Fearless Women in Harm’s Way
January 17, 2016
Anne Swaney
MARK JAWS writes:
When I read about the murders of women who put themselves in such recklessly dangerous situations, I could almost cry. All too often a young white woman loses her life because she thinks she can gallivant throughout the jungles of the Third World, or hitchhike on its highways, worry free, with her hair let down, while singing, “I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony.” Unfortunately and tragically, that is not the case.
I just read earlier today the tragic death in Belize of Anne Swaney, 39, an executive TV news producer at ABC Chicago. Ms. Swaney traveled to Belize alone and stayed at a resort with horseback riding and an organic farm. She was last seen heading down to a river by herself to do yoga. She was beaten and strangled. Think about that. Rivers, such as the Mopan River in Belize, are always on low ground, and often concealed by thick foliage. She went down to an isolated place, out of sight, a quarter mile from her cabin, in a land inhabited mostly by poor blacks and browns. Not a smart move. But to a majority of mind-numb Eloi Americans, I’d be a racist to have warned her not to put herself in such jeopardy in a land where blacks and browns rule.
A Guatemalan man who was fishing along the river has been questioned. Swaney was bleeding profusely when her body was found face down in the river.
There is also the case of 35-year-old Ashley Olsen, an American living in Florence. It seems Ms. Olsen, who had an Italian boyfriend, met a black African at a bar, took him home to her apartment, and had sex with him while they were both high, before he killed her. Not a smart move to take home someone she just met, particularly a black African.
I have raised two sons and two daughters. And I have explained to my daughters the ugly reality of this world in which dark-skinned men are much more likely to do white women harm and transmit sexual disease than white and East Asian men. Ms. Swaney and Ms. Olsen may be alive today if their fathers had done likewise.
Seven years ago I caused a little stir in one of Lawrence Auster’s View From The Right threads concerning the tragic murder of a British honeymooning couple in the Caribbean island of Antigua by recommending white people never travel to black-run countries unless they can provide their own security.
James P. writes:
Ashley Olsen died in “a drug-fueled one-night-stand gone wrong” — as if there is a right way to have “a drug-fueled one-night-stand” with an African immigrant you picked up in a nightclub!
I couldn’t help but think of View from the Right, where “white women killed by black boyfriends” was a long-running topic of discussion.
— Comments —
Abigail writes:
Mark Jaws claims that, “When I read about the murders of women who put themselves in such recklessly dangerous situations, I could almost cry.” He then mocks those deceased women he claims to sorrow for: “All too often a young white woman loses her life because she thinks she can gallivant throughout the jungles of the Third World, or hitchhike on its highways, worry free, with her hair let down, while singing, ‘I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony.'”Not only his assertion disrespectful, it lacks evidence.
I am a woman. I’ve not done any solo traveling in the Third World, but I have female friends who have. I have also been in situations in which, if I’d been killed or hurt, people like Mark Jaws would likely argue that I had been careless of risk. I’m guessing there’s hardly a woman alive who has avoided all such situations; who would be hard to function while living the perfectly risk-free life scolds seem to expect of us. What woman hasn’t chosen the convenience of walking somewhere later at night than many people think is safe rather than wait for a male guardian or undergo the expense of paid transportation? What woman hasn’t been alone with a man on a date?
It doesn’t follow that because a woman gets killed after having chosen to take some degree of risk that she was a stupid Pollyanna. Many of us — ALL of us, in fact, male and female – choose to take some degree of risk in order not to live a stunted life. If you truly wanted to curtail all risk, you would never leave the house or get in a car or go on a date. At some point, you are choosing some degree of risk because you decide that risk is worth certain rewards. I don’t know any women who engage in adventure travel who are oblivious to the risks of traveling alone — TRUST ME, women are constantly reminded all the time of the risk of existing in the world while female – but those who do choose the risky path do so because the rewards are worth the risk for them. That risk-reward analysis is a subjective assessment. How much risk am I willing to tolerate in order to have some degree of independence, autonomy and experience? How many limitations on my life am I willing to tolerate in order to mitigate risk? I can’t answer that question for you and you can’t answer that question for me. Yet, people are constantly wagging their fingers at women with one-size-fits-all rules, usually erring on the side of mitigating risk regardless of the costs to the woman of doing so.
It is also worth noting that it’s not only white women who get kidnapped, raped, or murdered in far flung places abroad. Men are victimized too, as are plenty of non-whites. But white women seem to be ridiculed for it more.
