Is Richard Dawkins Reviving Eugenics?

The recent furore over the controversial BBC documentary ‘Storyville: India’s Daughters’ has now drawn distinguished biologist and militant atheist Richard Dawkins into the fray. The film examines the values and mindsets of the rapists, and interviews the two lawyers who defended the men convicted of Jyoti’s rape and murder in 2012 on a Delhi bus. India’s Senior minister Rajnath Singh claims BBC has ‘breached conditions’ by broadcasting the rape documentary.

Dawkins tweeted:

Here, Dawkins effectively argues that the rapists acted the way they did because, in their eyes, “Nirbhaya” (Jyoti Singh) had allegedly violated some cultural norm by going out with an unrelated male.

‘Traditional’ rape culture? Anyone ‘rational’ as Dawkins claims to be can hardly have missed the obvious, because speaking of ‘traditional’ rape culture, Britain has it to saturation point. The relaxation of laws surrounding selling of alcohol have les to nightmare scenes of violence and sexual assault as a regular weekend feature on the streets of any medium sized urban concentration. If this is not enough this whole culture is exported to party venues such as Ibiza.

The more adventurous British sexual tourists go further afield to Thailand, Sri Lanka, and above all the Philippines where they can indulge their sick fantasies in the rape of children. This is what allowed veteran rock star Gary Glitter to act out his depraved mind on children in Vietnam.

But we need not go so far as this. Recent revelations have demonstrated the inadequacy and even collusion of the ruling elite, establishment and those with any power in the rape and abuse of children.

Sexual violence has been a regular feature in homes run by the Catholic Church for vulnerable children. But Dawkins’ very own secular brand of care homes for the young are not far behind.

Years after his death Liberal MP Cyril Smith has been exposed as a serial rapist and child abuser. The timely death of former Conservative MP and later Eurocrat Leon Brittan also saved him from any scrutiny inn his lifetime, as recent exposes revealed the extent of child abuse by the political establishment protected by powerful figures in the British government at the time.

But most damning of all is the culture within the BBC which allowed entertainer Jimmy Saville to rape children, sexually molest women, and even have sex with corpses. He was far from alone. Malcolm Muggeridge, the devoutly Christian film maker who made Mother Teresa such a celebrity for running disease ridden slum dwellings, was himself known to freely molest any women he wished, with complete impunity.

The failing of police to protect vulnerable teenage and even pre-teen girls from grooming by gangs running entire networks of sexual exploitation in Rotherham and Oxford indicate not just incompetence, but even collusion.

One of the reasons given is that the exploited girls are overwhelmingly white and the gangs themselves are run by men of largely Pakistani origin. So they want to avoid racial and religious stereotyping. None of this was in evidence when it comes to exposing India as somehow the world’s rape epicentre.

Again this sexual violence was for export. Under the guise of charity, the child migration scheme of Home Children in1869, sent more than 100,000 children were sent from the United Kingdom to Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa.
Forgotten Australians are the estimated 500,000 children and child migrants who experienced care in institutions or outside a home setting in Australia during the twentieth century. Many of these children suffered from neglect and were abused physically, emotionally or sexually while in care. Child migrants were adopted or brought up in children’s homes, institutions, orphanages or foster care.

Most of these children experienced neglect and abuse while in institutional care by the churches, the Christian Brothers or prestigious institutions such as Banardo’s. Here rape, beatings and torture were part of the ‘culture’ of ‘care’. Now with spiralling education costs, university students are being drawn into ‘Sugar Baby’ business to entertain richer older men for vast sums of money.

The hike in university fees has also led to an influx of young women into selling sex, which is now seen as not just glamorous, but a career in itself. Combine that with the proliferation of instant pornography, social breakdown, increasing numbers of homeless, and other dysfunctional factors and the thin line between destitution and ‘choice’ becomes ever more blurred; and with it the distinction between rape and consent.

An entire industry of PUAs (Pick Up Artists) makes lavish sums from running seminars on how men can ‘bag’ any girl they want with the correct psychological assault. Sometimes the assault advised is not just mental, but becomes physical with superstar PUAs such as America’s Julien Blanc.

But then why should that surprise us? In America sexual assault is rampant on university and college campuses. The right connections and especially the power to donate funds to the institution from lucrative alumni networks ensures immunity for the rapist.

Dawkins merely revamps the old colonialist mission of the White Man’s Burden, that famous poem by Rudyard Kipling in which he urged his fellow white Britons to spread Christianity and ‘civilisation’ among the dark-skinned heathens who were spiritually and culturally enslaved to idols, fetishes and witch doctors.

