the possibility of injury, mutilation, paralysis and/or death, are being exploited and oppressed by women. The situation is particularly clear-cut where women have/had the vote in the country concerned, and so helped to vote in the government which ordered the mobilisation of troops; if there were women in the government who made the decision – and especially if women make up a majority of the electorate, or the Head of Government or Head of State is a woman. In recent history, the Falklands War comes to mind – it came about when in Britain the Head of State, Head of Government, and the majority of the electorate were all women. The majority of those who died were men.

The former state of Yugoslavia was western in its culture, but the civil war there between Serbians, Croats and Muslims was fought largely by male conscripts (of course). There has been no sign of Feminists demanding equality of compulsory military service with men on the battlefields there. Feminist demands regarding military service are generally limited to the right to a career in the military for women who volunteer. Compulsion is only for men, as far as Feminists are concerned. Moreover, there has also been no sign of the women in the various communities being more willing than their menfolk to adopt a pacifist stance when attacked.

The only sign of women being involved in the fighting was one story about a single woman sniper. A sniper, of course, is a relatively safe combatant – even so, this woman was picked out by the media because she was such an exception to the rule that only men were doing the fighting. No doubt some of the press also had a hidden pro-Feminist agenda, and were trying to convey the visual impression that women were doing some of the dangerous fighting – without actually putting that lie into words.
The case of Israel is often cited as one country where women are conscripted alongside men. But there, too, it is the men who do the actual front-line fighting – not the women.

Young's Criterion 4 (cultural imperialism) also applies to men, to varying degrees in many western countries. As a group, men in such countries are stereotyped by Feminists and the MUC (Media University Complex) as potential rapists and murderers – not to mention child-abusers and wife-beaters! At the same time their experiences and situation as men are invisible to society in general. They have little opportunity and little audience for the expression of their experiences and perspectives on social events (cultural imperialism), since there are relatively few pressure groups which represent men's interests.

The Foreword to the New Zealand Human Rights Commission's "Equal Employment Opportunities Manual" states "Men who are not within the target groups (the various ethnic and other minority groups) are not included for special consideration in the manual." So any men wanting to claim they were being disadvantaged, compared to women in some particular workplace, would not even be able to file their claim, let alone prove it.

But can men be disadvantaged? Yes, they can: keep in mind there are some professions, such as primary and preschool teaching, where the workforce is overwhelmingly female. There are many men who would rather teach children than work as a carpenter on a dangerous construction site. One reason they don't, of course, is that the pay is better for working in the construction industry. The pay is better for the purely economic reason that no one would work in such a dangerous, unglamorous job, otherwise – not because women's work is undervalued, as Feminists claim. Also, women force men to focus on money more than job-satisfaction because most women prefer to date, mate and marry men with money – not men with satisfying, though low paying, careers.

In this context, I went to this Human Rights Commission to complain about an all-female courier firm that was reported in a newspaper as saying they would never hire men. As it turned out, I was not the first to complain, but the woman I spoke to at the Commission thought it sufficient to report that the firm said it had been misquoted.

However, she went on to claim that male-dominated management in some companies sometimes interview women just for appearances' sake – having no intention of hiring a woman at all. That may well be, but the implication was that she wasn't going to take very seriously complaints against female-dominated firms for that reason, as if two wrongs make a right! That is not the unbiased approach one would expect of a taxpayer-funded Human Rights Commission, and this bias is a result of men being an invisible minority in society. I have corresponded with the Human Rights Commission on various matters since then, and I am certain it is nothing more or less than a Feminist power-base.

Young's fifth criterion (suffering random violence and harassment ) also applies to men: I have been physically attacked and harassed by Feminazis (in a female-dominated and left-wing dominated workplace) who wanted to intimidate a potential Masculist activist and to censor the expression of views such as those expressed in the present book.

“I assert, then, the following principle: a democratic public, however that is constituted, should provide mechanisms for the effective representation and recognition of the distinct voices and perspectives of those of its constituent groups that are oppressed or disadvantaged within it. Such group representation implies institutional mechanisms and public resources supporting three activities: (1) self-organisation of group members so that they gain a sense of collective empowerment and a reflective understanding of their collective experience and interests in the context of the society; (2) voicing a group's analysis of how social policy proposals affect them, and generating policy proposals themselves, in institutionalized contexts where decision makers are obliged to show that they have taken these perspectives into consideration; (3) having veto power regarding specific policies that affect a group directly, for example, reproductive rights for women, or use of reservation lands for Native Americans.” (ibid, 128-129)

Young works within a liberal/left university context, with a ruling consensus about who the oppressors and oppressed are in a given society – i.e., the victim coalition of women, homosexuals, ethnic/racial minorities, and the disabled. This is an often simplistic consensus, as no group is completely powerless, and any group is liable to use what power it does have to carry out whatever level of oppression it is capable of, in particular contexts. This consensus is also oppressive in itself, since it makes it difficult for groups which have not been awarded the much coveted "oppressed and disadvantaged" label from persuading anyone of the seriousness of their claims to this status – particularly if the consensus has already stigmatised them with the "oppressor" label.

