The Law Of Gender Violence

Mary Malone writes:
Over the past few years, both in this country and on the Continent, there have been campaigns against violence that is perpetrated against women by men, particularly what is known as 'domestic violence'. The campaigns work from a premise that there are many women who are attacked by their menfolk on a regular and systematic basis, which is somewhat surprising as culturally, in this country at least, and amongst the indigenous population, men have traditionally repudiated violent men, particularly those who hit women. Amongst indigenous Englishmen, hitting a woman is an absolute taboo.
However, the definition of violence is extended so as to bring in more victims. A woman may verbally abuse a man, and a woman may be 'controlling' but these are not crimes. Only when a man is verbally abusive or controlling is it a crime. The idea behind the campaign is that there are millions of women cowering in fear of brutal husbands, having their individuality crushed out of them.
Just one look around us and we can see what patent rubbish this is.
Yet the campaigns go on. And in Spain, for the past ten years they have had the Law of Gender Violence. This keystone legislation, discriminating against men, was passed by the mostly male Spanish parliament.
It's 'success' can be measured by the fact that by 2010, 13% of the prison population consisted of men punished under this legislation.
The imprisoned men were punished for crimes, which had they been perpetrated by a woman, would have been treated as mere misdemeanors.
During its first five years, one hundred thousand men were convicted under this law. There are one hundred thousand denunciations annually, and according to the government this is only a quarter of 'real' figure, meaning that the 9,000 men currently serving time under this law should rise to 36,000, increasing Spain's prison population by 50%.
Yet the number of women murdered by their partners rises year by year. Either the increase in violence is due to the increase in immigrant communities, and it would be racist to suggest such a thing, or it is caused by a rise in bitterness and hostility between the sexes, caused by this divisive law, the endless harping anti-male propaganda in the media, and the inversion of values in the education system, where girls and boys are taught to sneer at their own gender, and at their own selves.
By pitting women against men, the Capitalist Patriarchal State once again divides in order to rule. By inciting discord between women and men, the military and police apparatus can intrude in to the most intimate recesses of social and family life. Men are kept under surveillance - they must beware lest words and deeds can be misconstrued.
Massive manipulation of the population through re-education walks hand in hand with massive control of the population through police methods. Men, who have always seen themselves as the providers and protectors of women, are now portrayed, and encouraged to be, vain, egotistical and childish.
What was once seen as manly self-sacrifice is now portrayed as selfish oppression. Simply for a man to love his family has become a crime, preventing a woman from taking her place within the hierarchy.

The Unquiet Grave

The wind doth blow today, my love,
And a few small drops of rain;
I never had but one true love,
In cold grave was she lain.

I'll do as much for my true love
As any young man may;
I'll sit and mourn at all her grave
For a twelvemonth and a day.

The twelve month and a day being up,
The dead began to speak
'Oh who sits weeping on my grave,
And will not let me sleep?

'Tis I, my love, sits on your grave,
And will not let you sleep,
For I crave one kiss of your clay-cold lips,
And that is all I seek.'

'You crave one kiss of my clay-cold lips,
But my breath smells earthy strong;
If you have one kiss of my clay-cold lips,
Your time will not be long.

'Tis down in yonder garden green,
Love, where we used to walk,
The finest flower, that ere was seen
Is withered to a stalk.

The stalk is withered dry, my love,
So will our hearts decay;
So make yourself content, my love,
Till God calls you away.'

A Verse On Sunday

The Gospel according to John, chapter 1, verse 3.
'All things were made by him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.'

Jesus Christ is the Word, not just a nice man who hung around Galilee two thousand years ago, but the Word, the creative force of the universe, God Himself, the Son of the Father.
God is the creator of everything. People make idols out of creation - stones, rocks, pools, springs, trees - worshipping creation. In these scientific days we make idols out of the State, our 'Life', Democracy, Equality, and so on, earthly creations, the inventions of the mind of man, that can only lead us to slavery.
But the universe and all that is in it was made by God. God is the creator of all, and it is he that we must worship.
Without the Word, without our Lord Jesus Christ, 'was not any thing made that was made.'

