Science of the Social Credit Measured in Terms of Human Satisfaction
Christian based service movement warning about threats to rights and freedom irrespective of the label, Science of the Social Credit Measured in Terms of Human Satisfaction

"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing"
Edmund Burke

Science of the Social Credit Measured in Terms of Human Satisfaction

1 February 2013 Thought for the Week:

Economic Democracy was written long before the depression; nevertheless, to anyone who could grasp its thesis it provided an instant understanding of the depression. That was of considerable interest and importance, no doubt, but it was not what made the impact on my mind.

What possessed me was the fact that Economic Democracy represented a perfectly unitary concept of the greatest profundity. It was clearly the key to an understanding of diverse problems of political economy.

So it has proved. History appears to the Social Crediter as crystalised politics, as Douglas put it, and no longer as a string of disconnected and unrelated episodes.

- - Dr. Bryan Monahan, “Why I Am a Social Crediter”, 1947  


FURTHER LEAGUE INITIATIVES IN ORDER TO SERVE THE PEOPLE

Visitors to the League website will now have access to three more historical and political resources:

Mayo MP3 Library
• Frances Hutchinson’s “The New Home Economics” series
The New Times (not to be confused with NewTimes Survey).

On the Mayo MP3 the late Jeremy Lee asks: “How Can the Whole World Be In Debt?”
On the ALORBlog Frances Hutchinson (an economist) and chairman of the Social Credit Secretariat has produced a series, “The New Home Economics” for you to download.
The New Times was published from 1935 to 1999 and provided readers with an independent commentary on Political and Economic affairs.
As you browse The New Times, note carefully how both the Liberal/National’s and Labor’s policies (and therefore philosophy) slowly changed.

Labor, of course, once saw itself as the defender of the rights and conditions of the working class (I doubt if many of the present incumbents of the Labor hierarchy have ever soiled their hands) and of course Liberals/Nationals presented themselves as defenders of the rights of the conservative businessman and farmer. One wonders how many of the present Liberal/ National politicians have actually conducted an independent business or worked a farm and truly understand the stresses and strains these people now come under.

The December 1999 edition carried these words:
The Gospel of The Kingdom: There is now a dawning realisation that the gospel has been fractured, and part buried. The gospel of individual salvation has been sanitised and quarantined from any application of Christianity to the social order.
In other words, many have arrived at a position where Christianity has nothing to do with the legal, constitutional, economic and financial systems on earth. They will have to take care of themselves until some future direct intervention of God Himself.”  


WHAT IN THE REAL WORLD IS ‘UNSUSTAINABLE’?

by Betty Luks
Open any newspaper these days and you will read that this or that is ‘not sustainable’. Interestingly, Liberal Senator Cori Bernardi has published his ‘unsustainable’ list for this year of our Lord – 2013AD. The Unsustainable Path (Cory Bernardi)

He writes: “The unsustainability to which I refer is that brought about by our government and the entitlement mentality that has been encouraged through policy positions. Put simply, we are living beyond our means economically and eventually we will have to confront the consequences of that position. Actually, we might not personally have to but at some point in the future one generation of Australians will. For too long we have been taking from tomorrow so we can ease the problems of today.
This is what governments across the globe have been doing for decades. The result has been the biggest bubble ever seen; an unsustainable bubble in cradle to grave welfare, debt and deficit and government promises that can never be fulfilled.
“… Australia is on an unsustainable path. I know that conjures up images of the Green basket-weavers and their pious lectures about limited food and energy but I don’t buy those Malthusian arguments. Mankind is an innovative species and I have great confidence in our ability to provide for our future demands in a growing world…”

The senator is quite right, there are matters of concern that we must deal with but I want to look at these ‘matters of concern’ from another angle.
Senator Bernardi thinks that “…we are living beyond our means economically and eventually we will have to confront the consequences of that position…” and yes, “for too long we have been taking from tomorrow so we can ease the problems of today.