Men have great difficulty being accepted (on the basis of claims they are being oppressed by women) into the "coalition of oppressed groups" (a.k.a., the victim coalition), since women have long been one of the cornerstones of this group and won their status on the basis of claiming men oppress them! Yet, as we have seen, men are oppressed in terms of three of Young's five criteria: exploitation, cultural imperialism, and suffering violence and harassment.

At the beginning of this chapter, we talked about the power of one man with a chainsaw in a forest. In the previous section, we talked about oppression, which is one type of misuse of power by one person or group, to the detriment of another person or group. Power is what politics is all about, and all issues surrounding men's and women's rights have to do with power.

So, what exactly is power? Power is the ability to do what you want, and/or to get other people to do what you want them to do. Some people might make a distinction between these two sorts of power by saying the ability to do what you want is "autonomy," and "power" has to do only with relationships between people. Unfortunately, perhaps, this is a rather naïve viewpoint. Virtually anything you want to do involves some competition with others, or some minor or major decrease in their freedom of action or quality of life. So you would have to be a very powerful person indeed to do anything you wanted, because a lot of these activities would run into actual or potential resistance from other people.

Socialisation is largely about learning what the limits are on your autonomy/power. Catharine MacKinnon and other Feminists talk about this in the context of gender as a means of limiting women's power. However, her arguments are one-sided and superficial, as is routinely the case with Feminist writers. Exactly how powerful was the young man drafted into the Vietnam War, while his sisters and girlfriend were safe at home attending Women's Studies courses and the like? Men and women are both socialised to accept limits to their power, and the myth of the all-powerful male is one the Feminists have carefully built up to attract sympathy for women.

The ancient Greek historian, Thucydides, had a very cynical (but valid) definition of liberty. It went something like this: Liberty is the ability to restrict the liberty of other people. This is equivalent to denying the validity of win-win analyses of political change – in other words, there are always winners and losers.

By this interpretation, for example, the USA is the freest country on Earth – being the most free from inhibitions from outside forces on its foreign policy, and also being the most able to impose its interpretation of moral issues upon the world as a whole. Conversely, Russia is unable to enforce its interpretation of moral issues even in its own backyard (e.g., Bosnia and Kossovo), if its interpretation differs from that of the USA. Russia has had to bow to the economic power of the USA, who would not be willing to help Russia in its economic weakness were Russia too independent in the line it took on Kossovo, for example. And, also in Kossovo, the Serbs were once "free" to oppress the Albanians and to protect the gypsies, but (at time of this writing) the Albanians have become "free" to oppress the Serbs and the gypsies.

Conventional 20th Century liberalism amounts, in practice, to seeking out oppressed groups and increasing their autonomy. The classic example of this was the Treaty of Versailles, which ended the First World War and redrew the map of Europe along largely ethnic lines – breaking up the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Unfortunately, when this formula is applied to internal politics, what you end up with is a rump minority of underprivileged people who fall into none of the categories targeted for extra compassion and/or resources. The other groups are all organised and have the ear of the media and the politicians, leaving this rump disorganised, unempowered, virtually disenfranchised and at the mercy of the "liberated" minorities, in political terms. In other words, the victim coalition gained liberation by enslaving the silent majority.

Suddenly, our democracies begin to look more like dictatorships. In a dictatorship, it might seem that one person does whatever he/she wants and has absolute autonomy/power. That is not quite true. Dictators are lucky if they have even a brief period when they can do absolutely whatever they like. Then they have to start looking over their shoulder and under their bed for potential threats to themselves and their country. To combat these actual or potential threats, Dictators have to be proactive. They have to form personal and international alliances, placate people, groups of people and states. They also have to create and disseminate propaganda to persuade people to agree with them (using the news media, among other tools).

What distinguishes a dictatorship from a democracy? The major difference, of course, is the method of bringing about a change of government. Julius Caesar, Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler are well-known examples of European dictators whose rule ended violently. Caesar was extremely popular with sections of his people. It was the elite, rather than his lesser subjects, who found it necessary to assassinate him – even though by then they were too late to restore the republic.

