Read Online Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape by Susan Brownmiller - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Susan Brownmiller
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The crime that is by reputation "the easiest to charge and the hardest to prove" has traditionally been the easiest to disprove as well. The rational experts found it laughably easy to debunk accounts of rape, and laughably was the way they did it.
One lengthy study, Atrocit y Propaganda, 1914-1919, pub lished by the Yale University Press in 1941, expended no more than a few skimpy sentences to construct a witty dismissal of rape. They are worth examining as a perfect example of between-us-men logic in a serious work that ironically purports to explore the nature of propaganda. The author, James M. Read, reported that in French accounts of the German terror the phrase des viols et des vols ( translation: rapes and thef ts ) cropped up with frequency. ( A police detective in any American city would hardly find such a combination startling since rape and thef t are of ten committed together if an opportunity arises. ) Read jumped on des viols et des vols as something suspicious if not downright sinister-a "eu phonious concatenation"-and lef t the reader to speculate that if any crime had been committed, it was probably the French sin of alliterative exaggeration!
48 I AGAINST OUR WILL
Having thus delivered a mortal blow to rape, Read finished it off in another half paragraph. Addressing himself to the validity of 427 depositions of atrocity taken in northern France during Oc tober and November of the first year of the war, after the German forces had retreated, he wrote, "Three hundred were sworn state ments; approximately 100 were not attested, while the remainder lacked even names. The latter cases were those of women who had been attacked. One or two of these were almost ludicrous in the paucity of facts, such as the declaration of 'Dame X, 38 years old, at Compiegne.' " Professor Read then availed himself of the opportu nity to reprint Dame X's testimony, which even he admitted was atypical: "I swear to tell the truth, and I consent to make a declaration to you of the facts of which I have been a victim, but I would be crushed if my deposition were made public . . ." To hammer home the point, Read wrote, "After this somewhat non committal statement followed four rows of dots."
The reluctance of Dame X to have the story of her humilia; tion set in type and publicized is far from an unusual attitude, even for our present day. Af ter all, she had to live in Compiegne for the rest of her life. The dots do not refute her credibility; they merely deny authentic details to history. Other depositions, as we can see from Toynbee and Morgan, were obviously more specific. But the declaration of Dame X of Compiegne represents the sum total of . factual information on rape that Read presented in his otherwise heavily annotated study of fact and propaganda in World War I. To the professor the case of Dame X was enough ammunition to make his point that rape reports could hardly be taken seriously by a scholar of his most estimable stature.
WORLD WAR II
As interpreted by the loyal philosopher-servants of the Third Reich, fascism's very nature was an exaggeration of the values that normal society held to be masculine. Goebbels himself had said as much, and before him _ _ . tzsch that fount of inspiration, had instructed, "Man should be trained for war and woman for the recreation of the warrior." Therefore, it was not surprising that the ideology of rape burst into perf ect flower as Hitler's armies goose—
stepped over the face of Europe in the early days of World War
II.
r
f
I
1 ..
1.
I -
f
t
Hitler always said that the masses are essentially feminine, and his aggressiveness and charisma elicited an almost masochistic surrender and submission in his audience-a form of psychic rape. . . . He didn't convince his audiences; he conquered them.
We owe this vivid image of a Hitler speech to Albert Speer, but the metaphor is clearly Hitler's. The Nazi aim was to cong!l. . not merely to win or convince, and that, of
One lengthy study, Atrocit y Propaganda, 1914-1919, pub lished by the Yale University Press in 1941, expended no more than a few skimpy sentences to construct a witty dismissal of rape. They are worth examining as a perfect example of between-us-men logic in a serious work that ironically purports to explore the nature of propaganda. The author, James M. Read, reported that in French accounts of the German terror the phrase des viols et des vols ( translation: rapes and thef ts ) cropped up with frequency. ( A police detective in any American city would hardly find such a combination startling since rape and thef t are of ten committed together if an opportunity arises. ) Read jumped on des viols et des vols as something suspicious if not downright sinister-a "eu phonious concatenation"-and lef t the reader to speculate that if any crime had been committed, it was probably the French sin of alliterative exaggeration!
48 I AGAINST OUR WILL
Having thus delivered a mortal blow to rape, Read finished it off in another half paragraph. Addressing himself to the validity of 427 depositions of atrocity taken in northern France during Oc tober and November of the first year of the war, after the German forces had retreated, he wrote, "Three hundred were sworn state ments; approximately 100 were not attested, while the remainder lacked even names. The latter cases were those of women who had been attacked. One or two of these were almost ludicrous in the paucity of facts, such as the declaration of 'Dame X, 38 years old, at Compiegne.' " Professor Read then availed himself of the opportu nity to reprint Dame X's testimony, which even he admitted was atypical: "I swear to tell the truth, and I consent to make a declaration to you of the facts of which I have been a victim, but I would be crushed if my deposition were made public . . ." To hammer home the point, Read wrote, "After this somewhat non committal statement followed four rows of dots."
The reluctance of Dame X to have the story of her humilia; tion set in type and publicized is far from an unusual attitude, even for our present day. Af ter all, she had to live in Compiegne for the rest of her life. The dots do not refute her credibility; they merely deny authentic details to history. Other depositions, as we can see from Toynbee and Morgan, were obviously more specific. But the declaration of Dame X of Compiegne represents the sum total of . factual information on rape that Read presented in his otherwise heavily annotated study of fact and propaganda in World War I. To the professor the case of Dame X was enough ammunition to make his point that rape reports could hardly be taken seriously by a scholar of his most estimable stature.
WORLD WAR II
As interpreted by the loyal philosopher-servants of the Third Reich, fascism's very nature was an exaggeration of the values that normal society held to be masculine. Goebbels himself had said as much, and before him _ _ . tzsch that fount of inspiration, had instructed, "Man should be trained for war and woman for the recreation of the warrior." Therefore, it was not surprising that the ideology of rape burst into perf ect flower as Hitler's armies goose—
stepped over the face of Europe in the early days of World War
II.
r
f
I
1 ..
1.
I -
f
t
Hitler always said that the masses are essentially feminine, and his aggressiveness and charisma elicited an almost masochistic surrender and submission in his audience-a form of psychic rape. . . . He didn't convince his audiences; he conquered them.
We owe this vivid image of a Hitler speech to Albert Speer, but the metaphor is clearly Hitler's. The Nazi aim was to cong!l. . not merely to win or convince, and that, of
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