John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE ABOUT AN ARTICLE IN SALON

I agree that likely the same proportion of people abuse children as ever. It is probably fair to say that any large human population has a similar distribution of “outliers” in the many functions of the brain.

But society has changed its views on what constitutes proper care of children and what constitutes abuse, and rightly so in the view of most people. There are historical examples of pedophiles being tolerated to varying degrees. Thomas Jefferson began sleeping with his slave, Sally Hemmings, when she was thirteen. Robert Hooke, eminent 17^th century scientist, had a long sexual relationship with his young niece.

But those kinds of examples cannot be cited as an argument for tolerating pedophilia in a modern society any more than other once-tolerated practices such forced marriage or bride burning or honor killings or droit du seigneur or still a hundred other ancient practices which reflect only the principle of might makes right. Might does not make right when you establish a true society of laws.

We have the rule of law now, and we don’t tolerate, for example, the marriage of 12-year old girls to men, even though the practice continues in several of the world’s dark corners and was once a part of aristocratic European culture.

I do think pedophiles may be characterized as just one of many of Nature’s unfortunate “freaks.” They occur naturally, likely with a certain frequency, but most of society cannot accept them because parents feel keenly the need to protect their children from predators of all types, and the laws of a modern society always reflect the needs of its basic unit, families, and I include families of all descriptions.

The human brain is almost infinitely complex, and it is the seat of sexual desire and imaginings. We know well in the case of other organs, as say with the heart or lungs, how many natural faults and glitches there can be. The brain’s very complexity makes it subject to an amazing variety of irregularities. All of our mental illnesses, I believe, can be ascribed to the huge number of irregularities, and repeated patterns of groups of irregularities (syndromes), which emerge regularly in the brain, the most complex of organs.

And I don’t see it as being any different with conditions like pedophilia or sadism or psychopathy. I’m not calling pedophilia a mental illness, there is nothing useful in saying so, but I am saying it is just one of many unhappy and naturally-occurring conditions which arise regularly yet cannot be accommodated by modern society.

It all makes an irreconcilable problem in terms of a minority versus the large majority’s vital interests, but I do think it essential for our laws and practices always to protect children’s interests first.

Pedophiles in modern society then are automatically condemned to unhappy, constrained lives, but this reality is no different from other such natural but unhappy situations which occur regularly.

Psychopaths, too, occur with a certain frequency in any population, but we can hardly be expected to tolerate what they feel the strong impulse to do. Then again, sadists are a natural phenomenon, but we cannot, as a society, accept people’s enjoying hurting others. And some men seem to be born with rape fantasies, again likely a natural phenomenon that we simply cannot knowingly tolerate.

The truth is, modern society has some inherent limits on the freedom of certain kinds of individuals, and I cannot see how that can be otherwise.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN THE GLOBE AND MAIL BY JOHN MOSCOWITZ

Evil is an out-dated, mumbo-jumbo word.

Indeed, it explains nothing, serving only to consign something to a dark corner of extreme disapproval with zero understanding.

The author in using it makes himself slightly ridiculous.

The truth is that this terrible event is one more brutal proof of how unbalanced the human mind can be.

That most complex of organs can suffer from countless faults and errors in its construction, just as simpler organs – hearts, kidneys, and livers – so often suffer from faults in their make-up.

And just as people sometimes have parts of their bodies missing – a hand or a leg – a portion of humanity have key bits of their brains either missing or mangled.

Such an event has no more “meaning” than does a stroke of lightning or a tidal wave killing innocent people.

It is terrible, but life goes on.

But, yes, a society which actually cares for its children would have effective gun laws, knowing such things are going to happen at intervals.

But where is the concern for children in America?

What of the children slaughtered in Gaza? No chest-beating over them. Indeed, Israel gets resupplied with all the bombs and munitions expended to kill Palestinian children.

What of the thousands of Iraqi children killed and mangled by America’s pointless invasion? Thousands more made refugees?

And what of the tens of thousands more murdered by a decade of horrible American sanctions against Hussein?

How many children have Americans killed in Afghanistan?

In Pakistan?

And now in Syria through the weapons and fighters imported into that country to undo its government?

The countless killed in Vietnam and Cambodia in a war to no point?

Indeed, today, the seas of Agent Orange America left behind go right on killing and crippling babies and children. What of them?

