Today’s blog entry was inspired by this brutally revealing GQ article. It does not make for light and pleasant reading, but I ask you to read it anyway, because it is only by understanding and acknowledging that things like this can and do happen that we can find the way and the will to stop them.

The gist is that men get raped in the military too. And unsurprisingly, men are far, far less likely to report it than women, and women aren’t exactly eager to do so either. Men are ganged up on, brutally raped, told that they will be killed if they speak a word of it to anyone, and if they do try to report it, they are met with a system that is perfectly willing to slap them with a mental illness label and give them a dishonorable discharge, thus wrecking the victim’s lives forever. And because their discharge is a dishonorable one, they cannot even get help from the VA. It is a most perfect hell.

This saddens me but does not surprise me. Absolutely anywhere there is unchecked power and insufficient scrutiny, especially in a highly charged, testosterone laden atmopshere, the darkness within men’s souls will rise and corruption of the worst possible kid will creep in, take hold, then take over.

And it is always the same kinds of evils. When power can use its power to protect itself from accountability, you always get the same evils of power, sex, and greed – the reptile takes over from the monkey.

But it not just the people with power who do these evil deeds that are to blame. They are merely the active component of a system far bigger than their little spiderwebs, and that system protects them not because it approves of their actions, but because people prefer to believe that these things do not happen.

Here’s how that works :

Suppose you are a child psychologist in the 1970’s. A very troubled patient of yours, an eight year old girl, has just tearfully told you that her father routinely and brutally sexually abuses her. What do you do?

From the point of view of the here and now, this is an easy question. You counsel the girl, report her father to Social Services and local police, Dad goes to jail, end of story.

But from the point of view of that child psychologist, the world has just split in two and he has a choice to face.

He could accept that what the girl is saying is true, and have his entire world view shattered. He would have to accept that this sort of thing really does happen and that would change everything he thought he knew about love, family, innocence, and the nature of evil. He would have to live the rest of his life in a much harsher, colder, crueler world, and sacrifice his entire sense of security and safety.

Or, he could call her a liar, get her out of his office, and go back to the world he lived in before that awful little girl opened her mouth and said those awful things. The steel shutters of total denial go down in his mind, he tells himself “it can’t be true. That kind of thing just doesn’t happen.”, and goes back to his life, never thinking about it again and going back to his more “normal” clients, of whom he has plenty.

We know which of those choices is right. But we also know which one is easier, and therefore which one he is most likely to choose. He’s only human, after all.

And that’s how evil grows.

If you want to get away with evil, simply do the unthinkable. Commit crimes so unspeakable that people do not want to think that kind of thing happens at all. If you do this, you will enlist a powerful ally called denial. Good, decent, wholesome people who are kind and benevolent and good citizens will commit profound crimes of negligence and heartlessness by turning away your victims, or even attack your victim themselves, simply because they want to preserve their candy-colored world view, where such things simply don’t happen.

That is why the world will always need those of us who are willing to go directly into the very heart of darkness in order to learn what is there and how to stop it. It needs those of us who are willing to give up all our illusions of comfort and safety in order to find the evil that lurks within the heart of humanity, and by exposure, destroy it.

People like myself, who are willing to think and ask questions like… exactly how does a rape gang organize itself? It’s not something you can advertise. Somehow, like-minded people find each other, and somehow the first time they find a victim and do the deed happens, and after that, they can do it again and again without ever mentioning it out loud. They just know what to expect will happen when they get together.

And in the case of men raping men, how much of a role does internalized homophobia play? It is clearly not about the sex. If the perpetrators were just looking for gay sex, they could have sex with one another.

But if they did that, there would be no way to deny to themselves that they are gay. Only by making the sex as violent, brutal, and most importantly dominating as possible can they reassure themselves that they are, as it were, the man in the relationship, and therefore not gay at all.

That would be at least a partial explanation of why, time and time again, when men have unchecked power over other men, the Abu Ghraib scenario repeats itself over and over and things always get more and more sexual.

If you want to know the true heart of darkness, that is it : the darkness in the hearts of humanity coupled will power using power to prevent accountability, and the public’s desire to maintain a happier worldview than reality will allow.

Now you understand why I am pro-surveillance.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.