Erasing the lines
The Line: Women, Partition and the Gender Order in Cyprus by Cynthia
Cockburn. New York: Zed Books, 2004, 244 pp., $25.00 paper.
Reviewed by Ayse Gul Altinay
APRIL 24, 2004, was a historic day in the troubled history of the Mediterranean
island of Cyprus. More than half a million Cypriots voted on the future of
their island and their lives. The voting came 30 years after the Turkish military
intervention in Cyprus, which had followed years of communal strife between
the Greek majority and the Turkish minority in the 1960s and a coup d'etat
by Greek Cypriot extremists associated with the Greek military junta in 1974.
Ironically called "the Peace Operation" by the Turkish social-democratic government
of the time, this military intervention, like all others, resulted in many
deaths and disappearances on both sides, forced relocations, and the partition
of the island into two: the Turkish North and the Greek South. In April, Greek
and Turkish Cypriots were asked to express their opinions about a UN-driven
negotiation document for a reunited Cyprus, the Annan Plan. Unfortunately,
the results were less than satisfactory for those longing for a solution:
a 65 percent "yes" to the Annan Plan in the Turkish North and a 75 percent
"no" in the Greek South. The 30-year-long struggle to demilitarize the island
and normalize relations between Turkish and Greek Cypriots went into a new
phase, its success to be determined by the extent to which women become a
part of it. Because so far, women's position has been one of total invisibility.
Cynthia Cockburn's remarkably timely book, The Line, introduces a
woman's group, Hands Across the Divide (HAD), which was set up in 2001 as
the first Cypriot political organization that, by the device of constituting
itself with a London postal address, legally has both southern and northern
members. The book also includes interviews with women in both parts of the
island who don't necessarily see themselves as political activists. Through
their life stories and daily struggles, a very different picture of "the Cyprus
problem" emerges. "The Line is a book about Cyprus as seen through
women's eyes," says Cockburn.
But that is not the whole story.
At another level, equally inspiring, The Line is a book about new
ways of imagining the connectedness of ethnic and gender conflicts, anti-militarism,
and feminism. Cockburn continues the conversation she began in her earlier
work The Space Between Us (1998), which examined women's across-the-line
activism in Northern Ireland, Bosnia, and Israel/Palestine. In The Line,
she presents her analysis of the "inner processes of line making, line negotiation
and line melting." Do not be misled by the singular use of "the line" in the
title; the book is about the many lines that structure our thinking, our politics,
and our every day lives.
How can we understand as well as challenge these lines which delimit our
militarized, ethnicized, gendered lives? Cockburn says we must start with
a simple realization.
A geo-political partition is not just armoured fencing, it is also
a line inside our heads, and in our hearts, too. In fact, the physical fence
is a manifestation of these more cognitive and emotional lines that shape
our thoughts and feelings. (p. 1)
In the case of Cyprus, the lines demarcating ethnic difference were a result
of colonial, international, and national projects that included Britain, Turkey,
Greece, and the United States as the most decisive actors. The Line presents
a nuanced history of these political projects--as interpreted by women. Not
surprisingly, the women's interpretations belie the over-used Turkish vs.
Greek analysis we often confront in both the media and academic works.
While some Greek Cypriot women come from nationalist families that supported
the ghettoization and marginalization of the Turkish minority in the 1960s
and applauded the coup in 1974, others were its victims. Arianna Enonomou,
the dancer whose performance inspired the book's title, had experienced British
raids into her home as well as threats from both Greek and Turkish nationalist
extremists. For her leftist parents, the Turks were hardly the enemy. They
identified "the Greek fascists and their local supporters as enemies more
immediately menacing than either Turkish Cypriots or Turks." Sevgül Uludag,
today a prominent Turkish Cypriot journalist, also remembers Turkish extremists
being more of a danger to her leftist parents than anybody else. After the
1974 coup, some of the Greek women who now belong to HAD, or their parents,
were blacklisted. While some women, like Ayse Hasan, saw the Turkish intervention
as a lifesaver, for others, who lost their villages, houses, and loved ones
in the ten years of ethnic strife, Turkish military intervention was not the
solution.
THE SUMMER OF 1974, when the Turkish military fought with Greek Cypriot
forces and ultimately drew the partition line, was a turning point in the
history of Cyprus.
From then on there would always be "before" and "after". The thing
that made the difference was your ethnicity in relation to where on the geo-ethnic
map of the island you had been living. If you were a Turkish Cypriot living
north of the Partition Line or a Greek Cypriot living south of it, you were
relatively lucky. (p. 73)
Those who did not fit in the new geo-ethnic divisions would experience violence
of all kinds, and, ultimately, displacement. Many were killed or went missing,
and everybody else had to relocate: about 180,000 Greek Cypriots became refugees
in the South and 45,000 to 60,000 Turkish Cypriots in the North.
The result is one of the most heavily militarized pieces of land on the
planet, where lives are separated by barbed wire and mines. Militarization
in Cyprus, as elsewhere, is deeply gendered.
In one sense, all politicians in both north and south Cyprus are
"military men" because the entire male population, bar a few ethnic and religious
categories deemed unreliable (such as Catholics and Turkish Cypriots in the
south), are conscripted into military service. (p. 113)
Cockburn explains the processes through which Turkish and Greek nationalisms,
each supported by militarized notions of heroic, soldierly masculinity, have
created deeply patriarchal gender orders on either side of the Partition Line.
"Neither militarism nor nationalism is conducive to women's equality and autonomy.
In Cyprus these twin mind-sets are still firmly in place, everlastingly legitimated
by the unresolved war, the unsigned peace."
How can this picture change? Cockburn, based on her interviews with HAD
members and other women in Cyprus, proposes two important types of action.
The first is to implement UN Security Council Resolution 1325, which calls
for including women at all levels of negotiation, as well as in post-agreement
processes of peace-building. As the UN has recognized: "War is a women's issue.
Gender is a peace issue." Second, Cockburn argues, we should understand, reveal,
and change the mutual workings of ethnic lines and gender lines through what
she calls transversal politics, "a very difficult art." Such politics entail
taking a position of "neither/nor" to the limiting models of nationalism and
patriarchal gender orders, a position that the women of HAD struggle to implement
across their own divisions. Different strategies are needed to tackle gender
and ethnic lines, says Cockburn: "While an ethnic line, such as the line that
encircles a ghetto or the partition line that splits a country, may almost
totally separate two cultural groups, the gender line that differentiates
men from women operates in another way. The gender line runs through every
institution, every street, every building, every bedroom - even the bed itself."
An ethnic line is reason for outcry and international negotiations; gender
lines are less visible because they have been normalized through patriarchal
discourses and practices.
One recent strategy to decenter the ethnic line and to emphasize the Cypriot
identity on the Turkish side has been the use of the terms new Kibrislitürk
(Cypriotturk) and Kibrislirum (Cypriotgreek) in everyday language.
As for other creative strategies for revealing and changing the gender and
ethnic lines of differentiation on the island, we will need to keep our eyes
and ears open for the actions of Hands Across the Divide and other women's
groups from Cyprus. I share Cynthia Cockburn's hope that her book "might encourage
the growth of an inclusive and outward-reaching woman's movement in Cyprus,
help make feminism a more say-able word, and feminist change a more thinkable
thought." What an inspiration a demilitarized, gender-equal, multiethnic,
multi-religious Cyprus would be for our conflict-ridden region! What a gift
this book is for making such an idea a "thinkable thought"!
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Reaching across divided societies
A conversation with Cynthia Cockburn
By Ayse Gul Altinay
CYNTHIA COCKBURN WAS INVITED to Turkey by Sabanci University to give a talk
on her new book The Line in March 2004. She spoke in Istanbul, Diyarbakir,
and Mardin, and met with various women's groups from western and eastern Turkey.
The following interview was done on March 14, 2004.
Ayse Gul Altinay: You talk about having two hats, the researcher hat and
the activist hat. In both The Line and your earlier book, The Space
Between Us (1998), these two seem to have come together in a new way.
Could you tell us a little bit about how this happened, how you integrated
research and activism?
Cynthia Cockburn: I've always thought one way an academic researcher
can contribute to activism is to research and write with a constituency in
mind, by which I mean a group of people for whom it could be politically important
to have the knowledge the research generates. I've always tried to do that
in my research, to work close to a constituency. The constituency isn't necessarily
the same group as the research focus. For example, when, as a feminist researcher,
I studied male trade unionists, the constituency I had in mind was women trade
unionists. But in the case of women actively counteracting the negativities
of war, the women who are the subjects of The Line and Space,
I have actually been researching the very women who I would hope would also
be my constituency. They're both topic and constituency.
AA: How did you make the shift?
CC: It happened like this. My main active involvement in the 1980s
was in the movement for peace and disarmament. We were protesting the deployment
of US nuclear missiles in Britain and the pursuit of a futile arms race with
the USSR. In the 1990s things changed. The USSR collapsed. There was the Gulf
War and then the Bosnian war, and they really shocked those of us in the peace
movement very badly. At that moment I was in any case ready for a change of
research direction. In my labor process studies I'd been working and focusing
intently on men and masculinity for many years, and I felt it would be a sort
of kindness to myself to start working more closely with women. I wanted to
work both in and for the anti-war movement. And I wanted to find something
positive to study. So I made contact with women's groups that appeared to
me to be doing very creative work in situations of ethnicized conflict.
AA: Can you explain what you mean by "ethnicized" as opposed to "ethnic"?
CC: Wars that present themselves as local, ethnic wars are often,
in reality, international wars or wars about economics or other aspects of
power. But they take the form of conflict between ethnic groups. In many ways
the differentiation of ethnic groups is as much the product of the war as
the cause of it. That's what I mean by saying "ethnicized war." Anyway, through
an international feminist friendship network of women opposing war and militarism,
I already knew of some projects where women were working to counteract ethnic
aspects of conflicts. And I asked them if I might come closer to try to learn
more about their work. It was truly a great relief and pleasure to me at that
moment to be able to put my research energy where my political activism had
already been for a long time.
AA: So you chose women's groups in Northern Ireland, Bosnia, and Israel/Palestine
for your first anti-militarist, action-research project--
CC: Yes, in Northern Ireland I worked with the Women's Support Network,
which was an umbrella organization of women's community centers. In Bosnia
it was a women's therapy center I got involved with. It had been set up during
the war to respond to the physical, social, and psychological needs of women
who were raped or otherwise traumatized--and their children. And in Israel
and Palestine, my research was about Bat Shalom, a local alliance of Jewish
women from kibbutzim in the North of Israel and Palestinian women, Israeli
citizens, living in Nazareth and other Arab towns. What I studied among them
was the mechanisms by which women cooperate across conflictual ethnic identities
in times of ethnicized war.
AA: And then you moved on to Cyprus--
C: Yes, some Cypriot women had the aspiration to take an initiative that
could bring together Turkish Cypriot and Greek Cypriot women in a unitary
organization. One of them had read The Space Between Us. They got in
touch and invited me to facilitate a seminar of 60 women from North and South
Cyprus. This was very exciting. I'd always had my eye on Cyprus as a place
where very interesting things must be happening, from which we could all learn.
In setting up the seminar, we agreed that I'd be accompanied by two women
from Northern Ireland, two from Bosnia-Herzegovina, and two from Israel/Palestine,
a Palestinian woman and a Jewish woman. They'd come and help us at the seminar
by telling us how they have been dealing with partition lines, as women. So
it was a four-way look at gendered and ethnicized partitions, and it really
was quite inspiring. After that, the Cypriot women decided that they wanted
to remain in touch with each other and with me, and this led to the establishment
of what eventually became Hands Across the Divide. And, for my part, it led
to a two-year program of action-research in and among the group. One result
of that is The Line.
