RH submission to ICASA: Re: Top TV/Cosatu Porn Channels Application

RH submission to ICASA: Re: Top TV/Cosatu Porn Channels Application



Andrea Muhrrteyn | Radical Honoursty | 18 March 2013

TO: The Independent Communications Authority of South Africa | Owners of Top TV: On Digital Media: B Jonker / Peter Meintjies. | Owners of On Digital Media: Kopano Ke Matla Invest. Co. (Pty) Ltd. | Owners of Kopano Ke Matla: COSATU: Congress of SA Trade Unions. | CC: Pastor Errol Naidoo: Family Policy Institute. | Dr. Albu van Eeden: Doctors for Life International. | Dr. Robert Jensen & Dr Gail Dines | CEO: Ms Keketso Maema: Commission for Gender Equality: Subject: RH submission to ICASA: Re: TopTV/COSATU Porn TV Channels Application (PDF)

RE: Radical Honoursty Culture and Yshmael Guerrylla Law Party Submission: Re: TopTV’s (owned by COSATU) application to broadcast three new porn channels.

The Radical Honoursty culture is a gender balanced culture which practices Æquilibriæx jurisprudence and authentic Multiculturalism; as opposed to all of South Africa’s other cultures, which are patriarchal, and practice AnthroCorpocentric Jurisprudence and fake Multiculturalism : the Egotist Consumptionism Ideology of Multinational Capitalism. The Yshmael Guerrylla law Party is an unregistered Æx party, currently drawing up its Constitution and related documents for registration.

The Radical Honoursty Culture submission covers the following issues/arguments:

• Radical Honoursty Culture and Yshmael Guerrylla Law Party values.

• Request TopTV/Cosatu to fund an investigation by the Gender Commission, to interview all South African individuals found guilty of rape and particularly gang-rape to determine whether they were exposed to pornography and whether their exposure to pornography had any psychological effect – change of personal, cultural or gender identity, or change of perception as to their entitlement to sex from women, or change to their perception of women’s sexuality – in motivating their criminal acts.

• Request that the Commission Officially request Pornography experts Dr. Robert Jensen and Dr. Gail Dines, to make submissions to ICASA, to provide the Commission with detailed research about the consequences and effects of pornography on gender and race relations in cultures based upon AnthroCorpocentric jurisprudence .

• Argument Examples detailing AnthroCorpocentric Jurisprudence’s total failure of credibility, as a system of Jurisprudence, in terms of its (a) failure to provide legal personhood to nature and animal and plant species; (b) disregard for the objective and scientific truth of the laws of nature/ecology, and (c) disregard for the laws of human nature, when it contradicts the objectives of the holders of subjective AnthroCorpocentric Truth.

• How and Why according to Æquilibriæx jurisprudence, ICASA not only has the legal constitutional right, but also the Æquilibriæx duty to refuse Top TV, permission to broadcast three subscription porn channels.

RH submission to ICASA: Re: Top TV/Cosatu Porn Channels Application



Andrea Muhrrteyn | Radical Honoursty | 18 March 2013

Dear ICASA Commissioners,

Radical Honoursty Culture and Yshmael Guerrylla Law Party Submission: Re: TopTV’s application to broadcast three new porn channels.

The Radical Honoursty culture is a gender balanced culture which practices Æquilibriæx jurisprudence and authentic Multiculturalism; as opposed to all of South Africa’s other cultures, which are patriarchal, and practice AnthroCorpocentric Jurisprudence and fake Multiculturalism: the Egotist Consumptionism Ideology of Multinational Capitalism. The Yshmael Guerrylla law Party is an unregistered Æx party, currently drawing up its Constitution and related documents for registration.

According to IOL article: TopTV has right to show porn - advocate:

Arguing for TopTV at public hearings at Icasa's office in Sandton on Thursday, advocate Steven Budlender said Icasa did not have the legal right to refuse the station permission to broadcast three subscription porn channels from abroad, Beeld reported.

"It does not matter what I, the Icasa council, any political party or any other organisation think about pornography on TopTV.

"Icasa, by law, does not have the power to refuse TopTV a licence,... in fact, it will actually be unconstitutional if consent is withheld."

This may or may not be true. It is difficult to tell what is ‘true’ and what is ‘not true’, what is ‘constitutional’ and what is ‘unconstitutional’ in any culture that relies on AnthroCorpocentric Jurisprudence to regulate (a) the relations between humans, nature and other animals species (in AnthroCorpocentric Jurisprudence practice almost at the exclusive benefit of Anthropocentric males and corporations), and (b) the relations between humans amongst themselves, gender, culture, religion and ideological conflicts (again in AnthroCorpocentric Jurisprudence practice almost exclusively for the benefit of Anthropocentric males and corporations).

Æquilibriæx Jurisprudence is Equal & balanced -- Eco/Anthropocentric – law, where Equilibriæx Jurisprudence adheres to the laws of nature / ecology, which manifests as all species living in carry capacity harmony with another; and Aquilibriæx Jurisprudence adheres to laws of human nature, which manifests as fully informed consent harmony between all human members and groups of society. Æquilibriæx Jurisprudence is equal and balanced Anthropocentric and Ecocentric Jurisprudence.

Æquilibriæx Jurisprudence asserts that AnthroCorpocentric Jurisprudence lacks credibility as a system of Jurisprudence, in terms of its (a) failure to provide legal personhood and rights to nature and animal and plant species; (b) disregard for the objective and scientific carrying capacity truth of the laws of nature/ecology, and (c) disregard for the laws of human nature, when they contradict the objectives of the holders of subjective AnthroCorpocentric Truth.

Understandably individuals who have grown up in, been educated or brainwashed in obedience to, and believe the AnthroCorpocentric media’s constant bombardment of AnthroCorpocentric Bullshit the Public Relations propaganda, or worse whose professions rely on the deception and frauds committed by AnthroCorpocentric Jurisprudence, shall find these claims difficult to digest.

Irrespective, the Radical Honoursty Culture submission shall cover the following topics:

• Radical Honoursty Culture and Yshmael Guerrylla Law Party values.

• Request TopTV/Cosatu to fund an investigation by the Gender Commission, to interview all South African individuals found guilty of rape and particularly gang-rape to determine whether they were exposed to pornography and whether their exposure to pornography had any psychological effect – change of personal, cultural or gender identity, or change of perception as to their entitlement to sex from women, or change to their perception of women’s sexuality – in motivating their criminal acts.

• Request that the Commission Officially request Pornography experts Dr. Robert Jensen and Dr. Gail Dines, to make submissions to ICASA, to provide the Commission with detailed research about the consequences and effects of pornography on gender and race relations in cultures based upon AnthroCorpocentric jurisprudence .

• Argument Examples detailing AnthroCorpocentric Jurisprudence’s total failure of credibility, as a system of Jurisprudence, in terms of its (a) failure to provide legal personhood to nature and animal and plant species; (b) disregard for the objective and scientific truth of the laws of nature/ecology, and (c) disregard for the laws of human nature, when it contradicts the objectives of the holders of subjective AnthroCorpocentric Truth.

• How and Why according to Æquilibriæx jurisprudence, ICASA not only has the legal constitutional right, but also the Æquilibriæx duty to refuse Top TV, permission to broadcast three subscription porn channels.

[I] Radical Honoursty Culture and Yshmael Guerrylla Law Party values:

[....]



[II] Request TopTV/Cosatu to fund an investigation by the Gender Commission, to interview all South African individuals found guilty of rape and particularly gang-rape to determine whether they were exposed to pornography and whether their exposure to pornography had any psychological effect – change of personal, cultural or gender identity, or change of perception as to their entitlement to sex from women, or change to their perception of women’s sexuality – in motivating their criminal acts.

[15] Once Commissioners have apprised yourselves of the evidence and information that experts Dr. Robert Jensen and Dr. Gail Dines have to share, I imagine, you would agree that it is important to determine and clarify whether sudden ‘shock doctrine’ access to individuals from culturally gender conservative culture’s altered their personal, psychological, gender or cultural identity towards women and/or women’s sexuality, and played a role in motivating their criminal acts.



[III] Request that the Commission Officially request Pornography experts Dr. Robert Jensen and Dr. Gail Dines, to make submissions to ICASA, to provide the Commission with detailed research about the consequences and effects of pornography on gender and race relations in an AnthroCorpocentric culture.

Dr. Robert Jensen

[16] Dr. Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

[16.1] He is the author of Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity , (video interview, radio interview, text interview, extended text interview on gender and pornography]

[16.2] He was involved in the documentary: The Price of Pleasure: Pornography, Sexuality, and Relationships" distributed by the MEF.

[16.3] He is the author of the following articles gender, sexuality, and pornography:

A. “Rape is all too normal,” Dallas Morning News, January 20, 2013.

B. “A Habit That Can Destroy Lives,” co-authored with Gail Dines, New York Times Room for Debate, November 11, 2012.

C. “‘Should I do it?’ Women struggle with porn-driven sex,” posed on MS Magazine, July 2, 2011.

D. “Pornography undermines our humanity,” interview with True Feminism, August 27, 2010.

E. Review of Gail Dines, Pornland: How Pornography Has Hijacked Our Sexuality, Voice Male, Summer 2010, pp. 27-29.

F. “Critiquing masculinity at the Corps,” posted on Countercurrents and Media With Conscience, June 17, 2010.

G. “Conflicting visions of romantic love,” (review of A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-First Century), Philadelphia Inquirer, July 19, 2009.

