United Nations’ banning of ‘teen’ cartoons violates human rights charter

Watching Murder Real or Non-Existent is Legal

It’s the first time I watched people die.

Seeing a plane fly into a tower seemed nothing short of a movie. I was a graduate student in Pennsylvania working toward my doctorate. The horror would begin to sink in as word came that the Pentagon was hit, and another plane in Pennsylvania had gone down, in a little rural town.

I can remember seeing dots falling from the towers. They were human beings jumping thousands of feet to their deaths. I was watching mass murder. One came from my previous college SUNY College at Brockport.

New York State is where I spent the first 28 years of my life. Though from upstate, a Buffalonian by blood, the attack resonated deeply in me and would later trigger similar feelings when Russia annexed Ukraine. My mother’s Polish blood wanted to fight for the Polish-Ukrainian resistance if the Russians moved toward Odessa. I never even stepped foot in Poland, nor did I have a military background. The feelings were very powerful.

On that same day, I witnessed an attack on a young Asian-American girl and a Muslim student getting turned away at a donut shop, the owner saying, “I will not serve you; look what you did” referring to the attacks. These students were also part of my blood, what made Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP) a beacon of hope in a land with a strong Klu Klux Klan history.

The Myth of a Free “America”

I was in love with a South Korean student. We just married that May, and I realized that we suddenly became 10 percent of the U.S. population. If we fell in love decades earlier, we would have been arrested. Interracial marriage was previously illegal.

My wife was turned away several times at the register, those pretending not to understand her. We were not served at a couple of restaurants. She said to a faculty member that she wanted to work in the U.S. The faculty member said, “If you want to work here, you have to change who you are.” My wife did not and has faced decades of consequences.

We decided to protest the Iraq War at IUP because Iraqi had nothing to do with the 911 attacks. The police presence was scary. There were only a few of us, but the police made it clear that we were the enemy. “Why do you hate America?” My answer, there is no such thing as US anymore.

I remember telling my wife that I am worried we lost our freedom. That I was afraid to speak. She said, “If you are afraid, you already lost freedom.”

She should know. South Koreans lived in constant danger, a looming “at war” and a pervasive and corrupt government that used the “Skeleton Police” to scare and intimidate protestors. Her father lived through the Korean War and he and his family swam across the Han River in November to escape communism.

He died last year. His only wish was to go back to his hometown in North Korea. He was cremated, now an unanchored soul, the history of the Korean War burned up with him.  He lived that painful silence.

Non-Existent Victims, and Very Real Oppression  

I was not going to write this personal history, but what follows connects. I was going to write about the United Nation’s poor decision on September 26 to equate non-existent teens to that of real people, criminalizing thought over reality with the banning of what some see as disturbing cartoons. Did not these “morality” experts take liberty to criminalize people’s thoughts?

We’ve heard it before, “This is for the children,” except there is no child, no victim, and no crime, just thoughts. They wanted to go further, criminalizing even written stories that had virtually any sexual discussion of minors. It’s not that farfetched that abuse memoirs, human sexuality books, people like me, would be locked up for creating and distributing child pornography. But, no worries, plenty of people and artists will be.

Such is not surprising as the Trump presidency supported an existing and an enhanced wave of questionable authoritarian leaders that dismiss human rights in favor unempathetic rule. Rule that seeps with hatred of others, of women, of anyone different in hopes of a new world supremacy. Yet this fear of the powerful woman could be ushering in a new world feudal system, where any sexual talk or expression, any affection, is criminalized, even our inner fantasies.

Potentially dangerous men with fragile egos: Trump, Netanyahu, Un, Putin, Duterte, Bolsonaro, and Boris Johnson are in the driver’s seat. There is arguably more human slavery than any other period, including labor, sex and organ trafficking. Economic disparity looks more like our endangered oceans than a line that separates the super-rich from everyone else. The world is entering a new dark age. We will not only be slaves physically but also our governments will own our thoughts. We will die, but we will have to take out a line of credit for it. The UN is creating our new world prison population: people we are mad at.

The United Nations Wants to Own Heads and Minds

There is no worse human rights violation. In a time where the United Nations chooses to violate its own Human Rights Charter by recommending to punish real artists, real people for hurting non-existent victims, I question whether the UN ever cared about human rights.

