Economic Aspects of "Love"

[American Dream]

Reproductive Rights and the Long Hand of Slave Breeding
By Joann Wypijewski
The Nation
March 21, 2012
http://www.thenation.com/article/166961 ... e-breeding

I hate liberalism’s language of “choice.” I always have. Redolent of the marketplace, it reduces the most intimate aspects of existence, of women’s physical autonomy, to individualistic purchasing preferences. A sex life or a Subaru? A child or a cheeseburger? Life, death or liposuction? In that circumstance, capitalism’s only question is, Who pays and who profits? The state’s only question is, Who regulates and how much? If there is an upside to the right’s latest, seemingly loony and certainly grotesque multi-front assault on women, it is the clarion it sounds to humanists to take the high ground and ditch the anodyne talk of “a woman’s right to choose” for the weightier, fundamental assertion of “a woman’s right to be.”

The mass-culture story of slavery is usually told in terms of economics, labor, color, men. Women outnumbered men in the enslaved population two to one by slavery’s end, but they enter the conventional story mainly under the rubric “family,” or in the cartoon triptych Mammy-Jezebel-Sapphire, or in the figure of Sally Hemmings. Yes, we have come to acknowledge, women were sexually exploited. Yes, many of the founders of this great nation prowled the slave quarters and fathered a nation in the literal as well as figurative sense. Yes, maybe rape was even rampant. That the slave system in the US depended on human beings not just as labor but as reproducible raw material is not part of the story America typically tells itself. That women had a particular currency in this system, prized for their sex or their wombs and often both, and that this uniquely female experience of slavery resonates through history to the present is not generally acknowledged. Even the left, in uncritically reiterating Malcolm X’s distinction between “the house Negro” and “the field Negro,” erases the female experience, the harrowing reality of the “favorite” that Harriet Jacobs describes in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.

We don’t commonly recognize that American slaveholders supported closing the trans-Atlantic slave trade; that they did so to protect the domestic market, boosting their own nascent breeding operation. Women were the primary focus: their bodies, their “stock,” their reproductive capacity, their issue. Planters advertised for them in the same way as they did for breeding cows or mares, in farm magazines and catalogs. They shared tips with one another on how to get maximum value out of their breeders. They sold or lent enslaved men as studs and were known to lock teenage boys and girls together to mate in a kind of bullpen. They propagated new slaves themselves, and allowed their sons to, and had their physicians exploit female anatomy while working to suppress African midwives’ practice in areas of fertility, contraception and abortion.Reproduction and its control became the planters’ prerogative and profit source. Women could try to escape, ingest toxins or jump out a window—abortion by suicide, except it was hardly a sure thing.

This business was not hidden at the time, as Pamela details expansively. And, indeed, there it was, this open secret, embedded in a line from Uncle Tom’s Cabin that my eyes fell upon while we were preparing to arrange books on her new shelves: “'If we could get a breed of gals that didn't care, now, for their young uns…would be ’bout the greatest mod’rn improvement I knows on,” says one slave hunter to another after Eliza makes her dramatic escape, carrying her child over the ice flows.

The foregoing is the merest scaffolding of one of the building blocks of Bridgewater’s argument, which continues thus. “If we integrate the lost chapter of slave breeding into those two traditional but separate stories, if we reconcile female slave resistance to coerced breeding as, in part, a struggle for emancipation and, in part, a struggle for reproductive freedom, the two tales become one: a comprehensive narrative that fuses the pursuit of reproductive freedom into the pursuit of civil freedom.”

[American Dream]

http://leninology.blogspot.com/2012/03/ ... ching.html

SATURDAY, MARCH 24, 2012
Trayvon Martin and the history of lynching posted by lenin




What is lynching? In its prevalent forms in American history, it appears as the administration of racial formations through terror. The mutilation, shaming and degrading of black bodies, and also the corpses being retrieved and displayed as trophies, was intended to maintain the symbolic subjection of black people to, in bell hooks' formulation, "white supremacist capitalist patriarchy". I stress the symbolic as a material element in racial oppression, because the problem of etiquette, of racial manners, was invariably central to such violence. Night-riders and lynch mobs were the enforcers of this etiquette. We know it's a peculiar problem in Jim Crow, the thousand and one rules and codes that crowded the field of sociality, exchange, transport, production and so on.

As Howard Winant explains, black people were expected to "remove their hats in the presence of whites, to step off the sidewalk (where one existed) into the muddy street at the passage of a white, and to wait in such shops as would serve blacks until all whites had been served, no matter who had arrived first". One finds this everywhere. Not just in the segregated public accomodations, but in the sites of production, the factories, the textile mills, where black labour was menial and expected to be deferential. If there is a white woman walking down a corridor, you step out of it until she passes. You don't speak to a white person unless they address you. If you need the toilet, you walk out of the building and several hundred yards to the facility marked "colored". So much, we all know. And what does it tell us about the social order? The South's theologians, ideologists and apologists hailed the region as a sort of classical, Athenian structure, a gentle, stable and aristocratic community. Yet the first infringement of one of the region's rituals could result in an explosion of violence, as if the antagonisms pervading the whole formation were suddenly displaced onto one symbolic crux.

But this doesn't capture the whole problem. For the organization of political violence in American history is unusual in some respects, in that the whole history of countersubversive (anti-radical, anti-union, anti-immigrant, anti-black) violence is one in which the state's monopoly on legitimate violence is deputised to sections of the citizenry. The invocation of the 'right to bear arms' has almost always been made in this sort of context, as during the trials of Klansmen in the Reconstruction period. And it is in this sort of area of political violence, where citizens were de facto deputised by states according to illicit hierarchies and instructions, whether it was Klan, minute men, FBI mobs, or Pinkertons, that parapolitics has a peculiar role in American history and politics. Occasionally, the logic has been subverted, as when Black Panthers invoked this right to defend themselves against police criminality - one of the few such invocations of the 'right to bear arms' where the state's monopoly of the legitimate use of force has genuinely been challenged. But this violence was precisely not legitimized, whereas lynchings, employer violence, the 'disappearing' of militants, and so on, often has been legitimized. In the shift from Jim Crow to the penal administration of race, which required that the black criminality be identified through increasingly sophisticated classifications, codes and statutes, the 'right to bear arms' has most often been raised in the context of white self-defence. Citizens have often been allowed to wield punitive or capital violence when certain social norms or classifications were tested and defied; their violence has been legitimized because at the very least they have not been sanctioned.

But there is one other facet of this, which is the spatial re-ordering of American cities and towns. The racial aspect of this is familiar enough that I don't need to rehearse it here: the construction of 'the ghetto', 'white flight', the displacement of segregation from county to neighbourhood level. But of course this spatial re-organization is also way of structuring class power, as well as of preserving certain (patriarchal, conservative) social forms. The emergence of 'private towns' signals another twist in the delegation of state power sanctioned by the doctrine of property rights. In a previous post, I mentioned 'Leisure World' of Arizona, where constitutional protections are seemingly suspended, where the board of directors censors published material at will, precisely as one might in one's own household, or one's own company. In these zones, Mexicans and other people of colour may work, but in total silence. If they say anything to the whites who live there, they're out. The so-called 'gated community' is a related phenomenon, not quite as extreme in the internal controls available to its owners, but obviously protected with civilian violence - security guards, neighbourhood watch, armed citizen vigilantes, all do their share. It is in the context of territorial property rights, concerning households especially, but certainly gated communities and private towns, that stand-your-ground laws allowing for killing in 'self-defence' have been most available to legitimize this kind of violence.

Trayvon Martin was murdered while walking through a gated community in Miami known as Twin Lakes. His killer, George Zimmerman, has not been arrested. In fact, judging from witness statements, the police have taken quite extraordinary steps to avoid arresting him. Zimmerman had a long-standing relationship with local police, inasmuch as he was constantly in contact with them to report disturbances, suspicious sightings, windows left open and so on. It seems likely that they knew who he was, and what a vigilant citizen he was. Indeed, it seems probable that they shared many of his concerns, as their officers were known to have worries about black vagrancy and criminality. Neighbourhood Watch knew Zimmerman well, knew that he was always alert to the possibility of young black men who may be outsiders coming into the gated community. The security guards who defend local properties have displayed similar concerns, in one case shooting a black man while he was in his vehicle. They cited self-defence, claiming that he was driving toward them and about to run them over, although autopsy reports show that he was shot in the back. The judge threw out the case for lack of evidence. Of course, we have abundant examples, of which the execution of Troy Davis is just one, of just how racialised the question of evidence is.

