Linked was another documentary from 1981, titled “Boys for Sale”, of which I watched the first hour, after which I thought I had the gist of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWY8T3ujxNw
Few thoughts.
First, the dates for the events described in Conspiracy of Silence happened in the 1980’s. Nobody seemingly remembers anything any more, but I remember that the whole NOTION of sex crimes against children only got mainstream attention some time in the 1980’s.
I have not studied this issue in depth, but the book Assault on Truth–which I think every student of the history of psychology should read–was published in 1984, and caused an enormous amount of controversy.
It does not appear that the pervasive tolerance of pedophila by the Catholic Church started encountering large scale public resistance until some time in the late 1980’s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_sexual_abuse_cases
Here is one lawsuit settled in 2003: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/11/us/archdiocese-of-louisville-reaches-abuse-settlement.html
Franklin, of course, is a staple of what is sometimes called “alternative media”. Much of this media is crazy. But I consume it. I read the stories about the alleged Marine who alleged there are bases on Mars. I read Alex Jones, who I have come to believe is mostly sane.
I can rationalize this in several ways, several metaphors. One is Simulated Annealing, the net of which is that in initial exploration, it is useful and desirable to go as many qualitative different places as possible, prior to funneling attention more narrowly. Another is Signal Theory, in which the goal is to increase Signal and decrease Noise, but which recognizes that the only way to allow all actual signals through, is to also allow all potential Noise through.
According to the “Boys for Sale” video, in 1981 about 350 boys were killed every year in Houston alone by perverts, most of whom were heterosexual in their open lives. Most of these crimes were not reported as homicides. One boy, for example, who was killed through what I guess is called fist rape, died of “massive internal bleeding”. He was, if memory serves, found naked in a dumpster.
Searching for statistics, they are hard to come by. Here is one resource from 1998: http://www.veronicasvoice.org/statistics/
Here is one from 2009: http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/10-surprising-and-counterintuitive-facts-about-child-sex-trafficking
In that last one, it is interesting/disturbing to note that children under 18 are more likely to be charged with a crime than helped, if they turn to most authorities.
I will grant that in this post I am exploring. I saw something a few months ago that gave me cause to believe that pedophilia is common among the power elite. I won’t say more than that, not least because it is hard to believe I saw what I saw, and I would not be prepared to swear on it in court.
But I do want to say a few things.
1) It is not necessary to believe in a Grand Conspiracy with regard to Franklin. It is merely necessary to believe in moral cowardice on the part of the FBI and Omaha police.
As with 9/11, as with Sandy Hook, there is a great deal of evidence that no one in a position of authority wanted to take up. Doing so would have meant creating massive public controversy, becoming a target of very vicious attacks by the actually guilty, and perhaps even violence.
Mostly, though, I think in Franklin those who were responsible for conducting the investigation were unable to IMAGINE that these crimes were possible. They were further lulled to sleep by people like the District Attorney, who in fact WERE in on a conspiracy, and finally put everything back on the shelf because to do otherwise would have meant taking bigger risks than they were prepared to make, all for allegations which befuddled them, and seemed inconceivable.
One sees the claim made, in discussing this documentary, that the trail went “all the way to the White House”. What actually happened is that an influential lobbyist–who later killed himself, if memory serves, prior to going to jail–took kids on tours of a closed, dark, sleeping White House. They did not meet the President, and on no accounts did anything of a sexual nature happen in the White House. It is certainly conceivable that someone able to put together large political donations would get privileges like this, without the President or his staff knowing just what was going on.
2) This is my more important point: The lessons of that 1981 documentary seem not to have been learned by anyone. It seems extraordinarily unlikely to me that the market for teenage boys has disappeared. According to one of the studies cited above, teen boys seemingly continue to constitute roughly half the prostitutes in America. Back in 1981, hundreds were killed annually in Houston alone, and their deaths reported as everything but homicides.
Has male perversion decreased since then? Or is this STILL going on, today, in nearly every major metropolitan area in the country? The thing about young male prostitutes is they are not victims of “child abuse” in a formal sense. They are not being held against their will in most cases, or forced into selling sex. And at my age, I have never imagined or known that HALF the prostitution in this country was homosexual (I will note that Thomas Philpott took care to note that the homosexual aspect is secondary; it is the power dynamic that is primary).
I can’t find statistics on this. Why would the best documentary be 34 years old?
And here is one more major question: what happened to the masses of kids from Central America who flooded our border last year?
As a nation, we seemingly STILL do not have a category for the systemic prostitution of, and abuse of, by any standard, boys.
Why?