AA: So, your book, The Space Between Us, has been a catalyst for
the formation of a new women's group in Cyprus. How inspiring!
CC: Yes, The Space Between Us seems to have been of use, let's
say, to some Cypriot women. It could be that The Line proves of use
to women in other countries, perhaps more than it does to women in Cyprus.
The way, for instance, I try to clarify the relationship between ethnicity
and gender may ring bells for women elsewhere. I felt this very much when
I visited the women's groups in the Kurdish areas in Turkey with you last
week. It was suddenly very gratifying to see that I understood enough about
what Irish women were experiencing to realize that there would be a potential
for dialogue between them and women's centers like KAMER in Diyarbakir [a
city in Kurdish-dominated southeastern Turkey]. We are already trying to arrange
contact between them. So in that way, yes, the work does feed from one situation
to another.
AA: Because you've made it feed from one situation to another,
both in your writing and in your networking.
CC: Yes, it's true that as I've studied instances of women making
connections, I've often looked for a way of enabling them to directly transmit
what they're learning to similar groups in other countries. Bridges between
bridges.
AA: You came to Turkey at a particularly heightened time in the Cyprus
conflict. Ever since the Annan Plan was accepted in New York by both sides
as a basis of negotiation, every night on television you can find a discussion
on the Cyprus issue. And yet it's almost exclusively men, sitting around a
table talking about what you call "big P politics" and making "strategic"
analyses of Cyprus for Turkey. Unfortunately, women and feminists haven't
joined into this discussion. We don't even see a parallel discussion going
on among feminists themselves. When you came here were you expecting to find
women more interested in Cyprus?
CC: I have to say I've been quite confused to find women a bit surprised
to be asked to talk about Cyprus. As if to say, "Where did that come from?"
Conversely, when you're in Cyprus, everyone sees Turkey as so central to what's
going on. It's been a bit surprising to be told, for instance, that the Cyprus
problem isn't a "real problem": People aren't dying; it's not Palestine. This,
I think, is to seriously underestimate what it is like to live in North Cyprus,
an embargoed economy where your children are doomed to emigrate; where there
are no career prospects; it's very difficult to travel freely in the world;
your currency is worth absolutely nothing; and you're never invited to international
events because people either assume you can't come, or they forget you exist.
Those things are life-damaging problems, and if there are forces that can
actually resolve them, then I think they have an obligation to do so. You
might expect that the women's movement and the anti-militarist movement in
Turkey to be helping and listening and actually looking for relations of solidarity
with people who are saying Turkey's policy constitutes a problem in Cyprus.
Of course, I have only met a few people here, so maybe I'm wrong, but I haven't
met any who are seriously concerned about it. A positive exception is the
visit of Istanbul's Amargi Women's Group to Cyprus last year. But even that
doesn't seem to have resulted in concrete relations or joint action.
AA: Do women in both parts of Cyprus, particularly those in Hands Across
the Divide, have anything specific to say about the Annan Plan?
CC: As the negotiations continue, week by week, the detailed provisions
in the Annan Plan are changing. I know women in Hands Across the Divide feel
it's a flawed plan, and each would perhaps choose different things in it they'd
want to improve. But the majority want to move forward--on this basis because
there isn't any other. More concretely, one thing they are agreed on
is that the absence of women, and civil society as a whole, from the negotiations
has meant that a whole spectrum of real, every day life is left out of the
plan altogether.
This week, Hands Across the Divide will send letters to all parties at the
negotiation table, including representatives of the UN, the European Union,
the United States, Britain, Greece, Turkey, as well as Cypriot politicians
in the North and South. What they say in that letter is this: The Annan Plan
aims to create a new Cyprus that will enable relations between the Greek Cypriots
and the Turkish Cypriots to become equal, respectful, communicative, and nonviolent.
Hands Across the Divide makes a parallel demand for the relations between
men and women, for the first time in history, also to become equal, respectful,
communicative, and nonviolent. Let's take an example. We all know that in
the new Cyprus, school history and other textbooks would need to be rewritten
because currently, both the Greek and the Turkish pedagogy is heavily nationalistic.
As education gets rid of nationalism, why not simultaneously rid it of sexism
too, bring gender sensitivity and equality to schooling? If we can think of
ending the stereotyping of Turks and Greeks, couldn't we think of ending the
sex-typing of boys and girls too?
As I argue in The Line, in conflict situations like this, the key
conceptual problem for a group like Hands Across the Divide is to bring ethnicity
and gender into a single conceptual framework, a single equation. This letter
they've sent to the leaders on the "gender dimension of a post-solution Cyprus"
in a way is saying that the processes by which we draw arbitrary lines between
ethnic groups and between genders are pretty similar. This is just the kind
of thinking I reckon UN Security Council Resolution 1325 meant to introduce
into peace negotiations when it called for the greater inclusion of women.
I think it's sad that in the Cyprus negotiations, which the UN actually hosted,
they haven't acted on the Resolution they themselves passed four years ago.
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From recruit to soldier
Military discipline is enforced with marching chants-and their sexist,
racist, brutal messages.
Reviewed by Carol Burke
ALMOST EVERYONE HAS SEEN THE MOVIES about basic training. Some celebrate
it; some mock it; but each typically depicts a tight-lipped, square-jawed
dynamo of a drill instructor barking commands at a group of hapless recruits
whose every act subjects them to merciless criticism seasoned by colorful
profanities. Although real drill instructors may not be as square-jawed or
as tall as their cinematic equivalents, they do bark out commands to each
new cohort of recruits to arrive at basic training. For their part, recruits
soon figure out which answers are acceptable and which will be ridiculed.
They learn to walk or run in step, to endure petty humiliations, and to internalize
the will of their drill instructor as their own. Basic training aims to transform
individuals into standard, "government-issue" soldiers by erasing civilian
identities that have been formed over many years. During basic training, recruits
are prohibited contact with the civilian world, the anchor to their former
selves. No previous accomplishments matter. Intelligence, charm, and humor
count for little. Above all, basic training demands a suppression of individual
difference and exacts conformity in all outward actions and dress.
Drill instructors deliberately treat the recruits as children, scolding
these babes in arms because in the eyes of the institution they do not speak,
walk, or even eat properly. They cannot accomplish the simplest of tasks--making
the bed or cleaning the floor--to the satisfaction of their overseers. Recruits
cannot keep time; therefore they are allowed no control over their time. The
noncoms determine when they wake, when they go to the bathroom, and when they
sleep. Basic training withdraws recruits from society and consigns them to
a liminal, deindividualized state where it comes to seem natural to refer
to themselves in the third person, to get little, then less sleep, to swallow
complaints when the body rebels at the relentless demands that it leap, crawl,
squat, swing, carry, and march, and march, and march.
Most new recruits experience profound disorientation. Drill instructors
talk to them in ways they have never been addressed before. Forced to suppress
their anger and frustration, they must endure emotional bullying and the cognitive
confusion that results from incessant, often contradictory commands: They
are ordered to march one way on the parade ground, then suddenly reversed,
only to be reversed again. You might think that an institution that so prizes
order would have no use for confusion; yet confusion is a state that drill
instructors intentionally induce in their recruits, because it increases the
recruits' dependence on their harsh taskmaster. Only the drill instructor,
the god of their universe and the architect of their transformation, can erase
their confusion. As Lieutenant Colonel Michael Becker, commander at Parris
Island, told Thomas Ricks in Making the Corps (1997), "The reason we
do this [simulate confusion] the way we do is to create uncertainty.... From
the recruit's perspective, it appears to be chaos. War is chaos. And then
they see this drill instructor--this magnificent creature who brings order
to chaos. They learn that if they follow orders, their life will be calmer."
Without uniformity, the highly choreographed dance of the military parade
would dissolve into chaos. Drill effectively teaches recruits that each must
keep every step, every line of the body, even every gaze in sync with the
group. Close-order drill is important figuratively also--it trains individual
soldiers under the orchestration of their leaders to configure an army collectively.
Drill has played an important part in military training since the 17th century,
when Dutch forces demonstrated the power of rigorous drill to transform the
rank and file into a cohesive unit that would be efficient in battle and obedient
in the garrison, explains William H. McNeill in The Pursuit of Power
(1982). But today's drill, considered essential to any training program, has
no direct parallel to movements in war. A vestige of a time when men fought
standing up, not on their stomachs, and certainly not behind technologically
complex control panels, drill today teaches obedience, erases individuality,
and inscribes a corporate identity in which the movements of individuals are
indistinguishable from the whole.
Marching chants accompany drill in all branches of today's military. Practical
in their purpose, they build morale, insure group cohesion, and ease strain
by diverting attention from monotonous, often strenuous labor or training.
As military traditions, these verses pass from company to company, division
to division, service to service, even war to war. Although some chants celebrate
the bravado of combat, most complain of the daily discomforts suffered away
from home: "Ain't no use in going to chow/They never feed you anyhow."
Through marching chants, humor lightens the tedium and pain of training,
providing opportunities for even the lowliest to mock a superior and for the
group to express its disdain for a rival. Sometimes wit and originality are
applied to amend the most familiar chants and express a group's sentiments.
The improvised additions to standard chants are evidence that even within
the rigid practice of discipline there is room for collective innovation.
OFFENSIVENESS DRIVES MARCHING CHANTS. Some take the form of insult to a
superior:
The cabin boy, the cabin boy,
That naughty little nipper:
He lined his ass with shards of glass
And circumcised the skipper.
Chants can also be ghoulish celebrations of the slaughter of innocents:
See the family by the stream,
Watch the parents run and scream.
Viet Cong will never learn.
Push a button and watch 'em burn.
or playfully objectify women:
I wish all the girls were bricks in a pile,
And I was a mason; I'd lay 'em all in style.
I wish all the girls were pies on a shelf,
And I was a baker; I'd eat 'em all myself.
Through such chants, the group asserts itself as the tough "bad boy," equally
ready to slaughter or to screw. For the trainee, these chants transform the
horrifying prospect of combat into a humorous, macabre sport.
Other marching chants oppose the longing for loved ones with the celebration
of a new life as a member of the group:
Suzie said to me one day long ago
"Honey, please don't join the corps [pronounced co]
All they do is fuss 'n' fight
and they look kinda weird with those 'high-and-tights'" [popular marine corps
hairstyle].
Presented with Suzie's ultimatum, the recruit exchanges his girl for the corps--or
rather, the stern drill instructor shouts the lines and his trainees repeat
them in unison. These chants celebrate the displacement of sexual energy from
the female left behind to the enemy waiting on the battlefield. Women are as
infinitely replaceable as the enemy, and combat, according to marching chants,
is as exhilarating as sex. They devalue all nonprofessional affiliations and
mark a soldier's passage from civilian life to combat by encouraging masturbatory
compensation: "I don't want no teenage queen./ I just want my M-16."
Such compensation was illustrated first in James Jones's novel From Here
to Eternity and later in Stanley Kubrick's Vietnam film, Full Metal
Jacket. In the film, a drill instructor leads his trainees, clad only
in underwear, one hand on their rifles, the other grasping their genitals,
in a truly universal marching chant, one that has crossed all service lines:
This is my rifle; this is my gun.
This is for fighting; this is for fun.
