Doug writes of Ashwin Desai's lecture:
'This would have been more interesting and effective if Desai had actually cited some examples and named some names.'
I did clip it, but the tenor of caution is present throughout, I assume because he is describing a milieu in which he is active. I thought that it sounded pretty familiar to me, and had some echoes in particular of the Landless People's movement that achieved some prominence during the UN Conference on Racism in SA.
> Vans, Autos, Kombis and the Drivers of Social Movements
>
> by Ashwin Desai
>
> Harold Wolpe Memorial Lecture
> Centre for Civil Society
> International Convention Centre, Durban, Hall 1B
> Friday 28 July, 5:45-7pm
>
Doug
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Message: 5 Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2006 19:53:02 +0100 From: "James Heartfield" <Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk> Subject: [lbo-talk] Iran's supposed torture and murder of gays To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Message-ID: <001401c6b59b$b7a41520$0201a8c0 at D6F2G31J> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
I would not want to minimise the importance of homophobic legislation in the Middle East, nor throw up some culturally relativistic smoke screen, but when these charges become a part of a western diplomatic-military offensive, the truth is bound to get a bit twisted.
After all, it is not so very long ago that western accounts of the Orient invited us to distrust Arabs and Persians precisely for their supposed effeminacy. How long ago, exactly? Well just before the point that gay sex was legalised in the West, if you want to know (in 1967 in the UK). Caricatures of lascivious Arab homosexuals, limp-wristed, heavy-lidded and eye-lashed were a mainstay of Anglo-Saxon pulp fiction. Perhaps the last echo of that stereotype can be seen in the Turkish prison rape in Alan Parker's Midnight Express.
If the Middle East has turned to anti-gay legislation, that suggests that it _is_ adopting western values, just more traditional ones. 'Get with the program guys, we like gays now!' insist today's western propagandists. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: ../attachments/20060801/00a8b12d/attachment-0001.html
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End of lbo-talk Digest, Vol 32, Issue 7 ***************************************