If this latest round of reporting on the Julian Assange rape charges are to be believed (as opposed to the first reports), then the allegations are actually more serious than the merely creepy. Assuming they are to be believed.

But my concern — and the concern of many Assange supporters, especially those of us most opposed to the state —  is that the attention given to these charges by the international press and by the Swedish, UK, and US governments, shows that whatever their nature, feminists are showing themselves as willing and eager tools of the imperial warfare state. Who has been called a terrorist by people with real power? Threatened with death by people with real power? Who has had the law enforcement officials of the most powerful nation in the world publicly consider how best to use a very bad hundred-year-old law in order to get an indictment and thus an extradition? Not the two young women in Sweden, who have been vilified and belittled by many, but by powerful people in or around the U.S. government. Whatever the merits of the Swedish prosecution, the Swedish state cannot be trusted. Not with Assange. Too much other power wants to act against him.

It should come as no shock that feminists seek to use brutal and merciless state power for their advantage. I would have thought that at least some feminists would have appreciated the power disparity at work here (who has power working on their behalf, and who has power working against them), and maybe some I’m not reading do. But feminism has clearly demonstrated here (again) that it is simply one more murderous statist ideology that doesn’t care who it hurts and who it kills. So long as its ideological aims are achieved.

The Best of Charles H. Featherstone