>Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
>>Why silence then? Why preoccupation now?
>
>Not sure whether you're asking me or the ideological-state
>apparatus. You know quite well why the ISA was silent then - the
>acid-throwers were the heroic enemies of communism, the gravediggers
>of Bolshevism. They were wretched then, and they're wretched now.
>It's not news to me or anyone else on this list that Bush & Co don't
>really care about the status of women, either in Afg or the US or
>anywhere else, and that their talk of liberating women from their
>living shrouds is a lot of crap. But in some ways you sound like
>their mirror image - they were bad when they were fighting the
>Soviets, but now that they're on the side of the U.S. they're what?
>Not exactly good guys, but not worth condemning either?
>Anti-imperialists under very deep cover?
It seems to me that politics takes much more than setting up moral standards, evaluating guys by them, deciding which guys are good, & condemning bad guys. If that's the only or main thing to do, you might as well issue condemnations on all involved & then go home, feeling good about your moral standing relative to the Taliban, the anti-Taliban mujahideen, & US politicians. However, if you are interested in long-term prospects of self-emancipation of Afghan & other women, then you have to take interest in how the expanding US military presence in Afghanistan, Central Asia, & beyond will affect those long-term prospects, among other things. Unlike some feminists, I do not think that lobbying the US government in the hope of making it practice a more sexually egalitarian imperialism will improve the long-term prospects of the majority of Afghan and other women.
Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri write in _Empire_: "What we are calling moral intervention is practiced today by a variety of bodies, including the news media and religious organizations, but the most important may be some of the so-called non-governmental organizations (NGOs), which, precisely because they are not run directly by governments, are assumed to act on the basis of ethical or moral imperatives....Such humanitarian NGOs [e.g., Amnesty International, Oxfam, Medecins sans Frontieres, and other orgs for relief work and human rights protection] are in effect (even if this runs counter to the intentions of the participants) some of the most powerful pacific weapons of the new world order -- the charitable campaigns and the mendicant orders of the Empire" (pp. 35-6), whose work is comparable to what Christian missionaries did for colonialism & imperialism in the earlier centuries. I'd include Mavis Leno, the Feminist Majority Foundation, & the like among "the mendicant orders" whose work on balance helps to expand the Empire's "right of the police" (p. 17), even though "this runs counter to the intentions of the participants" as H & N note & they often provide useful criticisms of concrete forms that imperial interventions take. -- Yoshie
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