H. "Feminism's challenge: Articulating alternatives to unsustainable hierarchies," posted on Common Dreams, March 11, 2009.

I. “The cruel boredom of pornography," posted on Last Exit Magazine, September 24, 2008.

J. “Still riding the Second Wave: Reflections on feminist struggles,” posted on ZNet, September 19, 2008.

K. “Universal patterns within cultural diversity: Patriarchy makes men crazy and stupid,” posted on Monthly Review Zine, July 8, 2008.

L. “Diversity and the incoherence of journalism’s ideology,” Outlook (magazine of the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association), Summer 2008, p. 9.

M. “Masculine, feminine or human?” posted on SleptOn.com, June 2, 2008.

N. “The anti-feminist politics behind the pornography that ‘empowers’ women,” co-authored with Gail Dines, posted on ZNet and Atlantic Free Press, February 2, 2008.

O. "Does porn make the man?" posted on Alternet, November 17, 2007. Also distributed as a ZNet Commentary.

P. "The quagmire of masculinity," posted on Counterpunch, October 22, 2007.

Q. "Pornographic positions," posted on Atlantic Free Press, October 22, 2007.

R. ZNet book interivew--Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity, posted on ZNet, September 28, 2007.

S. "Pornography and the end of masculinity," with introduction by Don Hazen, posted on Alternet, September 22, 2007.

T. “Abusive images belittle women, men and sex,” Irish Examiner ( Dublin), June 7, 2007, p. 10.

U. "Men and pornography: Real men, real choices," Voice Male magazine, Spring 2007, pp. 8-10, 20, 24.

V. "Media reform should include critique of sexual-exploitation media," posted on Alternet, February 10, 2007. Also distributed as ZNet Commentary.

W. Pornographic query: Is a DP inherently sexist? posted on Dissident Voice, November 14, 2006.

X. "The consequences of the death of empathy," posted on Common Dreams and Counterpunch, October 30, 2006. Also distributed as ZNet Commentary.

Y. “Men being men is a bad deal: Guys should evolve beyond masculinity,” San Francisco Chronicle, October 8, 2006, p. F-3. Also appeared as "The high cost of manliness," posted on Alternet, September 8, 2006.

Z. "One nation, in the closet," Anniston Star (AL), April 30, 2006, p. E-4. Also posted on Counterpunch and ZNet.

AA. "So, what do you give our society's most influential pimp?" co-authored with Gail Dines, Houston Chronicle, April 9, 2006.

BB. “The pursuit of manliness harms men -- and women as well,” co-authored with Gail Dines, Philadelphia Inquirer, April 2, 2006.

CC. "Noxxxious fumes: As porn turns more mainstream, the images it produces are more degrading," Hindustan Times (India), February 9, 2006. Also posted on OpEdNews.com.

DD. "Pornography is a left issue," posted on ZNet, December 6, 2005.

EE. "This strong feminist voice was hardly a man-hater," Houston Chronicle, April 19, 2005, p. B-9.

FF. "Just a prude? Feminism, pornography and men's choices," April 5, 2005. An edited version ran as "Empathy and choices: Rethinking the debate on pornography," American Sexuality magazine, Vol. 3, No. 4, August 2005.

GG. "Just a john? Pornography and men's choices," posted on Left Hook and xy, March 9, 2005.

HH. "Sex, sexual violence, and the sex industry: Some thoughts for boys and men," March 1, 2005.

II. "A cruel edge: The painful truth about today's pornography -- and what men can do about it," MS magazine, Spring 2004, pp. 54-58.

JJ. "Pornography and sexual violence," VAWnet, July 2004.

KK. "You are what you eat: The pervasive porn industry and what it says about you and your desires," Clamor magazine, September/October 2002, pp. 54-59.

LL. "Men's pleasure, women's pain: A dangerous sexual ethic woven into cultural fabric,'" Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star, September 1, 2002, pp. D-1, 3.

MM. "Blow bangs and cluster bombs: The cruelty of men and Americans," feminista , July 2002.

NN. "Resisting masculinity: The importance of feminism to men," ZNet Commentary, February 22, 2002

OO. "Tired of hot sex? Some lessons from radical lesbian feminists on how to approach sexuality at a deeper level," OutSmart Magazine , Houston, February 2001, pp. 80-83.

PP. “Signs of Struggle: Voices from the Anti-Pornography Movement" (review of In Harm's Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings), Jurist/Books-on-Law, July 1998.

Dr. Gail Dines: Stop Porn Culture

[17] Dr. Gail Dines is a professor of sociology and women’s studies at Wheelock College in Boston, an internationally acclaimed speaker and author, and a feminist activist. Her writing and lectures focus on the hypersexualization of the culture and the ways that porn images filter down into mainstream pop culture, including porn’s effect on race relations.

[17.1] Dr. Dines work on media and pornography has appeared in academic journals, magazines such as Time and Newsweek, and newspapers across the country. She is a frequent guest on radio and television and is a recipient of the Myers Center Award for the Study of Human Rights.

[17.2] She is a founding member of Stop Porn Culture – an educational and activist group made up of academics, anti-violence experts, community organizers and anyone who is concerned about the increasing pornification of the culture.

[17.3] She is the author of Pornland: How porn has hijacked our sexuality Boston: Beacon Press. 2010; Gender, Race and Class in Media (co-edited with Jean Humez). 2nd Edition CA: Sage publication. 2002; and Pornography: The Production and Consumption of Inequality (co-authored with Robert Jensen and Ann Russo). New York: Routledge. 1998.

[17.4] Dr. Dines presented a talk in Dec. 2012 at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem: “How Porn Creates the John: Porn, Trafficking and the Social Construction of Masculinity.” She gave another presentation at a London conference in 2012: “From the Personal Is Political to the Personal is Personal: Neo-Liberalism and the Defanging of Feminism.”

[17.5] She is the author of the following articles:

A. You know you have lived here too long when... Counterpunch, Feb. 15, 2013

B. Vagina Gazing at the New York Times. Counterpunch Sept. 21, 2012

C. LA County’s Measure B is a major win for safe sex in adult entertainment The Guardian, Nov. 12, 2012

D. Porn, syphilis, and the politics of the money shot. The Guardian, Aug. 28, 2012

E. Cosmopolitan and the False Promise of an ‘Awesome Life’. The Guardian, Aug. 7, 2012

F. The “Price” of Counter-Hegemonic Pedagogy: The Case of Dr. Jammie Price and The Price of Pleasure. Gail Dines and Dana Bialer. Transformations 23 (1): Spring/Summer 2012

G. Why are Women Devouring Fifty Shades of Grey. Counterpunch, July 27, 2012

H. When a Feminist Gets Bumped for a Pornographer, Counterpunch, July 10th, 2012

I. ‘Having it all’ looks very different for women stuck in low-paid jobs. The Guardian, June 25, 2012

J. Porn is in rude health. The Guardian, June 7, 2012

K. A Feminist Response to Weitzer. Violence Against Women, April 2012. Vol. 18 (4): 512-520

L. The Feminism of Margaret Thatcher. Counterpunch, Feb 24, 2012

M. The Help at Downton Abbey. Counterpunch, Jan 13, 2012

N. Moral panic? No. We are resisting the pornification of women. The Guardian, Dec. 1, 2011

O. DSK and the Meaning of Consent. CounterPunch July 12, 2011

P. Hugh Hefner Falls for Matrimony The Guardian, June 12, 2011

Q. SlutWalk is not sexual liberation The Guardian, May 8, 2011

R. Kate’s Kismet CounterPunch, April 26, 2011

S. Porn: A multibillion-dollar industry that renders all authentic desire plastic The Guardian, Jan. 4, 2011

T. Should We Worry Whether Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality? Uprising Radio, Sept. 11, 2010

U. 3-D Nude Centerfolds? Playboy Tries to Survive in World Filled With Hard-Core Gonzo Porn CounterPunch, May 19, 2010

V. Living in a Porn Culture. New Left Project. Posted April 15, 2010

W. The Ideal Partner? Counterpunch. Posted January 20, 2010

X. From Stepford Wives to Stepford Sluts: How the Media Constructs Femininity. Rain And Thunder. 2009, Issue 44.

Y. Hollywood rape: Why Polanski is getting a free ride. Campaign for America’s Future. Posted October 2, 2009

Z. Porn, Penn and Me. CounterPunch. Posted June 23, 2008.

AA. Prostitution and Male Power. CounterPunch. Posted March 15/16, 2008.

BB. The Anti-Feminist Politics Behind the Pornography that “Empowers” Women (with Robert Jensen). ZNet and Atlantic Free Press. Posted February 2, 2008.