This at a time when Jack the Ripper was murdering prostitutes in East End of London and where the age of consent had only recently been raised to sixteen – yet child prostitution remained rampant. But the Victorians thought it more important to cover piano legs because they were too sexualised.

In India the British Raj clamped down on what they regarded as indecent displays of sensuality, such as public dancing. Yet these policies actually increased a voracious sex trade as artists found no other option. Sometimes the sex trade was actively encouraged with the Cantonment Acts regulated and structured prostitution in the British military bases.

It was seen as necessary to stave off boredom among soldiers and to reinforce imperial dominance through sexual control of Indian women Each regiment contained about a thousand soldiers. These women were kept in brothels called chaklas. They were licensed by military officials and were allowed to consort with soldiers only.

Most of the women came from poor families and had no other opportunities for social or economic independence. The structural inequalities that pushed women into prostitution were often enforced by the colonial governments. Indian women were not seen as violated or as victims when they engaged in prostitution with British men, and one reason for this was that the British believed that Indian women were inherently sexual, so prostitution would not offend them.

Concerns over trafficking were restricted to European sex workers in what was termed ‘White Slavery’. One 1917 committee report by the Government of India claimed that homosexuality would invariably take hold if men were denied access to women. Many British citizens viewed homosexuality as non-British perverse behaviour. They often believed that same-sex practices were “natural” to other peoples, such as Indians, Arabs, and Africans. The sordid legacy survives in places like Mumbai which has become a centre of child prostitution as a direct result of the British colonial sexual exploitation policies.

Dawkins himself achieved notoriety in 2014. Anita Singh wrote in The Telegraph that the academic wrote how violent date rape’ is worse than ‘mild date rape’ in Twitter comments that angered campaigners

The academic and author also differentiated between “mild pedophilia” and “violent pedophilia” in a Twitter row about language and logic.

After facing condemnation from other Twitter users, Prof Dawkins withdrew from the argument by saying: “What I have learned today is that there are people on Twitter who think in absolutist terms, to an extent I wouldn’t have believed possible.” But in his remarks about India, he has himself spoken as an ‘absolutist’.

With all his supposed intelligence that he claims atheists and humanists exhibit in a master race which he terms ‘Brights’ one would have thought that making sweeping generalisations about India would have been something he would have avoided, especially since there is a rape culture in his own backyard. Holly Dustin, Co-Director of the End Violence Against Women Coalition, said his comments were an insult to survivors of rape:

Shami Chakrabarti of Liberty said her “jaw dropped” when she heard of Prof Dawkins’ comments.

Dawkins has previously claimed that he was the victim of “mild paedophilia” during his childhood, when he and other boys were molested by a prep school teacher, but insisted: “I don’t think he did any of us any lasting damage.” Judging by his comments on India and ideas of ‘mild’ rape, perhaps it did. The lasting damage of this racist attitude is only now coming to the fore.

On 9 March 2014, Jamie Campbell of the Independent newspaper reported that Professor Annette G. Beck-Sickinger, at Leipzig University rejected an Indian student for internship y at her institution because:

When the applicant replied saying that he believed Professor Beck-Sickinger to overly generalising, she replied that:

She added that she felt “multi-rape” crimes in India were emblematic of the country’s attitude to women and added that the rejection of male Indian students for these reasons was a practice carried out by “many female professors” in Germany. But if we are going to use statistics in the same manner that Dawkins’ religious detractors furnish religious texts to justify their beliefs and actions, we find some disturbing facts which Dawkins and Beck-Sickinger overlooked. According to crime statistics on website Nation Master, Germany has the 43rd highest proportionate rate of rape in the world whilst India is in equal 94th.

Within hours German ambassador Michael Steiner strongly objected to the “discriminating generalisation” in a strongly worded comment to the professor at Leipzig, as reported by the Indian Express 

One need only look at Germany’s recent past, from the Holocaust to violent attacks on foreigners by ultranationalists and neo-Nazi terrorist groups to look at how successful that country has not been able to solve the problem of racism, intolerance and finally laying Hitler’s ghost to rest. Yet nobody would be correct in saying that Germany was a country full of nothing but Nazi terrorists. How would that sound? It would sound like an absolutist sweeping generalisation that pandered to ethnic, racial and cultural ignorance. Which is exactly what Dawkins is guilty of and helps give intellectual fodder to fellow academics such as Beck-Sickinger.