Ota Benga Alliance For Peace, Healing and Dignity

The Greatest Silence is an apt title for the film this article reviews, since it keeps under wraps one of the most common crimes, so common that people just shrug their shoulders, sometimes with the words: it is human nature.

The filmmaker, Lisa F. Jackson, has brought out something which horrifies people, but the horror, strangely, does not seem to lead to anything serious enough to change the dominant mindset about rape. Why do the offenders brag about raping one might ask? I think, from what is in the article about the HBO film, that she could have gone further. At the risk of offending some sensibilities, rape, and how it is allowed, could be compared with any other crime against humanity (e.g. slavery, Herero, Armenia, certified and uncertified holocausts, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Rwanda, etc...)--more specifically, comparable with any crime against humanity which goes on unacknowledged and unpunished. It reproduces the mindset which says that might is right.  read more »