CC. Yale Sex Week. Hartford Courant, February 11, 2008

DD. Feminist Debates on Pornography (with Robert Jensen). In Wolfgang Donsbach, ed., International Encyclopedia of Communication, Vol. 8 ( Oxford, UK and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), pp. 3807-3811. READ HERE

EE. Don Imus and Ron Jeremy. CounterPunch, Posted April 14, 2007.

FF. The White Man’s Burden: Gonzo Pornography and the Construction of Black Masculinity”. Yale Journal of Law and Feminism. Spring, 2006, V. 14

GG. Borat: It’s a Guy Thing!” CounterPunch, Posted November 15, 2006.

HH. So, what do you give our society’s most influential pimp? (with Robert Jensen). Houston Chronicle. April 9, 2006, pp. E-1, 4

II. The pursuit of manliness harms men — and women as well (with Robert Jensen). Philadelphia Inquirer, April 2, 2006.

JJ. So You Think You Know What Porn is: Q&A with Gail Dines. The Mars Society

KK. Invisible in Hollywood: Jewish women. Boston Globe. January 16, 2006.

LL. Pornography Is A Left Issue (with Robert Jensen). Znet. Posted December 6, 2005.

MM. Porn and Race Encyclopedia Entry. Encyclopedia of Race and Racism. New York: Gale (2007).

NN. Remembering Andrea Dworkin. Boston Globe, April 14, 2005.

OO. King Kong and the White Woman: Hustler Magazine and the Demonization of Black Masculinity. Journal of Violence Against Women, 1998, Vol. 4 No 3, (291-307).

[IV] Credibility Failure of AnthroCorpocentric Jurisprudence, in terms of its (a) failure to provide legal personhood to nature and animal and plant species; (b) disregard for the objective and scientific truth of the laws of nature/ecology, and (c) disregard for the laws of human nature, when it contradicts the objectives of the holders of subjective AnthroCorpocentric Truth.

[.........]


[V] How and Why according to Æquilibriæx jurisprudence, ICASA not only has the legal constitutional right, but also the Æquilibriæx duty to refuse Top TV, permission to broadcast three subscription porn channels.

Overview:


The Radical Honoursty culture is not aware of any South African culture which considers pornography to be one of their cultural products; except perhaps for Corporate Foxy Liberal Elites, who no longer strongly associate with the family and community cultural values of their culture, but have adopted what the communist philosopher Slavoj Zizek refers to as the cultural logic of Multinational Capitalism: inauthentic multiculturalism. Where they pretend to ‘care’ about other cultures, by means of two faced political correctness, while totally avoiding an honest discussion about cultural values; because their primary focus is the cooptation of all cultures into the industrial rat race consumptionist culture.

Or as Primitivist John Zerzan argues: the primary function of the liberal left is to exterminate and co-opt indigenous cultures, into becoming alleged ‘developed’ workers and consumers in the industrial rat race for the profit of multinational corporations.

The Radical Honoursty culture submits that ICASA should request the Commission for the Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Cultural, Religious and Linguistic Communities to contact all South Africa’s cultures and determine if there are any cultures, which consider pornography to be a cultural value of their culture.

The Radical Honoursty culture argues that there are many cultures, whose entire identity and cultural cohesiveness relies upon the practice of certain behaviours and products, to the exclusion of other behaviours and products. Put differently the particular behaviour or product, or avoidance of particular behaviours are inseparable from the individual and groups concept of their cultural identity.

For example Peruvian Indian culture’s identity is inseparable from ingestion of, and the wisdom learnt from, Ayahuasca. To deny a Peruvian Indian access to the ingestion of Ayahuasca is to deny him/her, his/her cultural and religious identity. Similarly other cultures identities are based upon their behavioural avoidance of particular products or behaviours, which they consider to be destructive of cultural unity and community relations. Many cultures have identified such products as, among others, pornography, specific plant and chemical substances, etc.

Pornography is a product with powerful psychological addictive and identity changing properties. There are huge psychological, gender and race relations effects to the digestion of this product, by an individual immersed in a cultural milieu with cultural values totally contradictory to the cultural messages being dispensed in pornography.

Metaphorically adding the product of pornography to any culture is similar to following any cooking recipe. Any Anarchist Cookbook will tell you that there is a huge difference between adding Fertilizer to (a) dirt, compost and seeds; or (b) Newspaper, Cotton and Diesel fuel. The fertilizer shall have an entirely different chemical/cultural reaction to dirt, compost and seeds, than it will to newspaper, cotton and diesel fuel.

If it were possible to log onto your computer to a particular website, where you could stick your bong pipe into the USB port, and cocaine or heroine could simply be ‘smoked online’, delivered via fibre optic cable from Colombia or Afghanistan; would local authorities consider that a worthy argument to allow ETV and TopTV to also offer their viewers specific 24 hours channels where viewers can smoke or digest their preferred drugs, via television fiber optic cables?

The psychological effects of pornography, have massive cultural and identity destructive effects on people from cultures whose gender and sexuality values do not include pornography as a cultural identity value. In culturally, sexual and gender conservative agrarian Ghanian culture, young men who saw pornography experienced total gender and sexual identity shock; they admit they could not sleep, their perceptions of women were changed into viewing women as sluts and whores who wanted to be, and enjoyed being, raped and gang-raped; they sent their younger brothers out to go and find a woman to rape and gang-rape.

It is far easier to culturally colonize and destroy a cultural, sexual and gender conservative agrarian self sufficient indigenous culture, by dropping pornography Mindfuck bombs into the culture, to explode their cultural gender conservative identities, and contribute to a destruction of cultural conservative values within the families and community. These pornography culturally colonized mindfucked men will no longer fight back against the destruction of their families, communities and the rape of their land, culture and identities, by multinational corporations.

Conversely, drop a few TNT bombs on such villages, or start a mine that destroys their ecological habitat and clean water, and the men in those villages, whose identities have not bee mindfucked colonized by pornography, will cooperate and become guerrilla’s and fight back against their cultural and physical colonization.

Pornography is a Psychological Warfare product of Multinational Corporations cultural colonization of culturally conservative cultures and individuals identities, to foster gender division and destruction of families, to co-opt cultures identity shift to becoming consumers for the profits of the Corpotocracy elite.

As Lt. Col. Ralph Peters writes in Constant Conflict, the ultimate struggle is cultural.

[..] Contemporary American culture is the most powerful in history, and the most destructive of competitor cultures.

[..] We are Karl Marx's dream, and his nightmare. Secular and religious revolutionaries in our century have made the identical mistake, imagining that the workers of the world or the faithful just can't wait to go home at night to study Marx or the Koran. Well, Joe Sixpack, Ivan Tipichni, and Ali Quat would rather "Baywatch." America has figured it out [..] our cultural power will hinder even those cultures we do not undermine.

[..] Our cultural empire has the addicted--men and women everywhere--clamoring for more. And they pay for the privilege of their disillusionment. [..]Our military power is culturally based. [..] Hollywood is "preparing the battlefield," and burgers precede bullets. The flag follows trade. .. [..] .. Our unconscious alliance of culture with killing power is a combat multiplier no government, including our own, could design or afford. We are magic. And we're going to keep it that way.

[..] The action films of a Stallone or Schwarzenegger or Chuck Norris rely on visual narratives that do not require dialog for a basic understanding. They deal at the level of universal myth, of pre-text, celebrating the most fundamental impulses (although we have yet to produce a film as violent and cruel as the Iliad). They feature a hero, a villain, a woman to be defended or won—and violence and sex. Complain until doomsday; it sells. The enduring popularity abroad of the shopworn Rambo series tells us far more about humanity than does a library full of scholarly analysis.

When we speak of a global information revolution, the effect of video images is more immediate and intense than that of computers. Image trumps text in the mass psyche, and computers remain a textual outgrowth, demanding high-order skills: computers demarcate the domain of the privileged. We use technology to expand our wealth, power, and opportunities. The rest get high on pop culture. If religion is the opium of the people, video is their crack cocaine. When we and they collide, they shock us with violence, but, statistically, we win.

[..] Violent conflict will dominate the headlines, but cultural and economic struggles will be steadier and ultimately more decisive. The de facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing.

Cultural Imperialism, Cultural Identity and the Eurocentric ideology of Ecological Destruction and Compulsive Development:

[149] In Cultural Imperialism and Cultural Identity, Sandbacka writes

Cultural imperialism is the economic, technological and cultural hegemony of the industrialized nations, which determines the direction of both economic and social progress, defines cultural values, and standardizes the civilization and cultural environment throughout the world.

The whole world is becoming a cultural common market area in which the same kind of technical product development, the same kind of knowledge, fashion, music and literature, the same kind of metropolitan mass culture is manufactured, bought and sold.

Western ideologies, political beliefs, western science, western laws and social institutions, western moral concepts, sexual symbols and ideals of beauty, western working methods and leisure activities, western foods, western pop idols and the western concept of human existence have become objectives, examples and norms everywhere in the world.

But there are too many dispossessed people who have amassed a few western material possessions but no longer have any birthplace, home or final resting-place.

[150] In What is Cultural Imperialism?, Matti Sarmela, Former Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Helsinki from 1973 to 2000, and a founder and the first president of the Finnish Anthropological Society, describes the inner psychological and corporate workings of cultural imperialism.