Is he writing about the real world in which we live?
I don’t think so. Further along he dismisses any concerns ‘green groups’ might have about the sustainability of agricultural production in this land. “Australia is on an unsustainable path. I know that conjures up images of the Green basket-weavers and their pious lectures about limited food and energy but I don’t buy those Malthusian arguments. Mankind is an innovative species and I have great confidence in our ability to provide for our future demands in a growing world.”

The Free Online Dictionary tells me: “Thomas Robert Malthus was a British economist who wrote An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), arguing that population tends to increase faster than the food supply”. Well we know Mr. Malthus didn’t get that part right because the world’s population has increased enormously since 1798, but we need to define our terms if we are to get somewhere in this public discussion.

Don’t confuse the terms please Senator. An Economic System is NOT the same thing as a Financial System.
When I type ‘economic’ into my Thesaurus I come up with such words as ‘ecology’, ‘eco-friendly’, ‘ecosystem’, ‘eclipse’, etc. An economy has everything to do with the natural world, this earth we live upon and the soil in which all mankind grows his food, mines his minerals, etc.
When I type in the words ‘government’ and ‘finance’ then I come up with ‘pay money’, and related words such as: ‘expenses’, ‘expenditure’, ‘costs’, payments’, etc.

Therefore, I understand when you write of ‘us all living beyond our means’ you are referring to us living beyond our financial means; i.e., governments, individuals, families, businesses, and industries, are living beyond their financial means.
But a financial system is simply a man-made system and these days can consist of mere ‘blips’ in a computer.
Surely Senator, you are not claiming the financial world is running out of computer ‘blips’? Are you?

Please Senator Bernardi, clear your mind of such confusion
Thomas Malthus may also have confused the economic system with the financial system (I haven’t read his essay), but ancient history reveals that Mammon (Money Changers, Banking) became more powerful than the Priest/Kings of those ancient City/States.
The Priest/Kings of yesteryear (and of today), lost sight of their true roles under their heavenly Father, resulting in the Money Changers’ figures in their ledgers being more important than the real people in the real world.

Wealth defined. Sources of wealth (natural; no other sources demonstrable…):
“John Ruskin, in the preface to "Unto this Last ", wrote that the real gist of these papers, their central meaning and aim, is to give, as I believe for the first time in plain English, . . . a logical definition of WEALTH: such definition being absolutely needed for a basis of Economical Science".
He went on to quote J. S. Mill, who, after saying that writers on political economy professed to teach or to investigate the nature of wealth, gave his opinion that "everyone has a notion, sufficiently correct for common purposes, of what is meant by wealth", and further protected himself by asserting that it was no part of the design of his treatise (Principles of Political Economy) to aim at "metaphysical nicety of definition ".
Ruskin's comment is that "metaphysical nicety, we assuredly do not need; but physical nicety and logical accuracy, with respect to a physical subject, we as assuredly do".
Such a need for "physical nicety and logical accuracy" was met in Ruskin's opinion by the statement that "there is no Wealth but Life. Life, including all its powers of love, joy and admiration".
This is doubtless an admirable definition to those who know the work in which the words appear, but open to some misunderstanding by others.
Ruskin scarcely meant to assert that wealth and life were interchangeable terms, e.g., in the statement that a man in danger of his wealth escaped from captivity among Cossacks, leaving all that remained of his life among them.
Ruskin went on to say that "that country is richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings."
- - Dr. Tudor Jones. “Elements of Social Credit”, Lecture IV, October 1946)

I put it to you Senator Cori Bernardi, the realistic situation is that governments would rather serve Mammon than serve their people and the present financial debt structure IS leading to the destruction of the economic systems of the world.  


IS THE SOIL OUR ‘FINANCIAL’ INSTITUTION?

Instead of the above heading, I would have asked the question: Is the Soil our Store of Real Wealth?
Be that as it may, Craig Mackintosh, editor of the Permaculture Research Institute (PRI) has pretty well summed up the state of this civilisation’s economic systems in his article from the PRI website.