But the point to make here is that while Zimmerman acted alone, he did not act in isolation, at odds with the expectations of police, or with the social norms current in the gated community. He saw a young black man walking around the gated community. To him, as to any officer, or security guard, or citizen vigilante, this was 'suspicious'. His presence was not in keeping with racial etiquette. His behaviour, walking slowly and looking at the houses of the well-off in the rain, suggested a deranged, drugged mind - because it is not done. Not in this neighbourhood, not in this community, and not in this town. Zimmerman acted expeditiously to suppress this symbolic infringement. Perhaps he spoke to Trayvon Martin, perhaps he challenged him about his behaviour, queried his motive for being there, instructed him to move along with more haste. But, whether because cooperation was not forthcoming, or because it was too late for the infringement to be remedied, he resolved the problem finally by putting an end to Martin's life, blasting his chest open.

Geraldo Rivera thinks the murder happened because Trayvon Martin was wearing a hoodie, and thus sending out a signal that he was a gangster. However morally cretinous this suggestion is, give Rivera credit for having some intuition about the politics of racial symbolism. He means that the murder victim is partly to blame for his death, because this symbolic action, wearing a hoodie, identifies one as someone who should be killed. He cannot help partially sharing the point of view of the killer, understanding the anxiety and horror that such sassing, such brazen boldness, such reckless wearing, walking and looking, provokes. He partially shares the point of view of the killer and that's why gets it: hey, if you don't want to get shot, don't go out looking like a punk. If you don't want to get shot, don't loiter, stand up straight, dress properly, show some manners. For there are points in the administration of America's increasingly jittery racial class system, where it seems that everything rides on this symbolic order and its maintenance.

[American Dream]

.

For effective social change to take place there must be a supportive system with values, institutions and propaganda that can stand up to and take the place of the prevailing culture. In other words, a counter culture.”
Emma Goldman


“There was a time when you were not a slave, remember that you walked alone, full of laughter, you bathed bare-bellied. You may have lost all recollection of it, remember… You say there are not words to describe it, you say it does not exist. but remember, make an effort to remember, or, failing that, invent.”
Monique Wittig


“..Till a married woman can be in possession of her own property there can be no love or justice.”
Florence Nightingale


“If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own. For if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.”
James Baldwin


“Class consciousness is knowing which side of the fence you are on. Class analysis is knowing who is there with you.”
Anonymous


“What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?
The world would split open.”
Muriel Rukeyser


“….love and domination do not go together…if one is present, the other will be absent.”
Bell Hooks


“In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.”
Anne Frank




http://emmarosenthal.wordpress.com/favorite-quotes/

[American Dream]

http://www.solidarity-us.org/node/1962

Arab Sexualities

— Peter Drucker

Desiring Arabs
by Joseph A. Massad
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007,
444 pages, $35 hardcover.


THE ISSUE OF same-sex sexualities in the Arab world is a political and intellectual minefield, and more so since 9/11 than before. In a bizarre twist, neoconservatives and other rightists who were hostile for decades to the lesbian/gay movement(1) have repackaged themselves as defenders of oppressed Arab women and gays. Responses from the left have been divided.

When international human rights or LGBT (lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender) groups have issued alerts lately about persecution of Middle Eastern LGBT people (most often in Iran), some anti-imperialist gays have denounced the critics for contributing to the Republicans' (and some prominent Democrats') war drive. Others, closer to the politics of Against the Current, have insisted on the importance both of opposition to U.S. intervention and of solidarity with LGBTs.

The arguments have rarely shown much knowledge of the sexual cultures of the Arab world, however, or included much analysis of how imperialism and sexuality interact. Overcoming this lack of understanding is a crucial and urgent task.

The right's reliance on arguments about women's and sexual freedom makes it increasingly difficult to be an anti-imperialist or antiracist in the United States without integrating gender and sexual analysis. Similarly, international feminist and LGBT movements are hamstrung by their relative weakness in and ignorance of the Arab world. They badly need to take up the task of linking imperialism, gender and sexuality.

This task is not made any easier by the paucity of serious scholarship on sexualities in the Arab world. Lesbian/gay studies has focused mostly on modern Europe and North America. Fortunately more work has been done in recent years on dependent-world LGBTs. But Africa and the Middle East are the parts of the world where LGBT communities are least visible and LGBT movements most harshly repressed.

This helps explain why scholarship on Arab same-sex sexualities has been relatively thin on the ground. People outside the Arab world, who often don't know it well or even speak Arabic, have published most of what exists in English. While academics in North America and Europe have many times more resources, the knowledge and experience of researchers in and from the Arab world are indispensable.

Joseph Massad, an associate professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia University, has now walked out boldly into this minefield with his book Desiring Arabs. Massad is no stranger to controversy. His earlier work concentrated on Jordan and Palestine, not exactly fields where calm, collegial discussion is the rule in U.S. academe - least of all at Columbia, a hotbed of right-wing Zionist hate campaigns of which Massad has been a prime target. Naturally and rightly, the left and defenders of Palestinian rights have come to his defense.

Desiring Arabs has brought Massad a new crowd of detractors. His criticisms of North American and European efforts to identify, defend and free gay people in Arab countries(2) have been met with a wave of accusations. An online review of Desiring Arabs by a staff member of The New Republic, after describing police torture of a Palestinian gay man in graphic detail, charged Massad with an "insidious attempt to convince the world that men like [this one] are somehow figments of the Western world's imagination."(3)

Another review by Brian Whitaker, former Middle East editor of the London Guardian, accused Massad of reflecting "essentially the same ideas" as the Jordanian Islamic Action Front when it denounced women's rights as an "American and Zionist" attack on the nation's "identity and values."(4) These are excerpts from the relatively nuanced attacks; other diatribes on the net have been more scurrilous.

No Homophobe

Massad is clearly no homophobe and has no sympathy with torturers or fundamentalists. On the contrary, Desiring Arabs is an important resource for serious students of sexualities in the Arab world. It confirms that same-sex sexual desire and behavior were widespread in Arabic literature during the centuries when Arab civilization was at its height.

Above all, the book does a service to scholarship comparable to what Kate Millett did in Sexual Politics or Dennis Altman in Homosexual Oppression and Liberation: it analyses the sexual ideologies of a wide range of 19th- and 20th-century literary works, many of them inaccessible to non-Arabic speakers. In the process Massad shows respect for and familiarity with queer theory, the dominant current today in LGBT studies.

For all its merits, however, Desiring Arabs has major flaws. Like many queer theorists, Massad seems more interested in literature than in reality. He leaves crucial questions about Arabs' sexual behavior and identities not only unanswered - answers admittedly hard to come by in countries where mass surveys or in-depth interviews about sexuality are rarely feasible - but largely unaddressed.

While his criticisms of activists' and academics' Eurocentrism are often justified, he seems to suggest that the international lesbian/gay rights movement is largely to blame for the persecution of people engaged in same-sex sexualities in the Middle East today. Yet his own research shows that this persecution predated international LGBT activism by many decades.

Massad rightly rejects many lesbians and gays' essentialism ("we were born this way" and "we are everywhere"). However, he does not engage seriously enough with the more substantial scholarly work that has been done on global same-sex sexualities. As a result, he doesn't recognize that LGBT studies have not always shared the essentialist impulses of many ordinary LGBT people. On the contrary, many theorists have emphasized that same-sex sexualities have been socially constructed in the course of history, and that these sexualities were and are extraordinarily diverse in different parts of the world.

Edward Said warned in his classic book Orientalism against notions that "there is such a thing as a real or true Orient (Islam, Arab or whatever)" or "that there are geographical spaces with indigenous, radically 'different' inhabitants."(5) Massad describes Said not only as "a mentor, a friend, and a colleague" but also as "a surrogate father" (xiii) and seems to heed Said's warning when he writes, "My point here is not to argue in favor of non-Western nativism and of some blissful existence prior to the epistemic, ethical, and political violence unleashed on the non-West." (42)

Nonetheless, his book tends to idealize the indigenous sexual culture of the Arab world. He repeatedly dismisses signs of lesbian or gay life in the Arab world as outside impositions, fabrications or shameful attempts by Arabs to mimic Europeans or Americans. He fails to come to terms with the reality that the Arab world too is increasingly part of a global capitalist order and that its contemporary sexualities are likely to be hybrid and diverse.

Beyond Gay and Straight

On one central issue Massad is right: his insistence that traditional Arab sexualities were not based on a "hetero-homo binary." (40) This will be a difficult point for many U.S. readers to grasp, given how deeply the division between "gay people" and "straight people" has shaped our common-sense understanding of sexuality. Most scholars agree, however, that this binary conception is a fairly recent development, and that there have been innumerable other ways of conceiving sexuality.