He draws an ideological profile of the cognitive and ideological factors that “go some way towards explaining the hegemony of western culture and the process that is leading to the establishment of a common world culture” of compulsive development, which has destroyed the ecological equilibrium of ethnic communities; as all cultures are blindly encouraged to blindly adopt their the dogma of compulsive development, as an alleged ‘superior cultural system’. He concludes that it is time for sociologists and cultural anthropologists to examine their roles in this dogma of ‘compulsive development’: “Should they merely record the changes that take place, perhaps even establish new disciplines such as urban anthropology or mass anthropology? Should they concentrate on collecting into museums what can still be salvaged, setting up memorials to dead cultures? Are there no longer any cultures that are not western or westernizing?”

1. The ideological profile of cultural imperialism

Industrial development is customarily considered to be the path towards a better future for the whole of mankind, material squalor, hunger, sickness and the rawness of nature becoming, in the process, things of the past. Development on a global scale and colossal industrial production since the war have been accompanied by a blind faith in scientific and technical progress and in the ability that western social planning, environmental planning, educational planning, family planning and leisure planning will before long solve all the problems confronting man.

[..]

1) The ideology of the technological imperialists. To western man, culture is the antithesis of nature; it implies the subjugation of nature in order to build a technological, man-made world, in order to establish civilization, the acme of which is the metropolis. The ideology of the subjugation of nature has reached its climax in the conquest of outer space, but it has also supplied the moral justification for the white man's voyages of discovery, for colonialism, the slave trade, the unscrupulous exploitation of natural resources and the overseas aid plans of today: the purpose of these being to yoke all nations to the world trade network of the industrialized countries.

2) The maximization of culture; the ideology of total efficiency. The ideal of the competitive, mass-producing society is to achieve total efficiency. It strives to maximize production, organizational efficiency and human performance in science, art and sport.

3) The cult of modernism; the ideology of novelty. Western culture does not set much store by the unchanging and traditional: it accords its highest accolade to the unconventional and the revolutionary. Western civilization has established the cult of the genius for those who are instruments of change. The worship of modernization and the faith in technological progress culminated in the radicalism of the sixties, the heyday of the student, when it was believed a new society could be created by means of surveys. In this scientific utopia the non-democracy dictated by traditions such as the institution of marriage and sexual norms would no longer exist. Instead unremitting progress, liberation and change would lead eventually to an optimal ethical or ideological democracy. But has this development merely led to the dictatorship of the men of change, of the planners?

4) The ideology of productivity. Both on the group and individual level cultural choices and decisions are made in the first instance on the basis of materialist economic planning, of cost accounting, of a 'scientific' assessment of the relations between input and output. Industrial culture is in fact being transformed into an organization geared exclusively to the planning of productivity, a statistical curve, index and trend mechanism, from which human, historical and traditional elements must be eliminated as disruptive factors.

5) International standards; the ideology of the supranational. In industrial production, science, art and every other human activity, western culture recognizes no higher goal than internationalism: the standards of the metropolis hold sway. The change in the structure of western societies has taken the form of adaptation to market economy, to international trade; the response of the ecosystem to international standards. The techno-structures are the most rigidly standardized of all, part of a sterile, professional mass culture employing standardized values, to reach standardized ‘scientific’ and ‘artistic’ decisions, a culture in which personal and individual solutions are more illusory than real. Social planning and architecture that come up to the professional international mark have created standardized modern environments, the fruit of the very latest research into metropolitan design, in which life is played out with the same cultural props, the same basic services.

6) The mechanistic system of knowledge and causal relations; the ideology of technical solutions. The functional basis of western society is a classification of the natural world into a cognitive system that only recognizes mechanical, factorial and technical causal connections and solutions. The most important logical model for scientific thought throughout the sixties was factor analysis. The material and human waste problems resulting from the production process are eliminated by means of special mechanisms; a technological waste process grows up side by side with the production process – sewage plants, asylums, approved schools, community homes and police stations. New sicknesses are cured by new medicines, the debilitating effects of mass production and the conveyor belt are solved by the invention of ergonomics. The establishment of counter-technologies, counter-organizations and counter-cultures corrects technological blunders – thus development becomes synonymous with the fragmentation of society into ever smaller and weirder compartments.

7) Group centricity; the ideology of organization. Western society is one-sidedly based on marching masses, which become socialized into one all-powerful cybernetic machine; it is based on group centricity and faith in organization. The mechanistic or atomistic structure of society has led to the formation of increasingly specialized and efficient organizations but also to an intensifying struggle between them for material development, power and growth. Their policy of growth demands that the individual become totally dependent on them so as to strengthen mass identity and solidarity. The manipulation of these masses requires ever more authoritarian personality cults, the dogmatization of ideals, a strict demarcation of interest-areas and an intensified information war. In the western world power has become concentrated in the hands of organizations, which use discontent, gain, progress and social change as instruments of unscrupulous manipulation.

8) The opinion industry; the ideology of the control of knowledge. Scientific and technical progress has also maximalized knowledge. On the other hand it has made communications, the mass media, manipulation, information shocks, industrial opinion-moulding, propaganda and advertising its most important instruments of power and influence. Western society permits any form of manipulation, even if it is systematically one-sided, as long as its aims are economically useful, commercially successful or otherwise progressive. Western man has long accepted the necessity of organizational lies.

2. Super-culture and local culture

[..] The industrialized west has adopted a common technological culture that satisfies international standards and that has made possible the realization of the imperialists' centuries-old dream of yoking the entire world's resources with a systematic global production process. This megalomania has given birth to the super-culture, which prides itself on building the largest reservoir in the world, the largest atomic power station and the longest conveyor-belt. Western culture is a monument to its own planners, executive directors, party leaders and developmentalists, a culture evaluated statistically in terms of size, productivity, and material objects, development trends and consumer indices. In this culture the man in the street has increasingly less value collectively or culturally, as a worker or as a consumer. The high standard of living of western society has delivered nations from the tyrannies of nature and submitted them to the tyrannies of man. Primitive societies had nothing of value to offer in the creation of this new society that worshipped development – in the spectrum of human ways of life, the two stand irreconcilably at opposite poles.

So-called primitive cultures are essentially small community-cultures that gain their ethnic characteristics through adaptation to a specific environment. The individual's relationship with his community is the prime relationship in non-technological communities. The individual has his own permanent place in his community and he can comprehend this ethno-social organism as an entity. Many small ethnic communities have learnt to live in accord with nature rather than at the mercy of nature and thus aim at a state of permanent equilibrium. Their cognitive world picture, their intra-cultural system of knowledge, is not geared to unscrupulous and egocentric exploitation or to a greed for growth but to their life as a community. Increased productivity and growth are not seen as ends in themselves; production is only expanded enough to guarantee the traditional subsistence of future generations. Research has demonstrated that small ethnic communities are cultures totally regulated by tradition and governed by the traditional world order, the folk culture.

[..]

3. The death of ethnic culture

In industrialized countries the functioning of the production process necessitates professional specialization. Society is compartmentalized into thousands of sub-cultures; civil servants, technicians, salesmen and workers each have their own 'culture' made up of professional or interest groups that are supra-nationally and non-locally orientated, cogs in the machinery of development, progress and power, that use professional jargon as a means of manipulating professional discontent. In differentiated societies the most varied social and religious groups and group-cultures can be found but real regional or folk culture is dead.

To be more precise, folk culture is outlawed, for the scientific-technical society has turned culture itself into an organization. Culture has become the exclusive responsibility of vocationally trained specialists, cultural architects, whose job specifications and qualifications are defined by law, and who are all members of unions. Folk culture can only emerge within the limits of the money specifically allocated to it from the public purse and under the direction of professional cultural leaders. The supranational, compartmentalized eco-system has no room for a spontaneous, do-it-yourself folk or regional culture. The industrialized countries can show imposing and unprecedented achievements in science, art and sport, in the vast metropolitan sets and technical props of professional culture. But what culture has the industrial nomad or the urban lemming? Can restaurants, nightclubs, the entertainment world be called culture? Does the weekly visit to the supermarket constitute a cultural pilgrimage?

4. The fragmentation of cultural identity

Cultural identity is the term commonly employed to describe internalized cultural consciousness, identification with one's own culture. In anthropology, cultural identity is most often defined as identification with an ethnic group and its culture, the communal spirit. With the disintegration of small communities, it has become increasingly difficult to define ethnic identity. Soviet scientists have coined the term 'ethno-social organism' to describe the process of economic, social and cultural change which takes place in particular historical circumstances within an ethnic community having a common 'ethno-genesis' i.e. history. This historically fatalistic concept is coolly scientific – as is the description of an ethnic community as an ecosystem. It takes no account of the way in which human beings experience their own culture and the changes that take place in it, nor questions the necessity or value from the human point of view of change perpetrated in the name of development and progress.

Cultural identity is perhaps generally understood to mean the concept of reality held by a member of a particular culture, the way in which he comprehends and motivates his own socio-cultural existence. A vital part of cultural identification is therefore the community's concept of the purpose or meaning of life around which the individual organizes his own existence. In this respect global cultural change has meant the disappearance of any generally held concept of the meaning of life and the emergence of numerous substitutes. The sense of regional identity has been submerged in that of national identity, which was perhaps latent anyway. More significantly, the individual has come to identify himself with the culture represented by groups sharing the same profession, interests or ideals.

