The Century Of Rape

Mary Malone writes:
Until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the vast majority of humanity had always lived in autonomous communities. Granted that taxes had to be collected for monarch and priest, the soldier and the magician, nevertheless, people were mostly left alone to organize their work, their farming, and their society. There was little crime, and very little rape. People lived as part of the great outdoors, not as refugees from the world. Their senses were as not yet centralized in the small area between their legs.
In their day to day lives men and women did not suffer the brutality of patriarchy in their social relations.
In such primitive societies, where sensual power had not merged into genital imperialism, people were not always thinking about sex. Sex relations was still primarily a means of producing the next generation.
But, in Europe and Russia, with the rise of the nation state, property relations, and the expulsion of the peasantry from their land, came the brutality of life in a capitalist state. And this brutality was exported to China and India too.
Peasants were deprived of their land, and women were reduced to objects of the patriarchy. Women had no role in the armed gang, in its subjugation and exploitation of the peasantry. Indeed, the patriarchal state used rape as a method to subjugate the populace.
The Western soldiers, supported by missionaries, raped many many thousands of Chinese women during the suppression of the Boxer Rebellion in 1900. The Japanese were horrified. They had brought along their own mobile brothels. But the Japanese learnt their lesson well. In the thirties and forties they perpetrated terrorism by rape on a vast scale.
The destruction of women by the degraded foot soldiers of patriarchy was a major war aim. Stalin thought as much, sending the Red Army onwards to victory, raping the women of Eastern Europe in their millions.
And so it continued, in each and every conflict in that most militarized of centuries, the twentieth century, the century of rape.
Wars in Africa produced the same result, as nations were created and the resources of the peasants were expropriated, their societies crushed.
In Asia, in Bangladesh, the Pakistani Army systematically raped the rebel women.
Indeed, in each and every war, wherever there is a soldier there is patriarchy, and wherever there is patriarchy there is hatred and fear of women, its object is the degradation of women and its weapon is rape.