Massad's reading of the Koran, later Islamic religious texts and medieval Arabic love poetry confirms what other historians have found: that Arabs in the first centuries of Islam simply did not classify human beings in this way. It is less clear how much continuity there is between this traditional Arab sexual culture and the sexual culture of the contemporary Arab world.

Despite Massad's skepticism, there are self-identified lesbians and gay men in the Arab world today. But distinctive lesbian/gay identities as they exist in North America and Europe do seem less visible in Arab countries than in most other regions. Many Arab men who have sex with other men do not identify at all as gay, transgender or even bisexual. Some of them fuck transgender or other males, concealing this sex from public knowledge; others simply have discrete sex with one another.(6)

As Massad points out, this means that the tactics that LGBT movements have used elsewhere cannot simply be imported unchanged into the Arab world. For example, in a culture where people can engage in same-sex sexual behavior without necessarily identifying as gay, it is doubtful what it means to call on them to "come out." People whose lives include both same-sex and different-sex relationships have to be free to decide when, where and how they speak up.

Massad has strong arguments for rejecting the insistence that desire is "embedded in the body [and] can only be freed in an individualist project of liberation through public confessionals" (365) - though even in the Arab world, transgender people and others do sometimes feel that their desire is embedded in their bodies.

The scholars in LGBT studies who laid the foundations for a social constructionist approach should be sensitive to the pitfalls of binary thinking. Yet as Massad shows, when it comes to the Arab world some of the most distinguished theorists can succumb to Eurocentrism. This Eurocentrism contradicts the main thrust of the history of sexuality since the 1970s. Even worse, it ignores the key lesson of 20th-century liberation struggles: that each oppressed people needs to find its own way to free itself through understanding and transforming its own unique social formation.

Massad is better at showing how Arab sexual cultures do not work and cannot be freed, however, than in analyzing how they do work and can be freed. There is still an enormous amount of work to be done before this question can be answered. Nonetheless, Massad could have benefited a bit more from analyses by other scholars.

Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe's anthology Islamic Homosexualities, for example, contains more useful insights than Massad allows in his passing, cutting reference to it. (170-71) A reader who knew the book only from Massad's comments would never guess that Roscoe and Murray denounce Eurocentrism and the tendency to tell the "history of homosexuality as a progressive, even teleological, evolution from pre-modern repression, silence, and invisibility to modern visibility and sexual freedom." They even contrast the relative uniformity of modern "Western" homosexuality to the "variety, distribution, and longevity of same-sex patterns in Islamic societies."(7)

Massad barely discusses the social relations that made up classical Arab sexual culture. For example, his account of classical Arabic poetry makes clear, as others have, that boy love was an important theme for a major Abbasid poet like Abu Nuwas. But he casts little light on the dynamics of what Murray and Roscoe call "age-differentiated homosexuality," either in classical times or in the Arab world today.

He also devotes virtually no attention to another component of Arab sexual culture: transgender. Studies have shown transgender's importance as a form of same-sex sexual expression in many parts of the underdeveloped world, including Muslim countries like Pakistan and Indonesia. There is evidence from several continents that working-class and poor people in particular are more likely than middle-class people to engage in transgender relationships as opposed to lesbian/gay relationships.(8)

Transgender people have shown an impressive capacity for radical organizing and action, to the point of virtually taking over the World Social Forum in Mumbai in 2004. Forms of transgender have been identified in at least some Arab countries, as among the hassas of Morocco and khanith of Oman.

Yet Massad passes over the subject in virtual silence. He denounces the International Lesbian and Gay Association for saying that transvestite dancers are popular in Egypt; he comments that this was "a nineteenth-century phenomenon" and complains that time "is never factored in when the topic is Arabs and Muslims." (167) But elsewhere he mentions the popularity of female impersonators as singers in Cairo in the 1920s and '30s, and of a female impersonator on Syrian TV as late as the 1980s. (364)

Massad's snipe is one example of how he tends to substitute discussions of ideology (Is time a factor in discussing Arabs?) for discussions of reality (Is transgender still a significant phenomenon in the Arab world?).

Empire and Culture

Imperialist domination of the Arab world is increasingly politicizing sexuality. Is Massad open to sexual politics within Arab countries, or only to a defense of Arab sexual culture against imperialism? Can Arab anti-imperialists opt for solidarity with women, transgender people and youth in their own region, with all this implies for transforming the existing sexual culture? The Islamist political movements that currently have hegemony over the oppositions to U.S.-backed regimes clearly prefer the defense of tradition - as they selectively define it. But the choice remains open.

There is neither a historical nor a logical connection between anti-imperialism and cultural nativism. The British Empire was careful not to interfere with Islamic domination of civil society in countries it ruled like Egypt and Pakistan. By contrast, Muslim Turkey's fierce resistance to colonization after the First World War and Muslim Indonesia's struggle for independence after the Second World War involved far-reaching secularization. It is no accident that Turkey and Indonesia have stronger LGBT communities and movements today than almost any Arab country.(9)

Still today in the Arab world, repressive regimes linked to imperialism use sexual repression as a cover. Many of the Arab regimes whose repression of same-sex sexuality is most notorious, like the Saudi kingdom and Egypt, are among the closest U.S. allies in the region and among the Arab countries best integrated into the neoliberal world economic order. And U.S. right-wing lip service to lesbian/gay rights is worse than useless to LGBT Arab people.

The Shiite parties, militias and gangs that dominate Iraq today are guilty of vicious repression of people engaged in same-sex sexualities, which the U.S. occupiers have hardly lifted a finger to stop. In one incident in 2007, an Iraqi LGBT activist heard Americans talking in the next room while Iraqi police were torturing him.(10)

Massad consistently assumes that the presence of lesbian/gay identities in the Arab world is a result of European and North American cultural influence. His wide-ranging analysis of 19th- and 20th-century literature does show, as he says, that "cultural production as a whole has been marshaled, consciously and unconsciously, toward … shaming non-Europe into assimilation." (416) But he hardly tries to make a case for cultural causes of gay identity as opposed to other factors; he only occasionally puts forward a class or economic analysis.(11)

In fact, the spread of lesbian/gay identities in the dependent world probably owes less to outside cultural influences than to social causes like mass migration to cities, more waged labor by women, higher wages, commodification of everyday life, assumption of some traditional family functions by the state, and the spread of modern medicine with its penchant for classification.(12) The relative scarcity of lesbian/gay identities in Arab countries would then be due less to weaker European and North American influence (which seems doubtful) than to factors like the region's relatively low rate of female-paid employment.

Another factor is probably what Gilbert Achcar calls "the Arab despotic exception": the fact that the United States has continued to back dictatorships in the Middle East, due to its vital economic and geopolitical interests there, rather than risk the kind of transitions to nominal democracy that it has allowed in much of Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and other parts of Asia.(13) The result has been less freedom for political and social organizing, and specifically for LGBT organizing, in the Arab world.

Repression

Massad makes clear at many points in Desiring Arabs that he deplores the repression of same-sex sexuality by Arab governments. What has generated most of the controversy around the book is the chapter (by far the shortest one) where he blames this repression largely on the lesbian/gay groups, human rights organizations and "discourse" that he calls the "Gay International."(14)

Speaking of the crackdown on same-sex sexual activity in Egypt following the 2001 Queen Boat raid, for example, Massad says, "The Gay International and its activities are largely responsible for the intensity of this repressive campaign." (184)

"By inciting discourse about homosexuals where none existed before, the Gay International is in fact heterosexualizing a world that is being forced to be fixed by a Western binary," he says. (188) The "sexual rights agenda … has led to much repression and oppression in the contemporary Arab world." (375) He even says that Islamic fundamentalism has an "unwitting alliance" with the "crusading Gay International in identifying people who practice certain forms of sex." (265)

The irony of this line of argument is that Massad provides so much evidence that hostility to same-sex sexualities in the Arab world long predated the arrival of LGBT movements. He describes a host of modern Arab attempts to deny, downplay or condemn traditional Arab openness to same-sex sexual desire.

He notes that erotic poetry focusing on youths or men "disappeared completely as a poetic genre" around the late 19th century. (35) He devotes almost 20 pages to 20th-century Arab critics' denunciation of the poet Abu Nuwas' praise of youthful male beauty. (76-94)

He describes a paradigm shift in the work of Egyptian Nobel Prize-winning author Naguib Mahfouz, from the 1947 novel Midaq Alley, which portrays same-sex sexuality as commonplace but public awareness of it as shameful, to the 1957 novel Sugar Street, which portrays male same-sex desire as an "illness." (272-90) And he shows how Arab literature since the defeat in the 1967 war with Israel has been pervaded by images of humiliating, emasculating penetration of Arab men.