Laura writes:
Spending time alone in skimpy clothes (yoga clothing) by a river with dense overgrowth far from other people in that part of the world is reckless. I assume Mr. Jaws wants other women to exercise better judgment.
I would not criticize the people of Belize if they showed especial concern for the murder of one of their own in America.
Mr. Jaws writes:
Having read Abigail’s response, I shall explain myself with greater clarity.
I mentioned my two daughters – one is married to a jet fighter pilot and the other is still in high school. Both are very intelligent and quite assertive. The older one now has five children, but during her college days she engaged in all sorts of “risky” physical behavior to include bungee jumping. The girl was simply fearless. However, as an intelligent person she could calculate the risk of every endeavor she undertook. As she once told me that there is a huge difference between bungee jumping under the supervision of a professional outfit, or having your girlfriend’s brother rig up a line by himself and then using it to jump.
I was an Army paratrooper and the four years I was at Fort Bragg we went 956,000 jumps between fatalities. However, the last year I was there we had four accidental parachute deaths. Three of the four were the result of young soldiers doing stupid or negligent things, such as panicking while stuck in a tree and strangling himself to death, or not checking his equipment prior to departing the aircraft, with his lowering line coming undone and wedged in the door, causing the young paratrooper to be stuck underneath the aircraft. Jumping out of airplanes, particularly at night, as we often did, was risky business indeed, but when one followed the procedures and operated cautiously, one was far, far less likely to become a statistic.
That is what I am trying to convey in the aftermath of Ms. Swaney’s tragically and very unnecessary death. Belize is a heavily black country, which is now currently being inundated with illegal immigrants and drug cartels from Guatemala. It needs to be drilled into the heads of white women that they are particularly tempting targets – as the women in Cologne and throughout Germany have painfully discovered – by blacks and browns. Statistics show that when white women put themselves in situations allowing black and brown men to do them harm, they are far more likely to get it.
Ms. Swaney was not a college student. She was 39 years old, working in a news studio in Chicago. Therefore, she knew – had to know – that black neighborhoods are No-Go for white people. And yet she went to a black-run country and violated every common sense safety procedure known to women, thinking, no doubt, that it could not happen to her. And it did.
Abigail writes:
I appreciate Mark’s clarification. If I am reading him correctly, he is not opposed to the notion of women engaging in a risk/reward analysis and choosing to take certain risks in order to live fully. That’s important and I’m glad to hear that, because I often get the opposite impression when I read remarks like those in his initial post.
I understand that Mark is still taking the position that Ms. Swaney made an ill-judged choice and, essentially, should have known better. I posit that we don’t and can’t know all the relevant factors or what she may have thought about them. We don’t know her reasoning, thought process, the information the resort gave her, or the precise set up in the area where she was killed. I think it is damaging to speculate and blame the victim of a murder who may have taken a calculated risk for her own personal reasons. Also, these finger-wagging types of comments always seem to be directed at women, whereas men are also frequently the victims of violent crimes both here in the U.S. and abroad. .
I would also mention that I am a white woman, older than Ms. Swaney, and I have lived in two “black run” African countries, a Latin American country, and three major cities in the U.S. I don’t think it is obvious at all that black neighborhoods are a no go. Improverished and crime ridden neighborhoods are a no go — but not all such neighborhoods are black, and there are black neighborhoods that are neither. City dwellers generally rely on learning the city they are in – where to go and where not to go.
Lastly, yoga clothes are skimpy? In Belize?
Laura writes:
Also, these finger-wagging types of comments always seem to be directed at women, whereas men are also frequently the victims of violent crimes both here in the U.S. and abroad.
It is human nature to feel a greater revulsion toward violence against women, just as it is human nature to feel a greater revulsion to the idea of women being blown to bits and raped as combat soldiers.
You don’t need to tell me that you are an exception to this rule. I already know.
Yoga clothes are tight and revealing.
Mr. Jaws writes:
This article depicts the grief suffered by Mr. Swaney, the father of the slain news producer. It indicates that his daughter, Anne, had previously gone hiking and biking in Turkey, and that as long as he could hear her voice via cell phone, he thought everything was OK. No sir, everything was not OK. Your daughter was treading where most have enough sense not to tread. If an attractive white woman wishes to go hiking and biking, then a Moslem country should be the last place she should go. Are there not enough attractive places in the USA, Europe, and the First World portions of South America (e.g., Chile, Argentina, etc.) to hike and bike?
Laura writes:
Feminism has made women feel invincible.
It has also induced them to replace family life with travel and adventure in exotic places.