The pivotal point of cultural existence for a member of an urban culture offering multifarious possibilities and possessing multifarious values is a material or ideological objective: a house or property of some other sort, a professional career, a position of influence in a political or religious group or in some other organization. A member of industrialized society may identify himself with his objective, provided that this seems sufficiently worthwhile in the long-term and allows him to make full use of his potentialities. But for a far greater number, who are just factory fodder, the meaning of life lies in identification with the consumer society.

Changes of identity and the essential content of different identities could perhaps be tabulated as follows:

Regional identity (spatial/ethnic identity) includes the individual's personally lived-out experience of culture in the environment in which he lives: the social intercourse that links an individual to his community in his capacity as a member of society. Regional identity also includes a fundamental sense of continuity and permanence, social awareness and the idea of the community as the most important framework of existence. The individual sees his own immediate circle as part of the regional community and his own existence as part of a social entity, which manifests itself in communal symbols, traditions and systems of communication.

Group identity means nowadays identification with a meta-group for which the individual has no physical significance. In the differentiated society groups are little more than organizations whose members are united by common professional, political or ideological interests, the struggle between interest groups or the fear of losing rights. On the other hand social alienation and compartmentalization has led to a search for a real feeling of belonging through ideological and religious group fervour, occult, mystical and magical movements, transcendentalist or para-psychological cults, social-psychological group therapy itself and, to a certain extent, communes and other regressive back-to-nature movements. These movements represent a counter-culture and have no functional status in industrialized society.

Goal identity is identification with the illusions of the creative, development-minded and forward-looking cultural architects for whom work and achievement are the purpose of Life. Or equally well compensatory alienation and escape from the realities of monolithic culture.

Mass identity is identification with the industrial mass production society as a consumer of the technological products of a specialized metropolitan culture. The meaning of life is to be found in egocentric, new experiences, in taking advantage of all the technically maximal entertainments and stimuli offered by the professionals: restaurants, sport, television, or so-called creative hobbies and art-forms, or the new technological challenges – parachuting, slalom and motor racing. Existential experiences provided by specialized departments of the welfare state are the be-all and end-all of human existence.


5. The imperialism of the production process

Economic development today is dominated by supranational, world trade organizations, common market federations between states, and supranational or multinational giant enterprises. In the market economy countries the development of monopolies, mergers and the emergence of mammoth corporations is a fact; in the language of the politics of commerce it is called integration or the international division of labour. The cultural and ecological changes that have taken place as a result of adaptation to world trade in every country are self-evident:

1) The regional concentration of production, the emergence of mammoth industrial areas.
2) The establishment of a metropolis-periphery relationship between central and subsidiary industrial areas with all its economic, social and cultural consequences (governmental and cultural centralization).
3) Increasing specialization in production demanded by the international division of labour.
4) Adaptation of the structure of production plants and sales organizations to supranational marketing.
5) Product development and production planning determined by international standards, standardization of cultural products.
6) Policy of a centralized labour force. The individual seeking employment becomes the new nomad of the industrial society.
7) Death of small ethnic communities.

The nations of the world have been made to run on terms laid down by industrial, urban employment and world trade, they have been concentrated around standardized services, packed into the endless rows of identical suburban and slum-land boxes. Modern man is himself a mass product, the cheapest, most insignificant and dispensable structural unit of a worldwide production process. The continual intensification of technological growth is a prerequisite of the functioning of political organizations; the political ideologies of the world compete amongst themselves to bring about scientific and technical development – on terms laid down by international trade. The international production process has given birth to the mechanism of political, obligatory development. The fate of the natural environment and of plant and animal species threatened by the ever-expanding global production process has become a subject of universal concern. Ethnic cultures have come into being as a consequence of their isolation and by a process of economic and ecological adaptation to their regional environments; they are mutations just like the Galapagos sparrows. But the market economy and the production process do not only trample underfoot aboriginal cultures: every single small regional community and traditional ethnic culture is threatened by eco-catastrophe.

6. The imperialism of marketing mechanisms

The continued development of the industrialized countries is dependent on marketing their culture in total. The further production moves from the satisfaction of basic needs, the more important become sales organizations, the creation of consumer demand and the regulation of consumption. Cultural experts have paid too little attention to the fact that the most efficiently organized thing in the world is diffusion, and that it is the marketing organizations – direct and indirect advertising, newspapers and magazines, the entire worldwide awareness industry – that create the framework of meaning in the modern folk culture. Folk culture is merely the response of the people to external, supranational, commercial and political influence and regulation, a more or less uniform manifestation of mass identity, in which national, ethnic and regional differences are primarily reflected in terms of consumer potential, the unequal distribution of economic resources over the world.

In the market economy culture everything that is produced must be sold, the tools of culture, science, art, even man himself. The cultural eco-system of the mass production society is only kept going by marketing which is more important than the tools of production, surplus and capital. The marketing mechanisms are approaching scientific and economic perfection: marketing has not for a long time meant the advertising and distribution of individual products but integrated marketing in which the demands of marketing influence the earliest stages of planning and production down to the smallest detail. In a world becoming economically unified the mechanisms of marketing are in their turn becoming global:

1. Supranational marketing creates common illusions throughout the world, the cultural values of the urban consumer

2. Marketing is the sale of the total technological way of life. It would be cynical to deny that much else of the western way of life is not introduced into other cultures along with western technology. One cannot buy a transistor without also buying western pop music, a television without advertising breaks, gangster films and violence, a glossy magazine without pornography. No part of western culture can be bought as an isolated product, one machine requires another and thus one is launched on the slippery slope of western consumption.

In non-technological cultures the mechanization of one phase of production assumes the mechanization of the other phases and, in order to function efficiently, every machine requires all the rest of the related western technology. And when agricultural production is automated then transport, storage and further processing must also be automated. In the tough world of international technology, formal speeches about gentle development from a national base and individual choices are more often than not empty rhetoric.

The marketing of western cultural development has created supranational illusions of the metropolitan living-style: the modern furnishings of the white European, his de luxe kitchens, night clubs, yachts and sports cars. During the last decades whole armies of writers and pen-pushers have sold a fairy-tale urban world, have swooned in ecstasies of self-expression describing the narrow-mindedness of small communities, the tangled web of social relationships, social controls, the absence of real stimulus. Man has been made to believe that in his little urban box he can spend a more remarkable life than anywhere else or ever before. There he can liberate himself entirely from social relationships and social controls and devote his time exclusively to himself and his own consumption.

7. The imperialism of the social order

To the expert in international politics the world might seem to be an arena of national interests and cultural contradictions. Yet in every state behind the political violence, cruelty, terror and the fight for justice a centralized social order is being created which in terms of its structure and governmental machinery more and more conforms to world-wide governmental models. In every country of the world centralized, technically efficient, economic and political organizations are being created, western bureaucracies and social hierarchies which bury beneath them the communal order (the result of adaptation to local circumstances) and standardize the socio-cultural structures within each state.

In the construction of this state machinery, regional ethnic cultures (tribalism) are seen as a threat to national unity and to patriotism. In many countries the creation of a uniform governmental social order and a state culture is political expediency, the unadorned construction of a mechanism of power. This is sometimes realized in the name of civilization and social development, sometimes in the name of a future of equality for the various racial groups.

All too often the western machinery of manipulation called political democracy is employed in the creation of a uniform, supra-national, technocratic culture, even as a tool of the utilitarian politics of supranational economic organizations and interests. In developmental phraseology ethnic cultures are synonymous with primitiveness, witchcraft, feudalism and despotism: these labels of a Eurocentric cultural and social science are surely infinitely more suited to describe the governmental and political reality of the western countries than non-technological ethnic cultures. Political bureaucracy has established the concept that the small ethnic communities of the Third World exemplify non-democracy whereas the organized, western political mechanism of power exemplifies democracy.

The centralized state machinery is more and more energetically removing the possibilities of influence from the local community, from the level at which the individual, the man in the street, lives. In many countries internal colonialism prevails. In many developing countries the palatial parliament and administrative buildings – monuments to western architecture – are the tombstones of the country's true ethnic culture. In many countries the small community world has been transformed into a benevolent dictatorship of smiling party representatives and popular development leaders.

8. The imperialism of the transmission of culture

In the civilized modern state enculturation, the transmission of culture to new generations has become increasingly institutionalized: it has become the responsibility of official organizations, which conform to supranational, metropolitan standards. The cultural heritage of every race comes more and more under the control of 1) The western educational system and 2) The supremacy of western communication. A standardized western epistemological superstructure standardizes the cognitive, ethical, social and historical world picture of every race. The technological superpowers and the communications controlled by the west, not forgetting audio-visual mass communication and the pop culture, are instituting a cultural imperialism that is rapidly supplanting ecologically and socially localized knowledge with globally standardized knowledge.