If America, that brutal imperial force, cared one whit about children, none of these questions could be raised.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY STEVIE CAMERON IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Sorry, this is a bizarre piece.

First, no one has forgotten these horrors, and outfits like CBC spend time every year playing the record again.

Second, the world is so filled with horrors – a million killed in Iraq, two million refugees, tens of thousands killed in Afghanistan, American torture and assassination, Israel’s running an endless gulag for millions of innocent people, Africa a vast continent of brutality and mass murder – that the Canadian cases almost do not stand out.

Third, it is the normal brain’s function to forget savage events and try to resume normal life.

Fourth, we have a lumbering, destructive Harper government owing to the majority not getting its act together. The man slashes and burns on the support of thirty-odd percent of Canadians.

________________________

“Great article. The truth stings for some. Rape as a war crime in Darfur, Congo etc. The subjugation of women in countries around the world (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia to name just a few), the denial of education to girls in some countries – just what are men afraid of in education? Power perhaps?”

The complete ignorance shown in postings like that is itself a serious danger to society.

If we proceed in our affairs out of ignorance, we get nowhere.

Rape in war has been a constant of history. As the Soviets entered Berlin at the end of WW II, there was an orgy of rape, not typically discussed in history texts. Literally hundreds of thousands of German women were raped, often gang-raped.

And what about the “comfort women” for the Imperial Japanese Army in WWII? And the orgies of rape and murder in places like Nanking? Tens of thousands killed and countless rapes.

And just what does the writer of that nonsense think is behind the words, read countless times in ancient history, “and the city was sacked with all the men put to the sword.”

You read of the horrors of Abu Ghraib in Iraq, but we know from the world’s greatest investigative journalist, Seymour Hersh, that in fact the worst stuff has been suppressed, pictures and recordings of boys being raped.

Indeed, some of our soldiers in that hellhole of Afghanistan have seen boys being raped, to the point of blood running down their legs, by those assisting us as translators and guides. It is a common practice in such repressive and backward societies, just as it is in prisons.

Such events only tell us that war is stupid and savage beyond telling, for war is just a time when sick people get to carry out whatever twisted and savage dreams they have with impunity.

After all, likely a quarter of us is mentally ill, as clearly M. Levine was. You just need the right conditions to set them off.

Because men are in general physically stronger and loaded with hormones promoting aggression, they are the perpetrators by a ratio of about 10:1 compared to women.

We need to stop promoting war, and we need to treat people in normal society who are unbalanced. Those are the real lessons here.

The denial of education to girls? God, American propaganda for the Afghan War.

Go look at countless millions of boys in India and Africa and other places who get virtually no education. Boys go to work in places like India or Pakistan doing things like sewing soccer balls or working on carpets as young as seven years old.

And in Afghanistan, are you telling me that the men of the Northern Alliance or the Taleban are educated? The entire society is unbelievably backward and poor. Even if you got a good education in Afghanistan, there would likely be no place to use it. You would have to emigrate unless you were very fortunate.

Think before you write, and go seek some knowledge before you even think.

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A SERIES IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

I do wish that we could wave a magic wand to eliminate the plague of mental illness, but I know perfectly well that we cannot.

We have no good answers for most of the severe forms. All the various non-drug treatments are ineffective on the severe mental illnesses, which are all the result of glitches in the body’s most complex organ, the brain.

Actually, we still suffer a lot of mumbo-jumbo myths around various psychotherapies, the practices of the same people who forty years ago told families that schizophrenia was due to overbearing mothers, sending already-victim families into waves of ignorant guilt.

Schizophrenia is in many ways more tragic than brain cancer. It destroys whole families. It is what sends all the most pitiful street people out onto the streets.

But the medications we have for schizophrenia have major problems. First, many schizophrenics have intense paranoid fears. They actually fear efforts to help them. That is why many refuse to go to shelters.

Second, the drugs themselves are partly ineffective and can be quite dangerous in some cases. In other cases, they turn some schizophrenics into pathetic foggy zombies.

How do you control a paranoid person taking his/her medication? You cannot without imprisoning them in institutions as we did forty years ago, something which is unacceptable in a free society.

Despite our pride and arrogance about our science, the truth is our abilities with mental illness remain fairly primitive. We just do not know enough. So I find it difficult to see any immediate light at the end of this very dark tunnel.