But the point of similarity between democracies and dictatorships I want to concentrate on here is the use of propaganda and the news media. The news media are very powerful, as Goebbels knew. He was aware of the need to conceal the "art" of the media professional from the audience by using historical analogies rather than making blatant political propaganda. Similarly, the modern western media propagandizes by choosing what to cover and what questions to ask, rather than by being blatantly biased in the presentation of what it does cover. The problem for politically incorrect causes such as Men's Rights has been how to get covered at all.

If there were various sources of news, if they had very different viewpoints and if they all had an almost equal share of the "market," the problem would not be great. In many small countries, however, the vast majority of the population gets its major news and political commentary from one single source. Cable television and satellite television, with their dozens of channels were rare on the international scene until fairly recently. Regardless, the western mass media expresses few points of view, especially on prime-time television. Political correctness dominates because that is the mindset of most journalists.

What is particularly interesting about the Jews, in this context, is how they are labeled victims in their role as a minority in western countries – and so they get very little negative press from journalists who fear being branded anti-Semitic. Indeed, they have so much power they are often able to suppress the dissemination of information on the Nazi Genocide that they disagree with. The Armenians have no comparable power to suppress Turkish Revisionism that denies the Turkish Genocide of the Armenians, for example. But, as the saying goes, "those who do not learn from history are condemned to relive it." Since Zionist activists do not allow us uncensored access to information about every aspect of the German Nazi Genocide of the Jews and what led up to it, we can never really understand what the causes were. If we can't establish the causes, how can we prevent it from happening again?

But Jews in Israel are seen as "oppressors" of the Palestinians, and so they get some bad press in the West for that role! I am sympathetic towards former Likud Party Prime Ministers (such as Benyamin Netanyahu) of Israel when they complained about anti-Israeli media bias. It's not so much that I agree with their policies – it's just that they, like Masculists, come up so often against the wall of simple-minded media bias that they feel there's almost no point in fighting it head-on.

Another case in point is Bosnia, where the western media has been biased against the Serbs. Martin Bell was a famous BBC television reporter who argued within the BBC against their official policy of neutrality. He eventually left the BBC and went into politics. I heard him in an interview referring to the Bosnian Serbs as the "bad guys." His intonation made it clear he meant to have scare-quotes around the phrase, but it is also clear that that was how the western media – and hence the western world - actually saw the Bosnian Serbs.

People often say things like "Knowledge is Power" or "Information is Power," but they seldom seem to realize this applies to politics as well as to everything else. The Media – particularly before the advent of the Internet – controlled information. This seems to have gone to their heads, in many cases. Some media people have acquired star status. They have seen populist or right-wing politicians criticise the media, yet they are not aware of their own bias.

Another example is the well-known Feminist author, Susan Faludi. According to Laura Taflinger, "Faludi thinks a journalist's job is to create social change by educating people and taking the time to investigate things. A journalist needs to be passionate about a cause, she says." (www.dnai.com/~ljtaflin/FEMJOUR/faludi.html)

In the former Yugoslavia, the Serbs and the Croats had virtually the same spoken language (called "Serbo-Croat"), but the Serbs wrote in the Cyrillic alphabet (like the Russians and the Bulgarians) while the Croats used the Roman alphabet. Whether this was cause or effect (or both), I am not sure, but it is clear the Serbs had closer relationships to eastern Europe, and the Croats (to the extent the Cold War allowed) had closer relationships to western Europe. This made it almost inevitable that the western media would have an anti-Serb bias – which was exacerbated by the fact that these media people were mostly based in Sarajevo, in anti-Serb territory.

I am not excusing Serb atrocities. But the agenda of the Serbs appeared to be to be independent from the Croats and Muslims. The United Nations and the media, dominated by western interests, decided on a contrary agenda of forcing the three parties to live together in one country (Bosnia). Faced with the world community's hostile agenda, it is not surprising how some Bosnian Serbs may have acted like cornered animals.

With a few exceptions, the Feminist viewpoint now dominates the main news sources throughout the USA, Canada, Europe, Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand. This gives them the kind of influence that borders on the power to dictate what we read, see and hear on the subject. This raises the question, what has become of our democratic ideals?

Any person or political movement that aspires to fight the values that have been absorbed into the bosom of the Politically Correct needs to understand the power of the Media University Complex and the way it carries out its indoctucation. The PC scenario we live within is Orwellian in its disregard and contempt for truth. Hence, this book. Like all wars, the Sex War will be won by proceeding from analysis to strategy, from strategy to tactics, and from tactics to action.
 
 
 

Last Update: 28 December 2004

©Peter Zohrab