In every country, regardless of its ideology, the western educational system is pursuing didactic goals that are increasingly standardized. The developing countries are following suit in the creation by professionals of educational communities that are all organized along similar lines and are alike in what they teach. For the technological culture of the west cannot be bought without the white European's ways of thinking, cultural values and ideology of mechanistic knowledge. Today western super-culture is being transmitted to more and more of the world's schoolchildren.

The technological and political super-culture renders utterly devoid of meaning the ethno-science and intra-cultural systems of local communities, the fundamentals of social and existential order, the explanations of life here and in the hereafter, the whole communicative, symbolic and empirical system of causal relations on which traditional culture is based. In their place the super-culture supplies the western mechanisms of socialization, the humiliating and authoritarian educational system that instils organized behaviour and competition as also the aggressiveness, the unrelenting fight for status symbols, for power and the instruments of power of the white man.

In many Third World countries the educational system is as inheritance from colonial times and tuition, at any rate at university level, takes place in the language of the former colonial power. Alternatively the responsibility for curriculum planning may lie with a small 'upper class' that has itself received a western education.

The use of tribal languages is frowned upon by nation-states bent on centralization and the consolidation of power nor are these languages considered suitable for the transmission of the technological knowledge of the white man. The educational technocrats seem more interested in method than content, the aim being to create the most efficient methods for transmitting western knowledge to new generations and for establishing a uniform global educational system.

9. The imperialism of the assessment of cultures

The super-culture has its own superior machinery for the assessment of cultures. Just as individuals are assessed in terms of intelligence quotients and capability scales, the nations of the world are also assessed in terms of technocratic units of measurement. Every aspect of a culture has its own quantitative unit of measurement: 1) Those of development: gross national product, volume of exports, industry index. 2) Those of 'happiness' i.e. the standard of living: how many material possessions each person/household has. 3). Those of 'unhappiness': starvation, sickness, mortality. These cultural statistics have become indispensable to western society as they provide the scientific basis for social and economic planning.

Today their compilation is the responsibility of the World Bank. Although these statistics are accepted as gospel and find their way from encyclopaedias to school textbooks and the pages of the weeklies, the basis on which they are compiled is not known and their veracity is un-certifiable. The Eurocentric writing of history is paralleled by the imperialism of western statistics.

In the assessment of cultures a simplistic scale is employed which merely measures the extent of technological development. On this basis small, self-supporting communities find themselves at zero on the scale for they can produce no export figures, no indices of urbanization – how in fact the gross national product is calculated at all in such communities is one of the mysteries of western science. What these comparative statistics fail to take into account is the other side of the coin: the increasing class distinctions, crime, violence, the use of narcotics, the sharp upward turn of the problems of social waste, which are an integral part of super-development even in the Third World.

Western cultural statistics arrange the nations of the world in an order of precedence that encourages the race for western development and the creation of a material culture on western lines. By means of statistics economic development is controlled over the heads of national leaders, new needs are created for entire nations, compulsive development is justified. The statistics are complemented by the supranational bureaucracy even by the United Nations' numerous agencies, which establish the imperialism of starvation. The starving have their uses.

Starvation statistics demonstrate the necessity of the supranational developmental bureaucracy and all the great and small development directors that take it upon themselves to plan a new global society. They demonstrate the necessity of mass communications to supply information shocks. In the treatment by the western media on the problems of the developing countries, one can see the creation of a total lie, for economic organizations have been seen in the role of charities, and expansionist politics, economic re-colonization and the selling of western technocracy have been seen as missionary work euphemistically called development co-operation or development aid. It should be more widely known that development aid in its present form is only the real-politics of the industrialized countries, whose aim is to guarantee new potential markets for intensified production. There have always been people in the West who have justified their right to make crusades to other cultures and in the Eurocentric history of the west the subjugation of peoples has only too often been seen as a deed of heroism.

Gross national product per capita is one of measures to order the nations, cultures and life-styles of the world in order of precedence as defined by the white man. Another equally common method is to list nations according to how small a proportion of their population works on the land or how large a proportion lives in towns. A small self-sufficient agricultural village cannot make a significant enough contribution to world trade to figure in capitalist indices. What sort of civilization and development is it that moves the greatest proportion of its population into city slums in order to produce the cheapest luxury goods, labour force, services, criminality and starvation? Is it because in cities human beings provide their leaders with development statistics? Why is it that in the statistical comparison of cultures, no mention is made of those other figures that describe the urban consumer culture, the statistics of crime, violence and narcotics? Why are only trade volumes measured? Why not the alienation and rootlessness of the slum dweller or the real human consequences of mechanical conveyor-belt work?

10. Compulsive development

During the past decades a mechanism for compulsive development has been generated by the centralized and specialized organizational structure of society. The mechanism of development is no longer controllable by individuals and the process of standardization is no longer directed by one particular class or interest group but by the organization. It is above all the working-class that has seen western development as its hope for the future. But as organizations grow, the mechanism of compulsive development grows up with them as do the mechanisms of economic unification and the standardization of social structures, education and cultural concepts and acculturation.

It is a fact that the ecological equilibrium of ethnic communities has been disturbed and that the developing countries are forced to change in order to adapt to the new economic system. The catch phrases of today are the new economic order, self-sufficiency, regional democracy, devolution, cultural heritage, africanization and so on. But what is at issue is not regional culture but the levelling out of differences in the standard of development. Nationalist movements in many countries may speak of taking their own road to development; the mechanism of global development is approaching an indivisible whole.

In non-technological countries western development is considered the superior cultural system, which offers untold riches to those that adapt themselves most quickly. In the developing countries an international sub-culture has grown up that has been nicknamed the International cocktail club and which apes the western way of life. But western development is indispensable to the bureaucrats who use it to construct the machinery of power around themselves, to ups-tart national politicians who flirt with international ideologies, to scientists and artists who can set themselves up as geniuses after the western model. Numerous developing countries are governed by political and economic profiteers, who have stakes in the industrial and commercial enterprises in their country, who receive princely sums from investors, entrepreneurs and importers. Corruption is the price to be paid by the west for the expansion of its markets and the demise of ethnic cultures.

The time has come for sociologists and cultural anthropologists to examine their own role in this compulsive development. Should they merely record the changes that take place, perhaps even establish new disciplines such as urban anthropology or mass anthropology? Should they concentrate on collecting into museums what can still be salvaged, setting up memorials to dead cultures? Are there no longer any cultures that are not western or westernizing? Has the knowledge industry an institutionalized cultural system, a concept of civilization that must inevitably lead to standardization? Is mass identity endemic to man? Have ethnic culture and ethnic characteristics any permanent value as other institutions, such as marriage and the family, seem to have? Can culture be assessed in other than quantitative terms? Is environmental protection more important than the protection of cultures? Can technology only create centralized, mammoth production units, urban slums? Is a post-urban period possible in the history of human culture?

[151] Similarly Primitivist John Zerzan argues that the primary motive of the ‘left’ is to co-opt indigenous cultures into becoming industrialized cultures, where their members become workers and consumers in the industrialized retrace. The problem with the left, is their addiction to industrial progress, industrialization and domestication, and their cooptation of indigenous and non-industrialized cultures, on behalf of international corporations. Primitivists do not endorse industrialization or industrialization’s cooptation of indigenous cultures; whereas the left are fully engaged in the cooptation of indigenous people’s into becoming workers and consumers, and not to be indigenous agrarian and outside of industrialization. Primitivists perceive indigenous cultures as cultures which still have community face to face, and an authentic community and cultural life, in touch with the land. Primitivists believe we cannot all of a sudden become primitives and return to a relocalized and non-industrialized way of life, but overtime we can do so; and if we do not do so, the collapse of industrial civilization shall either exterminate us, or force us to do so.

[152] Fribourg Declaration on Cultural Rights:

[152.1] The launch of the Fribourg Declaration on Cultural Rights was held May 7, 2007 at the University of Fribourg and May 8, 2007 at the Palais des Nations in Geneva. The text was presented by the Observatory of Diversity and Cultural Rights (which headquarters are at the Interdisciplinary Institute of Ethnics and Human Rights at the Fribourg University) together with the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie and UNESCO.

[152.2] The cultural rights as expressed in the Fribourg Declaration of Cultural Rights, brings together, in one document, the cultural rights, currently recognized in a dispersed manner in a large number of human rights instruments; such as: Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the two International Covenants on human rights of the United Nations, the UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity and other relevant universal and regional instruments; because it is important to assemble these cultural rights together in order to ensure their visibility and coherence and to encourage their full realization.

[152.3] The Fribourg Declaration is convinced that violations of cultural rights give rise to identity related tensions and conflicts which are one of the principal cause of violence, wars and terrorism; and Equally convinced that cultural diversity cannot be truly protected without the effective implementation of cultural rights. Among others it states:

The term “culture” covers those values, beliefs, convictions, languages, knowledge and the arts, traditions, institutions and ways of life through which a person or a group expresses their humanity and the meanings that they give to their existence and to their development;

The expression “cultural identity” is understood as the sum of all cultural references through which a person, alone or in community with others, defines or constitutes oneself, communicates and wishes to be recognised in one’s dignity;

“Cultural community” connotes a group of persons who share references that constitute a common cultural identity that they intend to preserve and develop.