Soil, Our Financial Institution,” by Craig Mackintosh PRI Editor August 7, 2008
“Humus is a rich resource – and could easily be compared to a modern day bank. Deposits and subtractions are made by the natural rhythm of decay and recycling through the weathering of air, water, and complicated interactions of various types of soil macro and micro-organisms. This ‘bank’ has been our central ‘financial institution’, sustaining our race for millennia, although there have been times in our history, in localised areas, where subtractions have exceeded deposits – resulting in biological bankruptcy.

Throughout history, the story has repeated itself
Great civilizations have grown where soils were fertile enough to support high-density human communities, and fallen when soils could no longer sustain our rough treatment. According to the International Task Force on Land Degradation, the great early civilizations of Mesopotamia arose because of the richness of their soils, and collapsed because of declines in soil quality. Poor land management and excessive irrigation caused soils to become increasingly degraded, leading to power struggles, migrations, and ultimately, the collapse of the Fertile Crescent civilizations.

Ancient Greece suffered a similar fate
The philosopher Plato, writing around 360 B.C., attributed the demise of Greek power to land degradation: “[In earlier days] Attica yielded far more abundant produce. In comparison of what then was, there are remaining only the bones of the wasted body; all the richer and softer parts of the soil having fallen away, and the mere skeleton of the land being left.”

Many experts also blame the collapse of the great Mayan civilization and the peaceful Harappan society of the Indus valley on soil exhaustion and erosion, resulting from agricultural practices and clear-cutting of forests.
According to Jared Diamond, a UCLA professor and author of the books Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse, 90 percent of the people inhabiting Easter Island in the Pacific died because of deforestation, erosion and soil depletion.
In Iceland, farming and human activities caused about 50 percent of the soil to end up in the sea, explains Diamond. “Icelandic society survived only through a drastically lower standard of living,” he says. – The Scoop on Dirt, Tamsyn Jones.

Concerned that Craig was confusing the terms in his own mind I wrote him and he responded:
“I fully understand what you say. Don't worry, the difference between the real economy and the arbitrary financial systems imposed on us is not at all lost on me. I've changed the words to 'financial meltdown' to keep you happy, but please recognise that we are, in point of fact, having an actual economic meltdown.
Watersheds are being overpumped. Forests are still coming down. Soil humus content is diminishing year by year. Fish stocks are plummeting.
The very basis of all economic activity is being undermined in all areas at every level. In other words, we're having a financial meltdown, and an economic meltdown…”  


WHY SOME INSTITUTIONS SHOULD BE CLOSED DOWN

James Reed is not the only one who writes that certain institutions do more harm than good. The following is an extract from John Papworth’s book, “Why Schools of Economics and Political Science Should be Closed Down”, taken from The Social Crediter, Winter 2012.

“... One of the most widely taught and accepted economic suppositions is that the factors of production consist of land, labour and capital. Indeed this is probably the first statement many students hear when they begin their studies. It is a statement which may appear to be nothing more than a formulation of the obvious, yet its mere enunciation marks out the entire subject as the most iniquitous exercise of human faculties it is possible to imagine.
We are being urged by this formulation to accept that these ‘factors of production’ (within market limits) are capable of being equally substituted for each other and that for the purposes of economic reasoning each is on an equal footing.

But consider what is being said: we are being urged to accept without question that ‘labour’ by which is meant individual human beings, made if you will in the image of God, are of no more or less account than a share certificate or a cabbage patch…

In making it [this supposition] we are denying, of course, the unique significance of the human personality and its attributes, we are denying the capacity of human creativity, and, no less important, its capacity for moral judgement and moral distinctions.
It is a purely static and mechanical view of human life as though human beings were nothing more than computerised robots functioning solely for market purposes. We are ignoring the crucial fact that life is a qualitative experience and reducing our reasoning about it to a mere quantitative exercise…

Not least of the tragedies from the enunciation and practice of this grotesque formula has been its effect on human labour, on work itself. It was Freud who asserted, ‘Work is man’s chief contact with reality,’ and in doing so he was pointing to quite unique aspects of both man and work. All life is born to create in the mundane sense of propagating its kind. Man is unique in also possessing the priceless attribute of imagination; it is one which plays an enormous part in human sexual activity, but more significantly, it also transcends it, providing the thrust for creative art of every kind. Indeed, it is evident that the creative play of the imagination is an integral condition of freedom — it is a factor so implicit in the character of the human psyche that without its exercise an individual is inevitably of diminished human stature.