As folklorist Bruce Jackson has pointed out, the character Joe de Grinder in
African-American work-songs is the devilish ladies' man who makes time with
the workingman's lover, mother, and sister, then makes off with his possessions,
while the cuckold goes out to earn an honest living. During the Korean War,
many African-American drill sergeants took their work-song tradition with them,
which spread through every training unit, black or white, and transformed the
marching chant. Joe de Grinder became the character Jody, and the word jody
itself became synonymous with marching chants. Even today in the marine corps
or the army, one calls a jody, not a chant. For the trainee, Jody is the clever
civilian who brutally divorces the recruit from the civilian world by appropriating
all his possessions and loved ones:
Ain't no use in callin' home.
Jody's on your telephone.
Ain't no use in lookin' back.
Jody's got your Cadillac.
Ain't no use in goin' home.
Jody's got your girl and gone.
Chants rarely speak of war's loneliness. The exception, Vietnam chants, contain
several references to the isolation of the single combat soldier. Take, for
example, the following:
Vietnam, Vietnam,
late at night,
while you're sleeping,
Charlie company comes creeping.
You're sitting in your foxhole.
You think you got it made.
But there lies your buddy
with a bullet in his head.
You're sitting in your foxhole,
You're thinking about your wife.
Charlie's on the move.
He's out to take your life.
They take you up in choppers
to the battle zone.
You think they're all around you.
Then you find you're all alone.
Here the bitter voice of experience speaks. The narrator has known the darkness
through which Charlie invisibly creeps, firing silent bullets. Without his buddy,
without his wife, without even the "they" who take him to the battle zone, the
soldier is alone with Charlie.
Each war carries its own brand of dark, twisted humor that laughs at what
is too horrible to take seriously. The chilling irony of battlefield humor
removes the speaker from the terror close at hand and imposes a momentary
control that softens the shriek into uneasy laughter. In response to a 1967
New Yorker article by Jonathan Schell, General William Westmoreland,
the commander of all allied forces in Vietnam, rationalized the need for gallows
humor: "Soldiers have employed gallows humor through the ages. What paratrooper,
for example, singing the drinking song 'Blood on the Risers,' really revels
in the gory death of the man he is singing about? Gallows humor is, after
all, merely a defense mechanism for men engaged in perilous and distasteful
duties."
To laugh at the chance accident, to minimize the fear that every paratrooper
faces, is a way of keeping that fear under control, or at least within the
ordered rhythm of a patriotic hymn. "He was just a rookie trooper, and he
surely shook with fright," "Blood on the Risers"--sung to the tune of "The
Battle Hymn of the Republic"--begins, and each stanza is followed by the chorus:
Gory, gory, what a helluva way to die!
Gory, gory, what a helluva way to die!
Gory, gory, what a helluva way to die!
And he ain't gonna jump no more.
BUT WESTMORELAND MIGHT HAVE FOUND more typical examples of battlefield humor,
Vietnam style. To shrug off in song a real danger that confronts each paratrooper
is very different from chanting of one's pleasure at inflicting pain on civilians,
as in the following Vietnam chant, which begins,
See the family beside the stream,
flyin' high and feelin' mean.
Pick one out and watch 'em scream.
Yo, oh! Napalm, it sticks to kids.
In this chant, the demonic pilot, from his remote and mighty perspective, delights
in repeated demonstrations of his power, or rather, the power of American technology
to unleash napalm. The napalm rarely lands on enemy troops and does little to
insure victory, but falls from the skies like blazing rain, searing the civilian
population below. The speaker fiendishly narrates in the first person one brutal
scene after another--barbecued babies, burned orphans, decapitated peasants.
Napalm, the sign of American extravagance, luxuriously annihilates even
the harmless. The narrator who wields such a weapon does not speak as the
brave warrior of "Blood on the Risers," who defends himself against assault
on all sides, but sounds instead like a crazed adolescent who delights in
his own power, the puny guy inside the big machine.
Such sadistic pleasure rings through calls sung during and after Vietnam
that have no explicit Vietnam theme. Consider the following:
A little bird with a yellow bill
Landed on my windowsill.
I coaxed him in with a piece of pie
And then I poked out his little eye.
The giving hand is the hand of destruction in this call, as it is in other napalm
chants:
Throw some candy to the children.
Wait till they all gather round.
Then you take your M-16 now
and mow the little fuckers down.
See the Cobras in formation.
Watch them flying way down low.
See them fly into the children,
Heads are tossed to and fro.
Such chants demonstrate the irony at the center of American ambivalence toward
its role in Vietnam, an irony that haunts today's Iraq war as well. American
soldiers sent to free Iraqis from a hostile dictator, like those sent to defend
South Vietnam, find themselves performing aggressive acts against the people
and the land they seek to liberate. Vietnam lore inverts an American stereotype:
the friendly GI surrounded by foreign children, familiar in accounts of World
War II veterans. In the Vietnam chants, the GI's gesture of generosity becomes
the act of destruction.
The rage of the narrator of these kinds of marching chants erupts in hideous
delight at the game of war. But such dismal delight infects all battlefield
humor, from legends of grunts gone crazy in combat to macabre jokes, from
accounts of ear necklaces to stories of photo albums of Vietnamese corpses
(with their grim mockery of photojournalism). The chants articulate the anger
and enthusiasm of the soldier in combat: two emotions, many would argue, that
enable the soldier to fight. In preparing thousands to fight and kill, training
programs that employ such marching chants seek to regulate the fears of young
recruits through the perfectly measured recitation of sadistic verse.
A version of this article appeared in Camp All-American, Hanoi Jane,
and the High-and-Tight: Gender, Folklore, and Changing Military Culture
by Carol Burke. Copyright © 2004 by Carol Burke. By permission of Beacon Press,
www.beacon.org.
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Immigration Ain't for Sissies
Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return by Marjane Satrapi. New York:
Pantheon, 2004, 191 pp., $17.95 paper..
Reviewed/drawn by Jennifer Camper
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Dueling masculinities
Plan of Attack by Bob Woodward. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004,
480 pp., $28.00 hardcover, $14.00 paper.
Reviewed by Cynthia Enloe
THIS YEAR HAS OFFERED BUSH-WATCHERS a treasure trove of insiders' books.
Right now, my own collection is dispersed throughout the apartment: Richard
Clark in the kitchen; John Dean and James Mann on the coffee table; Paul O'Neill
beside the bed; and Bob Woodward here on the desk at my elbow. All of these
inside-the-Beltway books are written by men, about men. With the notable exception
of National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, in each of these books, women
remain almost invisible. Masculinities remain unexamined. Yet as feminists,
we must aim our curiosity at the political workings of masculinity and femininity,
even when others claim or imply that gender is beside the point.
In Plan of Attack, Bob Woodward describes how the Pentagon's chief
military operations strategist, General Tommy Franks, presented a full-blown,
detailed Iraq invasion plan--with slides--to President George W. Bush and
members of the National Security Council on August 5, 2002 (at a time when
Bush has insisted that he did not yet have a war plan "on my desk"). Few of
us ever glimpse these kinds of details, yet the small circle of civilian and
uniformed war-planners went on the record with Woodward, the well-known Washington
Post reporter who in the 1970s, with his Post colleague Carl Bernstein,
broke the story that became the Watergate scandal. Woodward's own political
loyalties have always been unclear, as befits a professional reporter, although
many reviewers felt that Bush at War (2002), his first book on the
Bush administration, treated the president and his advisers with considerable
generosity. Plan of Attack is neither an apologia nor a critique. Rather,
it is a day-by-day account of who said what to whom, who kept secrets from
whom, and who tried to marginalize whom as planning for the invasion of Iraq
progressed.
Feminists have learned that while gender refers to masculinity and femininity,
neither is singular in practice. Masculinities--the plural is important.
In any patriarchal political system, the crafting of rival masculinities is
serious business, so to understand such systems we must discover what criteria
the senior actors wield to judge masculine behavior. Woodward reveals that,
in the upper reaches of the Bush administration, the men competing for policy
influence wield specific kinds of masculinities. Those who fail to meet the
criteria for masculinity lose credibility and influence. Without ever consciously
giving a nod to gender, Woodward reveals how such competition between masculinities
laid the groundwork for preemptive war. He demonstrates that, for members
of the Bush inner circle, masculinity equals "resolve."
For example, Bush told Woodward about a meeting he had with British Prime
Minister Tony Blair. "We want you to be part of this," Bush had told Blair.
Woodward notes, "Blair's resolve had made a real impression":
After the meeting, Bush walked into the conference room where Alastair Campbell,
the prime minister's communications director, and several other Blair aides
were waiting.
"Your man has got cojones," the president said, using the colloquial
Spanish for balls.
The president recalled, "And of course these Brits don't know what cojones
are." He said he would call the Camp David session with Blair "the cojones
meeting." (p. 178)
In the president's eyes, Blair proved his possession of "cojones"
by showing resolve. George W. Bush himself was determined to show resolve.
His father, George H. W. Bush, had jeopardized his standing as a masculine
player by showing insufficient resolve.
To create and sustain a hierarchy of masculinities--who are the "real men";
what is a "manly pursuit"; what is worthy of masculine attention-effort must
also be constantly invested in feminization: The masculinity gamesman maneuvers
to relegate the allegedly insufficiently manly men to feminized arenas. Woodward's
account shows how individuals, institutions, and even processes and ideologies
were feminized by Bush and his circle. It is difficult to show and practice
resolve--thus masculinity--in a democracy, which requires free-wheeling public
discussion, weighing complexities, and hammering out compromise. Anyone--for
instance, Secretary of State Colin Powell--who had the patience (or the principled
commitment) to engage in such feminized processes risked becoming feminized
himself and thus politically marginalized. In the build-up to the invasion
of Iraq, diplomacy became feminized in the minds of the Bush circle. The United
Nations became feminized. Congress became feminized. So, eventually, did democracy.
OFTEN, BUSH IS PORTRAYED AS putty in the hands of his vice president and
secretary of defense, but this is belied by Woodward's evidence. Bush was
the principal audience for each successive iteration of the Rumsfeld/Franks
invasion plan, and he gave his personal approval as the timetable for logistical
preparation got shorter; the numbers of US troops to be initially deployed
shrank; and a veil of secrecy was imposed over the extensive military preparations
in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar. Bush insisted that that no one outside
his small circle--Rumsfeld and his civilian aides Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz;
Cheney and his aide Lewis "Scooter" Libby; Franks; Rice; and CIA Director
George Tenet--learn about their invasion plan.
It is easiest to show manly "resolve" when decision-making is shrouded in
secrecy. George W. Bush created an executive policy-making culture rooted
in distrust of and distaste for the messiness of democratic life. Members
of Congress--including Republicans--were not to be trusted. Foreign allies
were not worthy of confidence. Journalists were kept in the dark, despite
their post-9/11, passive, rely-on-the-president-to-tell-us-what-to-say mode.
Even the Joint Chiefs of Staff were not fully informed. That is, being male
did not alone qualify one to be "in the loop." Entry was insured only to those
who held particular masculine credentials.
The way Bush characterized the Rumsfeld/Franks strategy for "moving troops
in and expanding infrastructure" is, in this context, revealing: "It was,
in my judgment," Bush said, "a very smart recommendation by Don and Tommy
to put certain elements in place that could be done so in a way that was quiet
so that we didn't create a lot of noise and anxiety." In the minds of Bush
and his advisers, "noise and anxiety" appear to have been the chief attributes
of democratic life--ones to be avoided.
Instead, the sort of manly resolve that won credibility in the White House
required quietly holding one's cards close to the chest, even during high-level
discussions. Bush often simply said nothing, while Vice President Dick Cheney
spoke cryptically, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld responded to questions
with volleys of unrelated questions of his own. This mode of interaction required
the key players to resort to reading one another's body language.
