It broke my heart to hear that he had died today. I never for one moment ever believed he abused a child despite the allegations. Michael was a victim of child abuse. Many child stars have it tough. For every Ron Howard, there are many others who have had their childhoods robbed from them. I believe Michael's explanation of [i]Neverland[/i] was organic.
Jackson Interview Transcript
{excerpt}
{on why we he developed Neverland}
Because I wanted to have a place that I could create everything that I never had as a child. So, you see rides. You see animals. There's a movie theater. I was always on tour, traveling. You know? And — I never got a chance to do those things. So, I compensated for the loss by — I have a good — I mean, I can't go into a park. I can't go to Disneyland, as myself. I can't go out and walk down the street. There's crowds, and bumper to bumper cars. And so, I create my world behind my gates. Everything that I love is behind those gates. We have elephants, and giraffes, and crocodiles, and every kind of tigers and lions. And — and we have bus loads of kids, who don't get to see those things. They come up sick children, and enjoy it. They enjoy it in a pure, loving, fun way. It's people with the dirty mind that think like that. I don't think that way. That's not me.
The Jackson Five were abused by their father.
Variety
Michael Jackson dies at 50
by Pat Saperstein
{excerpt}
Jackson's own early influences included fellow Motown stars Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, while Diana Ross, with whom Jackson starred in "The Wiz," became a sort of spiritual mentor. James Brown's liquid footwork on the stage also exerted a pull on the singer.
Born in Gary, Ind., he had eight siblings: Rebbie, Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, La Toya, Marlon, Randy and Janet. His father, Joseph, was a steel mill employee who performed in an R&B band, while his mother was a devout Jehovah's Witness.
Jackson and his siblings have described his father's abuse with whippings and forcing constant rehearsals, which affected Michael's stability the rest of his life.
In 1964 Michael and Marlon joined the Jackson Brothers, a band formed by Jackie, Tito and Jermaine. When he was 8, Michael and Jermaine became lead singers for the group, whose name was changed to the Jackson 5. The group signed with Motown Records in 1968. Despite his high, childish voice, he quickly emerged as the main draw.
Their first four singles, "I Want You Back," "ABC," "The Love You Save" and "I'll Be There" hit No. 1 on Billboard Hot 100.
Starting in 1972, Jackson released four solo albums with Motown, including "Got to Be There" and "Ben," the soundtrack for the film about a boy and his rats.
Alice Miller is perhaps the greatest intellectual, when it comes to explaining child abuse. She respected Freud's profound insights on the effects of memory on consciousness. Unlike Freud, however, she didn't see the victim's sexuality as the cause of their difficulties in life. She speaks of the child within. What happens is, when we experience trauma at a young age, we end up reliving them through what she refers to as the repetitive, regressive compulsion. I encourage all readers to check out her books. She has her own website. There was also a body of work put together by Arthur Silber called Essays Based on the Work of Alice Miller. Hat tip to Abbeysbooks.
If one desires to understand why things never seem to get better, such philosophy is important to tap into. Child abuse comes in many forms. We are taught from the earliest of ages that the parents and adults are always correct. That leads to we the people being more likely to accept all types of authority figures running things, without our critical thinking skills included.
Abbeysbooks emailed me saying this would be a good story to blog on due to my admiration for Alice Miller. However, I am at a loss for words. All I can think of is that based on Miller's ideas, I do believe that Michael Jackson was an innocent man. I feel he got a raw deal in life. I believe he died at such a young age as a result of all the abuse he experienced. How would you like to be called a pedophile? How would you like it, if people made fun of you due to a rare skin disease?
Just because most of us would never consider sleeping in the same bed as a child of someone else's, because of the obvious threat of it being misunderstood, I believe Michael Jackson felt it was an okay thing to do precisely because he would never have harmed a child. He built [i]Neverland[/i] with the best of intentions, imho. Now he is dead, because the cruel world he was born into tortured his soul with false allegations.