Jan. 19, 2016
Bill R. writes:
Abigail writes, “Also, these finger-wagging types of comments always seem to be directed at women, whereas men are also frequently the victims of violent crimes both here in the U.S. and abroad.”
I second Laura’s response to the comment, and if I may be forgiven adding the obvious, one, women are objects of sexual desire for men, and, two, vastly easier to overcome physically. In this context, that’s quite the double-whammy for them. One word we use to describe it is “vulnerable.” And at least outside the leveling silliness of radical feminism, for which it seems only white women have any interest (or dare to), our concern over that vulnerability is not generally labeled “ridicule.” Also, among those men willing to commit rape to satisfy that desire, and then commit murder to hide the crime, the rate is considerably higher among blacks and non-white Hispanics, both races, furthermore, with average IQs substantially below that of whites, who are more prone than whites to violence and crime, score higher on personality measures such as psychopathy and lack of impulse control, score lower in such categories as willingness to delay gratification, abstract reasoning, and capacity for future planning, and finally, some of whose members come from cultures where what we white Europeans consider rape is endemic and viewed much less seriously, if indeed it is even a crime at all.
This, to me, is the real lesson of Miss Swaney’s violent death: It has nothing to do with any “risk-benefit analysis,” nor any criticism of women’s ability to make those calculations or other reasonable and intelligent choices. In fact, it has nothing to do with Miss Swaney or women in general at all. It has everything to do with the dangerous philosophy and pernicious culture of racial equality that Miss Swaney and other white women (and men) have grown up with. That is the real villain in this piece, in some ways even more so than the filthy animal who raped and killed her. It is not Miss Swaney who should have known better, or even her father. It is the culture that taught them both and whose rape-and-murder-inviting lies they both tragically trusted.
Abigail also writes, “I don’t think it is obvious at all that black neighborhoods are a no go. Impoverished and crime ridden neighborhoods are a no go — but not all such neighborhoods are black, and there are black neighborhoods that are neither.”
Haven’t we all heard that one before? It’s rubbish. At best, recklessly misleading. Intelligent decisions that are a matter of life and death about where one should and should not go are not based on exceptions but on prevailing patterns (or what upper-middle class white liberals who never have to deal with the issue are pleased to derisively call “stereotypes”). There’s a word for taking a risk on an exception. It’s called gambling. There is also a rule that governs the way in which one can do so safely, and that is not to bet more than one can afford to lose. Miss Swaney gambled with her life and she lost. The reason Miss Swaney did this is because she did not realize she was gambling, let alone with her life, and that is because her culture had taught her otherwise. A white person does not make the decision to enter a black neighborhood (or a Third World jungle) because, like the proverbial needle in a haystack, you might find a safe one somewhere. No, a white person makes the decision to enter a black neighborhood, or a black or brown jungle (not, frankly, that there’s whole lot of difference between the two), precisely because they have been taught by their culture, and since they were children in a public education system dominated and controlled by cultural Marxists, that finding such a neighborhood to be safe is no more an exception than finding a safe white one since there are, of course, no meaningful differences between racial groups. (The article linked to about Miss Swaney’s death, by the way, noted that Belize is “plagued with violence.” That must be due to past white imperialism. It couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the racial makeup of the place!)
In short, Abigail is wrong, period, and all the statistics we have on this issue say that she is wrong. If she is interested in knowing in more precise detail just how wrong she is, I would suggest she start with the publication The Color of Crime, published by the New Century Foundation and available in PDF free of charge. A couple quick statistics from it are worth mentioning here: Blacks are seven times more likely than people of other races to commit murder, and Hispanics commit violent crimes at roughly three times the white rate. Here are just a few more: A black is 27 times more likely to attack a white and 8 times more likely to attack a Hispanic than the other way around. A Hispanic is 8 times more likely to attack a white than vice versa. For anyone interested in a few books chalk full of disturbing if fascinating and compelling anecdotes to supplement the statistics, I recommend White Identity by Jared Taylor, and Mugged and Adios, America both by Ann Coulter.
These are not fearless women in harm’s way, by the way. They are ignorant and tragically misguided women, who have been cruelly betrayed by their own culture.
Laura writes:
I’d say, they are fearless because they are ignorant and tragically misguided. I agree with Bill when he writes:
It is not Miss Swaney who should have known better, or even her father. It is the culture that taught them both and whose rape-and-murder-inviting lies they both tragically trusted.
It’s unfair to blame her or her father. They were taught to disregard the dangers.
