by Ramin Mazaheri for The Saker Blog
(SPOILER ALERT! This article is not very good.)
If House of Cards only had a first season and a final season it could have been remembered as almost genuinely dissident television.
Season 1 did something never seen on American screens: It accurately showed that modern American Liberal Democracy is designed to be won by politicians who are amoral, individualistic and disgusting sociopaths.
Season 1 showed, via the rise of small-town Southern politician Frank Underwood (played by Kevin Spacey, who didn’t forget his lines and stood on his marks; had it been played by someone else the political-moral thrust of Season 1 would not have changed one iota), that US politicians achieve success by being in a state of perpetual war with absolutely everybody, and not just non-Americans.
Say all you want about socialist despots, and there were some, but Underwood personally killed reporters and was a despot solely to further his own career, which came before everything. Western individualism – “#MeOnly” – was his ideology, instead of a party/social ideology. His wife, Claire, was a frigid sociopath of the exact same type, but female.
Besides being murderous and warmongering, everything they had was used as a weapon to “get ahead” or else had to be destroyed. Both were repeatedly adulterous, orgy-having (Frank was a closet bisexual), childless people who had mostly had zero contact with any family (a couple is not a family). Caligula seemed like their role model.
Despite decades of US liberality on the portrayal of sex and violence, Americans had never been offered such a jarring, unrelatable perspective on their own leading politicians. And that made Season 1 dissident TV; limited, yes, and by omission still proffering TINA (There Is no Alternative), but it was impossible not to watch Frank Underwood and think: “The US system is fundamentally designed to reward – not prevent – rapacious immorality.”
Why either of the Underwoods even wanted to win so much power is something which was never answered…but Western capitalist art never has an answer these questions: for a century their proffered explanations rely on either Freudian/childhood psychology or nihilism/sociopaths-are-just-a-part-of-life-ism, none of which is satisfying to an intelligent person.
Frank wanted to “win” because that’s what capitalism values and promotes: winning, always, at everything, no matter how meaningless, and regardless of the social cost. To Frank politics was devoid of any sacred meaning, and anyone who ascribed sacred meaning to politics he despised as a fool. Frank’s viewpoint was typically capitalist: “society” was limited to protecting the rights of one individual (Frank Underwood), so that he could fulfil any desire as much as he pleased and without legal consequences.
Being a politically-minded person, I found Season 1 riveting. Was there any doubt that Bill Clinton was not the model for Frank Underwood, and Hillary for Claire?
It is only via the false philosophy of “universal values” that one could say “Yes, but Frank Underwood was also quite close to Mao or Khomeini or anyone else in power”.
Really? You honestly think Khomeini’s relationship with his wife was similar to the Underwoods (or the Clintons)? And you think this relationship had no affect on Khomeini’s personal life and thus also his political attitudes? These two assumptions and the many others which are implied are…preposterous. And nihilistic, because it implies that nothing we do – not even the quality of our closest relations and our dearest feelings – matters. I note that this is also what the Underwoods believed and acted from….
To quote the Final Season (Season 6), “politics is war” – indeed. Anyone who doesn’t understand that has never been in, or close to, or affected by war’s fighting – people will fight to the death over political (i.e., moral) ideas. However, this phrase was used by now-President Claire in the capitalist-imperialist mindset: it was uttered to excuse any dirty action to advance one’s career and personal will-to-power, and thus an action which is totally untethered to any socialist-inspired idea of “this is to empower the oppressed classes” or a religious ideal of “this is to improve our morality”.
Season 1 was nearly revolutionary because it showed so clearly that US Liberal Democracy is yet another illegitimate and perpetually anti-social war levelled by the capitalist 1% against the 99 and also within the 1%.
All the seasons in between – boring propaganda
House of Cards lost its dissident, inherently anti-American viewpoint when Frank rose from parliamentarian to president: Seasons 2-5 became reactionary Hollywood propaganda because the “bad guys” were no longer American, and thus also no longer the failures of their antiquated US socio-political system.
President Frank focused on foreigners, and the foreigners of the 2014-17 moment: China (trade war, election meddling), Muslims (terrorists) and above all Russia (gay rights, anti-Putinism). Whom foreign bad guys replaced were the minor, only slightly-less ruthless parliamentarians and politicians whom Frank & Claire “fought”, and who also greatly contributed to the overall portrayal of American Liberal Democracy as a fundamentally immorality-rewarding system.
Instead of their own backyards, House of Cards Seasons 2-5 essentially became synonymous with Democratic Party concerns, which are extremely conservative on the global spectrum and which are pure Western fake-leftism.
I think they lost their nerve because their fundamentally jingoistic pro-American ideology (one disconnected from “internationalism” and “socialism”) compelled the writers and the script ok-ers at Netflix to at least partially “defend the presidency”. Frank and Claire were not portrayed as saints, but they were far more saintly and “inspired Americans” than in Season 1.