The president told Woodward that when he first met with Franks in late December
2001 to craft the Iraq war plan, "I'm watching his body language very carefully."
Woodward notes that Bush "emphasized the body language, the eyes, the demeanor.
It was more important than some of the substance."
Similarly, Rice recalled trying to "read" President Bush in January 2002,
to figure out whether he had understood that launching a covert CIA operation
in Iraq would require persuading Iraqi operatives that the administration
would back them up with the US military: "The president's body language suggested
he had received the message," she told Woodward.
And Woodward notes that in September 2002, when Nick Calio, the White House
congressional lobbyist, was trying to persuade members of Congress to give
the president broad military authority, Calio assumed "from Bush's side comments
and body language…that the question on Iraq was not if but when there would
be a war."
Body language is open to conflicting interpretations and myriad misreadings.
Yet in the Bush White House it determined matters of state and international
affairs.
AS FEMINISTS, WE SHOULD ALWAYS ASK, "Where are the women?" Woodward tells
of one, an economist in the state department, who was brought in to inform
the president about the UN-supervised Oil for Food program in Iraq. The president
did not ask her for any substantive policy advice. But Condoleezza Rice was
party to almost all the war-planning sessions. In early 2002, Colin Powell
asked for his first-ever private meeting with the president, to express his
concern that Bush's fixation on invasion planning was making a military solution
a foregone conclusion. Rice sat in on the conversation, as she did again at
a later meeting when Powell's concern about creeping militarization had deepened
even further. As Woodward describes it, Rice served as Bush's shield against
Powell's skepticism.
Journalist Laura Flanders' provocative book Bushwomen (2004) shows
that the women in and around the Bush administration indeed have political
interests and ideas of their own--but these are barely visible in Plan
of Attack. In 2003, Woodward asked President Bush about Laura Bush's apparent
unhappiness at the prospect of war with Iraq. Bush replied that his wife "understands
the sadness and agony" that war produces, as well as "the uproar, the noise,
the protestation." Woodward followed up: "And she told you this?" Bush responded:
"Not really. She told you that. And probably by telling you, told me."
Three women senators make a brief but enticing appearance in September 2002,
when the president belatedly and partially briefed elected representatives
on his Iraq policy. Christine Ciccone, a lawyer and member of the White House
congressional lobbying team, reported to the president that California Democratic
Senator Dianne Feinstein, who serves on the Senate Intelligence Committee,
was not persuaded by the White House case. Perhaps even more worrisome to
the White House, Feinstein wasn't alone:
Ciccone reported that Senators Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington,
and Kay Bailey Hutchison, a Texas Republican, had waited for Feinstein at
the door, and they had left together. (pp. 171-172)
Maybe the next insider's book will be written by a feminist and will start with
Feinstein, Murray, and Hutchison.
Some recent "insider" books:
Richard A. Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror,
New York, Free Press, 2004.
Ron Suskind, The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House,
and the Education of Paul O'Neill, New York, Simon and Schuster, 2004.
John W. Dean, Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George
W. Bush, New York, Little, Brown and Co., 2004.
James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: A History of Bush's War Cabinet,
New York, Penguin Books, 2004.
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Pink thongs and patriarchy
In protests against the Iraq war, women are using the media and popular
culture as never before.
Reviewed by Liza Featherstone
Photo by Jennifer Pozner
|
WOMEN HAVE BEEN LEADING the most creative, inviting, and lasting manifestations
of the movement against the war on Iraq. The most visible leaders of large
coalitions like United for Peace and Justice, and of many small, local groups
as well, are women. Some groups--whose members are mostly, but never exclusively,
women--have chosen to make explicit the femininity--and feminism--behind their
anti-war protests. They've often done this in strikingly new ways, but in
the process revived some long-running questions about the role of gender stereotypes
in women's peace movements.
Take, for example, Axis of Eve, a San Francisco-based phenomenon with national
imitators, which sells a line of "protest panties." Outraged by the deceitful
way in which the Bush administration went to war, the group urges "no more
cover-ups" and appears at major protests flashing fuschia thongs with messages
like "Expose Bush," "Drill Bush Not Oil," and "Weapon of Mass Seduction."
Some--myself included--welcome this sort of silliness, but it's a matter
of taste. A much bigger group, Code Pink, which boasts at least 100 chapters
nationwide, tends not to go in for such sexualized antics. Even the staid
and the prim will feel at home at Code Pink's summer protest against the Republican
Convention, which begins at the statue of bluestocking icon Eleanor Roosevelt
in New York City's Riverside Park. But those with more outrageous sensibilities
will also feel welcomed by Code Pink's sense of girly fun. Code Pink has a
trademark "pink slip" action, in which our worst leaders are symbolically
"fired" by being presented with women's lingerie. Last October, pink slip
banners were dropped in 40 cities nationwide. Women dressed in pink also presented
Vice President Dick Cheney with a 45-foot banner in the shape of a pink slip,
in front of the Beverly Hills Hilton, where he was giving a speech. The banner
read, "Dick's in bed with Halliburton, but we got screwed. Cheney, you're
fired." President Bush himself has been presented with pink slips on several
occasions by Code Pink protesters hoping that he'll soon join the ranks of
the nation's unemployed.
HISTORICALLY, WOMEN'S RESISTANCE TO MILITARISM has taken many forms--and
ideas about it have varied. In her 1938 treatise Three Guineas, Virginia
Woolf argued that as a woman, she had no reason to be patriotic, as the state
denied her equal property and citizenship rights. She wrote,
If you insist upon fighting to protect me, or "our" country, let
it be understood, soberly and rationally between us, that you are fighting...to
procure benefits which I have not shared...in fact, as a woman, I have no
country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole
world.
The Axis of Eve seems to share Woolf's intellectual impulse--though it's a stretch
to imagine the melancholy novelist flashing a thong. Noting on their website
that only 14 percent of congressional seats are held by women, they explain
that "the ultra-feminine gesture of the flash parodies our political exclusion."
Other feminists have suggested that, whether because of biology or culture,
women's traditional roles as caregivers--especially as mothers--lend us a
more life-affirming worldview, one that frowns on war and violence. In this
spirit, in 1961 a national organization called Women Strike for Peace (WSP)
organized 50,000 women nationwide to walk off their jobs and out of their
kitchens to demand that their elected representatives embrace a nuclear test
ban. These women wanted to protect their children, but as historian Amy Swerdlow
has pointed out, they also felt a motherly responsibility to the world. As
one WSP participant put it: "No mother can accept lightly even the remote
possibility of separation from the family which needs her. But mankind needs
us too."
The otherwise admirable antinuclear activist Dr. Helen Caldicott has appealed
to popular audiences with an even less subtle traditionalism. "As mothers
we must make sure the world is safe for our babies," she once said in a speech.
"I appeal especially to the women to do this work because we understand the
genesis of life.... We have wombs, we have breasts, we have menstrual periods
to remind us that we can produce life!"
Photo by Jennifer Pozner
|
This sort of sentiment doesn't sit well with Jenny Brown, a Gainesville,
Florida, activist who is a member of Redstockings (founded in the 1960s, this
radical feminist group is still around). "Since when are women naturally peaceful?"
asks Brown. "Harriet Tubman carried a gun when she ran the underground railroad."
Brown is only 38, but her thinking comes out of a venerable tradition. In
January 1968, radical feminists protested the Jeanette Rankin Brigade, an
all-women peace formation. They held a funeral procession and buried traditional
womanhood. As Brown explains, "They felt that appeals based on women's peaceful
natures would only assure men that they were not a threat." Brown and many
other women worry that groups like Code Pink, by organizing for peace as women,
tap into a deeply conservative tradition.
Particularly given the Bush administration's ferocious attack on reproductive
rights, now would be an especially bad time to reinforce traditional gender
stereotypes or to exalt the cult of compulsory motherhood. The notion that
women are biologically--or even culturally--destined to breed and to nurture
could feed the forces of reaction. As radical feminists have long suggested,
denying women's capacity for aggression and militancy also denies our power.
But asked about the emphasis on mothering, activists say it hasn't played
a significant role in contemporary feminist anti-war organizing. "Some people
like it," says Code Pink founder Medea Benjamin. "But we really want to be
inclusive. A lot of our friends don't have kids. We don't want it to sound
corny, old, or off-putting." Code Pink's mission statement emphatically rejects
biological determinism:
Women have been the guardians of life--not because we are better
or purer or more innately nurturing than men, but because the men have busied
themselves making war. Because of our responsibility to the next generation,
because of our own love for our families and communities and this country
that we are a part of, we understand the love of a mother in Iraq for her
children, and the driving desire of that child for life.
Indeed, the desire of women to protest the war as mothers is still a powerful
one; many mothers of soldiers have become activists as a result of the Iraq
war, fearing for their children's lives. "Worry and fear for one's child is
a horrible thing to live with," writes Vida Jones, the mother of two sons in
the army, one of whom was sent to Iraq, on the www.motherspeak.org
website, which collects narratives from military mothers (and is encouraging
fathers to share their stories, too). Another woman, Rachel Avila, writes of
her son's serious injury in Iraq: He has been on a respirator and may permanently
live with shrapnel in his brain.
Activists and thinkers today have widely varying theories about why women
should oppose war. Most make connections between militarism and oppressive
forms of masculinity. Cynthia Enloe, who has written many excellent books
on militarism and gender, observed recently in an interview with the Left
Business Observer that Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and George W. Bush
"take on what they think are the attributes of the military--not to be confused
with having ever served in the military--but they take on a militaristic culture
of masculinity, and that's how they compare themselves with Clinton"--as well
as with the first George Bush, whom they also view as insufficiently manly.
Their foreign policies are thus intricately connected to their ideas about
men's and women's roles in the world. (See Enloe's article on p. 10 of this
issue.)
The relationships between militarism and aggressive masculinity were not
abstract to a group of Okinawan women I met at Code Pink's White House vigil
in March 2003. Their protest group was founded in 1995, when a 12-year-old
Okinawan girl was raped by US soldiers. The women had traveled to Washington
to protest the impending war on Iraq, and spoke excitedly through a translator.
Said Noriko Akahane, "Women don't want the military anywhere."
CODE PINK AND PROJECTS LIKE IT resist essentialism by making a joke of femininity,
even while honoring it. It is a delicate balance, which somehow mostly works.
The Axis of Eve promotes its message--and tactics--through "pantyware parties,"
modeled on Tupperware parties, in which they not only sell their appealing
political thongs, they organize women to register voters and donate to John
Kerry's presidential campaign. A similar group, the Chicago-based Pink Bloque,
whose members, needless to say, always dress in pink, urges members to put
the "Femme" in "Femme-inism."