Taken as a whole, this suggests a drastic, century-long transformation of Arab sexual culture, in large measure completed before the modern lesbian/gay movement was born with the 1969 Stonewall rebellion.

European influence undoubtedly played some role in this transformation, as shown by colonial laws against "sodomy" still on the books in many former European colonies. Doubtless other factors, neglected by Massad, played a role as well, as in the case of modernizing, nationalist and Stalinist regimes elsewhere in the dependent world.(15) But protests by international LGBT and human rights groups have undoubtedly been more a reaction than a contributing factor.

The power of these organizations is derisible compared to that of the former colonial empires, the U.S. military, major multinationals or the international financial institutions. Imperialist governments have shown virtually no interest in supporting them with more than an occasional press release. Arab governments may vilify these organizations in their propaganda, but Massad provides little evidence that they have had any significant effect on law or policy, even negatively.

Furthermore, while international LGBT organizations are largely European-led and often Eurocentrist in their thinking, they are far from having a unified agenda for the Arab world, as the 2001 Egyptian Queen Boat raid showed.

For example, Act Up Paris responded to the raid with a protest at the Egyptian embassy, whose slogans included a demand to "free our lovers." This slogan would hardly have been welcomed by the Egyptian defendants, who were not defending themselves as open gay men, let alone as men with European lovers.

If this were typical of the European movement, Massad's charges would be vindicated. But in fact, at the next Euromediterranean Summer University on Homosexualities, an annual LGBT gathering in Marseille, a lone representative of Act Up Paris faced a barrage of criticism from virtually every other participant in the discussion for his group's insensitivity and counterproductive tactics.

Massad's argument becomes even less plausible when he asserts that the Egyptian police "do not seek to, and cannot if they were so inclined, arrest men practicing same-sex contact but rather are pursuing those among them who identify as 'gay.'" (183) This is the opposite of the truth: the police rarely know whether the people they harass, arrest or torture identify as gay. There is hardly a law or policy on earth that uses this as a criterion for police repression.

The sequence of cause and effect is the reverse, as historians have shown: the common experience of repression can contribute to the development of transgender, gay and lesbian identities. In any case, the dominant sexual ideology that Arab states have developed over the past century has increasingly led to repressive practices against same-sex sexual behavior, and did so before lesbian or gay identities had begun to emerge. Clearly the identities are not the cause of the repression.

Love and Solidarity

In at least a few Arab countries, some people engaging in same-sex sexuality have begun responding to repression by assuming LGBT identities and even organizing LGBT groups. The Lebanese group Helem is one example. Interestingly, it suspended its LGBT advocacy in 2006 to turn its headquarters over to relief efforts for victims of the Israeli invasion, working with a range of other Lebanese organizations.(16)

Among Palestinians in the West Bank and pre-1967 Israel, the LGBTQ [the Q here stands for "Questioning" - ed.] group Al-Qaws has been working since 2001 "not simply to mimic an existing model of queer identity/community, but to provide a social space for LGBTQ Palestinians to independently engage in a dialogue about our own visions and ideals for a community."(17)

As Arabs engaged in same-sex sexualities begin adopting LGBT identities, they may form more lasting relationships and speak more of their love for one another. This would cast doubt on Massad's assertion that in the Arab world the goal of sexual desire is "consummation and not romantic love." (363)(18)

Contrary to conservative ideologies now gaining ground, sexuality does not require any justification in romantic love or in stable partnerships sanctified by marriage. Pleasure is its own sufficient justification. But neither should same-sex desire necessarily be limited to episodic gratification "on the side." Love too has its rights.

No one can know for sure if, when, how or in what forms Arab LGBT communities and movements will develop.(19) In particular, no one knows for sure what proportion of Arabs who have sex with people of the same sex identity as lesbian, gay, transgender or bisexual. But this is no argument against solidarity with them. Nor is it an argument for privileging those who have LGBT identities, as international movements tend to do - or those who have no such identities, as Massad does.

In the age of neoliberal globalization, power relations between colonizers - witting or unwitting - and colonized cut across LGBT movements, anti-imperialist movements and for that matter the Marxist left. The fact remains that all the victims of oppression today badly need allies in the imperialist countries, who have access to far greater resources.

Cultural sensitivity and respect for self-determination are essential. But neither should stand in the way of solidarity with the victims of repression by regimes whose vicious sexual puritanism often goes hand in hand with their subservience to an imperial agenda.


ATC 137, November-December 2008

[American Dream]

http://emmarosenthal.wordpress.com/cate ... y-of-love/

Kissing Frogs: The Tenacity of Love

Posted on March 21, 2005 by emmarosenthal

This is the first of the Kissing Frogs letters that reflect the downs and downs and downs of dating and searching. There’s a saying, I saw it on a greeting card once, I don’t know who said it: “If you don’t go in, you’ll never know…..”

The writer’s life is a public one, our lives splashed on the page, naked. Someone must tell the truth and be the mirror. I believe there is also a responsibility to kindness.

The names of all “the frogs” have been changed to protect their privacy. It is one thing for me to decide to tell my own story. The telling of the stories of other people requires discretion or at least, permission.

Emma

Published in; Coloring Book: An Eclectic Anthology of Fiction & Poetry by Multicultural Writers. Edited by boice-Terrel Allen. Rattlecat Press

http://www.rattlecat.com/homepage.html

___________________________________________

The Tenacity of Love

-An essay disguised as a love letter

By Emma Rosenthal

Al riesco de parecer ridículo el revolucionario está animado por gran sentimientos de amor.
-Che Guevara*


Dear William,

This is a love letter, though not the type of love letter a man would be afraid to receive after what between us was in most likelihood a one night stand. While nothing I do is shallow, some relationships aren’t meant to last longer than one night. I am not a clinging vine, although I used to be, afraid, more afraid to be alone than poorly matched. Today I know my own feet and my own soul and I no longer have to sew myself into the hem of my garment as I walk on broken glass. This is a revolutionary love letter, not a romantic one, not one meant to bind or lure, one meant to free, to liberate, to heal.

A friend of mine called me last night, late, past the calling hours, while INS was rounding up, arresting, detaining, cuffing, fingerprinting, holding without explanation people from his country. Another round of raids, and roundups and deportations, that started before my grandmother stepped on Ellis Island, and continue to this day. All our families know this terror, if not in this generation, in ones that came before us.

He and I have known each other for many years and we love each other, not romantically, not sexually, it is a different intimacy, the intimacy that comes when there is held between two friends the faith in the endurance and the integrity of the other, an understanding, an esteem for the history of the other and the work each is called to do.

I had called him that day, twice, his cell phone had been off, unusual, that I couldn’t reach him and I had left him two messages. It had been a simple question, it was a five-minute call at best. I needed to know if the sound system we had used in the park a few weeks ago could feed two mikes.

“Why are you calling me?” He was enraged.

These are hard times and I am seeing so many of us, those of us with vision, who feel what is happening around us, I see us, we are going mad. I went mad a few weeks ago and he had carried me through it, held the burden of my perception of the moment, the distortion of the situation, the delusion, the isolation my mind had latched itself to. Lately I have been praying (even revolutionaries pray) that when gripped by the fear and insanity, when grasped in the separation, when bitterness is hurled at my feet or thrown in my face, to be able to hold my people through, to carry their burden, staying, not running away from the anger.

My people; I am Jewish, yes, and they are my people and very, very mad. Genocide will make you so, but when I say my people I do not stop at blood and kinship. This friend, he is my people. All those who fight for justice, they are my people. In this sense you too, are my people.

His anger scared me. “Why are you calling me?” he demanded. He had never asked me this before.

“Because I am your friend.” I answered as if asking a question.

“What do you want? Why did you call?” He yelled at me. I wanted to yell back or run away. I stayed. It took more strength to stay than to strike back or leave.

“It’s not important now. What’s going on?” I asked.

“ You of all people should know what I am going through. I shouldn’t have to tell you.” As if in the not knowing I had betrayed him.

Was it a personal matter he had mentioned to me last week in passing? A situation that I had thought had greater significance in his life than the attention and intensity he was bringing to the telling.

“No it is not that.” He barked. “You do not understand, perhaps it is because we live in different worlds.”

Later in the conversation he would tell me that that was not what he said at all. He reminded me that all our conversations were probably taped and that perhaps we would have the opportunity to play it back one day. At that point I understood that we had passed through the trial of this conversation, survived the test and the battlefield, this insidious war that turns us on each other.

