Telegraph: "Vergewaltigung in Indien dient dazu, Männer zu dämonisieren"

Nur in Großbritannien findet man solche Artikel, die sich dem allgemeinen Einheitsbrei der Medien widersetzen, niemals in Deutschland. Ich zitiere diesmal besonders ausführlich, denn die Kritik daran, wie ein Verbrechen dazu missbraucht wird, international Geschlechterhass wieder anzufachen und noch dazu eine Variante von neokolonialem Rassismus zu transportieren, ist vernichtend:

The Delhi rape/murder is being held up, not simply as evidence that the men who carried it out are craven individuals who deserve the severest punishment, but as evidence that India itself is craven, that its hundreds of millions of men have been so warped by "macho culture" that they are one Bollywood film screening away from becoming rapists. That is why the UN is getting involved: the Delhi rape is being used to induce collective guilt in India, over everything from its morals to its mad males to its economic growth.

(...) Every aspect of modern Indian culture and life has been examined in the wake of the Delhi rape, and found wanting. Gang rape is what happens in a society that is "totally patriarchal" and dominated by "macho culture", newspapers tell us. Indian men simply don't know how to behave, apparently, especially the poor, medieval ones. The Indian film industry, Bollywood, has had blame heaped on it, too, with commentators telling us that rape isn't surprising in a country where films feature "few strong women leads… and an overbearingly dominant male lead". Apparently this communicates to the "gullible viewer" (that is, your average dumb Indian) that the "role of woman [is to be] a sidekick to male supremacy". Even India's economic growth has been held partly responsible for the actions of the men on that bus. Apparently, rapid economic growth, by changing social roles, has made men more isolated and bitter and susceptible to becoming rapists. India must now "sacrifice growth for justice", says one Indian commentator, echoing widespread Western discomfort with the economic upheaval in India in recent years.

What is happening here is that guilt for one unspeakably awful crime is being shifted on to an entire nation, on to all Indian men, on to the temerity of India to grow and expand and change. The rapists are seen, not as wicked individuals who must be punished, but as the products of a strange and perverted foreign culture which, for all its modernist pretensions, still falls far short of our Western standards of behaviour and linguistic interaction. Observers offer PC-sounding solidarity to beleaguered Indian women, yet simulataneously express a pretty foul contempt for India herself, and for her half-a-billion men in particular.

A handful of observers have challenged the sweeping demonisation of India and its people in the wake of the Delhi rape – but strikingly they have done so on the basis that we in the West are just as rapacious as the "hyena-like" men of the subcontinent. In the past, progressives would have critiqued the heaping of collective guilt on to foreign nations on the basis that it was inhumane and inaccurate; now they critique it on the basis that rape is not just "a cultural phenomenon in India", but is "endemic everywhere", with verbal or violent misogyny "happening all around us", including in civilised countries like Britain. In other words, it isn't just Indian men who are hyenas – all men are. This is one of the most shocking things about the Delhi rape case – the fact that so many observers aren't especially shocked by it, either because they expect animalistic Indian men to behave like this, or because they view all men, if not all of humanity itself, as capable of such despicable evil.