The relationship of these groups to popular culture is strikingly similar
to their approach to gender: parodic yet affectionate. The Pink Bloque had
Darrin Henson, a choreographer for Britney Spears and N'Sync, teach its members
how to dance like MTV stars. At anti-war protests they dance to Mary J. Blige,
Nelly, and Justin Timberlake songs, and one of their slogans is "Drop Beatz
Not Bombz." (Another is "2 Cute 2 B Arrested.") In the same spirit, Code Pink
tried this spring to enter a pop culture realm many social critics love to
hate: reality TV. Medea Benjamin attempted to star on Showtime's American
Candidate, in which candidates are chosen to "run" presidential campaigns
and viewers vote for a winner. The pop culture industry has not yet returned
the feminist peace movement's affection, however: Benjamin was initially accepted
by Showtime but later rejected for reasons never explained. Such efforts are
politically savvy, since most of the public, especially the young public,
enjoys pop culture; crucially, however, these activists, although critical
of it, also enjoy it themselves. This enjoyment represents a crucial shift:
For feminists in the 1970s, pop culture was a target of protest (recall the
feminist demonstrators at the Miss America pageant of 1968, who crowned a
live sheep with a tiara). Today's feminists view it as a useful lingua franca,
even a weapon, however playfully deployed. Humor is part of the pleasure--and
effectiveness--of such activism. But these groups also transcend treacly appeals
to women's "peaceful nature" in ways that are powerfully serious: They emphasize
"sisterhood," recognizing that many of us share experiences that may transcend
national boundaries. Code Pink has gone beyond rhetoric in expressing this
solidarity. The group has not shied away from protesting the Israeli occupation
and has picked a brave place to do so: the West Bank itself. Last fall a Code
Pink delegation joined Palestinian and Israeli women's peace groups in protesting
the Israeli "security wall," where many were tear-gassed by Israeli soldiers.
This sense of cross-border female solidarity is especially apparent in the
journal entries written by women who have traveled to Iraq on Code Pink delegations.
Linda Durham wrote in her travel diary, posted on the Code Pink website, codepink.utne.com:
Sitting in small rooms, with groups of Iraqi women, I frequently
experienced a strong sense of sisterhood, womanhood, motherhood. It was possible
to communicate those feelings with a smile or a gesture. Or with tears. And
that happened, over and again.
Of a woman she met in Iraq, who invited the American activists to tea, Durham
wrote, "Thoughts of that woman, whose name I do not recall, return to me again
and again. Although our lives are so very different, in so many ways, I feel
deeply connected to her."
It makes a kind of paradoxical sense that the Bush administration would
inspire such solidarity, as well as a women's peace movement with an emerging
analysis--whether in the form of parody or explicit critique--of gender. This
presidency makes the connections between a crude, violent masculinity and
a crude, violent foreign policy painfully obvious. At a time when the only
political response to Bush seems to be more swaggering, simian machismo--see
for example, the 2004 Democratic Party platform, in which the word strong
appears 66 times, the word strength 41, but the word compassion
exactly once--the creative feminist presence of groups like Code Pink is badly
needed and highly welcome.
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Pro-whose-life?
Ten reasons why militarism is bad for your health
Reviewed by Ryn Gluckman, Betsy Hartmann, and Azi Shariatmadar
THESE DAYS, WE'VE HEARD the most unlikely people sound the battle cry of
equal rights for women whenever they want to argue for more funds for the
military or for aggressive action in yet another small, poverty-stricken country.
When the US invaded Afghanistan in the fall of 2001 and unseated the Taliban,
our country was hailed as the liberator of Afghan women. President George
W. Bush has repeatedly referred to the expansion of rights for women in Afghanistan
and Palestine as a positive potential outcome of US intervention in those
areas as well as in Iraq, despite rising body counts and ongoing reports of
rape and human rights abuses. If we believe what we hear, militarism is the
true herald of feminism. But of course, upon closer examination, it is clear
that tanks and guns damage women rather than liberate them. From carcinogenic
pollutants to decreasing funds for social services, militarism is among the
most dangerous threats to women's health and reproductive freedom around the
world. Here's why:
1. Environmental pollution
Militaries are among the worst polluters on the planet. Not only does war
degrade or destroy local environments, but military bases and weapons facilities
contaminate the air, soil, and water with deadly toxins. In Dangerous Intersections
(1999) geographer Joni Seager points out that, "Anywhere in the world, a military
presence is virtually the single most reliable predictor of environmental
damage." Military pollution has many harmful and long-lasting effects on reproductive
health. In Vietnam, the herbicide Agent Orange, sprayed by the US military
during the 1960s and '70s, is responsible for high rates of birth defects,
miscarriages, and reproductive cancers even today. In both the US and Russia,
say Nancy Lee Peluso and Michael Watts in Violent Environments (2001),
releases of radioactive materials from nuclear weapons production and testing
are associated with sterility, cancer, and genetic abnormalities. Military
pollution is usually shrouded in secrecy. In Memphis, Tennessee, a military
depot dumped chemical weapons in the midst of a black residential community
without informing people of the health dangers. Today, women there report
a high incidence of miscarriage, birth defects, kidney diseases, and cancer.
(See the report by the Military Toxics Project and Environmental Health Coalition
at www.miltoxproj.org/magnacarta/DefendOurHealthReport.html.)
2. Exploitation of prostitutes
Military bases are notorious for their contribution to adult and child prostitution
and the spread of HIV/AIDS. In countries where prostitution is illegal, women
are counted by those governments and the military as "special job workers"
and denied protection against abuse by their customers or their bosses. Military-base
prostitution has led to the devastating spread of HIV among prostitutes. Today,
sex workers are still blamed for the spread of HIV/AIDS and sexually transmitted
infections, while little or no attention is given to the military's role.
3. Increased sexual harassment
In times of war, military-sponsored sexual harassment and rape become commonplace.
In February 2004, the Denver Post interviewed women who had been raped
or sexually assaulted in the US military but never reported the attacks, fearing
retaliation. The recent exposure of the horrific sexual abuse and assault
by the US military and private security companies at the Abu Ghraib prison
in Iraq also demonstrates how women are exploited as a military tactic. In
May 2004, the London Guardian reported that women held in the prison
appear to have been arrested in violation of international law,
not because of anything they have done, but merely because of who
they are married to, and their potential intelligence value. US officials
have previously acknowledged detaining Iraqi women in the hope of convincing
male relatives to provide information; when US soldiers raid a house and fail
to find a male suspect, they will frequently take away his wife or daughter
instead.
4. Rape as a military strategy
The treatment of women in military prisons is devastating. Amnesty International
reports that Iraqi women in US military prisons have been raped (sometimes
resulting in pregnancy); humiliated, including being harnessed and ridden
like donkeys; and forced at gunpoint to expose themselves. Because of the
resultant shame and stigma, an unknown number of women have died in suicides
and honor-killings carried out by their families.
Rape is also frequently used as a tool of "ethnic cleansing," notoriously
in Bosnia-Herzegovina. In the early 1990s, an estimated 20,000 women and girls
were raped by the Serbian military in a deliberate campaign to terrorize the
population and eliminate Muslims from the region by impregnating Muslim women
and forcing them to bear Serbian children.
5. More domestic violence
While rape is used as a strategy of war, the climate of militarism also
contributes to domestic violence. In the summer of 2002, four wives of US
military officers, all stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, were killed
by their husbands. Three of the four officers had recently returned to the
country after being deployed to Afghanistan as special operations soldiers.
It is suspected that these women had been victims of domestic violence long
before their murders, but could not or did not choose to obtain help. This
is not surprising, given Cynthia Enloe's observation in Ms. (December
2001/January 2002) that, during times of war, "Soldiers' girlfriends and wives...[have]
been persuaded that they are 'good citizens' if they keep silent about problems
in their relationships."
6. Denial of necessary health care and social services
While perpetuating a culture of silence and violence against women, militarism
restricts women's access to health care. For example, women in the US military
are unconstitutionally denied their right to choose abortion if they are faced
with an unplanned pregnancy: They are barred from obtaining an abortion on
a military base, even if they are able to pay for the procedure with their
own money. In June 2002, the Senate voted 52 to 40 to lift this ban. However,
the House of Representatives opposed the measure and prevented it from being
included in the fiscal year 2003 National Defense Authorization Act. As a
result, women who are stationed in countries where abortion is illegal or
inaccessible are still forced to carry their pregnancies to term. Their only
alternative is to travel long distances at their own expense.
Well-funded and accessible social services like health care, child care,
and education are crucial to survival. War is expensive and is often funded
at the cost of such services. The National Priorities Project reported that
in May 2004, the Bush administration announced its request for another $25
billion for the war and occupation in Iraq, bringing the total war expense
to $152.6 billion since April 2003. In contrast, only $13 billion has been
allocated for Community Development Block Grant programs, which aid state
and local governments. The 2002 Bush budget relied heavily on cutting Medicaid,
the Children's Health Insurance Program, and Social Security. Budget cuts
such as these jeopardize safe and accessible health care for low income and
older women.
7. Curtailed freedom of movement
Restrictions on freedom of movement during wartime include curfews, roadblocks,
checkpoints, and closure of geographical areas. These restrictions are enforced
by the military. They can have a devastating effect on women, barring their
access to food, work, and medical attention. The right to move freely is particularly
critical for sick, injured, or pregnant women. The Israeli human rights organization,
B'Tselem, has documented at least 35 Palestinian deaths since 2000 due to
restriction of movement imposed by the Israeli military. Eighteen of the dead
were women and girls. Eight were infants who died because their mothers were
detained at checkpoints while in labor.
8. Increased racism and anti-immigrant bigotry
In addition to restricting freedom of movement, militarism increases racism
and anti-immigrant activity. It is no secret that militarism fosters racial
prejudice in the name of national security. From Japanese-American internment
camps during World War II to the current Immigration and Naturalization Service
detentions of Middle Eastern men, war reinforces racial stereotypes and discrimination.
Today, racial profiling of Arab-Americans, Muslims, and South Asians is defended
as necessary for homeland security. In the wake of 9/11, anti-immigrant groups
stepped up their activism. Organizations such as the Federation for American
Immigration Reform, Negative Population Growth, and the Carrying Capacity
Network have advocated for programs, public policy, and legislation that target
women of color and immigrant women for population control--which has often
taken the form of involuntary sterilizations, welfare family caps, and/or
risky long-term contraceptives. The anti-immigration attitudes associated
with militarism pose huge threats and challenges to immigrant women, particularly
to those seeking asylum or fleeing domestic violence. According to Amnesty
International, women seeking asylum in the US (some of whom are pregnant)
have reported being detained without adequate food or medical care and undergoing
strip searches, as well as physical, verbal, and sexual assaults.
9. Silencing of women's voices
During war, the first voices to be eliminated from the public sphere are
those belonging to women. According to a study conducted by Fairness and Accuracy
in Media, in the month following 9/11, women were outnumbered by ten to one
on the op-ed pages of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and
USA Today. Similarly, said media critic Jennifer Pozner in Ms.
(December 2001/January 2002), while Bush's 90 percent approval rate was consistently
hailed, a poll finding that 48 percent of women supported limited or no military
action was severely under-reported.
10. Diminished support for social concerns
Militarism shifts the nation's priorities toward increased support for military
and defense programs. This undercuts issues like gender equity and reproductive
choice, discouraging citizens from considering such social concerns when voting.
Candidates with the staunchest support for war are usually the most adamantly
opposed to reproductive freedom; anti-choice politicians win wartime elections
and continually draft and introduce anti-choice legislation. Under the Bush
administration and the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, several
anti-choice, anti-child initiatives have passed in the House including the
Child Custody Protection Act, the Abortion Non-Discrimination Act, and the
Unborn Victims of Violence Act. These initiatives do the opposite of what
their names suggest: They create a wedge in the public mind, pitting the rights
and health of mothers against those of their children. Rather than support
children, these policies put them and their families in danger, but through
strategic messaging and appropriation of human rights and anti-violence language,
the administration has garnered significant media and public support for them.
In November 2003, Bush also signed a ban on so-called partial-birth abortion
procedures (more accurately described as late-term abortions). The ban is
defined so broadly that it could outlaw abortions in the second trimester,
and it makes no exceptions for the health of the woman. Bush signed this ban
despite that fact that the Supreme Court had found similar bans to be unconstitutional.
Bush has also consistently supported judges who are opposed to reproductive
freedom.