This is one of the major enormities of market forces treating man as a ‘factor of production’, for by allotting labour a role inferior to the play and power of those forces, they have succeeded in deadening the power of the creative imagination for all but a tiny minority, and even that minority has been decisively marginalised within the general social framework. Hence today we tend to think of ‘art’ as something separate from the general business of life, as the icing on the cake rather than the cake itself. In so doing we overlook how before the dominance of the market and its mass production machines art was a central factor of nearly all types of work done by the generality of the people.

If this view appears extreme it is only because it is extreme in today’s conditions. Most farming operations — the hand-scything of grass for winter fodder, the building of haystacks, the milking of cows, the baking of bread, to name but a few — involved much arduous physical labour, but also involved the creative capacities of the artisans. Haystacks differed significantly in their pattern and structure from village to village, but they were generally works of art and of distinctive appeal to the eye; cows were known by name and had preferences for whom would milk them, so that there was a relationship between the milker and the beast which had to be respected and cultivated; bread-making was a high art form undertaken by ‘master’ bakers; and so on.

All that hard, exacting labour yielded fruits which in most modern ‘jobs’ are conspicuously absent. It had its own innate status and dignity, as well as a sense of achievement and fulfilment which gave meaning and purpose to life, qualities a modern nine-to-five commuter may well find incomprehensible as he winds through the treadmill of a daily routine which may well furnish him with creature comforts of exceptional degrees of opulence but which have their own poisonous thrust of pointlessness because they deny the validity of those questions relating to the meaning of his existence.

One may follow the theme through the entire spectrum of trades that provided for human needs, through tailoring, shoemaking, carpentry, building, and so on. In every case the creative instinct was being exercised and being served. It was at work in the construction of an African thatched mud hut as much as in the ethereal glories of the stately homes of England, homes which needed the services of a wide range of highly skilled creative artisans for the fashioning of graceful edifices in stone and their multifarious furnishing. And all this creativity spilled over into other aspects of people’s lives, their dress, customs, folk art and music. In times of prosperity the world was awash with the cultural riches which were thus enabled to proliferate.

Today, work has become a ‘job’. Where labour is required at all it is on terms awesomely demeaning to human stature: standardised; uniform; repetitive; and essentially insulting. Machines made to lighten human labour and to serve human needs, under the genius of theories propagated by established schools of economics, have transposed human roles so that man (labour!), instead of expressing the creative interplay of the human spirit with the material world in terms of master-ship, is now subordinated to serving the needs of machines.

Our theorists will no doubt point to the fruits of their teaching, as seen in what they believe are higher living standards for millions in terms of cars, aeroplane journeys, centrally heated homes, TV, radio, cheap food, foreign holidays, and the rest of the package. As usual they are confusing terms and the evidence abounds that higher consumption levels are not remotely synonymous with higher standards of living and are only too often in conflict with them…”  (emphasis added...ed)


ECONOMISTS’ QUOTES FROM THE POST-AUTISTIC ECONOMICS WEBSITE

“[T]he close to monopoly position of neoclassical economics is not compatible with normal ideas about democracy. Economics is science in some senses, but is at the [same] time ideology. Limiting economics to the neoclassical paradigm means imposing a serious ideological limitation. Departments of economics become political propaganda centres . . .”
- - Peter Söderbaum