From The Jim Nabors Show with clips compiled by penny2000:
I'll Be There
From The Sonny and Cher Show:
Ben
God bless Michael Jackson, and may he rest in peace.
A Victim of Child Abuse and the Cult of Personality
This guy's sexual innocence was stolen.
Slate
Arrested Development: The tragedy of Michael Jackson.
By Jacob Weisberg
June 14, 2005
{excerpt}
...Michael was made into a performing sexualized freak, a boy whose soprano voice kindled passion in grown women. He was made to witness adult sexuality at an age when it can only have been terrifying and incomprehensible to him. By 10, he was performing in strip clubs and hiding under the covers in hotel rooms while his older brothers got it on with groupies. At 11—the age at which his psyche seems frozen—he was a superstar. "My childhood was completely taken away from me," he has said.
Many disturbing posts can be found at MyLeftWing.
A poster named Antibi described him as "a dead baby-raper." Then later on he or she admitted there was no proof that Michael was even a child molester. An MLW admin named durratti agreed that Michael was a molester. His problem was that rape was not the correct word to use. Another admin named Curmudgette also backed the idea that Jackson had molested children by going off on some kind of tangent about molesting being as bad as rape. Then donkeytale {Joseph kkk} added to the list of people with big egos making comments with no proof.
Most boyz have had gay sex with other boys or men before they are 13.
Uhm, no, they haven't. Where's the proof? Where do any of these people find the nerve to even discuss child sexuality, as if they have the credentials to do so?
Child abuse occurs more often than most people realise. One needn't even be sexually abused to be a victim. Michael was mentally abused. We have all been victimised by this perverted world. When the parents and the State are always deemed correct, the child from within us is destroyed. We are taught to accept things as they are. We are brainwashed by the mass culture. Our sexuality is forced onto us without much freedom of will, innocent wonder years, nor organic development.
Donkeytale is wrong that no damage occurs when pre-teens are sexualised. It is not natural. He is projecting, plain and simple. He was abused as a youth, and he is trying to make it seem that is ok. He speaks of students having sex with the "hot teachers" as if they have won the jackpot. And Curmudgette is right in his corner also justifying the sexualisation of youth.
Take away the tv, movies, and print media, and children are not sexualised. Our brains tend to still be developing until the age of 21. This explains how even older teenagers can make some of the most mystifying mistakes. Children need to be protected and not drawn into the "real" world.
My own first experiences were at 12 were with a longtime neighborhood friend who was 15.
Then he went a step further and promoted the idea that an adult sexual predator shouldn't get into trouble for statutory rape/sexual relations with a minor. He even blames the victim.
In the case of my Okie friend, he was the pursuer of gratfication from an adult when he was a minor.
Your mind set leads inexorably to bad law and criminalizes victimless activity.
Minors can't consent to sexual relations. I've never been more disgusted by a poster than donkeytale. He seems to be debating from the viewpoint of NAMBLA. That's wrong.
That hot blond school teacher in Florida a few years back. She molested the 15 yr old boy? Wright....believe me if that was molestation, then I would desire plenty of that type of molestation. We both wished we could have been molested like that at 15, dont we?
Disgusting. The teacher stole the youth's childhood. Just because donkeytale wishes to justify the way he was abused as a minor as being natural and healthy, it does not make it so.
What is up with donkeytale's lack of grammar and spelling? Why no apostrophes? This thread is actually symbolic of what MyLeftWing has turned out to be, a repetitive echo chamber full of egos who love the sound of their own voices. KarmaFish and Imhotep even found a way to get in their circular Israel/Palestine debate. Maryscott O'Connor showed up to tell the world some more of her most personal secrets, of how she was sexually abused as a child. She just throws it out there. Why does she blurt stuff out like this?
I will give donkeytale credit for the following.
Maryscott: I wonder why I'm not an abuser.
Why I'm so violently repulsed by it, instead.
donkeytale: Maybe you work it out by being an online abuser.
Bingo.
