Stop the Next War Now (14 page)

Will be too tender of those of another country

To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”

From the voice of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with

Our own. It says: “Disarm! Disarm!

The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.”

Blood does not wipe our dishonor,

Nor violence indicate possession.

As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil

At the summons of war,

Let women now leave all that may be left of home

For a great and earnest day of counsel.

Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.

Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means

Whereby the great human family can live in peace …

Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,

But of God—

In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask

That a general congress of women without limit of nationality,

May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient

And the earliest period consistent with its objects,

To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,

The amicable settlement of international questions,

The great and general interests of peace.

W
STANDS FOR WAR

LAURA FLANDERS

Laura Flanders is the host of
The Laura Flanders Show
on Air America Radio and the author of several books, including
Bushwomen
.

After 9/11, to justify its attack on Afghanistan, the Bush administration deployed its women to cast its campaign not as a vengeful assault by the world’s most powerful nation against one of planet’s most underdeveloped states but as a rescue mission. Out came Laura Bush to say, “This isn’t about revenge; this is about protection and defense, not just of Afghan women and girls, but of women and girls the world over.”

Some Afghan women returned to schools, but liberation remains an unfinished business. In fact, Afghan women have been denied the support they were promised by the Bush administration during the bombing. Laura Bush was used to put a soft face, a kind of feminist-friendly face, on a devastating bombing campaign, but the Bush administration never made supporting Afghan women a priority. Few people know how much money was allocated in the administration’s 2004 budget for the Women’s Department in Afghanistan: not one cent. Only after women’s organizations protested did some money get put in the budget.

While Bush is using the rhetoric of women’s rights to advance an unpopular corporate agenda around the world, at home, his administration has been giving public jobs to religious extremists who’d set women’s choices back decades. For all the talk of security, most women’s lives today are more perilous. Bush’s policies around the world are fueling anger against all things American—including equality for women. In some places that backlash is taking the form of extremist religious movements in the name of national resistance.At home that backlash is taking place beneath a veil of secrecy.

George W. Bush campaigned for the presidency on the slogan “W Stands for Women.” The reality is that
W
has come to mean war—including war on women.

FEMINIST

VOICES

FOR PEACE

STARHAWK

Starhawk is the author and coauthor of ten books, including
The Spiral Dance
, about the neopagan movement, and the ecotopian novel
The Fifth Sacred Thing
. Starhawk’s newest book is
The Earth Path
.

When outcries against the war and the occupation of Iraq echoed across the United States and around the globe, women were not silent. Groups like codepink: Women for Peace disrupted congressional hearings and organized monthlong peace vigils at the White House. Women in Black held vigils in hundreds of communities around the world. Women Rising for Peace and Justice, the women’s caucus of United for Peace, issued calls for nationwide women’s actions against the war.

Women are deeply affected by war, racism, and poverty—the three evils named by Martin Luther King Jr. When we stand for peace as women, we are not doing it to make a case that we’re victims but to represent a different vision of strength. The unique power in women-initiated and women-led actions comes not from excluding men—most of these actions welcome men as participants—but through embracing the joy and visionary potential that arise when we come together as women to defend the life-sustaining values that we hold dear.

No set of qualities is innately or exclusively female or male. Men can be compassionate, loving, and kind, just as women can be tough, brave, or callous. Wise feminists do not claim that women are essentially kinder or gentler than men, per se. If we did, the Margaret Thatchers and Condoleezza Rices of the world would soon prove us wrong. Nonetheless, we have seen throughout history that patriarchy assigns the qualities associated with aggression and competition to men and relegates to women the devalued roles of nurturing and service. Patriarchy values the hard over the soft; the tough over the tender; punishment, vengeance, and vindictiveness over compassion, negotiation, and reconciliation. The “hard” qualities are linked to power, success, and masculinity—and exalted. The “soft” qualities are identified with weakness, powerlessness, and femininity—and denigrated.

Under patriarchy, men are shamed and considered weak if they act in ways associated with femininity. Politicians win elections by being tough—tough on terror, tough on crime, tough on drugs, tough on welfare mothers. Calls for cooperation, negotiation, compassion, or a recognition of our interdependence are equated with womanly weakness. In the name of “toughness,” the power holders deprive the poor of the means of life, the troubled and the ill of treatment and care, the ordinary citizen of privacy and civil rights. Force, punishment, and violence are patriarchy’s answer to conflicts and social problems.

Patriarchy finds its ultimate expression in war. Soldiers can be coerced into dying or killing when their fear of being called womanlike or cowardly overrides their reluctance to face death or to inflict injury on others. War removes every argument for tenderness and dissolves all strictures on violence.

To counter the rabid cries for war, we need not just women’s voices but raucous, incautious, feminist voices—for feminism allows us to analyze and pull apart patriarchy, the constellation of values, ideas, and beliefs that reinforces male control over women.

As the powers that be cynically use the instances of oppression against women in the Muslim world to justify racism and to encourage American support for military takeovers, only feminist voices can speak to issues of women’s freedom and autonomy with candor and genuine concern for the welfare of Muslim women.

The United States and its allies, who now pose as the liberators of women in the Muslim world, are the same powers that gave the Taliban, Saddam Hussein, and Al-Qaeda their start-up funds—supporting them and putting them in power, with no consideration of their impact on women. The “liberators” of Afghan women ignored the grassroots women’s organizations, like the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (rawa), and installed a new government almost as oppressive as the Taliban, thereby excluding the heroic women who had risked their lives to educate their daughters and maintain some sense of freedom under oppressive rule.

