The Proof is in the Prejudice - Why did Earl Silverman Have to Die?
By Rod Van Mechelen
The first time I met Earl Silverman we were publishing under the name of Shameless Men Press. What was interesting was how angry feminists would get because we were not ashamed of being men. That was almost 20 years ago, and now Earl is gone. Despairing of there ever being a shelter for battered men in Canada, on April 26, 2013, he hanged himself.
A futile quest
2013 Olympia, WA - Earl Silverman was a friend of mine and I mourn his passage, but I am not surprised that he killed himself. His efforts to gain government funding for a battered men's shelter in Calgary, Alberta, were doomed to fail; worse, he was doomed to despair. This is because from the top down, our society is bent on crushing men, and Earl tried to work from within that system to change an agenda that has been in place for generations.
It is a conquest in slow motion, and we have seen it, before. Here in the Americas, we have seen it on the Indian Reservations and in the Inner City ghettos. The goal is domination, and the strategy involves taking away the male role of provider-protector to leave the community to be run by women. Nature, God, call it what you will, whatever created human societies never meant for them to be run by women, or by men, for that matter; what we call patriarchy evolved over tens of thousands of years to create a balance between the Yin and the Yang, the male and the female. Without it, poverty, disaffection and despair are the result.
Emasculating Men
In the 19th Century when American Indians were herded onto Indian reservations, at first the men were not allowed to hunt or to leave. They could not protect or provide for their women. The trauma from that persists to this day, and Indian Country has the highest death rates and lowest life expectancy of any in the United States.
In the 1960s when the Johnson Administration set out to push through the Great Society legislation, a man who would later rise to be Senator, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, warned that single mother households and poverty would be the result. He was right, and far too many men of those communities end up criminals in the penal system.
From the 19th Century and continuing to this day, to emasculate men and subdue the populace to authoritarian rule, societies throughout the world are gradually eliminating the male role of provider-protector. This is happening everywhere, with the notable exception of the Islamic Countries. And maybe this is why Islam is being stereotyped today as a violent and rogue religion that must be eliminated.
Don't get me wrong, I am not a Muslim. But communities run by women are subject to domination by the powerful elites that control the government. You can't fight this from the bottom-up. The only way to fight it from within, is to enter on the same level as those who set the agenda. Which is to say, from a position of wealth and power.
A Different Strategy
I shared this with Earl and a few others whom most in the Men's Rights Movement (MRM, or MERGE) would recognize. I shared my opinion that our only path to victory lies in achieving wealth and power.
This is not a popular idea with many MRAs because, as with the feminist movement, so many within the MRM are politically progressive, which is to say, they believe in big government solutions. But progressivism is predicated upon dominance and submission--with those in control of the government being dominant, and everybody else being submissive.
Now, if dominance and submission or sadomasochism are your thing, that's none of my concern; candidly, it's been so long since I've had sex that I've forgotten who gets tied up. But if equal opportunity, equal respect and freedom to make our own choices are our goals, then we are doomed to fail if we try to achieve these things by working within progressive institutions because progressivism is fundamentally opposed to liberty and freedom. Worse, at the highest levels the global elites are committed to emasculating the majority of men.
What the Global Elites Want
While the global elites surround themselves with the very kinds of products advocated by "health nuts," eating organic foods, wearing natural fabrics, avoiding plastics that leach estrogen-mimicking chemicals into our food and water, their proxies promote the use of these hazardous compounds to the rest of us. The consequences are profound:
As vaccines pump the population full of mercury and thimerosal, as genetically modified crops alter human DNA, as bisphenol-A in plastics and can linings alter the hormonal structure of the human body, as pesticides pollute the land and water, more people are experiencing disease sooner in the United States. According to new findings, people today are being diagnosed with disease 33 percent faster than their grandparents. Age 30 has become the new 45 in reference to on-setting disease. - 30 is the new 45: Today's adults getting diseases 15 years faster than their grandparents, Lance Devon, Natural News
The global elites want it this way. They want you to ignore the hazards of eating foods loaded with toxins, sit on your duff when not working so you don't make trouble, and die young. I grew up at a time when we were taught to believe that each new generation would be more prosperous and healthier than the last. But this is not what the global elites wanted, and so my parents' generation (the so-called Greatest Generation) was the last truly prosperous generation of Americans. Now, the wealthy grow richer while the rest of us see our earnings being eaten up by inflation. (The American dollar has lost at least 30 percent of its buying power to inflation during the past 10 years.)
We cannot fight this with Occupy Wallstreet demonstrations anymore than Earl could fight the prejudice that dominates the domestic violence industry by asking for equal funding for men's shelters from the progressive government agencies. Our only hope lies in promoting liberty and pursuing wealth, and if we are to die in the process, then we should do so at their hands while standing up for what we believe.
Shameless Men
When I first met Earl, we were publishing under the name of Shameless Men Press, and the rage this evoked from feminists was instructive. They flatly stated that all men should be ashamed simply because we were men. That sexism and prejudice toward men continues, today. It is the prejudice of identity politics, which is a key tool of the global elites and their progressive political apparati.
It is ironic that in an age in which few behaviors are considered shameful, we are shamed simply for being male. Earl was not ashamed for being a man, and neither should we. We are shameless men on a mission, but what is our mission? If it is to establish real gender equality, then we cannot hope to prevail by appealing to progressive institutions that work for the global elites whose goal it is to emasculate and dominate us. As Earl discovered to his despair and our grief, it is futile.
Our best hope is to strive to achieve great wealth. In this we should work together, sharing information, sharing knowledge, teaching what we learn and know. And then we should use our wealth to fight the culture war in defense of liberty and the freedom to choose.
Regards,
Rod Van Mechelen
Rod Van Mechelen is the author of What Everyone Should Know about Feminist Issues: The Male-Positive Perspective (the page now includes several articles by other authors), and the publisher of The Backlash! @ Backlash.com and Cowlitz Country News. He is a member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe and served for 9-1/2 years on the Cowlitz Indian Tribal Council.