As the UN worries about stoking the misconception of pedophilia panic worldwide, it is following a tradition of criminalizing what the powerful and ill-informed don’t like instead of focusing on the ills that powerful do.

I guess we all decided that Epstein’s abuse of real girls, not fake ones, was an isolated incident? That is why so many shady child model agencies are “upper end” as noted in the documentary Girl Model. Even with all the human rights advocacy they have done, has the UN ever criminalized too much power? Who has veto power at the UN? There you have it.

There are South American children being caged on the U.S. border; the forgotten Syrian kids of an ugly and brutal war, the Rohingya, Uighur, and the rampant sex trafficking of women, including boys and girls, but the UN wants our minds and heads, our thoughts, the most private and intimate parts of ourselves scanned by powerful states and prison states.

The Worldwide Rise of Purification Supremacy, the Same Old Genocide

If we want to minimize the abuse of human beings across the globe, it may make sense to focus less on who we are oppressing and more on the pattern that makes that oppression possible. Historian Arthur Miller explains, in horrid detail, how genocide happens throughout time. He learned it from his father who was a war crimes investigator after World War II. It’s called the Chain of Destruction.

First, we target a population we did not previously. Then we ostracize that population. Then we take their rights; then we take their bodies. Then we attempt to kill them off by denying care, putting them on registries, and then we exterminate. It happens throughout history, everyone watching and no one acting. It is a formula. Plug in who you hate; it doesn’t matter. Hate is not about a group; it’s about a pattern of thought.

The Violence-Sex Paradox

I did not see non-existent victims in 911, nor in Syria, nor in mass-shooting coverage that is looped over and over again. There is little doubt that such provides profit for big media and motive for copycats. Nor is horror writer Stephan King arrested for murdering non-existent human beings. Nor are true crime novelists arrested for making money off real dead people.

How many ISIS execution videos did we see? Are you all not murderers? You wanted to watch, didn’t you? Why lock someone up for drawing an obscene picture, or one of the child-like fairies in disturbing situations?

This is how reasonable people determine unjust laws. As a child sex abuse survivor, I say this to the UN, I wish my preparers looked at naughty cartoons instead of abusing me. There is no causal relationship between sex cartoons and crime, and if they have such evidence, I am more than willing to show its flaws openly in another column.

Porn, in general, does not create sex crime, not can we say violence does. Comparing non-existent human beings to real child sex abuse victims is appalling and demeaning to CSA victims. The fear of sex has this effect on people. Sex is a way for the government to control women’s bodies and men’s minds. We have little education in human sexuality.

Maybe it’s all the panic that our news media and social media feed us every minute, but sexual fantasy does not lead to sex offenses. We say so because we look at the wrong population. In Dr. Justin Lehmiller’s latest research, the majority of people never act on a sexual fantasy they really want to act on. As one that worked with sex offenders, most are not pedophiles, and not all pedophiles offend.

This is why the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Disorders makes a distinction: pedophilia is not a disorder, pedophilic disorder is. Even then, not all with pedophilic disorder offend. Experts consistently ignore this, as does the general population. Law enforcement can perpetuate such misunderstanding. How does that help kids when we focus on the minority and on non-existent victims?

UN Control, Sex, and Power

It’s about power, less so sexual attraction. Will we lock up a woman with a rape fantasy because she is raping herself? Courts have locked up kids for distributing pornography of themselves when they were 12 or 13? Kids cannot consent to sex? Apparently they can “consent” to being sex offenders.

The only way we can make the world a better place, not a perfect place, is when we stop politicizing human sexuality and actually study it. Were any of the experts that were creating this ban, sex therapists or actual sexuality experts? Was human diversity and diversity of thought considered, or was South Korean law imposed on the rest of the world? Interestingly, it was recently learned that thousands of child athletes may have been sexually abused in South Korea. Instead, let’s focus on non-existent kids.

Where are the UN’s priorities?

Earl Yarington

The opinions and analyses that Earl writes are his own and are not necessarily the positions or views of his employers, the agencies he supports, or  that of his colleagues. Reach out with comments or questions.