Everyone, alone or in community with others, has the right: a. To choose and to have one’s cultural identity respected, in the variety of its different means of expression. This right is exercised in the inter-connection with, in particular, the freedoms of thought, conscience, religion, opinion and expression;

Everyone is free to choose to identify or not to identify with one or several cultural communities, regardless of frontiers, and to modify such a choice;

No one shall have a cultural identity imposed or be assimilated into a cultural community against one’s will.
Everyone, alone or in community with others, has the right to access and participate freely in cultural life through the activities of one’s choice, regardless of frontiers.

Everyone, alone or in community with others, has the right to participate, according to democratic procedures: • in the cultural development of the communities of which one is a member; • in the elaboration, implementation and evaluation of decisions that concern oneself and which have an impact on the exercise of one’s cultural rights; • in the development of cultural cooperation at different levels.

[153] On 18 August 2008, Peru declared Ayahuasca part of their Cultural Heritage:

The Government of Peru declared the traditional knowledge and the use of Ayahuasca practiced by the indigenous communities of the Amazon forest to be national cultural patrimony. Ayahuasca is more commonly known in Brazil as Santo Daime. The decision of the Peruvian Government, signed by the Director of the National Institute of Culture, Javier Ugaz Villacorta, was published on the Saturday edition of the country’s official daily newspaper, El Peruano.

On the declaration of recognition, the Peruvian Government says that Ayahuasca has psychotropic qualities, acting on the psychic level, the mental activity, the behaviour, the perception, and is known all over the world as an indigenous plant that transmits spiritual knowledge.

It also says that the effects produced by its consumption are equivalent to the entrance to the secrets of the spiritual world. According to the National Institute of Culture, the Ayahuasca ritual is establishing itself as the center of the traditional medicine and is one of the pillars of the identity of the Amazon people, its use being necessary and indispensable to all the members of the Peruvian Amazon society.

Ayahauasca is a drink obtained from the decoction of the jungle vine also known as Ayahuasca (Banisteriopsis caapi) and the shrub Chacruna (Psychotria viridis). According to the Peruvian Government, Ayahuasca has an extraordinary cultural history due to its psychotropic qualities.

Therapeutical virtues

The National Institute of Culture notes that the use and the effects of the Ayahuasca are necessary to all the members of the Amazon societies at some point in their lives, and indispensable for them to assume the part of privileged carriers, be it through communication with the spiritual world, or for plastic expression.

Peru’s Government states that the effects produced by Ayahuasca have been extensively investigated due to their complexity and are different from the ones usually produced by hallucinogens.

"Part of that difference consists on the ritual of consumption, that leads to several effects, however always within a culturally limited margin, and with religious, therapeutical and cultural purposes" says Javier Villacorta.
According to the Peruvian Government, "the practice of Ayahuasca ritual sessions and their ancestral use in the traditional rituals, guaranteeing cultural continuity, is tied to the therapeutical virtues."

"There is a need for protection of the traditional use and the sacred aspect of the Ayahuasca ritual, differentiating it from the Occidental use, which is out of context, consumerist and with commercial purposes" alerts the statement of the National Institute of Culture.

[154] A Psychological, Cultural or Economic Shock Doctrine:

[154.1] The thesis of Naomi Klein’s, Shock Doctrine is that we've been sold a fairy tale about how the industrial economic system works. To implement less ecological or financial regulatory policies for the greater benefit of the Corpotocracy elite, the economic system needed to be shocked, in a similar way that psychiatry shocked their patients to break their spirits and introduce new identities. New Economic policies needed shocks, crisis, and states of emergency to implement new changes, new cultural, psychological or economic identities.

[154.2] Shock Doctrine sketches a history of the last thirty years where economic shock doctrine has been applied throughout the world, where Klein gives introductory examples of her two main hypothesis: (a) Practitioners of the shock doctrine tend to seek a blank slate on which to create their ideal free market economies, which usually requires a violent destruction of the existing economic order; (2) the similarities between economic shock doctrine and the original shock therapy – a psychiatric technique where electric shocks were applied to mentally ill patients.

[154.3] In the chapter on psychiatric shock therapy, Klein deals with the covert experiments conducted by the psychiatrist Ewen Cameron in collusion with the Central Intelligence Agency: how it was partially successful in distorting and regressing patients' original personality, but ineffectual in developing a "better" personality to replace it. She makes parallel arguments with economic shock therapy are made, including a digression on how government agencies harnessed some of the lessons learned to create more effective torture techniques. Torture, according to Klein, has often been an essential tool for authorities who have implemented aggressive free market reforms – this assertion is stressed throughout the book. She suggests that for historical reasons the human rights movement has often portrayed torture without explaining its context, which has made it frequently appear as pointless cruelty, when in fact there was, and is, a deep ‘identity shift’ purpose in the torture.

[154.4] Klein then proceeds to analyze how the use of shock doctrine transformed South American economies in the 1970s, focusing on the coup in Chile led by General Augusto Pinochet; followed by exploring ‘mild shock therapy’ of Margaret Thatcher, and other examples in Poland, Russia and South Africa. She concludes with an analysis of ‘Disaster Capitalism Complex’ and the best and most successful application of Shock Doctrine ever: the invasion of Iraq.

[154.5] Klein however, never questions her Cultural Imperialist attachment to the dogma of ‘Development Compulsion’; she never questions her liberal Eurocentric addiction to the ‘development’ of the ‘undeveloped’ natives. The cultural addiction to the subjugation of nature, in order to build a technological civilization and the unscrupulous exploitation of natural resources. However she does eloquently describe the psychological, cultural and economic shock doctrine process, of implementing changes, the recipients of the shock doctrine would culturally, psychologically or economically oppose, in the absence of the shock doctrine events.

[155] In How “Pornland” destroys intimacy and hijacks sexuality; Dr. Dines describes the process of how the objectification and commodification of women’s sexuality works, by starting with half-naked newspaper ‘pin-up’ ads or subtle ‘Sex in the City’ marketing, to hard core gonzo porn.

In the preface of your book, you share a personal story about a conversation you had with your son over pornography. You write, “I said [to him] that should he decide to use porn, that he was going to hand over his sexuality—a sexuality that he had yet to grow into, that made sense for who he was and who he was going to be—to someone else.” How and why do boys and young men give their power away to pornography? What kind of power does pornography have in shaping boys’ and men’s perceptions, attitudes, and beliefs toward sex?

Boys and men don’t realize the power they’re giving away to pornography. They don’t understand the power it has to shape who they are, their sexuality, and their sexual identity. In this culture, we think of pornography as a joke or something to laugh about. We don’t take it seriously as a source of information that has the ability and power to impact on the way we think about the world. Most boys and men go to pornography for an ejaculation; they come away with a lot more. I don’t think they’re quite aware of it.

Pornography, like all images, tells stories about the world. It tells stories about women, men, sexuality, and intimacy. In pornography, intimacy is something to be avoided, and—as I say in the book—“In pornography nobody makes love. They all make hate.” The man makes hate to the woman’s body. It’s about the destruction of intimacy.

Is it true that what most boys and men see in current trends of pornography are things that they expect in sex? How did that happen, and how is it impacting on boys’ and men’s perceptions, attitudes, and beliefs toward sex?

Well, a lot of people don’t know what pornography is. The first thing I do in the book is very purposefully describe it in detail. I know that for many people it’s going to be hard to read. I understand that. But if you’re really going to understand what I’m saying and why I’m saying it, then you have to understand the material I’m talking about. A lot of older men and women think I’m talking about Playboy from 15 years ago: a centerfold or a woman with no clothes on smiling in a cornfield. They think, “What’s wrong with that?” Well, that was bad enough in the way it objectified women, but we’re on a whole new level now with this kind of imagery.

How it got to this point is the Internet. It made it more accessible, affordable, and anonymous. You’re seeing a massive rise in use, and the users are getting younger and younger. Children who are 11½ years old are now looking at pornography because it comes straight into the home. There’s no limit on how much you can access. It used to be you had to steal father’s Playboy or Penthouse. Use was limited to how much you could actually pilfer. Today it is unlimited.

So what happens is that desensitization sets in that much quicker and that much earlier. In order to keep the consumer base going, the pornographers have to keep upping the ante. They make it more violent, body-punishing, or abusive as a way to keep men interested. When you think about it, if you’re exposed to it at age 11 or 12, you’re jaded by 20. You’re certainly jaded by 30. Pornography bleeds sex dry of intimacy, emotions, and connection. Once you do that, then there’s not much left. It becomes boring and mechanical. So you have to keep feeding newer and newer ideas just to keep [the audience] interested.

You describe Gonzo porn as “body-punishing sex.” Why is it body-punishing, why is it prevalent today, and what do people need to know about it?

It’s body-punishing because the male performers pound away at a woman’s body. You often see three men orally, vaginally, and anally penetrate her over and over again for 20 minutes or more, and these are often Viagra-fortified penises, so they stay hard much longer. A woman’s body has limits. All of ours do. What you see in Gonzo porn is a woman’s anus that is red and sore and a swollen vagina. All of these things happen because of the way a woman’s body is treated. Even the pornography industry says that Gonzo is very demanding and potentially dangerous for women. If the industry is saying it, then there’s certainly a problem.

