Tag Archives: population

UN study slanders Asian men as rapists

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I need to expand more on the way that “rape” is being used to slander Asian societies as a whole in the Western mainstream media, controlled ultimately by a small group of owners.

The basis for the slander is a UN-led study:

The UN multi-country study on men and violence in Asia and the Pacific.

The study is sponsored by Partners for Prevention—on behalf of UNDP (UN Development Program), UNFPA (UN Population Fund) UN Women, and UNV (UN Volunteers).
and is described as follows:

From 2010 to 2013, over 10,000 men in six countries across Asia and the Pacific were interviewed using the UN Multi-country Study on Men and Violence household survey on men’s perpetration and experiences of violence, as well as men’s other life experiences. The countries included were Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Papua New Guinea. The study was a collaborative effort involving partners from academia, research institutes, civil society, the United Nations family and governments around the globe

Vietnam is also included, though not mentioned in the paragraph above.

The UN Population Fund’s goal is very clearly defined, behind the rhetoric of “rights.”

It is monitoring population growth and migration, ensuring family-planning through contraception and abortion, and securing female emancipation with a view to ensuring the previously-stated goals.

QUOTE:

The goals of UNFPA – achieving universal access to sexual and reproductive health (including family planning), promoting reproductive rights, reducing maternal mortality and accelerating progress on the ICPD agenda and MDG 5 – are inextricably linked. UNFPA also focuses on improving the lives of youths and women by advocating for human rights and gender equality and by promoting the understanding of population dynamics. Population dynamics, including growth rates, age structure, fertility and mortality and migration have an effect on every aspect of human, social and economic progress. And sexual and reproductive health and women’s empowerment all powerfully affect and are influenced by population trends.

The findings of the UN study were trumpeted uncritically in the major media:

See “Nearly quarter of men in Asia-Pacific admit to committing rape,” Kate Hodal, The Guardian, Sept 9, 2013.

However, a few critical observers found gaping holes in the methodology used:

“One in four men in Asia “admit to committing rape”? It doesn’t add up,” Stuart Brown, The Guardian, Sept 18, 2013.

Brown points out the incredibly shoddy and tendentious reasoning behind the statistic that claims that one in four Asians are rapists.

QUOTE:

“The shocking headline figure that 25% of the men surveyed admit to raping a partner or a stranger appears to offer unequivocal confirmation that Asian women are the victims of a deep-rooted, cultural problem.As with many studies of this type, however, what we’re witnessing is the wide dissemination of one hopelessly misleading statistic, while the rest of the research in the report – the stuff that actually matters – is ignored.”

The study covers Bangladesh, Cambodia, Vietnam, Indonesia, China, Sri Lanka, and Papua and New Guinea.

That itself is odd. Why would Korea, India, and Japan be left out?

The second oddity is that  the samples are not even representative nationally.

For instance, for Papua and New Guinea, the sampling is drawn entirely from one place – the island of Bougainville.

The third oddity is that there are only two places where “yes” responses to rape are over 25% and they are both areas with a recent history of violent conflict. A higher incidence of rape would be expected in such areas.

Without those two areas, the proportion of “yes” answers falls to 18%.

Finally, except in the case of Bangladesh, the question signifying admission of rape doesn’t even clearly indicate the use of force, but runs as follows:

“Have you had sexual intercourse with your partner when you knew she didn’t want to, but believed she should agree because she was your wife/partner?”

In the Bangladesh sample, where the question most directly mentions force, the number of “yes” answers is also the lowest.

This suggests that the results of the whole study have been dramatically skewed by the ambiguous structuring of a question that doesn’t even deal with what most people would call rape, but rather with the inherently problematic dynamics of marital relations.

But, even apart from the bogus nature of the questioning itself, there is the sheer ludicrousness of slandering the whole of Asia – some 4 billion plus people – on the basis of a questionnaire circulated to some 10,000 people, replete with elementary methodological flaws.

Indeed, the study looks less like a study and more like the kind of  public relations concoction that has armed the “anti-trafficking agenda” with equally sensational and equally flimsy claims.

See “Women’s Funding Network Sex Trafficking Study is Junk Science,” Village Voice, March 23, 2011.

Like bogus sex trafficking research, the bogus rape research seems to be driven by the need to come up with lurid statistics to draw funding, media attention, and political backing.

And what could be the goal of the study’s political backers, which are departments of the UN?

That too is evident.