We protest the hypocrisy that trumpets the oppression of women in Muslim societies as a rallying cry for war while entirely overlooking the oppression of women in Western societies—and the Western governments’ complicity in it. (Similarly, the racism, economic oppression, and endemic violence of Western culture are notably ignored even as the United States appoints itself the flag bearer of freedom.) Women cannot walk safely through the streets of this country, nor can they be assured of a living wage, health care in illnesses, or care and support in old age.

We need feminist voices for peace to declare that those who truly care about life and freedom will work to support, not conquer, those women in every culture who are struggling for liberation and social justice. Real security can come only when we weave a global web of mutual aid and support. As we make larger connections and take action together, we must assert what we as women know to be true: compassion is not weakness, and brutality is not strength.

You were born with potential.

You were born with goodness and trust.

You were born with ideals and dreams.

You were born with wings.

You are not meant for crawling, so don’t.

You have wings.

Learn to use them and fly.

—Rumi, thirteenth century

FREEDOM THROUGH

SOLIDARITY—

THE LIE OF

“LIBERATION”

SONALI KOLHATKAR

Sonali Kolhatkar is the codirector of the Afghan Women’s Mission, a U.S.-based nonprofit agency founded in 2000 that helps fund the humanitarian and political work of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan. Kolhatkar is also the host and coproducer of
Uprising
, a daily drive-time morning program at KPFK, Los Angeles, part of the Pacifica Radio network.

“Our coalition has liberated Afghanistan and restored fundamental human rights and freedoms to Afghan women, and all the people of Afghanistan.”

—P

RESIDENT

B

USH

, P

ROCLAMATION

7584,

W

OMEN’S

E

QUALITY

D

AY

, A

UGUST

23, 2002

Many American women supported the October 2001 invasion of Afghanistan because of claims by the Bush administration that the war would liberate Afghan women from the Taliban. The administration and the corporate media worked in tandem to effectively sensationalize the Taliban’s abuse of women by keeping the message simple and palatable: Afghan women’s oppression was limited to the burqa (veil), and burqa-clad women needed saving by Western governments. While the war of “Operation Enduring Freedom” toppled the Taliban and resulted in the repeal of forced-veiling laws, it also resulted in the brutal bombing deaths of thousands of women and children and the installation of warlords as fanatical as the Taliban.

The rhetoric of “liberation” conjures up an image of millions of brown faces awaiting the Western savior as they starve and sustain torture and imprisonment by native tyrants (Mullah Omar, Osama bin Laden, and Saddam Hussein) and their cronies (the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, and the Ba’ath Party). The idea of a more “advanced,” powerful country “liberating” a weaker, “backward” nation and its women reveals the powerful nation’s sense of superiority—it is sexist and racist logic. (Immediately after the Taliban fell, Christopher Hitchens of the
Nation
, in a November 2004 article, celebrated this false superiority when he made the smug proclamation, “The United States of America has just succeeded in bombing a country back out of the Stone Age.”)

Older empires claimed to “civilize” their colonies with the same arrogance as today’s “liberators,” and with the same consequences. As described in
The Rise and Fall of the British Empire
, by Lawrence James, the British imperialists’ “possession of an empire … the same time, deeply rooted liberal and evangelical ideals produced a powerful sense of imperial duty and mission. The empire existed to civilize and uplift its subjects, or so its champions claimed.”

In the case of the U.S. empire, the language of “liberation” allowed Bush to justify war and imperialism in the name of women’s freedom. By perpetuating the burqa as the main visual symbol of women’s oppression, the Bush administration tried to fool us into thinking that if the Taliban were ousted, and their laws on forced veiling removed, then Afghan women would instantly be free. But a closer look reveals that Bush’s definition of “liberation” has not translated into tangible freedom for women. In fact, women are suffering as much as they did under the Taliban, and in some cases more so.

International human-rights organizations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have exposed the lie of Afghan women’s freedom. According to their reports, post-Taliban Afghanistan still poses grave dangers for Afghan women: armed warlords from the U.S.-backed Northern Alliance reign supreme and echo the Taliban’s anti-woman ideology; sexual violence against women has soared; more and more women are burning themselves alive to escape their traumas; married women and girls have been barred from schools; a constitution upholding the supremacy of Islamic law has been ratified; permission for political demonstrations by women are routinely denied; and an outspoken critic of the warlords (Malalai Joya) has received threats on her life.

The rhetoric of “liberation” victimizes and dehumanizes women: it denies them their ability to determine their fate and instead subjects them to the whims of the “liberators.” Conversely, to accept the humanity of Afghan women would mean acknowledging their dignity and right to self-determination, as well as their right and ability to resist the supremacist actions of foreign invaders and homegrown despots (who are often colluding with one another) and to decide what form foreign intervention should take.

In their self-serving focus on the plight of oppressed women in Afghanistan, the Bush administration and the corporate-controlled U.S. media ignored existing movements organized by women struggling for freedom. The women of rawa (Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan), for example, have been waging nonviolent war on fundamentalism and foreign occupation since 1977. Why don’t we ever see rawa on the nightly network news? Because Afghan women like these are not voiceless and faceless victims who can be portrayed as dependent on the benevolence of foreigners.

On October 11, 2001, as the United States commenced the bombing of Afghanistan, rawa released a statement: “We believe that once there is no foreign interference, especially of a fundamentalist type, all ethnic groups of all religions … will prove their solidarity for achieving the most sacred national interests for the sake of a proud and free Afghanistan.” We would do well to follow rawa’s example, replacing the language of “liberation” with that of solidarity.