What I’ve found with my interviews with men is the more they watch, the more they want porn sex, because they become habituated to that kind of industrial-strength sex. Once you become habituated to that, anything else looks boring or uninteresting. What I find is that some men lose interest in their partners altogether and use more pornography. Other men nag and cajole their girlfriends to perform porn sex, or they use prostitutes because that’s who they think they can play this porn sex out on.

Remember that you are not just reading or looking at porn. You’re actively masturbating and having an orgasm to it. It has a very visceral response in the body. This is one of the reasons it is so powerful.

How/why does pornography misuse and abuse the concepts of sex and how/why does pornography normalize the idea that pain is pleasure?

Well, it’s because of the way the woman’s body is treated. In pornography, no matter what you do to her, no matter how much you physically or verbally abuse this woman, she loves it. She can’t get enough. What I find fascinating and upsetting at the same time is...

Men believe that!

... That’s right. They believe it. I’ve had men argue with me that they believe women like it. So when I say to them, “What’s your evidence? Have you seen any empirical studies? Have you interviewed these women?” No, of course they haven’t. They’re using the text as their evidence because she’s saying “I love it! Give it to me harder!,” when of course she has no choice. First of all, she wants to get paid. She has to say that, and if she wants to continue working in pornography, she has no choice.

I often hear that women actively seek “body-punishing sex,” talk about liking it and desiring it, and write about it in non-pornographic, sex-related blogs, periodicals, and other forms of media. Sometimes I hear people say that degrading acts of sex can be intimate. Why is this perception wrong, and how has pornography made people think this way? Why is this an unhealthy perception of sex?

Because it distorts what women want, who they are, and the kind of sex they want to have. I don’t want to say there’s nobody who wants that kind of sex. In any society, you’re going to have variations on what people want.

The problem with pornography is that it normalizes that which is a minority preference for many women. That’s all you see in pornography. You never see anybody say, “Let’s hold, let’s kiss, let’s do all of these things.” Everyone in pornography wants it as hard and fast as possible.

So what they do is they normalize something very unusual in the culture. The more men look at pornography, the more they actually think that this is what women want, especially because they have no counterbalance to it. There is very little sex education today in this country outside of pornography that really speaks to boys and young men.

I’m sure you’ve heard the common response that “no one is forcing a gun on women to perform these acts, and they are doing it by choice.” Why is that a common justification for porn, and what is wrong with that argument?

I think that’s a very apolitical and de-contextualized understanding of choice. The majority of women in pornography—and it’s true in prostitution as well—are not women who have medical and law degrees, and they’re not choosing between practicing medicine or going into pornography. The women are usually working class women who are looking at minimum-wage jobs and who have been sold an image of pornography, that it’s glamorous. They see people like Jenna Jameson or Sasha Grey with all of their pop culture celebrity status.

Recently, Jameson was on Oprah Winfrey, and there was no real analysis of what happens to women in pornography. What they did is glamorize it by showing the wealth Jameson accumulated. What they don’t show is that for every Jameson there are tens of thousands of women who end up poor, drug-addicted, incur bodily problems and diseases. And often a lot of the women are there for only a short time. They have a very short shelf life, and many of them end up in brothels of Nevada. They don’t end up in a huge mansion with lots of fancy cars and beautiful clothes.

Another common attitude or belief boys and men have toward pornography is “Well, that’s just a fantasy and I wouldn’t act that out in real life.” Do you see that as an excuse to legitimize pornography? Why is that problematic?

I address this in my book. As progressive people, we cannot bear that the right-wing media has the power to construct ideology in this country. None of us who are progressive will look at Fox News and say, “It’s just imagery; it’s just a fantasy; and it has no effect.” People can tell the difference between media and reality. We know media has the power to shift views and consolidate right-wing ideology.

Pornography is also a form of media representation. So why is it that Fox News and Rush Limbaugh have the power to change and shape society, and suddenly pornography is the only media form that has no effect? This whole fantasy issue is totally ludicrous. It takes no account of how images construct reality.

While pornography is pushing the boundaries of sex, it’s also making its way into more and more mainstream media. What are the most prevalent examples of porn being accepted or seen as “normal,” and how is it being legitimized?

One example I talk about in Pornland is Brazilian waxes. They come straight down from the pornography industry. Most of the female students I meet across the country have no pubic hair whatsoever. Their boyfriends don’t like it, and I’ve even heard of cases where boys won’t have any sex with women if they have any hair. Where did this come from? When I was growing up, if somebody did that, you would think something was wrong with them. Suddenly girls are increasingly taking all of their pubic hair off and getting bikini waxes.

Another example is the way in which the pornographic and prostitution culture is being glamorized. Women can now take pole-dancing lessons. They wear clothing that looks like they just stepped out of pornography. You see it everywhere, and women are capitulating to men’s sexual demands because there are very few alternative ways of being female in this culture.

Another example of pornography having power is in the hook-up culture that’s taking place on college campuses. What is hook-up sex? It’s porn sex. It’s the same thing. It’s anonymous, non-intimate, and disconnected sex, and everyone is having hook-up sex in pornography. Increasingly, what’s interesting is that women and girls are consenting to hook-ups even though studies show that they experience less sexual pleasure than men and are more likely to be raped in such situations.

Pornography today is being mainstreamed by the likes of Howard Stern, “Maxim” magazine, or the “Girls Gone Wild” series. You also mention the series “Sex and the City” in your book. How does the show shape perceptions of pornography, especially for women?

In “Sex and the City,” pornography is kind of a minor character on the show. It pops up a few times with men masturbating to porn and wanting to bring it into the bedroom. These women on “Sex and the City” were not outraged. Some of them didn’t like it but rarely complained. A lot of men in “Sex and the City” wanted porn sex, hook-up sex, urination sex, and other things that come from pornography. What you saw in “Sex and the City” was women hooking up and then feeling empowered by it, when in reality what they really wanted—and what made “Sex and the City” such a conservative show—was to settle down with a guy. The series was all about finding Mr. Right.

In Pornland you discuss racism in pornography. Oftentimes I hear, “They’re not racist, they’re just funny titles.” How prevalent is racism in pornography, and is it being diminished or trivialized by consumers and producers alike? Why hasn’t most of society picked up on this element?

One in four new videos to hit the market is interracial, which is sex between a black man and a white woman. Today’s interracial videos depict body-punishing sex. A black man’s penis is referred to as “gigantic,” “huge,” and “monstrous,” and the images reduce black men to their penises, which has historical resonance in this culture.

Black women are portrayed as extremely animalistic, uncontrollable, and deviant in their sexuality. Now what happens is when you show these images over and over, it reinforces the way white people think about people of color, because in this country one of the ways in which they have rendered invisible racist ideology is by sexualizing it.

Why haven’t many people picked up on this racist element in pornography?

I think most of them don’t know. When I tell people, they’re shocked. If you ask the men who use pornography, they’re not. But these men, once aroused and eager to find an image to masturbate to, are not in any mood to start doing a critical deconstruction of the text.

One of the main reasons why interracial porn is so popular with white men, which is the main consumer base, is if pornography is about the dehumanization of women, what better way to dehumanize a white woman in the eyes of white men than to see her being penetrated over and over by something they view as depraved, the black male body?

People or individuals who try to explain that sex is about intimacy, caring, sharing, and trust in a relationship are often cast off as “prudish,” “a tight-ass,” “a religious nut,” or “someone who isn’t getting any.” How difficult has it been to explain this aspect of sex and how pornography strips it of any human connection? Why is there such aversion to sex based on equality and respect?

I think there is a real fear of being labeled anti-sex. The way pornographers and their allies have sold this is that you’re either pro-pornography or you’re anti-sex. Which of course is ludicrous because pornography is not the same as sex. Pornography is an industrial product. It commodifies human needs and sells it back to people, often in an unrecognizable form. It is not simply a reflection of reality. It is a specific representation of it and it is a specific way of representing sex.

Now to assume that if you are against pornography you’re against sex, is to assume that anyone who criticizes McDonald’s is anti-eating. People who criticize McDonald’s are against the destruction of the environment, against the assault on healthy foods, and against child obesity. They are against an industrial product. They are not against eating. So why can’t they see that it is the same thing when it comes to pornography and sex?

Given the prevalence of pornography today, that demand for pornography is going up, not down, and that sex acts are getting more and more violent, degrading, and humiliating for men and women, are you hopeful that things can be turned around?

To turn this around there needs to be a massive public health awareness campaign. Unless people begin to understand the role pornography is playing in our culture, I can’t see any reason that this won’t get worse, because all of these men who started watching pornography young are going to want more and more. Pornographers themselves say they’re having trouble keeping up with what fans want because they want it so hardcore.

Where is this going to end? I don’t know. What will an 11-year-old boy want 10, 20, or 30 years from now? Nobody knows. The truth is we’ve never brought up a generation of males with hardcore pornography. No one can really say what’s going to happen. What we do know, from how images and media affect people, is that it’s going to increasingly shape the way men think about sex, sexuality, and relationships.

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