“Economics students . . . graduate from Masters and PhD programs with an effectively vacuous understanding of economics, no appreciation of the intellectual history of their discipline, and an approach to mathematics that hobbles both their critical understanding of economics and their ability to appreciate the latest advances in mathematics and other sciences. A minority of these ill-informed students themselves go on to be academic economists, and they repeat the process. Ignorance is perpetuated”
- - Steve Keen

“All of these textbooks fail to explain how prices are determined in ‘markets’’ and thus how markets work. Where do prices come from? Who determines them? How do they fluctuate? These questions are never addressed, even though it is through the price mechanism that the ‘invisible hand’ is supposed to operate.”
- - Le Mouvement Autisme-Économie

“[M]ainstream economists seek knowledge through numbers to stop the messy reality of people, processes and politics dirtying their invisible hands.”
- - Alan Shipman

“[T]he economist must engage him or herself as a citizen with convictions regarding the public good and ways of treating it, rather than as the holder of universal truth that he or she substitutes for discussion in order to impose it on us all.”
- - André orléan

“The Taliban, and its variety of fundamentalist thinking, has been the most controlling and oppressive regime with regard to women in contemporary times. Contemporary academic economics, and contemporary global economic policies, are gripped by other rigidities of thinking – what George Soros has dubbed ‘market fundamentalism’. Fantasies of control are operative in both phenomena, and gender is far from irrelevant to understanding their power, and their solution.”
- - Julie A. Nelson  


THE SATANIC MILLS OF INDUSTRIALISATION

by James Reed:
As reported in The New Times Survey December 2012, p.3, shortly before his death, over fifty years ago, C.H. Douglas was with a friend while they surveyed the landscape near Aberfeldy in Scotland. Douglas turned to his friend and said: “I think the time is approaching when we shall have to challenge this monstrous and fantastic outgrowth of industrial expansion – fundamentally. Really, you know, I personally can see nothing particularly sinful about a small dynamo; but this thing we’ve got is past a joke. If it isn’t a joke, it is Satanic.”

That was fifty years ago. Douglas would be astonished to see the runaway industrialism of, say, China. A new book which I will review shortly, “Death By China” (Pearson Education, 2011) by Peter Navarro and Greg Autry gives a frightening story of China’s grab for power and the ill-effects this is having on the environment and people.

This, however, is only part of the problem which stretches now to include all aspects of our lives including medicine. It has led to people becoming so machine dependent that if there was a massive electromagnetic pulse from the sun, frying Earth’s electronics, most people would simply die. Man has become not a slave to the Machine but a part of it.  


MY, HOW THE OLD SOCIALISTS HAVE FLOURISHED

by Brian Simpson
Isn’t it intriguing how almost all the old communists and socialists from the 1960s onwards ended up with great jobs in Capitalism? And not just in Australia. Take Julia Gillard, a socialist feminist as a student, and as PM, why probably still a socialist feminist. Today though, it is no longer about building a utopian communist society; not as the Marxists at various universities in the 1960s and 1970s hoped; by the 1980s they had all gone multicultural and the migrant had replaced the working class as their “hero”. A communist Utopia has been replaced by a multicultural-capitalist Utopia.

Perhaps this circle of self-destruction was present in the Left from the beginning for Leftism has always been a “culture of critique” with the very point of existence being to “trash” traditional values and virtues. Better that the Universe be crunched into a black hole than for these people to rule over us.

Malcolm Muggeridge had a lot to say about the early Fabian-Socialists to a group of college students at Hillsdale, Michigan in April 1979. But let New Zealander Bill Daly tell it in his words:
“In his typically witty, insightful and humble way, he (Muggeridge) gave a brilliant summary of the state of the world. He titled his talk, “The Great Liberal Death Wish”.
Muggeridge never lacked hope and he stressed that while the liberal mind is incapable of grasping the predictable consequences of the liberal agenda which the liberal believes will usher in a world of endless peace and joy (reality will always, always, show that policies not based in reality will end in discord, hatred and dictatorship, such as in the old Soviet Union).