House of Cards Seasons 2-5 deprived us of the chance to see a series about a President whose immorality was so heinous as to inspire feelings of anti-Americanism within Americans, because those four seasons are simply stacked with American jingoism.
Season 6 surprisingly reversed that with Claire’s ascendancy. However, the negative portrayal of Claire was, in the current cultural context, even more daring than that.
Final Season 6 – You mean women aren’t the answer to all our social ills?
House of Cards’ Final Season cannot be examined without bringing in the #MeToo movement against sexual assault and sexual harassment. Spacey was fired for an incredible number of accusations of sexual assault, and that forced him off the show and forced Claire Underwood to be written into the presidential seat.
I think all fans of the show assumed that the Final Season would continue to follow the Democratic Party/US Jingoism party line: Claire Underwood would show that if only women were given the top jobs, then universal peace would immediately follow – women are the Messiah. It seemed a foregone conclusion that Claire’s presidency would serve merely as a “what could have been” revenge fantasy aimed at mollifying the supporters of Hillary Clinton.
House of Cards clearly lost its dissident mojo for four full seasons, but I tuned in because I’m political, and I’m thrilled with the tiniest morsel of true leftism (which is all I’ve come to expect from all American popular arts, excepting music).
So I was very pleasantly surprised to see that my assumptions were wrong: Claire is portrayed, constantly, as the psychopath she is. Hillary was likely disappointed (again) and offended, which is all we can hope for, since Trump cannot “lock her up”.
Fundamentally, the writers seemed to realize that, given Claire’s history, it would have been absolutely impossible for a psychopath like her to be “redeemed” just because she was a female awarded the presidency, and thus she had to remain an enigmatic sociopath…regardless of the current political climate. By being artistically honest House of Cards really defied public expectations, I think.
In fact, despite the 2018 “class credentials” of her gender, Claire is even worse than Frank:
Claire chooses a cabinet made entirely of women…and yet it is the Russian president who winds up pleading with her and her female cronies not to drop a nuclear bomb in Syria in order to distract from her domestic scandals.
In fact, the Putin stand-in gets many of the best lines in the Final Season. Claire gets pregnant, which at the outset seemed sure to be a manipulation to make her as American as apple pie and motherhood. However, the Russian president actually says something every adult knows but which can only be uttered by Russian despots in the West during the #MeToo movement: “Motherhood doesn’t automatically make a woman a saint”. Yes, the writers have Claire dismiss Petrov/Putin as an old-fashioned relic, but the fact that it is even published in Hollywood is more than a bit edgy in the US in 2018, I think. And given Claire’s nuclear-level psychopathy, how can the average viewer really view Petrov/Putin as the bigger problem? (Class-distorting Russophobia campaigns, that’s how.)
The series asked a question I imagine some readers won’t know the answer to: What is the opposite of “misogyny”? Unlike Claire, who poses the question, I didn’t have to look it up – “misandry”, which is prejudice against men. Merely bringing up this word in public seems like an act of political dissidence in the US in 2018. Sisters, hear my sincere cry: “I have suffered from misandry, too! I too have suffered from undeserved gender-prejudice!” (However, fake-leftists will tell me that as a man I cannot sympathize with women about gender prejudice…. Whatever: Womanhood doesn’t automatically make a woman a leftist.)
The series closes with Claire stabbing a former ally in the stomach, even though he no longer was physically threatening her: she didn’t have to kill him out of self-defense, but did so because he was going to expose her wickedness (in the silly, illogical, doesn’t-hold-up-to-scrutiny plot which is this soap opera/every TV drama ever).
If Frank was Bill Clinton and Claire was Hillary…both are equally bad. Men and women are psychologically different (not a popular idea in 2018), but it’s a dangerously bigoted and simply inaccurate idea to say one is morally superior to the other.
So, the Final Season goes quite against the current status quo – just as Season 1 did in a different way – by refusing to justify the current “men bad/women good” feeling which is so dominant in America from October 2016 until today. This feeling has turned from “feminism” into “female supremacism” and is thus reactionary.
That this idea has gained prevalence should have been an expected, positive outcome of the election of Donald Trump: by electing a true American fascist out of disgust with the US system (as described by Season One), instead of a whitewashed and protected one like Hillary Clinton, Americans forced themselves to come to grips with their enormous sexual assault/anti-feminist problems. There is no doubt that the #MeToo Movement would have never started under Hillary, just as “racism is over” was declared when Obama took office. Preposterous, of course.
I predicted a “Mexican Power” movement in response to Trump – and it’s still possible – but I forgot that in American Liberal Democracy the first group to get their rights rectified are Whites. American fake-leftism will not waste a good crisis – Trump’s election – and since gays have already been rehabilitated – which ensures that some White men are not denied their rights – it is now the turn of White Women. Western Liberal Democracy undeniably priorities White men and then White women. After that, if there is enough fake-leftism mojo – which is necessarily quite limited – then maybe the Mexicans will get some scraps. The racist and sexist nature of American Liberal Democracy does not tarnish the validity of #MeToo, but helps explain it.