Herbert Spencer - Man Versus The State

'Be it or be it nor true that Man is shapen in iniquity and conceived in sin, it is unquestionably true that Government is begotten of aggression. In small undeveloped societies where for ages complete peace has continued, there exists nothing like what we call Government: no coercive agency, but mere honourary headship, if any headship at all. In these exceptional communities, unaggressive and from special causes, unaggressed  upon, there is little deviation from the virtues of truthfulness, honesty, justice, and generosity, that nothing beyond an occasional expression of public opinion by informally assembled elders is needful. Conversely, we find proofs that, at first recognised but temporarily during leadership of war, the authority of a chief is permanently installed, and grows strong where successful war ends in subjection of neighbouring tribes. And thence onwards, examples furnished by all the races put beyond doubt the truth, that the coercive power of the chief, developing into king, and king of kings (a frequent title in the East), becomes great in proportion as conquest becomes habitual and the union of subdued nations extensive.
Comparisons disclose a further truth which should be ever present to us - the truth that the aggressiveness of the ruling power inside a society increases with its aggressiveness outside the society.
As, to make an efficient army, the soldiers must be subordinate to their commander, so, to make an efficient fighting community must the citizens be subordinate to the extent demanded, and yield up whatever property is required.'

Memories of Resistance

In 1860, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, whose capital was Naples, was overthrown by a combination of local Liberal revolutionaries and soldiers from the northern kingdom of Piedmont. The local peasants were faced with worsening labour conditions, the theft of common land and its integration into the property of the powerful, increased taxation, and the conscription of nearly all young men, the previous exemptions for fathers and only sons being abolished.
In defiance of the increased oppression and the martial law imposed upon them, many men and women took to the forests and the hills as bandits and brigands.
Central and Southern Italy already had a long tradition of resistance to Power. Its outlaws were famous even amongst the European intelligentsia of the era, many of whom, looking for something a little exotic on their Grand Tours of Italy, would visit the fearless outlaw Gasparone, locked up for forty years in a gaol in Civitavecchia. In the Lazio region, he was a legend, famed for robbing the rich and giving to the poor. Others, such as Stefano Pelloni, the Smuggler, Fra Diavolo, and Domenichino were equally famous. Nowadays their names mean little or nothing, but in their day they were often the protagonists of poems and ballads that sang of their misdemeanors as if they were epic deeds. These ballads were passed down the generations, the collective memory of a community expressed in song and popular verse, stories of the forest and the brigands who lived there.

The Centralisation Of Memory

The collective memory of autonomous societies is passed down from generation to generation, and with it the values of that society, and indeed its identity. For good reason did the Irish, in Mediaeval times fear the power of the written word. They feared that memory would be destroyed, that it would be captured by those experts who held the power of the written word.
In autonomous, and often illiterate societies, the people have their own slant, usually at odds with the official Narrative. A modern example is the myth of a united 'Britain' facing the Nazis in 1940, whereas, from what I have heard, most people regarded the war as something conjured up by the officer class, that it was the politicians who wanted the war. Most people simply wanted to survive and get on with their lives.
More rural societies than twentieth century England told their story through myth and legend. One of the most important aims of free compulsory education was to break the power of the peasant memory. People who could read, would read newspapers and novels, the myths that their masters wanted them to see as their own.
The tales of common people all over the world are full of characters such as Robin Hood, outlaws and brigands who fought against Power and the injustices of Power. These heroes fought against central authority, vertical authority imposed on them by violence. They took back what the rich had taken and gave it back to the poor. They were heroes, rebels driven to the woods and the hills by the oppressor.
 But the heroes in the books of the officer class, all too frequently overlooked these outlaws, and made heroes out of soldiers and policemen. The outlaws were cast as criminals, the agents of Power as saints. And when a myth was too powerful to expunge, such as the story of Robin Hood, they gave the story a makeover. In Victorian times, Robin was changed from a simple yeoman, to become Robin of Locksley, a knight who had been unjustly treated by Prince John and who waited for the return of the 'good' king Richard.
Robin became officer material and his men were simply his cannon fodder, an attitude clearly shown in the film Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves.
To this day soldiers are treated as saints and heroes, at least by the propagandists of Power. Some thug shoots up peasants in Afghanistan or Iraq, and you'd think he was Mother Teresa.
 And the dissident is a baddie, an extremist. Be he a member of a church, a libertarian, someone who doesn't like being taxed, monitored, crushed by debt, harassed by officialdom, he is treated not as a hero, but as a trouble causer.
It is the man of violence who conforms to Power who is the hero of memory that has been expropriated and transformed. Films, television, books blot out the memories of autonomous life enjoyed by mankind until very recently. Memories of freedom are routinely destroyed. Officially, Hierarchy is the established order, natural and eternal.
But not so long ago, in a world where people made their own decisions, it was the warrior, the policeman, the 'lord' who was the criminal, the one who overturned the natural order, and the good guys were the peasants like Robin Hood who fought the oppressor, brave men and women who only wished to be allowed to live as humans, not beasts of burden.

Thomas Hardy - The Darkling Thrush

I leant upon the coppice gate
When frost was spectre-gray
And winter's dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted high
Had sought their household fires.

The land's sharp features seemed to be
The Year's corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon the earth
Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited.
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or night around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.