War kills innocent people. Civilian casualties occur, no matter how "smart"
the bombs or how much peanut butter is dropped from the sky. In Afghanistan,
among other things, the US bombed a Red Cross building, a UN building, and
a wedding. The Gulf War, though hailed as a conflict with so few casualties
that the first Bush administration described it as "surgical," resulted in
the destruction of all Iraqi irrigation systems, 52 health centers, 28 hospitals,
56 mosques, and over 600 schools. Due to the extensive damage to water and
sewer systems, more than 250,000 people (most of them children under the age
of five) died within a few months.. After the Gulf War, the US led the United
Nations in imposing sanctions on Iraq. The International Action Center estimates
that, as a result, 1.5 million Iraqi people died, over half of them children
under the age of five. United For Peace and Justice reports that as of July
2004, between 9,451 and 11,333 civilians and 981 military personal have died
since the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Why is this amount of death and destruction
considered "very clean" and continually justified? That these atrocities are
authorized and committed by US leaders who claim to be "pro-life" is more
telling than any claim that military action is a liberating force for women.
Indeed, from occupation to domestic army-base life, every aspect of militarism
is an affront to the reproductive health and well-being of women and their
families around the world.
This is a revised version of an article originally published
by the Population and Development Program at Hampshire College as "Ten Reasons
Why Militarism is Bad for Reproductive Freedom." This article and a poster
based on this publication is available from the Population and Development
Program. Please contact the program at (413) 559-5506, rgluckman@hampshire.edu,
http://clpp.hampshire.edu/population_and_development.htm.
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Arundhati Roy
Photo by Pradip Krishen
|
Connecting the dots
An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire by Arundhati Roy. Cambridge, MA:
South End Press, 2004, 200 pp., $12.00 paper.
The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile: Conversations with Arundhati Roy.
Interviews by David Barsamian. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2004, 178 pp.,
$16.00 paper.
Reviewed by Kerryn Higgs
FOR AUSTRALIANS LIKE ME, India's proximity and its colonization by the British
lend a certain familiarity--India appeared in our history lessons at school,
though it was framed by the heroism of the imperial adventure, with the British
Raj cast as the bearer of "progress." For many in the US, India is probably
a vaguer concept--fabulous fabrics, swamis and ashrams, Gandhi, and, these
days, a call to the bank or the cable company, which might easily connect
you to Bangalore or Bombay. For the interested westerner, the work of Arundhati
Roy offers a highly accessible introduction to the complex mosaic of Indian
politics and society and India's relationship to the rest of the world.
Winner of the Booker Prize for her novel The God of Small Things
(1997), Roy is not an expatriate like many other celebrated writers from the
non-western world. She lives not in London or New York but in New Delhi. She
hastens to tell us this is not a decision rooted in patriotism. But it is
one that secures her a perspective from outside the centers of global power
and gives her an ear to "the murmuring in the servants' quarters... the words
of the worlds' subjects."
Roy's two new books differ in scope and content. Her fourth book of nonfiction,
An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire, collects seven pieces, six of
them originally given as talks and speeches--for the BBC, at the World Social
Forum, at the Riverside Church in New York, and at several educational venues
in India. The seventh, which gives the book its title, was published in the
London Guardian in April 2003, as the British besieged Basra and the
US advanced on Baghdad. The war on Iraq is this book's center of gravity.
The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile contains four interviews with
Roy conducted by alternative radio producer and journalist David Barsamian,
three of them before 2003. Their discussions range across the key passions
revealed in all Roy's nonfiction: the analysis of neoliberalism as a new wave
of colonial dispossession; the rise of Hindu extremism under the Bharatiya
Janata Party (BJP--recently defeated in the May 2004 election); and the ways
in which dissent battles these forces and still survives. The interviews also
include engrossing biographical anecdotes and reflections on writing itself,
which are not prominent in the essays.
An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire opens with "Peace is War--The
Collateral Damage of Breaking News," a talk Roy first gave in New Delhi at
a workshop on the media, just days before the Iraq invasion began. It weaves
together two themes: First, the fact, rarely noticed in the West, that "for
most people in the world, peace is war--a daily battle against hunger, thirst,
and the violation of their dignity…[an] endless crisis of normality." Second,
the way the mass media, "an elaborate boardroom bulletin that reports and
analyzes the concerns of powerful people," has perfected the production of
crisis as spectacle, "unmoor[ed] from the particularities of the history,
the geography and the culture that produced it."
The Guardian piece, "The Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire," follows.
In February 2003, Hans Blix and his team of inspectors were crushing and burning
Iraq's Al Samoud-2 missiles (said to exceed the permitted range by a mere
20 miles) at a time when a US attack seemed imminent. The conventional Iraqi
arsenal and Iraq's infrastructure had already been wrecked over the past decade.
"Operation Iraqi Freedom?" writes Roy. "I don't think so. It's more like Operation
Let's Run a Race, but First Let Me Break Your Knees… an act of cowardice…
unrivaled in history."
Roy zeroes in on the misconceived beliefs of ordinary Americans about Iraq's
fictitious involvement in the 9/11 attacks. It is anybody's guess, she concedes,
how much of the fabrication was and is believed by the US troops; she quotes
one private who says he's there "to take revenge on Iraq." Most of the world,
she says, sees the war as racist, engendering racism in everybody: "America
is a nation of morons, a nation of murderers, they say (with the same carelessness
with which they say, 'All Muslims are terrorists')."
Vilified in the past for being anti-American and anti-West, Roy finds herself
remembering the massive worldwide demonstrations of February 2003 and defending
US citizens from "the tidal wave of hatred… the absurd inability to separate
governments from people." It is an inability, she points out in "Instant Mix
Imperial Democracy," that is shared by bin Laden and Bush, who might as well
be working as a team, and for whom collective guilt and collective punishment
are accepted concepts.
"Instant Mix" was first delivered on May 13, 2003, at New York's Riverside
Church as an acceptance speech for the 2002 Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom.
Roy introduces herself as "a subject of the American Empire, a slave who presumes
to criticize her king." This wide-ranging speech is structured around a narrative
of the march to war. She describes the doctrine of the pre-emptive strike
as "The United States Can Do Whatever the Hell It Wants, And That's Official."
She provides a brief history of US relations with Baghdad, from the CIA-orchestrated
coup in 1963, which installed the Ba'ath regime in the first place (with the
CIA supplying lists of leftists and intellectuals for slaughter, just as in
Indonesia in 1965), to the continuing friendly support given to Saddam when
he assumed leadership of the Ba'ath regime--money, arms, components for bioweapons.
Roy pinpoints the many facets of US hypocrisy, such as Bush's harping on
the theme "Saddam gassed his own people," when the gassing of Kurds--and Iranian
soldiers--presented no apparent difficulty for the US government at that time.
She slams the "use of the urgent morality of the present to obscure the diabolical
sins of the past and the malevolent plans for the future."
She brings a novelist's language to bear on the multiple fictions and deceits
deployed to justify the war and rarely misses her mark--whether it's Rumsfeld's
remark about freedom being untidy ("Did anybody know that Donald Rumsfeld
was an anarchist?") or the ripple of laughter in the pressroom when he marvelled
at the multiplicity of vases carted off during the looting of the National
Museum ("Would it be all right for the poor of Harlem to loot the Metropolitan
Museum? Would it be greeted with similar mirth?"). Or the rhetoric of "free
speech" in a situation where corporations control almost all the space available
for public speech and, in the case of Italy, the prime minister personally
controls about 90 percent of the TV market. Or the greatest democracy on earth,
with its president appointed by the Supreme Court. Or the rhetoric of bringing
democracy to the benighted world. Turkey was rapped over the knuckles for
acting in line with its own population, 90 per cent of whom opposed the war,
while other countries like England and Spain were congratulated for ignoring
their people. Thus, democracy, the "modern world's holy cow," is in profound
crisis: "a hollow word, a pretty shell, emptied of all content and meaning…
the Empire's euphemism for neo-liberal capitalism."
IN THE REMAINING PIECES, Roy probes the relationship between the war and
established practices of globalization: "[T]he New Imperialist doesn't need
to trudge around the tropics risking malaria or diarrhea or early death. New
Imperialism can be conducted on e-mail." In India, the process is going smoothly,
without military attack:
[A] relatively small section of people become immensely wealthy
by appropriating everything--land, rivers, water, freedom, security, dignity,
fundamental rights including the right to protest--from a large group of people…
[W]ater, electricity, transport, telecommunications, health services, education,
natural resources--assets that the Indian State is supposed to hold in trust
for the people it represents, assets that have been built and maintained with
public money over decades--are sold by the State to private corporations.
In India seventy percent of the population--seven hundred million people--live
in rural areas. Their livelihoods depend on access to natural resources. To
snatch these away and sell them as stock to private companies is beginning
to result in dispossession and impoverishment on a barbaric scale. (pp. 103-104)
Roy's latest essays shine with the layered subtlety and acerbic wit of a
novelist's prose and a metaphorical flair rarely encountered in conjunction
with political thinking. Take this extract from "Do Turkeys Enjoy Thanksgiving?":
The tradition of 'turkey pardoning' in the U.S. is a wonderful allegory
for New Racism. Every year since 1947, the National Turkey Federation presents
the U.S. President with a turkey for Thanksgiving. Every year, in a show
of ceremonial magnanimity, the President spares that particular bird (and
eats another one). After receiving the presidential pardon, the Chosen One
is sent to Frying Pan Park in Virginia to live out its natural life. The
rest of the fifty million turkeys raised for Thanksgiving are slaughtered
and eaten on Thanksgiving Day….
That's how New Racism in the corporate era works. A few carefully bred
turkeys--the local elites of various countries, a community of wealthy immigrants,
investment bankers, the occasional Colin Powell, or Condoleezza Rice, some
singers, some writers (like myself)--are given absolution and a pass to
Frying Pan Park. The remaining millions lose their jobs, are evicted from
their homes, have their water and electricity connections cut, and die of
AIDS. Basically they're for the pot. But the Fortunate Fowls in Frying Pan
Park are doing fine. Some of them even work for the IMF and the WTO--so
who can accuse those organisations of being anti-turkey? Some serve as board
members on the Turkey Choosing Committee--so who can say that turkeys are
against Thanksgiving? They participate in it! Who can say the poor are anti-corporate
globalisation? There's a stampede to get into Frying Pan Park. (pp. 87-88)
Versions of most of the pieces in An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire
can be found online, a reflection of Roy's non-proprietorial view of her work.
Aiming at getting the stories out, she naturally launches her writing into
the world, just as she shared her Lannan Prize with some 50 progressive organizations
and community groups throughout India. Though many readers will have seen
some of the pieces before, the collection has its own coherence and deserves
a place on the bookshelf.
IN 2001, ROY PROPOSED a piercing metaphor for globalization in "Shall We
Leave It To The Experts?" (available online and in Power Politics [2001]):
It's as though the people of India have been rounded up and loaded
onto two convoys of trucks (a huge big one and a tiny little one) that have
set off resolutely in opposite directions. The tiny convoy is on its way to
a glittering destination somewhere near the top of the world. The other convoy
just melts into the darkness and disappears. (pp. 2-3)
In the first interview with Barsamian in The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile,
Roy describes the laborers in her street in Delhi, digging trenches for fiber
optic cables by candlelight. The "two convoys" are obvious in Delhi. The poor
are "packed like lice into every crevice of the city," while the beneficiaries
of the information revolution and the free market drive ever-sleeker cars and
build ever-higher gates. When Barsamian asks if the passion for social justice
evident in her recent work means that she has joined the large convoy, she is
clear that she has not and cannot--education and privilege determine where a
person rides. What she can do, from the small convoy, is speak.