In contrast, France did not elect their facist candidate (Marine Le Pen), postponing an honest reckoning with the fascism inherent in the French system, and thus it should not be surprising that last week President Emmanuel Macron wanted to honor Nazi collaborator Philippe Pétain, the Premier of the État Français (Vichy France). Such a thing would have caused near-riots among French fake-leftists had President Le Pen proposed it, and that would have been a very good & necessary thing.
(It is amusing that Pétain is invariably described as Marshal Philippe Pétain (“Marshal” being his pre-WWII job title) in French and English media instead of his Vichy title – it is clearly a subtle way to whitewash his, and thus all of France’s, crimes.)
Spacey’s alleged crimes forced House of Cards to get back on the dissident track
As a lifelong feminist I support the #MeToo movement. The incidence of sexual assault is absolutely astounding, and I am surprised that more countries do not enforce capital punishment for rape. I encourage women 100% to go public anytime such a heinous crime has been committed, and to fight for justice.
There should be a war to defend the safety of women from aggression, but war is not black and white….
Accusations are not evidence – those who jump on “accusation bandwagons” (via social media or at the local café) are fundamentally anti-democratic, because they are morally assuming the “I make the law” powers of a despot. From the beginning of the movement, it was only in the leftist media which immediately and correctly diagnosed this major flaw in #MeToo. Mainstream media, however, adopted the incredible stance of “believe all accusers” – totally contrary to the standards of journalism – which is the recipe for a witch-hunt, not lasting left-wing reform to a culture.
At the same time, because social politics are not black and white, accusations do matter:
It is incredible that people like Kevin Spacey are STILL free! A man who is accused by one or two people deserves the total presumption of innocence; there are SO MANY allegations against Spacey that it really strains credibility to claim that there is a “conspiracy” against him. He is accused by something like 20 people, including minors! Such a person has a lot of explaining to do, and immediately, and from a place where his freedom is drastically restricted until he is proven not to be such a vast, Underwoodian menace. However, Spacey, and the similarly accused Harvey Weinstein, obviously has Hollywood “mullahs” protecting him thanks to their Liberal Democratic-encouraged fundraising for the fake-leftist Democratic Party.
Contrarily, and unfortunately given his views, recently-confirmed US Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh deserved the benefit of the doubt because he had only one (not really) credible accuser combined with decades of a spotless record; with Spacey there is years of allegations, and which were allegedly committed when Spacey was an adult. Common sense cannot only be employed by judges – citizens should realize that the Kavanaugh case is not at all the same as the Spacey case. What the entire Kavanaugh episode revealed was the attempted co-opting of the #MeToo revolution by the Democratic Party in order to shamelessly achieve political ends, and at the expense of feminism, true reform and improved societal well-being. That’s what happens when you count on fake-leftists – Underwoodian tactics where morality should be.
There has been plenty of support for Spacey from the West’s true leftist media, but “American actor Kevin Spacey is one of the most gifted and significant performers of his generation,” is absolutely not the lede sentence when 20 people, including minors, are accusing him of sexual assault. It is telling that Western leftist media has not mounted an equal campaign for Tariq Ramadan, who is no mere, replaceable actor but a brave and unifying political thinker, and who also has plenty of proof that: he was the target of an entrapment conspiracy, that he has committed no crime, who has indeed been jailed for months unlike Spacey or Weinstein, and whose only crime appears to be committing adultery (which is not a crime in France).
Supporting Spacey or Weinstein – two guys who hung out with the Clintons and were 100% supporters of the 1% – is not at all the same as supporting Ramadan or Julian Assange.
Is Spacey a victim of the #MeToo movement? No: Lamenting the informal punishment of Kevin Spacey amid an obvious political-judicial conspiracy in his favor – due to his money, power, influential friends and status as a Democratic Party stalwart – is hardly a major crime or serious leftism – lamenting Ramadan or Julian Assange is, however. Spacey cannot get work, but I hardly imagine that he is on the streets.
It’s undeniable that Kevin Spacey’s fate is bound up with the collective perception of the Final Season. What seems almost certain, but not appreciated, is that by forcing Spacey off the show the writers had to get back to answering tough cultural questions.
#MeToo is a Cultural Revolution, and House of Cards warns against going too far
Without Spacey the writers were forced to take on the, “Are women morally superior to men in the Trump era” question – a huge question in the current atmosphere of American male-female heterosexual politics. They came down with a resounding “No, they are not”. Kudos to them.
The #MeToo movement is ultimately a revolutionary thing – the revolution against sexual assault and harassment endured by women. That’s a great and much-needed revolution, but revolutions are not black and white – all revolutions have excesses: House of Cards Final Season serves as a clear warning and corrective to this.