From the moment I met him we had been held in a deep kinship. Through all the years of friendship, this was the first time I had seen it, felt it, was imbedded in it; the wall, impenetrable. We live in different worlds. We are separate. The war was so imbedded in him that he was mad at me for loving him.

How could I know what was upsetting him? Not because of different worlds, but because he had never brought his pain to me before and because there was so much that could be the cause of his distress. I began to guess and was progressively wrong each time, right, then wrong. His anger and his fear knew no harbor.

Finally, I reminded him; “Don’t embrace the separation, I am your friend whatever you are carrying, tell me, I can carry it with you. Describe this world to me. I will enter it with you. It is what I do, why I am here on this earth.”

In the years I have known him, he has shared with me the loss of the revolution, the execution of his sister, his own imprisonment, the harbinger of defeat in the silence of the radio. All with calm self-possession. I left room but never forced the matter. I know trauma, too well. I know sometimes we can make statements so horrible with such dispassion because we have not touched the pain and it isn’t time. Other times, with such dispassion because we already know, we have fallen as far as the pain will take us and we have moved on. My trauma is of no consequence. I choose to love anyway, choose to fight, choose to seek out connection despite my wounds. I have let them heal. Perhaps his wounds had healed, or perhaps they had not and when the pain surged, it always surges, I would listen then.

This was the first time he had brought his pain to me and it was coming in a torrent of anger that needed to be held, not fought.

He and I are the most dangerous of revolutionaries, because we don’t throw bombs, because we love, across boundaries, across separation. “When can we talk?” he asked me, “I cannot have this conversation over the phone.”

“I can jump in a car right now if you need me to.” I said. It was the middle of the night with more than fifty miles between us.

“No, it’s not like that. It can wait.” He told me.

Friday I will know what world it is he says I do not live in. I have entered worlds like this before, stepped into lives and troubles I could have lived a lifetime and never known, suddenly connected to experiences and suffering more profound than marriage, more inextricable than divorce. This is what happens when we choose to love, the tenacity of love, when freedom is measured in humanity and the air we breathe instead of presidential platitudes. The worlds are joined anyway. Separation is illusion. Did so many Palestinians ever foresee their lives so intricately connected to the death camps of Europe? Suppose our grandparents, the world, collectively had refused the genocide of the Armenians, had entered that world, married that suffering, connected to that experience, stood up to generals and executioners. Such a stand perhaps would have changed the entire trajectory of history. The world we live in today would be very different from the experience of pain we all find ourselves in now.

William, last Friday night your anger scared me too. I am learning to tell myself words alone cannot hurt me and to endure, share the burdens we all carry living on this earth, especially those of us who know that freedom isn’t the right to go to the shopping mall. Justice doesn’t fly a flag from an SUV.

There I was, in your home, presenting possibilities, a crush now a reality. I don’t like pedestals, I tend to fall off and find no one there to catch me and there I was, and there you were pushing me off the pedestal you had propped me up on. I think you chose to insult me because you were afraid. I think I knew this at the time and so chose not to take your racist admonitions personally. “Why do we always need a Jewish savior?” you screamed at me, after repeatedly insulting the nose of the labor leader in the movie, and pointing to every rich, oppressive person and calling them a Jew. These were mean words, they were meant to hurt and they did. I shut you up by putting my tongue in your mouth. You were sweet again, on my tongue, your essence next to my skin, the scratchiness of your beard, the power of grip and grasp, the mingling of our dualities.

So why the need for a Jewish savior? Forget Jewish, forget that an entire civilization has been built on the image of a dead Jew on a stick, worn on gold chains around the necks of believers. Forget that all of Christendom has killed my people in the name of a Jewish savior. I do not know why you need a Jewish savior. I do not know why a Jewish savior captures the minds so vividly of those who would harm us so profoundly. You worship Jesus, not I. But that is not what you meant. It was just a clever way I could divert the conversation, could redirect your attack, deflect the blow, illuminate the bigotry that you were sending my way when all I was offering you was my warmth and the possibilities that can come when a man and a woman are drawn to each other, possibilities of connection, collaboration, transformation, the way that passion and vision intertwine, the nakedness of risk, the promise of endurance.

Jewish or not, we all need saviors. Very few books on Jewish history on your shelves, two or three, far fewer than the books of your people, on my shelves. I know your history much more intimately than you know mine. I am proud of Jewish labor leaders. I am proud of where my people have stood on the battlefield of human rights. I am proud of the risks we take and the love we make, daily with the world, passionately seeking deeper love and deeper justice.

Yes we make mistakes, bumble over patronizing conversation, err in cultural assumptions and misunderstandings, but we are there, risking the possibilities, allowing for the connections, breaking down the separations. Cross-cultural dialogue can be very difficult. And yet you condemned us for even being there, in the streets, in the factories, in the fields. “Why was Fred Ross Jewish? Why was Saul Alinsky Jewish?” You accused me as if we had injured you by desire alone. And yet you had invited me to dinner, had cooked for me, lit candles, chosen music. And in that evening, you could not even sit with me without insulting me, your guest, so difficult is this cross-cultural divide, so hard to cross.

And why didn’t I leave? Most women would have left with righteous dramatics, stormed out, broken something. I thought of leaving as I sat with you on your sofa, stunned by your anger and accusations but I felt in my soul that it wasn’t time to leave. There was the anticipation built up over the preceding weeks of telephone and email flirtations and innuendos, the mysteries built up in workplace exchanges that called within me for exploration, resolution. It was the man I first saw, the one who is so tender with children, the one who knows how to love the world, the adored teacher, the man who was drawn to me, not the one who offended me in his kitchen, but the man who invited me there. That was the man I wanted to kiss.

Beyond that, I have spent my life held in the rigid duality of right and wrong. I am dancing with the possibilities of dialectics, human dialectics, the changes we bring about in one another. I lived an angry life for many years. I know what it means to strike before struck, to hurt someone before I am hurt. I think that is what you were doing. Offending me to push me away. You said you were teasing. Perhaps, but these were jokes that require trust that hadn’t been earned without risking admonition.

I didn’t want to reproach your anger with anger. I wanted to leave on good terms, silly perhaps under the circumstances, and stranger yet with what manifested itself as good terms. Was I sleeping with the enemy when I joined myself with you? I don’t think so. I was dancing with the possibilities, with desire, with complexity; the understanding that each of us is more than we pretend to be. Beyond that, I was meeting you with abandon in a life of caution, fear and righteousness.

Venturing beyond your own people is not a skill you have honed, overwhelmed as you were by the prospects of one dinner with a woman from a different people. So be easy on us. There is no need to be cruel. No need to push me away. I understand you are wounded. I do not come pouring salt.

You want to go to Chiapas, you, an American, Chicano. You will be like a White boy there, stumbling over your desire to help, mixed with your assumptions, the barriers of language. Spanish in El Monte and Spanish in Chiapas are not the same, and then there are the languages of the region. You speak the language of the conqueror. None of this is simple.

Savior, why do any of us need a savior? On your bookshelf one of two books on my people, sat the book Schindler’s List. Schindler, our savior, an Austrian, womanizing, capitalist, Christian member of the Nazi Party, a slave holder, a manufacturer of war commodities and weapons. His Jews still call themselves to this day Schindler Jews. Do you remember how he saved them? He bought them. He owned them. Our savior, a slave holder, our savior, our master. I come from a people whose hair was made into rugs, our skin into lampshades and ladies purses, our ashes into the soap our murderers cleansed themselves with daily.

We all need saviors. We need saviors because we cannot endure without them, because we are not alone, we are not separate, we bleed the same, we love our children, our streets, the keys that fit into the doors of the places we call home. I do not need to be in your skin to know the pain that comes with negation, the fear that comes with marginalization. Gripped in that grip of humanity, we are inextricably joined together. When we think we are alone, that our humanity is more humane, that our suffering is greater, that our experience is incomprehensible, that we are too worthy for the support that salvation of someone else brings, then we too become dangerous.

We build monuments to our suffering and isolation. We construct walls of separation. We bring suffering upon our own image, our own community, our own blood. We do not recognize the reflection in the mirror. We find narrow solutions of self-preservation that are not preservation.

Not all Jews are labor leaders and revolutionaries. We do not all see and seek universal possibilities. Right now, so many of my people, the Jews, from ashes and lampshades, from round ups and numbers tattooed on arms, fight a war of isolation, forgetting our own skin, thinking we must be separate, forging unholy alliances with previous perpetrators in order to extract land and labor we are not entitled to, from those who never meant us harm. We are more alone than ever, more endangered than ever.