The interviews also include Roy's fascinating reflections on her life and
her writing. She grew up with her mother in Ayemenen, the village in Kerala
where The God of Small Things was set. Not unlike Rahel's mother in
the novel, who also transgressed and also detested the smug ordered world
of the village around her, Roy's mother married for love--a Bengali Hindu
outside her own Syrian Orthodox community--and then divorced. Her mother's
advice to the young Roy: "Whatever you do, don't get married."
Growing up in a little village in Kerala was a nightmare for me.
All I wanted to do was escape… In Kerala, everyone has what is called a tharavaad,
your ancestral home. If you don't have a father, you don't have a tharavaad.
You're a person without an address. (p. 5)
She lacked the security implicit in having a father's protection, but the trade-off
was a wonderful lack of indoctrination. "I had none of the conditioning that
a normal middle-class Indian girl would have… no caste, no religion, no supervision."
All this gave her "a vantage point… not rural, not urban, not completely 'traditional',
not wholeheartedly 'modern'… without the blinkered single-mindedness of the…
oppressed, nor the flabby self-indulgence of the well-to-do." In the wake of
her novel's success, she says, people in Ayemenen want to claim her as "their
woman" while ignoring the fact that the book damns the "intrinsic callous brutality"
of their society.
While those who know her from The God of Small Things might imagine
her political interests as new, Roy tells Barsamian she has been writing essays
since she was 21. In any case, she says, all of her writing shares the aim
of telling a story, building bridges between the small realities of people's
lives and the immense social forces that affect them
Fiction is the truest thing… Today's [s]pecialists and experts end up severing
the links between things, isolating them, actually creating barriers that
prevent ordinary people from understanding what's happening to them. I try
to do the opposite: to create links, to join the dots, to tell the politics
like a story, to communicate it, to make it real. (p. 10)
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The unmothering
Let Me Go by Helga Schneider. New York: Walker & Company, 2004, 172
pp., $19.00 hardcover.
Reviewed by Lisa London
Helga Schneider at age 4, in 1941.
From Let Me Go.
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A YOUNG WIFE AND MOTHER OF TWO children becomes involved in local political
activities. She hires a babysitter so she can attend weekly organizing meetings.
She gets her mother-in-law to stay with the children so she can leave for
one-, two-, three-day trainings. She participates in local organizing drives
and hands out literature, and slowly her participation is recognized and rewarded--she
moves up in stature and rank. She assumes more duties and is invited to meetings
with higher level officials. But her mother-in-law complains of the time she
spends away from the children; her husband demands she stop her activities;
and the neighbors talk: "Why isn't she caring for the children? What kind
of mother is she?"
Twenty-one-year-old Traudi Schneider not only withstood this criticism from
family and friends, she seemed to invite it with her regular rejection of
her mothering duties. Finally, in an act of social rebellion, she left her
husband and children to enter fully a political life. To reject the role of
mother and move on, to "un-mother" oneself: Few women have the inner resources
to carry out such an act.
But Let Me Go is not a story about an independent mother and her
long-lost daughter. It was 1941 when Traudi Schneider left her husband and
two children. She did so to become a proud member of the Nazi SS. In fact,
Traudi Schneider was so enthusiastic about her work that she was elected to
guard the inmates at the death camps: "Only the hardest, the thickest-skinned
were destined for those. That's why you were chosen for Birkenau, the most
selective camp of all," she was told. Traudi Schneider never recanted or apologized
for her barbarous participation in torture and murder. In fact, those continue
to be the proudest days of her life.
In Let Me Go, Traudi's daughter Helga Schneider travels to the bedside
of her now 90-year-old mother and transcribes in minute detail the conversation
that ensued. A document of the Shoah, the Holocaust, Let Me Go details
Traudi's experiences as a female guard. In her daughter's record of their
conversation, Traudi recalls numerous horrifying details about her desensitizing
training, witnessing torture, and enforcing camp rules: "'I had orders to
treat [the prisoners] with extreme harshness,' she crows, 'and I made them
spit blood.'" She goes on to describe the medical experiments carried out
on Jewish prisoners. Helga takes pain to fully document her mother's role
in the camps, which she presents without adornment or apology.
AND YET FOR ALL OF ITS historical weight and importance, this is a deeply
personal, heartbreaking story. Although the mother who left and the daughter
who was abandoned are continually subsumed by the large, brutal reality at
the heart of the last century, their story is always there, pulsing just under
the radar. While an apparently straightforward statement like, "Yes, mother,
I know, I've read your file," refers to Helga Schneider researching historical
documents on Traudi Schneider's crimes against humanity, it also refers to
a daughter learning about acts of brutality committed by her mother. The two
women share the same blood, the same family history; despite what Helga might
wish, she has a connection to the woman who committed these acts. "What a
sad couple we are, mother, and what an absurd bond connects us," says Helga.
When Helga meets her mother, she feels not anger but horror, not need but
desperation, not understanding but bewilderment. Her experience is not within
the normal human emotional range; she can't quite find language to describe
it. Twice she has to leave her mother's side because of panic attacks.
The emotional layers are thick and complicated. When Helga first met her
mother, Traudi presented her with her SS uniform and wanted her to try it
on. She tried to give her daughter jewelry stolen from Jewish prisoners in
the camps. When Helga realizes that her mother is completely blind to her
horror, she feels some pity for her. But ultimately Helga is unable to reconcile
her lifelong desire to meet, understand, and connect with the woman who gave
her life with her mother's continued anti-Semitism and outright reverence
for Hitler's doctrines.
As a reader, I'm drawn to history books. But I'm one of those for whom history
must have a face. As a feminist, I seek out woman's voices, especially in
those places where I feel I've heard the men's chorus for far too long. Women's
experience of the Holocaust is one of those places where the historical and
literary records are still overwhelmingly male. For this reason, I was drawn
to this haunting and difficult book. What adult daughter doesn't struggle
with the emotional inheritance left to her by her mother? As a historian uncovering
the full weight and reality of the past, Helga Schneider excels. As a daughter
yearning to connect with her mother, she must, if she has a heart, necessarily
fail. Each time Helga uncovers one of Traudi's acts of brutality, she pulls
further away, as though, if she can collect enough evidence, she too will
be able to "un-mother" herself.
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The "Newspeak" of our time
The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers,
and the Media That Love Them by Amy Goodman with David Goodman. Hyperion:
New York, 2004, 342 pp., $21.95 hardcover.
Reviewed by Harriet Malinowitz
"IF THERE IS HOPE," Winston Smith, the protagonist of George Orwell's 1984,
wrote in his illicit diary, "it lies in the proles." The proletarians were
uneducated and the latent power of their massive numbers unrealized. Yet only
such a force, reasoned Winston, could overthrow the ruling party, which controlled
the citizens of Oceania with systematic disinformation, unremitting surveillance,
and the pervasive threat of violence and imprisonment. Still, wrote Winston,
one fundamental conundrum had yet to be worked out: "Until they become conscious
they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become
conscious."
Fast forward to the Orwellian United States of 2004--where public relations
specialists craft the terms that make perpetual and spatially limitless war
acceptable; yesterday's news goes down the memory hole as today's reality
is spun (we never armed Saddam; we never trained and funded the Taliban);
hidden video cameras record daily life; and ever-shifting icons of evil flash
across our television screens to incite mass rage.
If Winston were here now, it's likely that this obdurate believer in verifiable
reality and logical reasoning would write in his diary: If there is hope,
it lies in independent media. Back in 1949--the same year 1984 was
published--Pacifica Radio, pioneer of listener-sponsored, corporate-unencumbered,
dissenting-voiced media, was founded in California. It grew to five stations
(in Berkeley, Los Angeles, New York, Washington, and Houston), and in 1985,
an avid listener named Amy Goodman started working with WBAI, the Pacifica
station in New York. Gaining experience, she became an editor, and then news
director and cohost of a morning show called Wake-up Call.
In 1996, the Pacifica stations launched Democracy Now!, originally
conceived as a daily election show in the months leading up to what became
Bill Clinton's second presidential victory. With Goodman as host, it pushed
beyond the usual horse race reported by mass media to critical investigations--of
why, for example, most people in the US don't vote. It was so successful that
Pacifica decided to continue it in a more general magazine format after the
election. With television cameras added in 2001, it has become what I (with
all due apologies to Ringling Brothers) think of as The Greatest Show on Earth.
Goodman officiates as acuminous ringmaster to an array of voices and ideas
that are usually fenced out of mass earshot--from public intellectuals, activists,
artists, and global notables like Jean-Bertrand Aristide and the Dalai Lama
(who are often inaccurately represented in the mainstream media), to imprisoned
political figures, military families, war veterans, and local eyewitnesses
in East Timor, Jenin, Falluja, Port-au-Prince, and Sudan.
In 2004, Democracy Now! is the largest public media collaboration
in the country, as Goodman mentions frequently. It broadcasts on community
radio and public access television stations, Dish Network's Free Speech TV,
and via video and audio streaming from www.democracynow.org.
(The website has an easily searchable archive, freely available to all: "Our
motto is, 'Steal this story, please!'") It is increasingly carried by NPR
stations, often in response to local demand. According to Goodman, on many
of these stations, "Democracy Now! is beating Morning Edition
and All Things Considered hands down on fundraising."
The Exception to the Rulers, a natural outgrowth of the show (as
much as it is an introduction to the show's ethos), is written in the first
person and details Goodman's experiences and observations about media and
politics as culled from her remarkable career before and during the course
of DN. (David Goodman is her brother, a print journalist who collaborated
in shaping the material into a format more within his bailiwick than hers.)
The first six chapters read like a synthesis of numerous Democracy Now!
features, exposing the government/corporate synergy that has long guided US
foreign policy and the domestic crackdown on civil liberties since 9/11.
Some of this information will be familiar to those who have followed alternative
online news compilations such as Truthout (www.truthout.com)
and Common Dreams Newsletter (www.commondreams.org),
or even the op-ed pages of many newspapers, over the past few years. But other
parts will be shocking reading for most Americans--particularly Goodman's
narratives of her trips to Nigeria and East Timor, where she reported on atrocities
that were largely ignored in the mainstream US press. Why the news "whiteout"?
Because these atrocities were perpetrated with aid from a succession of US
administrations, both Democratic and Republican, whose commitment to the cheap
production of oil and sneakers easily overran considerations of human rights
and life. In the interstices between the horrors glint little jewels of cheerier
news. We find, for instance, that Condi Rice, the national security adviser
and Bush confidante, has a cousin named Connie Rice--a fervent civil rights
attorney who spoke out against the round-ups of Muslims in the US. (Is there
a remake of The Patty Duke Show in here somewhere?)
AFTER THE FIRST THIRD of the book, Goodman becomes thoroughly attentive
to her ultimate message, which is about the messenger. She explicates the
wily arts that corporate media use to make Americans stupid, in media critic
Mark Crispin Miller's phrase, and lays out a blueprint for an independent
media that will instead make us smart.
Goodman asks, "If we had state media in the United States, how would it
be any different?" She suggests that the US media slavishly adheres to a code
of self-censorship, requiring little government interference because it is
so handsomely rewarded for acting as the public-relations wing of the administration.