The Final Season has the ability to distinctly improve the #MeToo revolution: viewers do not see that false allegations are only just slightly worse than murder (You shall not kill is Commandment #6; You shall not bear false witness is #9 ), but they do see that men do not have a monopoly on evil ways.
By taking this dissident view in 2018, the Final Season also calls into question currently en vogue but fundamentally reactionary and not revolutionary ideas: the totally-childish notion that women are morally superior to men; that women play no part in maintaining the evils of the world; that all men are sexual aggressors, or should be treated as potential sexual aggressors; that men and women are fundamentally set in perpetual socio-political opposition; that the interests of women are fundamentally opposed to the interests of men.
It is only in a capitalist & Liberal Democratic system where these notions appear justified and are promoted.
Socialism – stressing social unity – has no such problems, and in fact promotes gender harmony as a goal in an infinitely more successful fashion. I can easily prove this: 49% of Cuba’s new parliament is female…and they achieved that without quotas. Wow…without quotas! That undoubtedly implies a revolution in gender equality at the most difficult level – the cultural level. That is a stunning success. Hats off to Cuban male voters, eh? How about a #CubanToo movement?
What needs to be replaced in the #MeToo movement is the false idea that “men are the problem”, because rampant sexual harassment and abuse is a hallmark of, a reflection of, and also ideas which are inherent in, Western capitalism. The gender equality produced, in an unforced fashion, by Cuba’s 2018 vote simply cannot be explained otherwise.
My analysis of the Final Season 6 is not a popular one – “US heterosexual politics is bettered by showing that Claire Underwood was as bad as her husband” – but that is a necessary message in 2018; and by producing a “necessary message” House of Cards’ Final Season deserves praise and viewership.
But this unpopular analysis is unpopular and not promoted for a reason: capitalist Mainstream Media absolutely would absolutely adore it if men and women became convinced that they were pitted in permanent competition for (allegedly) limited resources instead of cooperating to share them equitably.
House of Cards hated by the right, unappreciated by the left
Season 1 was groundbreaking, appreciated and prize-winning because the 99% in the West feels the same way: Liberal Democracy has failed as a modern, democratic ideology…which has been clear worldwide since the Paris Commune.
The Final Season – with its dissident view that does not canonise White Soccer Moms – got mostly bad reviews from US Mainstream Media, close to its lowest ever, but significantly higher marks from the general public. I contend that it is because the Media elite were not prepared to accept that, yes, Claire – despite being female, and pregnant, and a widow, and in power – was just as morally and socio-politically atrocious as Frank. After all, the soap-opera plot twists were no more absurd in Season 6 compared with Season 2-5; what fundamentally changed is that the Final Season no longer seemed written by Democratic Party hacks.
The popularity of House of Cards is thought to rest almost entirely on Kevin Spacey’s amazing performance of reciting lines someone else wrote while not blinking; contrarily, I contend the Season One popularity stemmed from the fact that its rejection of the American system is what resounded and earned it so many viewers: Season One had a populist viewpoint.
That means that focusing on Spacey instead of appreciating this fact of populism is misguided, but predictable. I note that whereas France has an auteur-(writer/director)focused view of cinematic art, the US has an absurd actor-focused view. Perhaps this explains the US-leftist approach of “Free (the unimprisoned) Spacey”, instead of promoting House of Cards as dissident TV which was so vastly appreciated by the US “silent majority”.
Given its anti-American-system content, it’s not surprising that right-wing US media like The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal gave uniformly negative reviews to almost every season of House of Cards. Western rightists are so much more politically-astute than Western leftists, and they correctly identified the show as a major threat to the 1%. From The Washington Post article titled,“House of Cards insults our intelligence”:
“Maybe most irritating is the way “House of Cards” signals to us that Frank is a bad man. He’s a murderer, a man who has sex outside his marriage, a fellow who sells out a poor friend for political gain. But even though Frank’s transgressions are intimate and nasty, they’re actually relatively small-scale.”
Murder, to The Washington Post, is merely “irritating” – well, it certainly has always seemed that way with them; adultery is “small-scale” – I think many spouses do not feel that way, or at least their children hope so.
I refer to The Washington Post’s hilariously headlined article (given this article) “‘House of Cards’ is credible. Just ask the Russians, Chinese and Iranians”, LOL!
“In places like those, the show is a poisonous piece of soft power that validates toxic conspiracy theories and the anti-American propaganda of U.S. rivals like Russia, China and even Iran, all of which have avid viewers of the show.”
The series was considered so politically important that it was broadcast on Iranian TV; Putin reportedly recommended the show to officials as a way to better understand the United States.
That article only reaffirms the intellectual validity of this critique: I am not alone, I’m just not not going along with the American view; the opposition of right-wing media only reaffirms House of Cards’ “leftism-via-rejection”.