“Muggeridge's well-intentioned father was a Fabian Socialist, and as a little boy he often got to sit in on the high-minded discussions his father had with his Fabian friends. Later Muggeridge married a niece of leading Fabians Sydney and Beatrice Webb who were upheld as heros by the Soviet dictators in Moscow. When Muggeridge was later (in the 1930s) a foreign correspondent in Moscow for the Manchester Guardian he was stunned at the blindness of elitist intellectuals who would visit their hero Communist state and report lavishly on its numerous benefits. So engrossed were they in their misconceptions, aided no doubt in a few cases by the love of centralised power, that they were unable to see even what their own eyes told them of the appalling conditions and disgusting abuses by the Communist masters.

To quote Muggeridge: "The thing that impressed me, the thing that touched off my awareness of the great liberal death wish, my sense that Western Man was, as it were, sleep-walking into his own ruin, was the extraordinary performance of the liberal intelligentsia, who, in those days, flocked to Moscow like pilgrims to Mecca. And they were one and all utterly delighted and excited by what they saw there. Clergymen walked serenely and happily through the anti-God museums, politicians claimed that no system of society could possibly be more equitable and just, lawyers admired Soviet justice, and economists praised the Soviet economy. They all wrote articles in this sense which we resident journalists knew were completely nonsensical".

Muggeridge was at pains to say he put the source of the liberal disease at the elevation of man to the centre of the universe: “The efforts that men make to bring about their own happiness, their own ease of life, their own self-indulgence, will in due course produce the opposite, leading me to the absolutely inescapable conclusion that human beings cannot live and operate in this world without some concept of a being greater than themselves, and of a purpose which transcends their own egotistic or greedy desires.
Once you eliminate the notion of a God, a creator, once you eliminate the notion that the Creator has a purpose for us and that life consists essentially in fulfilling that purpose, then you are bound, as Pascal points out, to induce the megalomania of which we've seen so many manifestations in our time - in the crazy dictators, as in the lunacies of the people who are rich, or who consider themselves to be important or celebrated in the western world. Alternately, human beings relapse into mere carnality, into being animals”.  


LABOUR DECLARED SOCIAL CREDIT NOT COMPATIBLE WITH SOCIALISM

by Wallace Klinck, Canada
Social Credit champions free association of individuals where association is voluntary for ad hoc reasons to attain a specific objective.
Some forms of association are more or less continuing than others. Those most permanent should have minimal and prescribed limitations upon their intrusiveness upon the lives of individuals. Hence, we speak of "Constitutional" or "limited government".

Social Credit perceives society as an open, dynamic and informal co-operative of individuals and aggregations of individuals combining by free will to seek given objectives. Douglas's formulations were designed to facilitate the smooth and dynamic functioning of the social organism according to sound principles of association.
He viewed the group as a primitive survivalist form, i.e., as an atavism from which the individual seeks to emerge. Social Credit philosophy and policy is individualistic and not collectivist. Nevertheless, it properly recognizes the central aspect of human association as the basis of progress and advancement.

Relationship of the Individual to the Group
Perhaps the most notable aspect of Douglas's work was in his defining of the appropriate relationship of the individual to the group. The group is only justified when it is serving to achieve a desired end and should not be perpetuated for the sake of the group, per se.
The individual must have the power to "contract-out", which power is the individual's ultimate means of atrophying a group or a function which is not serving his or her interests.

In technical areas the prevailing form of association must be pyramidal because no enterprise requiring a high level of expertise can be carried through by a democratic process but rather by a disciplined chain of command (although it may be consultative). As Douglas explained the matter, we need an aristocracy of producers serving and accredited by a democracy of consumers.

Consumers must set production policy by their acceptance or rejection of the product.
This brings the basis of association onto a realistic basis. In all of this it must be remembered that Social Credit is not primarily based upon a primitive exchange economy but rather on a modern economy in which the requirements of distribution are becoming increasingly the salient and demanding feature of the economy.  


