The Iranian Whore and the Population Anxieties of the Modern world
November 22nd 2006 05:37
I have been writing about population fears in the ancient world. Here's an article that's been doing the rounds of conservative blogs all around that focuses on the rise of prostitution in Iran and the consequent death of Iran itself. Go read the entire article, it's worth your time.
Prostitution, for the author, is the symbol of a society in decline. The article tries to analyse what this means in the Islamic context but also uses a general view of population anxiety to bolster the case.
First, the import of widespread prostitution:
Wars are won by destroying the enemy's will to fight. A nation is never really beaten until it sells its women.
The French sold their women to the German occupiers in 1940, and the Germans and Japanese sold their women to the Americans after World War II. The women of the former Soviet Union are still selling themselves in huge numbers. Hundreds of thousands of female Ukrainian "tourists" entered Germany after the then-foreign minister Joschka Fischer loosened visa standards in 1999. That helps explain why Ukraine has the world's fastest rate of population decline. On a smaller scale, trafficking in Iranian women explains Iran's predicament.
Therefore:
To understand Iranian politics, cherchez les femmes: the fate of Iranian women sheds light on the eccentricity of President Mahmud Ahmadinejad. By Spengler's Universal Law of Gender Parity, the men and women of every place and every time deserve each other. A corollary to this universal law states that the battered Iranian whore is the alter ego of the swaggering Iranian jihadi.
There are many interesting allusions from history and even the relationship to literature. Why is it that a prostitute has been singled out as a symbol for decline of the people?
What is it that persuades women to employ their bodies as an instrument of commerce, rather than as a way of achieving motherhood? It is not just poverty, for poor women bear children everywhere. In the case of Iran, deracination and cultural despair impel millions of individual women to eschew motherhood. Prostitution is a form of psychic suicide; writ large, it is a manifestation of the national death-wish, the hideous recognition that the world no longer requires Ukrainians or Moldovans.
And now for the application of this theory to Iranian example:
Iranians already behave like a defeated people. That is why they are so unstable, and so dangerous. The new Persian Empire masquerading as an Islamic Republic is a wounded beast. The rural misery and urban squalor that drive Iranian women into the brothels of Dubai and Brussels contrasts sharply with neighboring Azerbaijan, whose economy will double in size by 2010 as new oilfields come online, according to the CIA World Factbook.
And now Spengler comes to an especailly relevant section for our blog, for we have been trying to track just such anixieties in world literature:
The crisis of modernization first of all is a crisis of faith, and the attenuation of religious faith is the root cause of the birth-rate bust in the modern world. Traditional society is everywhere fragile, not only in the Islamic world; by definition it is bounded by values and expectations handed down from the past, to which individuals must submit. Once the bands of tradition are broken and each individual may choose for herself what sort of family to raise, religious faith becomes the decisive motivation for bringing children into the world ...
The collapse of traditional society has brought about a collapse of birth rates across cultures. Cultures that fail to reproduce themselves by definition are failed cultures, for the simple reason that they will cease to exist before many generations have passed.
Curiously enough this links to Islamism even though all over the world, whether in India or in Europe, th rates of Muslim growth are a matter of anxiety. it is perhaps ironical that Mulsims everywhere should be flourishing but Iran be the odd man out:
That is why the Islamists - Muslims who seek a new theocracy - display a sense of extreme urgency. They are not conservative Muslims, for they reject Muslim society as it exists as corrupt and decadent. They are revolutionaries who want to create a new kind of totalitarian theocracy that orders every detail of human life.
And back to the prostitution and tying up both the concepts:
Nothing is more threadbare than the claim of Islamists to defend Muslim womanhood. Islamist radicals (like the penny-a-marriage mullahs of Iran) are the world's most prolific pimps. The same networks that move female flesh across borders also provide illegal passage for jihadis, and the proceeds of human trafficking often support Islamist terrorists. From Jakarta to Kuala Lumpur to Sarajevo to Tirana, the criminals who trade in women overlap with jihadist networks. Prostitutes serve the terror network in a number of capacities, including suicide bombing. The going rate for a Muslim woman who can pass for a European to carry a suicide bomb currently is more than US$100,000. The Persian prostitute is the camp follower of the jihadi, joined to him in a pact of national suicide.
When Soviet Russia fell, the Russian prostitute became a common symbol of the Brotherhood, to imply how capitalism has taken this once proud country to the dogs. Remember Dirty But Clean's Ludmilla's Broken English. Will the brotherhood so rise up and use the Iranian prostitute to depict Iran's descent into fascist totalitarianism?
You can read my other post here.
Prostitution, for the author, is the symbol of a society in decline. The article tries to analyse what this means in the Islamic context but also uses a general view of population anxiety to bolster the case.
First, the import of widespread prostitution:
Wars are won by destroying the enemy's will to fight. A nation is never really beaten until it sells its women.