The Final Season was not the pro-matriarchal, accusatory, superior, misandry-fueling nonsense which is so popular in the US during our current era, and I applaud it for that. I think it is important that they rediscovered the dissident analysis which was the true reason of the success of Season One; rather crucially (if we can call TV crucial), Season Six’s dissidence confirms the cultural-political importance of Season One and proves it was not by accident. Leftist media should not forget this legacy, as the Mainstream Media will always ignore it favor of typically-capitalist “hero-worship” (even if the alleged hero is Kevin Spacey).
House of Cards only dissented and never promoted, probably because they are stuck in Western fake-leftism. “Underwoodism is bad” is not much of an ideology, but it does call attention to the anti-democratic dysfunction inherent in the US system. I was glad to see that House of Cards returned to its “limited dissidence” in its Final Season, and thus makes 1/3rd of the series not merely enjoyable but politically and socially useful.
For a similar TV series which actually had (semi) pro-socialist ideals – as impossible as that has been in the US for decades – I suggest the recently-completed show The Americans. I wrote a praising review following their finale, which can be found here.
Ramin Mazaheri is the chief correspondent in Paris for Press TV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea and elsewhere. His work has appeared in various journals, magazines and websites, as well as on radio and television. He can be reached on Facebook.
I don’t watch TV. Don’t even have one.
It was bad enough in the 1980’s, when I stopped wasting time with it. I am sure you can find a lot there to diagnose the illness of our society, but why on earth participate in it going forward?
Better let it (the major networks) die.
“Art” were to have a better chance of becoming ART, imho if not centralized by mind-programming psychopaths.
The term entrapment with regards to Tariq Ramadan is inappropriate, if he is innocent of any actus reus. Entrapment involves unethical means to discover a crime. I suspect that what the author has in mind is police-attempted subornation, i.e. where the police try to get one to commit a crime, where one lacked the mens rea. A borderline case of entrapment and subornation is where the police provide the means and encouragement, but leave the decision to the person to be prosecuted. A defence of entrapment is an acknowledgement of the actus reus, but calling for non-prosecution on a technicality.
The main US police practice is (attempted) subornation, with judicial collusion in prosecution when the desired actus reus is not perpetrated. Case in point, the fraudulent prosecution of Victor Bout—if the police were at all interested in Bout’s intention to sell arms to the FARC, they would have given him the opportunity, and arrested him at that point—a legitimate sting, which an illegitimate police force could not attempt.
Bout had previously applied for a US visa, and was turned down, after the US had made lurid allegations against Bout. Were the allegations legitimate, they would have issued him the visa, and arrested him at his port of entry. Mainly, they were still apoplectic because he had brought the French peacekeeping force (operation Turquoise) to Rwanda, thereby forcing Dallaire and Kagame to openly display their opposition to the deployment of peacekeepers. 130,000 lives were temporarily saved, although Dallaire did manage to get the peacekeepers removed.
Tariq Ramadan finally released on bail.
10 months, 0 convictions.
He was obviously detained this long simply to ruin his reputation.
Releasing him now proves the state’s case is full of holes, which everyone who follows the case already knew. Time after time French justice has made shockingly unfair and totally ungrounded decisions.
Major black eye for French justice, which is not merely Islamophobic but overtly anti-Muslim and full of double standards against this huge minority group, as well as being reactionary & pathetically hypocritical. The case will not be forgotten, but Islamic intellectuals will never be permanently repressed, though France certainly will try to.
To me Ramadan is a victim of the #MeToo movement: the movement was unfairly co-opted to inflict the maximum possible damage on the West’s leading Islamic intellectual. Only thing he seems to be guilty of is adultery, which is not a crime in any of the countries he has been charged in. Going to be tough for him to return to preaching because of that…. But take out the preaching aspect and it’s crystal clear: His case is extremely similar to Julian Assange, and French justice is heinously anti-Muslim
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/11/tariq-ramadan-granted-bail-france-sex-assault-case-181116070243611.html
“Entrapment involves unethical means to discover a crime. ”
I thought entrapment means causing/leading/enabling someone to commit a crime that he or she otherwise would not have committed. Which is ipso facto unethical, so no need for a qualifier.
Katherine
I refer to The Washington Post’s hilariously headlined article (given this article) “‘House of Cards’ is credible. Just ask the Russians, Chinese and Iranians”, LOL!
“In places like those, the show is a poisonous piece of soft power that validates toxic conspiracy theories and the anti-American propaganda of U.S. rivals like Russia, China and even Iran, all of which have avid viewers of the show.”
“Poisonous piece of soft power that validates toxic conspiracy theories and anti-American propaganda.”
LOL. That’s quite a spittle-flecked mouthful of accusations emanating from the Jeff Bezos/Washington Post!