Do you want this for your people? Do you have to do it alone? Is this the road to freedom or the ghetto of the mind, the separation, the isolation posing for liberation? Justice requires unity, connection, revelry in diversity, a celebration of possibilities, the risk of connection, the adventure of love, real love, not pasty romantic love of shallow movies, not a president kissing his wife love, not the love the capitalist has for his money; propaganda; greed, not love.

Liberation requires the humility of both the savior and the saved. Truly we save each other, heal each other. These may very well be the worst of times. It is the strength we have to hold each other up that may very well be all that can get us through. We defend ourselves the most when we fight for someone else, knowing in the connection, that the possibility of a more just world is truly the only battle worthy of the fray.

-Emma



*I say to you at the risk of sounding ridiculous, the revolutionary is motivated by great sentiments of love.
-Ché Guevara

[American Dream]

[American Dream]

Three Killings

By John Feffer, March 27, 2012

The note left next to the bloodied body of Shaima Alawadi read “go back to your country, you terrorist.” Alawadi, who died on Saturday after being taken off life support, was an Iraqi-born mother of five living outside of San Diego. Someone had delivered a similar note to the family earlier in the month. It was likely the same person who returned with a tire iron and struck her repeatedly on the head. Alawadi had lived in the United States for 17 years. Several family members reportedly provided cultural training to U.S. soldiers deployed to the Middle East. In a very sad coda, Alawadi is indeed going back to her country – to be buried.

There were no notes that accompanied Trayvon Martin’s death at the end of February. But he was also killed for a perceived trespassing. An African-American teenager, Martin was guilty of “walking while black” as he carried iced tea and Skittles through the Florida community of Sanford. The self-appointed head of the community’s neighborhood watch, George Zimmerman, identified Martin as a threat. Zimmerman didn’t wait for the police to arrive. He chased after the young man and, in circumstances still very murky, shot him dead. Because of the “stand your ground” law that permits shooting in self-defense, the police did not arrest Zimmerman.

In the middle of March, Mohamed Merah went on a killing spree in Toulouse, France that left seven people dead. The victims were a rabbi, three Jewish children, and three French soldiers. Two of the soldiers were Muslim. Merah, who identified with Islamic extremism, specifically targeted Muslim soldiers for being “traitors.” The French-born Merah better fit the profile of a serial killer than a political extremist. But his Muslim victims are an important reminder that ordinary, everyday Muslims, even more so than Jews or Americans, figure as the most potent threats to the worldview promoted by al-Qaeda and its ilk. The overwhelming majority of al-Qaeda and Taliban victims are Muslims.

These murders are, on the face of it, quite different: a hate crime, a serial killing, and an act of vigilantism. But underlying these three tragedies is a notion of violated borders, of trespass. The message behind all three is this: you should not be here, you are not one of us, and your death shall serve as a warning.

Trespass is originally an economic term intimately connected to evolving concepts of public and private space. In the late medieval period in England, wealthy landholders began to fence off common lands to increase the pasturage for their flocks of sheep. This enclosure movement, privatization avant la lettre, created a new class of dispossessed, of those who did not belong. The word “trespass” – to enter private property without permission – comes from this period of late Middle Ages. Fences marked off the newly enclosed property. You could not enter without the permission of the owner or his agents. And scaffolds appeared throughout England to punish those thrown off the land who were forced to steal because they had no other means of subsistence.

In his captivating book The Swerve, Stephen Greenblatt describes how the violence and oppression of this system drove theologian Thomas More to create his famous “utopia” of commonly held property.

“Utopia begins with a searing indictment of England as a land where noblemen, living idly off the labor of others, bleed their tenants white by constantly raising their rents,” Greenblatt writes, “where land enclosures for sheep-raising throw untold thousands of poor people into an existence of starvation or crime, and where the cities are ringed by gibbets on which thieves are hanged by the score without the slightest indication that the draconian punishment deters anyone from committing the same crimes.” Greenblatt cites the statistic of 72,000 thieves hanged during the reign of Henry the VIII, when More was composing his tract.

We too are living at a time of gibbets and enclosures, of death penalties and gated communities, of state violence and privatization. The United States has become a country of wealthy enclaves, neighborhood watches, and charter schools. Widening inequality has directly contributed to the deterioration of any sense of the public good. The drive for minimal government has reduced the capacity of public servants to ensure basic services and security. The erosion of the middle class has not only reduced the tax base, it has weakened political support for programs that aspire to universality. “Ill fares the land,” wrote Oliver Goldsmith in his 1770 poem “The Deserted Village,” “to hast'ning ill a prey/Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.”

Colorado Springs, a sort of anti-Utopia, is a case in point. There, the city council responded to state and federal budget cuts by radically reducing public services. In its place, the city set up an extortion racket. If you want the electricity restored to all the streetlamps in your neighborhood or the Parks Department to take care of your local park, you have to pony up the dollars yourself. Most disturbingly, as a recent This American Life episode on Colorado Springs detailed, residents are willing to pay more money to maintain services in their own little patch of earth than they would have paid in additional taxes to keep the services running for everybody in the city.

Trayvon Martin was killed in a modest gated community in Sanford, Florida, a suburb of Orlando hard hit by the recession. The name of the community, tellingly, is The Retreat. As in Colorado Springs, the residents of Sanford must band together to compensate for what a diminished public sector fails to provide. The Retreaters, who live in townhouses priced around $100,000, have recently been concerned about a rash of burglaries. According to one resident, there had been eight cases in 15 months, and the culprits were mostly African-American males (or so he said). There are no signs at The Retreat that read: No Poor People or No African-Americans or No People Wearing Hoodies. The rules regarding trespass are unstated, shaped by fear and subject to the worst kind of stereotyping. Trayvon Martin was a victim of profiling but also of the insecurity that accompanies the decline of the middle class, an insecurity that especially plagues those of modest means, for they cannot afford all the perquisites of the wealthy. Vigilantism is the byproduct of a failed state. And the austerity measures promoted during our current mean season result in such a failed state.

Shaima Alawadi and her family recently moved from Detroit to the San Diego suburb of El Cajon, home to the second-largest Iraqi community in the country. Alawadi, like so many Iraqis living in El Cajon, took refuge in America from the human rights violations and the subsequent sectarian violence of Iraq. But they also found themselves in a city close to the Mexican border and therefore on the frontlines of the immigration debate in the United States. The economic crisis has produced a spike in anti-immigrant sentiment: “they” are taking “our” jobs; “they” are a burden on “our” city services; “they” are not assimilating into “our” culture. Hate crimes against immigrants have been on the rise. Alawadi was not only an immigrant. She wore a headscarf and so was identifiably Muslim. As such, she was a target for all those who conflate Islam with terrorism. Religious freedom and respect for ethnic diversity are still core American values. But a certain tribalism has crept into American discourse. A tribe of xenophobic Christians is fearful that demographic shifts and economic malaise will undermine their precarious cultural status. A small but growing minority within this tribe will resort to violence to maintain this status.

The politics of immigration, multiculturalism, and Islamophobia take on a very different character in France. In this election year, President Nicolas Sarkozy has tried to steal the fire from an unabashedly xenophobic right wing. He has stated that there are “too many foreigners” in the country. He has strenuously backed the French ban on the hijab. He has gone after halal meat (which has also raised concerns in France’s Jewish community that Kosher food will likewise be stigmatized). What had once been on the margins of French debate is now in the very mainstream. Muslims are somehow under suspicion for challenging a mythical unitary French identity through what they eat, what they wear, and how they pray. Mohamed Merah, meanwhile, believed that some Muslims had become too French and should be punished for their transgression. French Muslims find themselves in an increasingly difficult position. They trespass on French culture if they attempt to retain their identity. Or they trespass in the imaginations of religious extremists if they identify too closely as French — by, for instance, joining the army. If France and the European Union were enjoying an economic uptick, these culture wars would retreat into the background. As it is, Muslims have become a convenient scapegoat.

The European Union was supposed to be a borderless space. But the old dream of an ever more prosperous and economically equitable regional arrangement has come up hard against economic downturn and polarization. The United States was supposed to be a country without the class barriers of feudal Europe. But the old dream of a growing middle class and the relatively stable politics that accompany it cannot survive in the austerity liberalism and anti-government conservatism of the 21st century. When our notion of the common good, of commonwealth, begins to disintegrate, all that is left are tribes defending their turf, standing their ground, enclosing their land.