The French sold their women to the German occupiers in 1940, and the Germans and Japanese sold their women to the Americans after World War II. The women of the former Soviet Union are still selling themselves in huge numbers. Hundreds of thousands of female Ukrainian "tourists" entered Germany after the then-foreign minister Joschka Fischer loosened visa standards in 1999. That helps explain why Ukraine has the world's fastest rate of population decline. On a smaller scale, trafficking in Iranian women explains Iran's predicament.
Therefore:
To understand Iranian politics, cherchez les femmes: the fate of Iranian women sheds light on the eccentricity of President Mahmud Ahmadinejad. By Spengler's Universal Law of Gender Parity, the men and women of every place and every time deserve each other. A corollary to this universal law states that the battered Iranian whore is the alter ego of the swaggering Iranian jihadi.
There are many interesting allusions from history and even the relationship to literature. Why is it that a prostitute has been singled out as a symbol for decline of the people?
What is it that persuades women to employ their bodies as an instrument of commerce, rather than as a way of achieving motherhood? It is not just poverty, for poor women bear children everywhere. In the case of Iran, deracination and cultural despair impel millions of individual women to eschew motherhood. Prostitution is a form of psychic suicide; writ large, it is a manifestation of the national death-wish, the hideous recognition that the world no longer requires Ukrainians or Moldovans.
And now for the application of this theory to Iranian example:
Iranians already behave like a defeated people. That is why they are so unstable, and so dangerous. The new Persian Empire masquerading as an Islamic Republic is a wounded beast. The rural misery and urban squalor that drive Iranian women into the brothels of Dubai and Brussels contrasts sharply with neighboring Azerbaijan, whose economy will double in size by 2010 as new oilfields come online, according to the CIA World Factbook.
And now Spengler comes to an especailly relevant section for our blog, for we have been trying to track just such anixieties in world literature:
The crisis of modernization first of all is a crisis of faith, and the attenuation of religious faith is the root cause of the birth-rate bust in the modern world. Traditional society is everywhere fragile, not only in the Islamic world; by definition it is bounded by values and expectations handed down from the past, to which individuals must submit. Once the bands of tradition are broken and each individual may choose for herself what sort of family to raise, religious faith becomes the decisive motivation for bringing children into the world ...
The collapse of traditional society has brought about a collapse of birth rates across cultures. Cultures that fail to reproduce themselves by definition are failed cultures, for the simple reason that they will cease to exist before many generations have passed.
Curiously enough this links to Islamism even though all over the world, whether in India or in Europe, th rates of Muslim growth are a matter of anxiety. it is perhaps ironical that Mulsims everywhere should be flourishing but Iran be the odd man out:
That is why the Islamists - Muslims who seek a new theocracy - display a sense of extreme urgency. They are not conservative Muslims, for they reject Muslim society as it exists as corrupt and decadent. They are revolutionaries who want to create a new kind of totalitarian theocracy that orders every detail of human life.
And back to the prostitution and tying up both the concepts:
Nothing is more threadbare than the claim of Islamists to defend Muslim womanhood. Islamist radicals (like the penny-a-marriage mullahs of Iran) are the world's most prolific pimps. The same networks that move female flesh across borders also provide illegal passage for jihadis, and the proceeds of human trafficking often support Islamist terrorists. From Jakarta to Kuala Lumpur to Sarajevo to Tirana, the criminals who trade in women overlap with jihadist networks. Prostitutes serve the terror network in a number of capacities, including suicide bombing. The going rate for a Muslim woman who can pass for a European to carry a suicide bomb currently is more than US$100,000. The Persian prostitute is the camp follower of the jihadi, joined to him in a pact of national suicide.
When Soviet Russia fell, the Russian prostitute became a common symbol of the Brotherhood, to imply how capitalism has taken this once proud country to the dogs. Remember Dirty But Clean's Ludmilla's Broken English. Will the brotherhood so rise up and use the Iranian prostitute to depict Iran's descent into fascist totalitarianism?
You can read my other post here.
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Comment by Adrian
Philosophy Blog
I'm going to assert that there usually is some sort of correlation between the number of prostitutes, and the desperation of the populace.
But, reading over the white text above, I don't know if you necessarily disagree with this; I just get the impression you're cynical generally of the article.
Comment by Justin
I've never realised this facet of gender discrimination save a few short documentaries on the urban single mother poor in Iran saving their families by turning to prostitution yet degrading their commitments to their religion and their self-esteem.
This is perhaps why Islam hasn't conceived of a reformation of types that Christianity has undergone a few times - from the censoring of political bodies by gender to reinstigate a flailing model of action towards Western economy.
Comment by nagster
Cenacle
I am not cynical about the article. In fact, I'd say I appreciate the correlation between widespread prostitution and decline of populace which I'd never thought of before. The only thing that bothers me though is whether I'd take it as far as the author did.
But, my whole purpose was to highlight this article because I've been thinking and wanting to write about this issue, the fears of puplation death and its effect on mental landscape and this article came in handy.
Comment by nagster
Cenacle
I never realised that the problem was widespreda and so desperate either.