Translation: House of Cards is guilty of an Anti-American Thought Crime!
The Washington Post is chewing the rug because this show is, to a degree, depicting the American political establishment (of which the Post has always been a mouthpiece for) as it really is.
In fact, House of Cards has got nothing on reality, as the crimes of the Trump, Clinton, Obama, and Bush are much worse than Frank or Carrie Underwood.
quote: “As a lifelong feminist I support the #MeToo movement. ”
Somehow I find this hard to believe from the most ardent defender of the Iranian ‘socialism’ that I know of.
According to the UNICEF, approximately 17% of Iranian girls are married before the age of 18.
According to the Islamic Republic civil code, the legal age of marriage in Iran is 13 for girls and 15 for boys.
However, the same Act allows girls below 13 and boys below 15 to married with the consent of their father or the permission of a court judge.
(Why not the consent of their mother?)
I thing most of these girls can shout out #metoo too, for the rest of their lives. :-(
I don’t think that I will ever see you defending the rights of these girls.
Even though you’re such a hardcore socialist and lifelong feminist. :-(((
I really hope that I will not see you defending the rights of guy people next time.
Almost every state in the US allows minors to marry, with about 1/3rd having no age limit at all.
France: legal age for marriage is 15, with consent of a parent. Legal age for sex: only 5-year olds and under cannot give consent, per France’s top court. Parliament just shot down an attempt to make it 15 years old, and that was even after outrage over a recent case which made international headlines – an 11 year old “consented” to sex with 30 year old man, per their courts. Having sex with minors is clearly deeply ingrained here…
Child marriage is seemingly a universal historical phenomenon, though changing, thankfully. I would imagine that child marriage is a relic from the times when the average person died around 40. Mores should improve on this issue worldwide.
Rik seems to believe that the West is leaps and bounds ahead of Iran on this issue, but he clearly doesn’t know the facts – they are not. And the countries which have made more gains on this issue – they have all been made merely in the past generation, or maybe the past two, but almost certainly not 3. Mores need to change on this issue worldwide.
Thanks for this reply.
I did not know that.
Since France is half my county, I am deeply ashamed. :-(((((
Well, the legal age for marriage in France is 18 (since 23/03/2006)
https://www.mariage.fr/conditions-mariage/conditions-mariage.php
But I understand what you mean.
Hi Rik,
Well, we all have to do a much better job of children’s rights. As somebody once wrote: a good 11th commandment would be “honor your children”.
But in France girls aged between 15 and 18 can be married with the consent of one parent. It is pretty surprising, given the international outcry over the two cases of 11-year girls having sex, that Macron’s parliament backed down on updating these laws.
I would imagine that in 50 years this is all viewed like foot-binding or slavery worldwide – a totally outdated concept, due to the revolutions in health as well as psychology.
What a well-written thought provoking article! Kudos to the author and The Saker for publishing it.
My wife is Greek and we have some girls we know married at 15 and pregnant at 16/17! Is this so bad? This is occurring only in villages in Greece. The man is usually 17/18. The families all support it too.
Meanwhile, in contemporary America I know many women in their late 30s/early 40s who want to get married and have kids, but they are past fertility stage…..
What is better? I don’t think “The West” can look down on “East”. Hypocrisy!!
“Is this so bad?”
You asked Ramin, not me, but I’ll respond anyway.
Yes, it is bad.
Even though young girls are technically fertile at ca. 12 or 13 (earlier and earlier t hese years), the girl’s body is not yet finished growing.
It is a physical stress on the body and results in nutrients being channeled to the foetus that the girl still needs for her own physical development.
“Teens are at a higher risk for pregnancy-related high blood pressure (preeclampsia) and its complications than average age mothers. Risks for the baby include premature birth and low birth weight. Preeclampsia can also harm the kidneys or even be fatal for mother or baby.
Pregnant teens also have a higher chance of becoming anemic. Anemia is a reduction in the number of red blood cells (RBCs). This can make you feel weak and tired and can affect your baby’s development.
Giving birth in the United States is safer than ever, but it’s still more dangerous for a teen than for a woman 20 or older. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), complications during pregnancy or childbirth are the leading cause of death globally for girls ages 15 to 19.”
https://www.healthline.com/health/adolescent-pregnancy#effect-on-teen-mothers
Katherine
Dear Ramin,
About the metoo phenomenon i see it as an effect of something else. White women’s burden.
White women’s burden successor to white men’s burden (the fact that only the west has attained progress and they must instill it into us the savages by way of force bcoz our little tiny brains just don’t get.
And here you thought they colonized you murdered and massacred you to steal your land and make slaves and let out their frustrations by raping women and children and so they could live their fantasies of superiority of God’s chosen people. Nah why would you think such a thing? People these days are so cynical. No the west murdered you massacred you enslaved because they know whats good for you, its just you with the inferiror culture just cant get to progress on your own, so we have to bomb you for you to get there.Plus you never thank us! its always violence with you,savages, hence the burden part. Did you ever try to bathe a cat? Thats the exact image)
I once heard a frenchmen say to an Algerian if it werent for us you still wouldnt have roads. You can guess what the Algerian did.)