We are living now in a new world of enclosures. We are building our fences ever higher. We are patrolling our borders with ever more sophisticated weaponry. And we are punishing any and all who trespass. The victims of these recent killings are the collateral damage of these border wars.




http://www.fpif.org/articles/three_killings

[American Dream]

http://theanarchistlibrary.org/HTML/Jam ... ogamy.html

Jamie Heckert

Love without borders? Intimacy, identity and the state of compulsory monogamy


Throughout my life somebody has always tried to set the boundaries of who and what I will be allowed to be [...]. What is common to these boundary lines is that their most destructive power lies in what I can be persuaded to do to myself — the walls of fear, shame, and guilt I can be encouraged to build in my own mind. [...] I am to hide myself, and hate myself, and never risk exposing what might be true about my life. I have learned through great sorrow that all systems of oppression feed on public silence and private terrorization. [...] For all of us, it is the public expression of desire that is embattled, any deviation from what we are supposed to want and be, how we are supposed to behave.

Dorothy Allison (1995:116-117)

The state is not something which can be destroyed by a revolution, but is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of human behaviour; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently.

Gustav Landauer (1910/2005:165)


For some, non-monogamy or polyamory might be lifestyle choices, alternative sexual identities added to a growing list of sexual minorities: a proud, beautiful diversity or a range of shameful immoralities, depending on the eyes of the beholder. I can appreciate the appeal of political strategies based on stable identities: they fit into dominant political structures and patterns of relationships; they offer an obvious route for expressing desires for dignity and understanding. I can even understand the temptation to label immoral the practices of others that I don't understand, that I find painful to witness. I've done it. My concern here is less to do with right or wrong and more about the placing of borders around the imagination.

This chapter is about borders, about possibilities, about behaving differently. It has developed out of a larger research project in which I tried to clarify my own understanding of `sexual orientation,' to imagine different possibilities for the everyday politics of sexuality (Heckert, 2005). After having been heavily involved in what is now called identity politics and then very, very strongly opposed to such strategies (Heckert, 2004), I wanted to think through more carefully both how people experience this [end p255] notion of sexual orientation identity. I hoped understanding those experiences might help me both empathise with those attracted to Pride and imagine alternatives. Influenced by the work of queer women of colour who draw connections between borders of gender, race, nation and sexuality (e.g. Anzaldúa, 1987), by the border-crossing nature of my own life, as well as by my involvement in an anarchism engaged with everyday borders and policing, I invited as interview partners (a phrase I take from Klesse, 2006) folk whose intimate relationships crossed borders of sexual orientation categories.

Alongside other questions about sexual identities, practices and desires, I asked about their relationship status in terms of monogamy, how that decision was made, and how they continued to communicate about it. Challenging the assumptions of one advisor who, discussing my methodology, asked, `Do you mean promiscuous couples?', eight of my interview partners were in relationships they defined as monogamous, while five were in non-monogamous relationships with one other person, and three were maintaining multiple ongoing romantic and/or sexual relationships. In terms of categories of race and nation, they all identified as white and all had come from the overdeveloped world; seven were born outside of the UK and English was a second language for four of them. Although class varied in terms of income, job status and parental status, all of my interview partners had access to a broad range of social, political and cultural resources. All could be described as left-wing with a minority being politically engaged, including three involved in anarchist politics. Apart from two men living in small towns, the interview partners lived in large urban areas in either England or Scotland. Partners ranged in age from mid-20s to late-60s, with an average of 35 (for more on methodology, see Heckert, 2010a).

I make sense of their stories here by developing a theoretical story inspired by a re-reading of Adrienne Rich's `Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence' (1980/1999). My reading is influenced by Deleuze and Guattari's (1999) anarchist theorising of the State and the nomad (amongst, as ever, the infinite diversity of life). I offer this story as an invitation, one of many possible ways of making sense of the fragments of interview stories I share below.

The state of compulsory monogamy

Adrienne Rich's essay (1980/1999) offered critical insights and questions to the dominant (feminist) discourse of heterosexuality as natural fact and lesbian desire as minority taste. In doing so, her challenge to the construction of a hetero/homo division was one of a number of influences precipitating the development of queer theory (Garber, 2001). Her argument, as I understand it now, was that patriarchal and capitalist societies use repression, [end p256] both subtle and overt, to control the flows of women's emotional and erotic energies. Writing and speaking of heterosexuality as natural, she argued, fails to recognise not only the forms of compulsion which are involved in its institutionalisation, but also a huge range of ways in which women derive emotional sustenance from their intimacy with other women. She called for recognition of lesbian existence, the historical and continuing realities of women's physical passions for each other, as part of a lesbian continuum. Overflowing the medicalising category of lesbianism as a form of genital-centred orientation, and embracing “many more forms of primary intensity between and among women, including the sharing of a rich inner life, the bonding against male tyranny, the giving and receiving of practical and political support” (p 210), the lesbian continuum is offered as a gift, inviting women to recognise the sources of their power. In doing so, Rich enacts a form of anti-authoritarian method. “[L]ook at those creating viable alternatives, try to figure out what might be larger implications of what they are (already) doing, and then offer those ideas back, not as prescriptions, but as contributions, possibilities — as gifts” (Graeber, 2004: 11-12).

Inspired by this feminist critique of heterosexuality as institution and offering new ways of understanding and experiencing relationships, I attempt here to do something similar in relation to monogamy from an anarchist perspective. In doing so, I'm not the first to criticise monogamy as institution intertwined with hierarchy. Long before it was publicly questioned by other women, anarchist feminists in the US and UK at the turn of the 20th century challenged the role of the State apparatus, capitalism and patriarchy in coercing women into marriage and compulsory monogamy (a compulsion not applied so strongly to many men). In a powerful critique of normative relationships, Voltairine de Cleyre wrote in 1907, “In short, I would have men and women so arrange their lives that they shall always, at all times, be free beings in this regard as in all others. The limits of abstinence or indulgence can be fixed by the individual alone, what is normal for one being excess for another, and what is excess at one period of life being normal at another” (2004:14; for more on anarchist critiques of compulsory monogamy, see also Alexander, n.d.; Goldman, 1917/1969; Greenway, 2003, 2009; Haaland, 1993; Jose, 2005; Kissack, 2008; Kolářová, n.d.; Marso, 2003; Passet, 2003). More recently, compulsory monogamy has been tied into contemporary consumer capitalism and notions of ownership (McPheeters, 1999), patriarchal religion (Stelboum, 1999), race and class (Willey, 2003), and gender and compulsory heterosexuality (Rosa, 1994). The relationship between compulsory monogamy and so many forms of hierarchy makes it an important point of analysis for anarchist politics. More specifically, for queer politics, the incomprehensibility of alternatives to heterosexuality and homosexuality stem, in part, from the romantic, monogamous ideal of one person being able to fulfill all of one's needs (see e.g. Queen, 1995). Indeed, bisexuality has long been criticised based [end p257] on assumptions of its incompatibility with monogamy, and the assumption that monogamy is an intrinsically superior characteristic of relationships (Murray, 1995; Norrgard, 1991; Rust, 1993).

Before going further, I know that I, amongst others, have read the lesbian continuum as a form of lesbian hierarchy (Heckert, 2005), where some women are positioned as more feminist (that is, more lesbian) than others. While demands for lesbian purity and stronger commitments to women have sometimes become a component of particular lesbian feminisms (see e.g. Echols, 1992; Frye, 1983; Leeds Revolutionary Feminist Group, 1981; Rust, 1995), it is certainly not the only context where a discourse of liberation can become intertwined with practices of domination, particularly through claiming a moral high ground. Indeed, it's a common pattern in hierarchical cultures. Feminists, for example, have criticised the way in which a discourse of sexual liberation was mobilised in the 1960s and 70s to justify the sexual harassment and rape of women by men: `Hey, baby, what's the matter? I thought you were liberated!' (see Jeffreys, 1990). This is paralleled in recent history by claims of women's liberation made in corporate media and by US and UK military leaders to justify bombing the people of Afghanistan and Iraq (see, e.g. New York Times, 2001; see for critique, e.g. Chew, 2005; INCITE!, 2006; Sevcik, 2003; Viner, 2002). Patterns of moral hierarchy and constructions of borders between ‘us’ and ‘them’ are also to be found in discourses of both monogamy and polyamory where romantic love (associated with polyamory or mature relationships) is positioned over and above sexual pleasure (associated with promiscuity and immaturity) (Klesse, 2006; 2007). In each of these cases, violence is facilitated through acts of representation. For Deleuze, a critique of representation is “something absolutely fundamental: the indignity of speaking for others” (Deleuze, 1977; see also, May, 1994; Sullivan, 2005; Tormey, 2006). For Rich, this is the “control of consciousness”, the erasing of possibilities (e.g., lesbian possibilities) through authoritatively telling stories of “the way things are” (p 219). Whereas Deleuze, Rich and others explicitly attempt to avoid the indignity of representation, the State depends on it.