SOCIAL CREDIT OF THE LEFT

American writer Michael Lane researched the background of the very early Social Credit movement.

He wrote in “Social Credit of the Left”: “That there is a social credit of the Left will come as news to many social crediters.

To understand it, the reader will have to disabuse himself of the notion that socialism means nationalization of the means of production. This meaning became the paradigm after 1922, when the Labour party declared that social credit was not compatible with socialism.

Before 1922, the Left still had room for a Morrisian vision of economics, in which "the ordinary things men made ought to be so made as to be a `joy to the maker and the user'." In “The Political Economy of Social Credit and Guild Socialism”, Frances Hutchinson and Brian Burkitt adopt the definition of Henry Smith:
"Socialism is the economic equivalent of political freedom, equality and fellowship. Its defining criterion is the reduction to a minimum of conflict due to economic causes."

When it rejected social credit, the Labour party rejected true socialism.1 In calling attention to the origins of social credit in the trades union movement, Hutchinson and Burkitt bring a new dimension to the subject.

In 1907, A. R. Orage and Holbrook Jackson formed the Fabian Arts Group as a wing of the Fabian Society and purchased a bankrupt magazine, the New Age.
The New Age declared its intention to examine the philosophical basis of socialism, to which end it provided a forum for the guild socialism of Arthur Penty and S. G. Hobson and the distributism of Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton. In consequence, the New Age became the black sheep of the Fabian Society, and by 1909 the rupture was complete.  


THE GREAT FEMALE GENITAL SURGERY DEBATE

by Mrs Vera West
Here is a disturbing article that I had on file: “Genital Repair Surgery ‘OK for Westerners, Migrants refused’,” The Weekend Australian 8-9 December 2012, p.8. The article quotes a Muslim woman, I presume, working to prevent genital mutilation among African migrant women in Melbourne, who says that it is “discriminatory” that middle class Western women can have labiaplasty for cosmetic reasons, but other women cannot have their genitalia “reinfibulated” to create a small vaginal opening after giving birth.

This struck me as puzzling. As I understand it what is called “FGM” may involve either partial or full removal of the female external genitalia or the narrowing of the vaginal opening through cutting and stitching the labia, usually fusing the labia. The latter can lead to a wide range of health issues including frequent urinary tract infections. Obviously enough, these are not Western medical practices because they have ill health effects.

As for cosmetic genital surgery’s merits, this is part of a larger debate about the merits of cosmetic surgery. It may have psychological benefits to women. Surgical repairs to the vagina following birth also has a sound basis, and is not discriminatory. What women are not saying in this debate is that practices such as labia fusion do not benefit women’s health and are solely for male benefit.

The requests for these types of surgeries, both cosmetic for Western women and other genital surgeries primarily for migrant women, come from women who are vulnerable and who need substantial emotional and professional support. These are the sorts of issues that feminists should be helping out with, but they are too busy writing books on oppression to help women in need.  


THE JEWISH LOBBY AND THE WAGES OF IMMIGRATION

by Peter Ewer
Continual mass immigration is likely to change Australia’s demographics in ways contrary to long-term Jewish and Zionist interests. This, at least, is the message I take from the article “A Loss for the Jewish Lobby”, The Weekend Australian Financial Review, 1-2 December 2012 p.19.

The sub-headline of this article is “The PM’s pro-Israel defeat in caucus could be due to changing demographics”. Lebanese-origin Australians “heavily lobbied members of cabinet to vote in favour of a UN resolution upgrading the Palestinian authority to a “non-member State” status”.

There are five times as many Muslims as Jews in Australia, the article says. The implication is, that as Australia’s demographics change and the country becomes populated by people who either lack sympathy to Jewish causes, or more extremely, are hostile, the political climate will change.

This seems inevitable because “non-discriminatory” (meaning “discriminatory against Traditional sources”) immigration is the sacred cow. But having a sacred cow can have undesirable effects, especially when one has fine china all over the place!