The UN has always pursued the goals of the Western elites, under cover of internationalism.

Those goals include the need to corral and control the populous nations of Asia, lest they compete too strongly with those of the West for resources.

See the following:

George Kennan, Head of the US State Dept. Policy Planning Staff, Memo PPS23, Feb 28, 1948:

QUOTE:

In the face of this situation we would be better off to dispense now with a number of the concepts which have underlined our thinking with regard to the Far East. We should dispense with the aspiration to “be liked” or to be regarded as the repository of a high-minded international altruism. We should stop putting ourselves in the position of being our brothers’ keeper and refrain from offering moral and ideological advice. We should cease to talk about vague and—for the Far East—unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.

We should recognize that our influence in the Far Eastern area in the coming period is going to be primarily military and economic. We should make a careful study to see what parts of the Pacific and Far Eastern world are absolutely vital to our security, and we should concentrate our policy on seeing to it that those areas remain in hands which we can control or rely on.

Thus, the obvious implication of formulating bogus “rape studies” targeting Asian countries, let alone drawing wildly exaggerated conclusions from them, is the need for more surveillance and control of Asian populations by the international proxies of the Western elites.

Given the results of such surveillance and control in the US, where the prison population is the highest in the world and overwhelmingly black and brown, it is shameful that Asian media and government have not called out the slanderous characterizations of the UN study for what they are –

– Racist propaganda masquerading as social-science.

If the targets of the study had been African Americans, there would be no doubt that the researchers would have immediately been unmasked as latter-day theorists of classic scientific racism.

New Findings About Race in India..

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This news item republished at the genetics blog, Gene Expression, is likely to have some impact in India, where there’s been a long-standing debate about the North Indian-South Indian divide, also known as the Aryan-Dravidian divide.

There are several theories about the origin of the different peoples of India. The most popular one and the one that’s favored by the most prominent historians is the Aryan invasion theory.This theory suggests that there was a substantial difference between a preexisting population of shorter, darker people in South India (called Dravidians) and an invading bronze- age culture of taller, fairer people (Aryans) that brought in Vedic or Hindu culture.

This theory, of course, has had a lot of repercussions not only for history and anthropology, but also for politics. The Aryan invasion theory depicts Hindu culture as having a foreign origin, so it was considered colonial, if not racist, by many Indian scholars.

Anthropologists consider Indians to be a branch of a widely dispersed Indo-European group that sent out branches to Persia (Indo-Iranian), Europe (Indo-European) and India (Indo-European). Race theories that developed in the 19th century tended to use this Aryan theory as their foundation (if I’m not mistaken).

However, many Hindu nationalists have considered the Aryan invasion theory a colonial distortion and have argued instead that the movement of people was in the opposite direction. In other words, the Aryans moved outward from India. This would make India the mother culture of the Aryans

Critics of this Indian origin theory call it an outgrowth of Hindu chauvinism. The debate has been a pretty heated one, as a consequence.

Now comes new research.

The Times of India notes:

“The great Indian divide along north-south lines now stands blurred. A pathbreaking study by Harvard and indigenous researchers on ancestral Indian populations says there is a genetic relationship between all Indians and more importantly, the hitherto believed “fact” that Aryans and Dravidians signify the ancestry of north and south Indians might after all, be a myth.

“This paper rewrites history... there is no north-south divide,” Lalji Singh, former director of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) and a co-author of the study, said at a press conference here on Thursday.

Senior CCMB scientist Kumarasamy Thangarajan said there was no truth to the Aryan-Dravidian theory as they came hundreds or thousands of years after the ancestral north and south Indians had settled in India.

The study analysed 500,000 genetic markers across the genomes of 132 individuals from 25 diverse groups from 13 states. All the individuals were from six-language families and traditionally “upper” and “lower” castes and tribal groups. “The genetics proves that castes grew directly out of tribe-like organizations during the formation of the Indian society,” the study said. Thangarajan noted that it was impossible to distinguish between castes and tribes since their genetics proved they were not systematically different.

The study was conducted by CCMB scientists in collaboration with researchers at Harvard Medical School, Harvard School of Public Health and the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. It reveals that the present-day Indian population is a mix of ancient north and south bearing the genomic contributions from two distinct ancestral populations – the Ancestral North Indian (ANI) and the Ancestral South Indian (ASI). ”

The Political Ideology Behind Swine-Flu Hysteria

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A new piece about swine-flu that I’m still working on:

The President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology, the creators of the swine-flu scenario, has three co-chairs:

1. John Holdren (Director, White House Office of Science & Technology, Obama’s “science czar”)

2. Eric Lander, (head of the Broad Institute, MIT)

3. Harold Varmus (CEO of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Center, NY)

A little digging fills in the details.