I'll give Maryscott credit for sticking up for Michael's innocence. Then Curmudgette yet again showed her propensity to have her cake and eat it too. She should be a politician or astroturfer. Maybe she already works for both. She likes to play both sides of fences. When Francis Holland was being trolled on at MyLeftWing, she also piled on him with ad hominems and poorly constructed arguments implying he was a smearer. On the other hand, she said she didn't want him banned. Well, you can't have it both ways. You can't attack someone in ways which lead to a banning and then act innocent after the person was banned by saying you didn't want that to happen. In this current thread, she shows yet again an absurd amount of wiggle room. She says that Michael Jackson was found innocent, but that the signs indicate that he was guilty of the accusations. She puts out that Michael could have been victimised by grifters, yet still pushes he was guilty. Okay, based on Curmudgette's philosophy of debate, I am going to argue that either the Braves or the Red Sox are gonna win today's baseball game. In this way, I am correct no matter what.
The childlike behavior is very much indicative of childhood sexual abuse. I've known a number of abuse survivors to arrest, in that way, so that they speak like children into their adult lives. He absolutely was robbed of a childhood, as was LaToya, who also exhibits like a sexualized child.
I agree with you we can't know for certain, but it is absolutely true that a percentage of sex abuse survivors go on to abuse, because of repetition compulsion and a very damaged sexuality. Like Antibi, I think there were numerous tells with Michael Jackson. I would not go so far as to say I'm certain. But, the fact that he was never convicted in court is meaningless to me. Rapists and sex abusers go free every day. It's actually a very hard thing to prove, in court. No witnesses; terrified and emotionally damaged accusers.
The parents may have been angling for money. The parents may have been assholes. Here's something you may not know. Child molesters target children of irresponsible parents. They target the kids who are vulnerable and emotionally neglected; who aren't being properly protected by their parents and already have damaged self esteem. So the fact that the parents turned out to be exploitive jerks is not that surprising.
In short, nothing was accomplished by this MyLeftWing thread other than the need for a couple aspirin and a shower.
I was reading a fairly interesting article on Michael Jackson in today's Boston Globe. Yet, what I was left with was just another example of Curmudgette-like rules of reasoning. Where is the logic and consistency?
For blacks, Jackson’s struggles mirrored their own
By Wesley Morris
{excerpts}
Michael Jackson, pictured in 1979 (left),
underwent a series of plastic surgeries.
In 1993, Jackson told Oprah Winfrey - and, by extension, the entire planet - that he struggled with a skin condition called vitiligo that drained the pigment out of this skin. Regardless of whether this was actually the case, his face itself told the story of a torn soul....
....Look hard enough at Jackson, however, and you realize that it was aging, not blackness, that he hated.
...They - we - could see well past the bleached skin and unnatural Caucasian features. We could see his blues.
Why does the author discount Jackson's account of being afflicted with vitiligo? How is he able to go from having doubts about why Jackson's skin colour went white to pronouncing that it was due to bleaching? This guy needs to get his facts straight.
Chopra: Michael Jackson had lupus
UPI
Dr. Deepak Chopra says his longtime friend Michael Jackson suffered from lupus and vitiligo and had been known to use strong pain medication, People.com reported....
Chopra told People.com children who were physically or verbally abused can develop autoimmune diseases, such as lupus, later in life.
"Michael, he was never sexually abused but according to him, he was traumatized verbally and physically in his childhood, and it was a big issue with him," said Chopra, a spiritual teacher as well as medical doctor.
Lupus can cause skin discoloration, such as vitiligo, and Jackson had "huge white patches all over his body," Chopra said, adding Jackson had taken Oxycontin, Vicodin and Demerol at various times in his adult life.
Chopra's son, Gotham, also a friend of Jackson's, said the pop star was disturbed by reports that he bleached his skin to appear white.
"He identified as being a black person and so it was troubling to him that everyone thought that he was a hater of his own race," Gotham Chopra said. "And the lupus, why he didn't just come out more clearly and say that was the problem, I'm not sure. But I know it was something that bothered him a lot."
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