<http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/media/rubinafghn.htm>
Re: The, "Woman Question, " as Old Left usage put it and the anti-war movement. Michael Pugliese
http://www.newsandletters.org/Issues/2001/Nov/war_nov2001.htm
www.newsandletters.org
Column: Woman as Reason by Sonia Bergon
Women demand a more profound anti-war movement Just before Bush dropped the first bombs on Afghanistan, over 200 people crowded into a little room to officially create Chicago's anti-war coalition. As I sat through the meeting, I was hurled back to the anti-Gulf War movement of 1990-91 where people voted down including the following in the coalition's statement of principles: "We stand in solidarity with women's liberationists nationally and internationally."
This time, in the movement against the 2001 "war against terrorism," there was no proposal that explicitly sought to include women's freedom in our principles of unity, although there should have been. The proposal that was horrifically voted down this time was to "unequivocally condemn the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11." These are the reasons people gave for opposing it: "It would be playing into Bush's racism," and it would "shift the focus away from the real enemy," that is, U.S. imperialism.
MISPLACED SOLIDARITY
What became clear is that the "anti-imperialists" who expressed this view actually find more affinity with the fundamentalist terrorists for their alleged anti-imperialism than they do with the people who are fighting for freedom. Their position is a total slap in the face to all of humanity but especially to the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), who put their lives on the line every day, who exist to fight for freedom from fundamentalist terrorism.
What's worse is that their refusal to condemn the fundamentalist terrorist attacks writes off RAWA, the voice of freedom, and therefore cuts off the pathways, both theoretically and practically, towards building revolutionary solidarity that could impact the international movements for freedom. RAWA compels us to ask what kind of a world we are fighting for.
They challenge the idea that all we need to do as revolutionaries is to fight against the U.S. government and economic policies. The tendencies that refused to vote to condemn the attacks do so because they are divorced from any philosophic concept of freedom.
The same was experienced during the genocide in Bosnia, and again in Kosova. It was feminists who organized to stop the genocidal rapes, who created international solidarity groups to empower, counsel, and aid these women. That part of the Left that is so blinded by its narrow view of who the real enemy is denied the rapes, called women liars, and denied genocide had happened at all. Many felt that because Milosevic was a former "communist," he was a foe to capitalism. He wasn't the "real" enemy. But I doubt the thousands who were tortured in rape camps, massacred and forced to flee their homes realized that.
While feminists know that the call to "fight the real enemy" has always ended in putting off freedom and has served to denigrate and stifle our struggles, what has not been worked out is the development of a different vision of the future, of what freedom would actually be like. During the Gulf War, for example, we feminists couldn't articulate to ourselves as clearly as we needed to that to "stand in solidarity with women's liberationists nationally and internationally" meant that we were fighting for a totally different world and that we weren't going to buy into the "real enemy" ploy.
Because we couldn't envision that new society without going to Marx's philosophy to comprehend and develop the logical movement of our own thought and desire, we were unprepared to respond to the charges leveled against us.
CHALLENGE TO FEMINISTS
These charges included that we were "cultural imperialists," and that we "threatened to divide and shrink the movement" by angering fundamentalists who oppose women's freedom and who therefore wouldn't come out to demonstrate with us against the war. We were also unable to argue why it was false that feminism has "nothing to do with being anti-war" except to cite how women were specifically affected by war. We never got to the freedom part, to what it means to fight for human liberation and what that freedom would look like.
So here we are today in 2001: "If you want to get Muslims out to an anti-war demonstration, you can't say you oppose the terrorist attacks." (What planet was he on?) But the fetish is the same-numbers, numbers, numbers to fight the real enemy. We'll never get to freedom with this narrow view. For feminists and others to fight this, we need to be armed with a philosophic conception of a very different kind of world.
The fragmentation of ideas and movements represented by the "fight the real enemy" stance is exactly what humanity struggles against under capitalist society. We want to be whole, not body parts separated from our brains and emotions-whether on the street, in the home, on the job or in the movement. Those who refuse to condemn the terrorist attacks can't aid us in our quest for creating a whole new world.
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