1. Holdren:

Holdren isn’t just any old bureaucrat. He’s a climate change expert who holds the Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government

(The ‘Teresa’ is, of course, John Kerry’s wife when she was spouse of Ketchup king, John Heinz)

The support for climate change policies goes hand in hand with support for nuclear technology that Holdren believes is needed for those policies. He also believes all nuclear energy should be under the monitoring of the International Atomic Energy.

Climate change and “peaceful nukes” have been the beneficiaries of a huge PR effort over the last 15-20 years, largely stemming from the Pentagon, specifically, from Andrew Marshall, a charismatic theorist of American dominance whose Office of Net Assessments is the most influential outfit you never heard of. This PR typically derides any dissent from climate orthodoxy and downplays the enormous costs and risks involved in the global move to nuclear energy.

There’s more. As early as 1969 Holdren teamed up with neo-Malthusian doomsdayer Paul Ehrlich to advocate population control to “fend off the misery to come.” In 1977, he and Ehrlich, as well as Anne H. Ehrlich, co-authored a textbook (“Ecoscience”) in which they discussed “a wide variety of solutions to overpopulation from voluntary family planning to enforced population controls…..”

Check out this site for some truly mind-boggling quotes:

Toward a Planetary Regime
…
Perhaps those agencies, combined with UNEP and the United Nations population agencies, might eventually be developed into a Planetary Regime—sort of an international superagency for population, resources, and environment. Such a comprehensive Planetary Regime could control the development, administration, conservation, and distribution of all natural resources, renewable or nonrenewable, at least insofar as international implications exist. Thus the Regime could have the power to control pollution not only in the atmosphere and oceans, but also in such freshwater bodies as rivers and lakes that cross international boundaries or that discharge into the oceans. The Regime might also be a logical central agency for regulating all international trade, perhaps including assistance from DCs to LDCs, and including all food on the international market.

The Planetary Regime might be given responsibility for determining the optimum population for the world and for each region and for arbitrating various countries’ shares within their regional limits. Control of population size might remain the responsibility of each government, but the Regime would have some power to enforce the agreed limits.

George Kennan on the Realities Behind US Foreign Policy (Links added)

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I have been meaning to post the surrounding text of the famous passage in which George F. Kennan, a noted Sovietologist, cold warrior, and advocate of realpolitik, expressed his view that US policy in the post-war years should be unsentimental in its attitude toward Asia. As director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff from 1947 to 1950 (under George Marshall and Dean Acheson), Kennan was one of the principal architects of US post-war strategy and the formulator of the policy of long-term “containment” of the Soviet Union. So the piece makes for interesting reading today, especially in light of the following:

*the destruction of Asian savings by the US government-generated debt & dollar tsunami
*the rise in food prices in Asia
* the ongoing rush by Asian governments (along with everyone else) to buy up world farmland
* the potential for global water-wars in the immediate future.

KENNAN:

II. Far East

“We are deceiving ourselves and others when we pretend to have the answers to the problems which agitate many of these Asiatic peoples.

Furthermore, we have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.

For these reasons, we must observe great restraint in our attitude toward the Far Eastern areas. The peoples of Asia and of the Pacific area are going to go ahead, whatever we do, with the development of their political forms and mutual interrelationships in their own way. This process cannot be a liberal or peaceful one. The greatest of the Asiatic peoples-the Chinese and the Indians-have not yet even made a beginning at the solution of the basic demographic problem involved in the relationship between their food supply and their birth rate. Until they find some solution to this problem, further hunger, distress, and violence are inevitable. …..

…In the face of this situation we would be better off to dispense now with a number of the concepts which have underlined our thinking with regard to the Far East. We should dispense with the aspiration to “be liked” or to be regarded as the repository of a high-minded international altruism. We should stop putting ourselves in the position of being our brothers’ keeper and refrain from offering moral and ideological advice. We should cease to talk about vague and — for the Far East — unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better……”

— George F. Kennan, Policy Planning Study 23 (PPS23), Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), 1948

[From Russell Wvong’s website, via
Gilles D’Aymery in a piece on the improper use of this quote by Noam Chomsky and others atSwans Commentary.