She illustrates this from many angles, but perhaps most pungently in the chapter
"Psyops Comes Home":
Psychological warfare--psyops, to those in the business--was something
that the United States used against its enemies....Psyops is the military
way of winning the hearts and minds of a population....The 1948 Smith-Mundt
Act prohibited the domestic dissemination of U.S. government propaganda. The
reasoning behind Smith-Mundt was that "Congress wanted to be certain that
a U.S. government agency could not brainwash citizens as Hitler had in Germany."
(pp. 251-252)
But by 2003, she reports, there was evidence that "[t]he Bush Administration
had turned psychological operations against Americans." The large number of
Americans who believed, in mid-2003, that Iraq was directly involved in the
9/11 attacks, and that weapons of mass destruction had been found, indicated
that "we had become victims of our own propaganda." This is possible, says Goodman,
in large part because of "the symbiotic relationship between the corporate media
and the officials they cover." She details cases in which psyops personnel freely
worked on news programs at CNN and NPR: "Army psyops is forbidden by law from
manipulating US media. So what happens when psyops troops are the media?"
During the Iraq war, the 700 reporters officially "embedded" with US troops
presented what Goodman calls "the fake war--the one Americans saw on TV":
The embeds were supposedly there to offer frontline coverage. But
what can you cover from the turret of a tank? You can cover what it feels
like to shoot people. Then you can get the gunner's response and the commander's
spin. That is one narrow slice of the war experience....But what about the
victims? Shouldn't reporters be embedded in Iraqi communities and hospitals?
(p. 173)
Meanwhile, international journalists covering "the real war"--the one in which
"8,000 to 10,000 Iraqi civilians [were] killed and 20,000 injured"--quickly
came to realize that they, too, were military targets, as an American fighter
jet scored a direct missile hit on Al Jazeera's Baghdad bureau, and a US tank
opened fire on the Palestine Hotel, where many unembedded reporters from various
countries were staying. Some American journalists who expressed opposition to
the war were simply fired by their media organizations.
Agony, mutilation, and corpses were absent from the coverage Americans saw--"for
taste purposes," as a PBS news executive quoted by Goodman explains. But Goodman
is familiar with American "Newspeak": "Censorship goes by many names in the
United States. Taste is one of the favorite euphemisms. Sensibility is another."
She makes it clear, too, that the orchestrated fiction of a "clean war" didn't
originate with 21st-century Bushian extremism; she examines the history in
a stunning chapter called "Hiroshima Cover-up: How the War Department's Timesman
Won a Pulitzer." General Douglas MacArthur kept the press out of southern
Japan after the atomic bombs dropped, disseminating the official story via
the US authorities and the military censors: Radiation sickness didn't exist;
civilian casualties were minimal. An independent Australian journalist broke
the ban, horrifying the world and setting into motion a vast US cover-up.
Authorities declared the reporter a dupe of Japanese propaganda, seized his
camera and photos, and issued a "corrective" press release.
They also brought reporters to New Mexico to "prove" to them that radioactive
contamination didn't cause lingering harm. One of them was William L. Laurence,
a science reporter who, Goodman says,
was not only receiving a salary from The New York Times.
He was also on the payroll of the War Department....His dual status as government
agent and reporter earned him an unprecedented level of access to American
military officials--he even flew in the squadron of planes that dropped the
atomic bomb on Nagasaki. (pp. 297-298)
Laurence's series of articles for the Times glorifying the nuclear program
began with a front-page story called "U.S. Atom Bomb Site Belies Tokyo Tales,"
and offered his "expert" assurance that "the Japanese described 'symptoms' that
did not ring true." For this, he won a Pulitzer Prize. Goodman raises questions
that should be obvious, yet remain astoundingly absent from most public discussion
of the "free press":
[W]hat of the fact that the Pulitzer Board knowingly awarded the
top journalism prize to the Pentagon's paid publicist, who denied the suffering
of millions of Japanese? Do the Pulitzer Board and the Times approve
of "uncritical parroting of propaganda"--as long as it is from the United
States? (p. 301)
FAST FORWARD AGAIN from the 1940s to the present, to evaluate whether the newspaper
of record has tightened its standards. It's hard to pinpoint one particular
brazen individual (there were several) who left The New York Times with
no choice but to issue, in May, its awkward and half-baked (though still dumbfounding)
mea culpa about its fatally mendacious Iraq war coverage. But Goodman's blistering
chapter, "Lies of Our Times" (Exception was released in April)
certainly didn't minimize the pressure. Goodman particularly skewers the influential
Times national security correspondent, Judith Miller, who in the months
before she was embedded in an army unit "was filling the Times' front
pages with unchallenged government propaganda....Miller's lies provided the
pretext for war. Her lies cost lives." But Goodman also makes it clear that
Miller couldn't have acted alone:
This was the classic disinformation two-step: the White House leaks
a lie to the Times, the newspaper publishes it as a startling exposé,
and then the White House conveniently masquerades behind the credibility of
the Times. (p. 139)
Though many would call Goodman's a "left" or "liberal" agenda, there's neither
an O'Reilly nor a Franken factor to her. She is effective in part because she
helps to dissolve old and increasingly useless left/right dichotomies. Her pursuit
is not of a utopian ideology, but of those corny propositions called truth and
reality, in all their glorious distinction from lies and propaganda. If she
can't escape the label "progressive" it's only because--to borrow a remark by
Daniel Okrent, the conscientious new public editor of The New York Times,
quoted in The New Yorker--"the pursuit of balance can create imbalance,
because sometimes something is true."
The really radical thing about Goodman is that she takes conventional journalistic
principles seriously: Listen to more than one side of a story; do all you
can to provide accurate information; don't be bought; check your facts (and
those proclaimed by your sources, even if your source is the president of
the United States); report on what's not already being reported on; be a watchdog
rather than a mouthpiece for those in power; let diverse voices and real debate
be heard. Then, the people can decide what they think.
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Letter to the Editor
Amy Goodman
Photo by Robert Kim
|
The sword and the shield
A conversation with independent journalist Amy Goodman
By Harriet Malinowitz
Harriet Malinowitz: Why did you write The Exception to the Rulers?
Amy Goodman: I think the media is everyone's, or should be. The corporate
media is using the public airwaves, and they have a responsibility to bring
out the full diversity of views. We are now in an age of the "Clear Channeling"
of America--we're undergoing the largest media consolidation this country
has ever seen. But people are hungry for, and open to, ideas. What is often
called the "mainstream media" is a misnomer. It's not mainstream. It's an
extreme media that beats the drums for war. There is a vibrant independent
media movement in this country that needs to be shored up and built. And the
book may introduce people to independent media who haven't experienced it,
and let them know where it is. I also want to encourage people to challenge
the corporate media, because they're using our national treasure--the public
airwaves.
HM: You wrote this book with your brother. How did your family background
influence your work?
AG: When I was growing up, my dad ran a task force in our community
to integrate the schools. And he met tremendous public opposition. These were
neighborhood schools, so they were de facto segregated. My dad persisted in
the face of death threats and a thousand people screaming in an auditorium
or a cafeteria--I probably internalized that emotionally even more than I
understood what was going on. I saw what it meant to stand up for something
you believed in, in order to ultimately make your community a better place.
My mother taught women's literature and history at local community colleges,
and I saw what a difference she made in the lives of her students. Often her
students had come there for continuing ed credits--they were truck drivers
and cops, local guys who saved everything to go to community college, bringing
their wives to the class. My mother gave them an entrée into another universe.
That's what I think media should do--give people an opportunity to experience
other worlds, to know that there are many different possibilities out there.
My grandparents all came over from Russia and Poland, fleeing persecution.
I was shaped by the Holocaust and losing many members of my family, learning
about that. My grandfather and my great-grandfather were Orthodox rabbis.
I believe we each have to find our place in the world where we feel comfortable.
We must do what we can in that niche where we feel we can reach out from.
It doesn't matter if you work in the system or outside the system. What matters
is that you feel you can make a difference.
HM: What prompted you to become involved with independent media?
AG: I did my college thesis in medical anthropology on a drug called
Depo Provera, a contraceptive. At the time, it wasn't approved by the Food
and Drug Administration (FDA), but it was being distributed in more than 80
countries, even though it caused cancer in beagles and monkeys. In Atlanta,
Georgia, 10,000 black women at the second largest charity hospital in the
country were injected with it, without knowing that it hadn't been approved
by the FDA. When I defended it, one of my professors took the thesis, before
I even started, and said, "Miss Goodman, you know that this is not a thesis
in anthropology. Anthropology is to be a participant-observer in another person's
culture. This is looking at your own culture." I said, "Well, Dr. So-and-So,
to me, this is anthropology. My thesis is about white male corporate
culture, and science as it's practiced in this country. It's not a culture
that I'm part of, so it's very legitimate for me to look at it as an outsider."
After college, I worked with a colleague to turn my thesis into a series
of articles for the Multinational Monitor called "The Case Against
Depo Provera." As I was doing that, I turned on the radio to keep me company,
and I heard this remarkable station--WBAI. All the rawness of New York City,
authentic voices not trying to sell you anything. It was not slick. All the
accents of New York, the beauty and the horror of New York, all conveyed.
I was very taken with it.
HM: You've certainly been in some highly dangerous situations--I'm thinking
especially of East Timor and Nigeria. How do you manage not to let fear get
in your way?
AG: Well, I'm glad you didn't say "How do you manage not to be afraid?"
I'm afraid all the time. It is a matter of not letting it get in your
way. And fear is good. It makes you more careful. People here at home feel
constrained just by peer pressure. You just have to tunnel through that, challenge
yourself like you challenge other people.
HM: How would you say the visibility and impact of DN have grown
since its inception?
AG: We get millions of hits on our website. People who are interviewed
on our show are often called by other news outlets. Often we're not credited.
Sometimes we do a show, the international media picks it up, and then the
US press picks it up from the international media. I call it "trickle-up journalism."
HM: From your extensive travels around the country, have you gained any
insights about Americans?
AG: I would say that Americans are a compassionate people, and when
we learn something, we care. But we have to know. I just gave the graduation
address at Hampshire College, a very interesting college, which was set up
in 1970 as an experiment in alternative education. The motto of the school
is, "To know is not enough." We have to go beyond just having the knowledge;
we have to do something. But we start with information. That's where the media
has fallen so far short--in not providing us that information.
In the old Soviet Union, everyone knew you had to read between the lines
of Pravda. It's a state organ, it's not going to tell you the truth.
But in this country, we have the illusion, with so many channels and so much
press, that we can get our information not between the lines, but from
the lines. The great journalist I. F. Stone said to his journalism students,
"If there are two words you must remember, they're 'Governments lie.'" The
media has done us such a disservice in this country in not acting as a filter,
not analyzing. Instead, it has acted as a microphone for those in power.
At Hampshire College, I talked to the students about the danger of seeing
the world through a corporate lens and about what the US represents to the
rest of the world. We ended the book with this as well. The world sees the
US as two things--the sword and the shield. The US government has all too
often supported and provided weapons to repressive regimes--the sword. People
in other countries know this. But despite this, they have great faith in Americans
as a people. We come from the most powerful country on earth. Every little
act we engage in has a huge ripple effect around the world-the shield.
In 1991, I covered East Timor, one of the worst genocides of the 20th century,
with Allan Nairn, a great investigative journalist. People there would take
us to their backyards. They'd look around furtively, to make sure military
intelligence was not around. Then they would dig up the ground, and they would
pull out a piece of paper, an article written perhaps three years before,
that they had saved. And they would ask us, "Did this resolution pass in the
US Congress?" It was astounding. The article might be about some nonbinding
resolution that we hardly thought about--or that most Americans didn't know
about--but people in East Timor were keeping tabs. It so mattered.
Allan and I went through this horrific experience, Nove