Now onto to white women’s burden its a phenomenon where western women convinced of their own superiority and the fact they have attained their rights in western societies now they want to share that knowledge to shape other women in their image (bcoz other women r inferior bcoz to them they arent fighting for their rights and r content with submissive behavior inherent in the culture/s)
I once heard a frenchwomen(the boss) say to an algerian engineer i am going to teach you how to respect women, i understand you dont have that in your culture (he litterarly didn’t do anything at that point it was his first day)
She told this to an algerian. It boggles the mind because Algeria has more women instem fields than men, as does Iran btw, directly opposite the west. Plus algeria has the highest number of female army generals, 9btw the closet country next has like 3.
Where there is inequality, there will be suppression. Most suppressed are women of color. Especially in ghettos where they are nothing more but toilets for brutish walking dildo men. MeToo# is mostly middle/upper middle class white female movement.
I shall not watch the show but Ramin’s synopsis reminds me of Shakespeare’s “MacBeth and his Fiend-Like Queen”. Written to divert public attention from the witch hunts of Scottish James, and the terror of successive Tudor regimes. Shakespeare dared not question the twin regicides by which the ancestors of James and Elizabeth grabbed power — in fact, he glorified them. I do not know whether this TV show whitwashes the crimes by which the Bush/Cheney regime set up the present U$ House of Cards — the False Flag of 911, the demolition of WTC with murder of 3,000 New Yorkers trapped inside, the 4,000 U$ military casualties for a WMD Lie, the House of Lies for successive POTU$As from Bush to Trump — but I do know (from the above synopsis) that House of Cards is as much an attempt to divert a cowed and silent U$ public from looking into the real workings of State Terror in the White House as Macbeth & Richard3 were Shakespeares attempt to divert a cowed English public from looking too deeply into the State Terror apparatus of King James, Queen Elizabeth and their immediate predecessors.
Anonymous makes a similar observation at 5.45 above:
“In fact, House of Cards has got nothing on reality, as the crimes of the Trump, Clinton, Obama, and Bush are much worse than Frank or Carrie Underwood.”
But I go further: I suggest that House of Cards is like ShakeSpear’s Macbeth and Richard Third: a deliberate attempt to divert public attention away from the real political crimes of the Establishment by setting up a couple of lurid Grand Guignol villains for the audience to boo at.
Really enjoyed this essay.
But I don’t agree with this “commonsense” view:
” A man who is accused by one or two people deserves the total presumption of innocence; there are SO MANY allegations against Spacey that it really strains credibility to claim that there is a “conspiracy” against him. He is accused by something like 20 people, including minors! Such a person has a lot of explaining to do, and immediately, and from a place where his freedom is drastically restricted until he is proven not to be such a vast, Underwoodian menace.”
Where is the borderline after one accusation/ innocent until proven guilty where it turns into guilty as accused with no evidence but physical confinement just in case?
There is no such line.
In the case of one accusation, the standard is innocent until proven guilty.
In the case of two accusations, the standard is innocent until proven guilty.
In the case of twenty accusations, IMO the same standard applies.
Without any kind of trial or production of witnesses or evidence, Spacey has already been punished and, in effect, professionally “confined.”
What are the obstacles to bringing charges and indictments?
Why hasn’t this happened?
Statute of limitations, perhaps?
Let’s not throw out the law books and the Bill of Rights for this.
Katherine
i tried watching it when the first season appeared since the UK version was very entertaining. seeing a 99% white cast in a show that supposedly takes place in DC plus spacey’s painful foghorn leghorn accent made it difficult to suspend any disbelief. i made it through 1.5 episodes then moved on.
putin may have recommended the show to people and that’s fine but he should instead point them toward “american psycho” (which, in mary harron’s hands, became more of a feminist commentary than anything oozed out by dunham and her fellow hipsters) and “full metal jacket”. both show the essence of america on the home front and in the battlefield, respectively. both are also based on highly recommended books.
in any case, your entire giant text wall essay fell apart when you even insinuated that the death penalty is suitable for punishing rape (or any sexual offense, i’m assuming). even putting aside how often capital punishment is used against the groups you ostensibly defend (blacks, hispanics, other underclass folks) or that many are later found to have been innocent OR that it’s the ultimate expression of abusing state power (not much different than war) it’s absurd to suggest that violating someone sexually is equal to murdering the violator: guilty or not.
My “giant text wall essay”? It’s divided up into sections, plenty of paragraphs for easy reading….
I don’t know why you are “assuming” I advocate capital punishment for “any sexual offense” – that’s a huge leap and a huge mistake on your part.
