[lbo-talk] Wimmin at War - (Greenham Common protestor reflects on Hezbollah and the Euro-Left)

[Michael Pugliese]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2092-2309812_1,00.html
>...Wimmin at War
It is 25 years since the Greenham Common protests began. Sarah Baxter
was there, but now asks why feminist ideals have become twisted into
support for groups like Hezbollah
When Ann Pettitt, the mother of two young children, and her friends
set off in August 25 years ago on a 120-mile trek from Cardiff to the
little known American air base at Greenham Common in Berkshire, they
gave themselves the ambitious name of "Women for Life on Earth". Their
numbers were tiny but the stakes, they felt, were dauntingly high.

The cold war world was bristling with Soviet and American nuclear
weapons, posing the threat of mutual assured destruction (Mad). In a
dramatic escalation of the arms race between the superpowers, shiny
new cruise missiles were due to be delivered to Greenham, placing
Britain's green and pleasant land in the bull's eye for targeting by
the Soviet Union.

*
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The modest peace march was largely ignored by the media, so on arrival
at the base the women decided to borrow the eye-catching tactics of
the suffragette movement. They chained themselves to the gates of
Greenham and dared the police to remove them. Sympathisers began to
turn up bearing makeshift tents, clothing and pots and pans. Many came
and went but others stayed. Thus was the women's peace camp born a
quarter of a century ago this month and a new chapter in the history
of feminism opened.

"I was motivated by fear and terror," Pettitt recalled last week. "I
was the mother of a two-year-old and a four-year-old and weapons of
mass destruction were the ultimate denial of the fact that I'd created
life. There was such brinkmanship, I really thought that nuclear
weapons might be used."

Mercifully, they weren't. President Ronald Reagan once blurted out in
front of a live microphone that the bombing of Russia was going to
begin in 15 minutes, but it was nothing more than a tasteless joke. In
hindsight Reagan's hardline negotiating stance helped to bring about
the collapse of the Soviet Union. By the end of the 1980s the Berlin
Wall was down and the velvet revolutions in eastern Europe were under
way.

The peace movement lost a foe in Reagan but has gone on to find new
friends in today's Stop the War movement. Women pushing their children
in buggies bearing the familiar symbol of the Campaign for Nuclear
Disarmament marched last weekend alongside banners proclaiming "We are
all Hezbollah now" and Muslim extremists chanting "Oh Jew, the army of
Muhammad will return."

For Linda Grant, the novelist, who says that "feminism" is the one
"ism" she has not given up on, it was a shocking sight: "What you're
seeing is an alliance of what used to be the far left with various
Muslim groups and that poses real problems. Saturday's march was not a
peace march in the way that the Ban the Bomb marches were. Seeing
young and old white women holding Hezbollah placards showed that it's
a very different anti-war movement to Greenham. Part of it feels the
wrong side is winning."
<SNIP>

-- 
Michael Pugliese