Cultural Expressions of Masochism | She was raped, but she was not angry. Joanie de Rijke was abducted by Taliban fighters in Afghanistan

via CORRUPT.org: Remaking Modern Society

You hate the world, but realize you're too weak to do anything about it--what do you do? You decide to hate yourself instead and acquire power by appealing to other people's sympathy. Sometimes this psychological deficiency becomes institutionalized. This man, for instance, didn't approve of the marriage his father arranged for him, so he decided to voice his opinion in a way no one could misunderstand:

A 25-year-old Egyptian man cut off his own penis to spite his family after he was refused permission to marry a girl from a lower class family, police reported Sunday.
After unsuccessfully petitioning his father for two years to marry the girl, the man heated up a knife and sliced off his reproductive organ, said a police official.
The young man came from a prominent family in the southern Egyptian province of Qena, one of Egypt's poorest and most conservative areas that is also home to the famed ancient Egyptian ruins of Luxor.

This man probably felt unable to revolt against his paternal authority, so he neutralized the situation by removing a symbolic part of himself and play the victim role. An extreme case, but it speaks for a whole lifestyle that's embodied in many parts of the world today. The West, of course, takes the lead:

In November 2008 a Dutch journalist, Joanie de Rijke, was abducted by Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. She was held captive, raped repeatedly, and released after six days for a ransom of 100,000 euros ($137,000). After her ordeal, she acknowledged that her captors “did horrible things to me,” but added in several media interviews “They also respected me,” and emphasized “They are not monsters.”
In a speech in the Dutch Parliament last Thursday, the Dutch opposition leader Geert Wilders referred to Joanie de Rijke’s case.
“She was raped, but she was not angry. The journalist who went looking for the Taliban in Afghanistan saw her curiosity end in a cruel ordeal of multiple rape. While this would make others angry or sad, this journalist shows understanding. She says: ‘They also respected me.’ And she was given tea and biscuits.”

Here the self-loathing takes a different form. De Rijke is trying to excuse her perpetrators or at least tone down their actions, not to revolt against any authority in particular, but to process her experiences. Wilder's attempt of linking her behavior to the Stockholm syndrome is not that far-fetched; she knew she was powerless in her situation, so she found a way of dealing with it by trying to appeal to the sympathy and mercy of the authority. Now when she's come home, she repeats the behavioral pattern to herself in order to justify how she reacted.
While just about anyone can occasionally use self-loathing psychology to gain power or survive a situation, this behavior is clearly most prominent in the West, especially, as once noted by the Unabomber, among leftists. De Rijke was a leftist journalist and reacted accordingly: her powerlessness was apparent, so she flipped the coin and used her victim status to survive the situation, and defend herself at home. In one sense, it's a very clever survival strategy. As a public lifestyle and cultural psychological phenomena, it probably hints at a civilization in steady decline.:.