But you do make a good point that: in capitalist-imperialist countries like the West, and America especially, minorities would be unfairly victimized. Their justice systems are fundamentally opposed to the poor or the notion of equality under the law.
However, in countries where the death penalty has been chosen to be part of their system as a deterrent, I think using it for the crime of rape is appropriate. Rape absolutely ruins the lives of many victims; the societal consequences are beyond measure, as well. So, I have many other issues I’d like to see resolved before we start talking about taking away the ultimate deterrent against the rape of women and children (and men too).
I called #MeToo a revolution because a revolution against sexual crimes is absolutely needed – it’s been seemingly a universal plague throughout human history, and solutions need to be found immediately for the well-being of society. If rape doesn’t merit the harshest punishment a society believes in…then I would say that society is undervaluing women and acting as if rape is “not that big a deal”, as you seem to believe. It is a big deal, and I note that war, murder and rape went hand in hand for millennia, and often still does.
Ramin, thank you for offering words, well-placed; such as, “(You shall not kill is Commandment #6; You shall not bear false witness is #9 )” – now Ramin – we have before us – either : “schizophrenia in God” : or : “scribal error” : whatever your inherent merit to the plural term God (Eloh[e]im of Genesis), (btw: the Muses of Fate speak thus: “The fate of the Iranian Socialist World Revolution hinges on comprehension – whether The Mullahs of God fully understand if God can speak not or not” – my two cents: “choose not not”. Why? God of any and all before or after Gods cannot speak in “not” terms. Never. “Not” is naught. So check your interpretation, not your translation), Viva la Revolution!
I watched the first 5 seasons. First was best but I finished each season within a week of release. Season 6 I switched off after 10 minutes. So tired of the blatant attempts of the cultural marxists to divide us. Better brainwashing options IMO. But some (men and women) like seeing women capable of being as psycho as some of us men. Equality or something. So enjoy.
My advice to any who want to watch this. Go find the original British version instead. It is much better.
It took me awhile to watch this. It is not ‘binge-watching’ material. Its more like I get bored with it and turn it off at some point in each episode, then have to come back later and watch the rest.
For instance, there’s those little asides when the character speaks to the camera. Ian Richardson did them brilliantly in the British version. The American version never quite pulled them off. Spacey tried, but its more like the screen writers and the production team didn’t understand them, that they were just there because the Brit version had them. Most of the time, they need to be short one-liners. The character is playing the scene, then he looks quickly towards the camera/audience and delivers a little one-liner that reveals all. The Americans never got that. Spacey got close, Wright nowhere near it. She just seems to think its a time for her close-up.
Yes, the women can be bad too. To me, the world has known that since at least Maggie Thatcher. Its not news, even if the modern propaganda appears to have a moment of convenient forgetting. I’ve worked for women who had a bit of power in a corporate structure, and they were just like the men in being willing to abuse that power. No surprise there.
The first season was decent because they largely just followed and adapted the British script. Most of the seasons after that weren’t really that good an just made me want to get the old British DVDs. The American version is tamer in some very important ways, especially in the post 9-11 world, which I suppose is why the Americans wouldn’t go there. And the British version had a very good ending, where this was just a slow death to the suffering audience.
But anyone who’s surprised by the lack of character, by the scrapping dog-fight of trying to gain power and doing whatever it takes, simply hasn’t really ever met an American politician…. any of them. And you mostly still can you know. Meet them. They need suckers to work their campaigns, and from that need they do let people get close enough to really see them.
Much of this season was based on the myth of the “nuclear football.”
You know, the story that a military officer is always close to the President with a suitcase full of secret codes. The story supports the myth that in the American democracy, only the elected President can launch nuclear weapons.
Read Daniel Ellsberg’s book The Doomsday Machine.
The movie Dr. Strangelove does a good job of explaining why this is a myth. The only restraint on using nuclear weapons to destroy the other power is Mutually Assured Destruction. That’s the effect of Deterrence. But, for the Deterrence to be credible, it can not be only the elected President who can launch nuclear weapons. That just invites an attempt to kill the President just before the nuclear first strike is launched. The evil-doers had to know for sure that such a plan would never possibly work, and the way to do that is to make sure that officers below the President have the ability to launch nuclear weapons.
Back during Eisenhower, Ike had given the various theater commanders the authority to launch nuclear weapons to ensure deterrence. Most of those theater commanders had passed the same authority down the chain of command for the same reason. In the movie Dr. Strangelove, Col Jack D Ripper really did have the ability to launch a nuclear war. And his real-life counterparts, be they men or women, have the same.
And, remember, the US military made it crystal-clear early in Trump’s administration that they didn’t feel like they had to obey an order from Trump to launch nuclear weapons. The US military can launch a nuclear attack without the President, and the US military can also ignore the President’s order to do so. The officer carrying the nuclear football around behind the President is just for show.