Deleuze and Guattari understand the State as “a process of capture of flows of all kinds, populations, commodities or commerce, money or capital” (1987/1999:386). So, too, the flows of eroticism, desire and emotion. For Deleuze and Guattari, “the operation that constitutes the essence of the State” is overcoding (1972/1977:199). We all code the world, making sense of things with categories. Overcoding, however, is a claim of authority to impose on others the real or true code, the right way to make sense of life. Whether indigenous, feminine, queer, local, particular, intimate or otherwise Other, other forms of wisdom, knowledge or storytelling are always dangerous to the State and become targets to overcode, fit, fix. At the same time, the State depends absolutely on these enemies, or as Foucault once put it, “politics is the continuation of war by other means” (1976/2003:15; see also, Butler, 2008; Greenway, 2005 on enemies of the State). The First [end p258] Emperor of China provides one of many historic and ongoing examples of overcoding in action.

One of the imperial progresses he undertook to mark the boundaries of his newly conquered realm was impeded by local goddesses. In retribution, he ordered 3,000 convicts to chop down all the trees covering the goddesses' sacred mountain and to paint the mountain red, a color associated with condemned criminals. This is a graphic example of imperial overcoding: the Emperor sweeps down to impose his judgment, literally leaving his mark as he transforms the earth, usurping the powers associated with a local sacred site as part of a unifying circuit arouond the realm (Dean and Massumi, 1992:24).

Overcoding is not limited to the state as apparatus, embodied by the law or the despot, but is a decentralised pattern[1] supporting, and supported by, the state as apparatus. I see in Rich's dismissal of the word lesbianism as `clinical and and limiting' a critique of overcoding (p 210), in which “disparate practices are brought together under a single category or principle, and are given their comprehensibility as variations of that category or principle. What was different becomes merely another mode of the same.” (May, 1994: 106). Lesbianism is often used as a diagnosis, an effect of claims of knowledge/power to define others as normal or deviant. The diversity of women's experiences is overcoded, their own knowledges subjugated to medical authority.

The lesbian continuum, on the other hand, refuses overcoding, containment, control. Is there really a border, Rich asks, between erotic desire between women and heterosexuality? Is “lesbianism” another State, in which one can be a tourist or a lifelong resident, a criminal, (Clune, 2003) spy or traitor (Hemmings, 1993) or a devoted citizen? Or does erotic sensuality between women connect with other desires, other experiences, continuously, creatively overflowing patriarchal borders? In a clear affirmative response to this last question, I see a powerful affinity between the lesbian continuum and Deleuze and Guattari's concept of nomadism. Both emphasise a multiplicity of flows, of connections, of possibilities; both resist overcoding. For the lesbian continuum, this is a refusal to allow experiences of sensuality, eroticism, love and resistance to be divided and judged; instead, undermining the ways in which compulsory heterosexuality “fragments the erotic from the emotional in a way that women find impoverishing and painful” (Rich, 1999:203), and recognising the power of practices, of lives which overflow patriarchal borders of what constitutes political acts or revolutionary situations.

Resisting the reduction and erasure of possibilities, the overcoding of connections between women, Rich offers an expansive recognition of those connections as essential to feminism. In a similar vein, I propose that an expansive understanding of non-monogamy, an erotic continuum if you [end p259] like, may offer an energising and empowering contribution to anarchism and to practices of freedom more broadly. My argument has an affinity with Klesse's call for “a truly pluralistic sexual ethics that may embrace the diversity of non-monogamous sexual and intimate practices” (2006:566), questioning a hierarchical binary of ethical/unethical. Similarly, it also attempts to undermine, or overflow, any clear border between monogamy and non-monogamy just as Klesse questions the border constructed between “polyamory and its `others'” (p.565).

Overflowing monogamy

As I've argued elsewhere, anarchism can be understood as the production of conditions that support and nurture the development of human potential for sustaining relationships with themselves, each other and our living planet (Heckert, 2005; 2010b). For some people, at some times, these conditions may include deciding to have sexual relations with only one other person. While imposed borders and overcoding claims of knowledge/power are incomprehensible to nomadic intimacies, negotiated, autonomous, self-organised boundaries are different. “The nomad has a territory; he [sic] follows customary paths; he goes from one point to another; he is not ignorant of points (water points, dwelling points, assembly points, etc.). [...] even though the nomadic trajectory may follow trails or customary routes, it does not fulfil the function of the sedentary road, which is to parcel out a closed space to people” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987/1999:380). Nomadic space is open “without borders or enclosure” (ibid.). While the nomad knows, deeply and profoundly, that she can go anywhere, that no borders can contain her, she does not have to go everywhere. Whereas borders are constructed as unquestionably right, denying any historicity or specificity, ignoring expressions of needs, desires and emotions, boundaries are what is right at the time, for particular people involved in a particular situation. Whereas borders claim the hardness of walls, whether physically as in Berlin (1961-1989) or the West Bank, or psychically as in the carefully trained performance of the (mostly male) bodies that patrol and enforce them, boundaries suggest a softness, a gentleness that offers security without control. Whereas borders claim the unquestionable and rigid authority of law, boundaries have a fluidity, and openness to change; more a riverbank, less a stone canal. Borders demand respect, boundaries invite it. Borders divide desirables from undesirables, boundaries respect the diversity of desires. Borders, too, can soften, becoming boundaries, while what once was a boundary can become rigid, fixed, demanding (Lao Tzu, 1997).

Similar to Kath Albury's (2002) exploration of possibilities of “ethical heterosex” as alternatives to compulsory heterosexuality, nomadic boundaries involve ongoing and open communication, respect and trust. My interview partners described relationships that overflowed any border between [end p260] monogamy and non-monogamy[2]. Perhaps this border is untenable, anyway. Murray (1995: 294) described running a nonmonogamy workshops where she asked people to offer their definitions of monogamous relationships:

For some, monogamy means one can have casual sex outside the relationship, but not any emotional attachment. For others, it means love and intimacy are okay, just no sex. For some people the emphasis on monogamy applies to one's own behaviour, for others it applies to one's partner's behaviour. For some people, it means one couldn't even have lunch with or fantasise about anyone who could ever be a prospective sexual partner.

Understanding a relationship in terms of nomadic boundaries evades claims of superiority for particular notions of monogamy, non-monogamy or polyamory and the borders on which they rely. Instead, we might practice and share relational skills, including fundamentally, the dignity of listening to each other (see Marcos, 2005; Rosenberg, 2003). If the anarchist/poststructuralist argument that our subjectivities are the result of our practices (Ferguson, 2004; May, 2001; McWhorter, 2004) is in any way true, then our capacity to develop egalitarian relational skills may be stunted by our participation in fixed hierarchies. Here, many of us learn to practice skills of domination and submission, conformity, secrecy, and defensiveness (Schmidt, 2000) in order to survive. In an anarchy of nomadic boundaries, participants in a relationship create space to discuss, define and refine their boundaries, which are always open to change (see Roseneil, 2000). Interview partners described a wide variety of arrangements with regards to boundaries around pornography, discussion of attractions to others, and different agreements about sex or romance with people outside a relationship. None of them took monogamy (whatever that is) for granted.

* * *

Melissa and her partner have had many discussions about boundaries in their relationship and they had agreed not to have sex with other people, unless they are both sharing sex with a third person. At one point, they discussed the possibility of a triad relationship with a mutual friend.

my friend's girlfriend was abroad and [the two of them] were kind of breaking up, but because they decided to go back together, [the triad] didn't happen. And I was quite open to the fact that [a triad] would happen but then [the couple] got back together. ... I discussed this with my partner but I didn't dare to suggest it to [my friend] at that point yet because I wanted to also respect her girlfriend. [But . . .] we talked about it and I think that would have been quite cool. [end p261]

Here, the borders that define a conventional relationship are denied and alternatives are openly discussed. Furthermore, these discussions include an emphasis on respect for herself, her partner and prospective partners.

I happened to meet Melissa several months after the interview, where I got an insight into the ongoing process of boundary production and change. Melissa told me how her partner had had an experience where he was very tempted to have sex with someone else and how this had encouraged him to rethink his position on monogamy (or polyfidelity[3]) as morally superior. Melissa was very happy that this opened discussion between them; she'd felt conflicted because she did not want to be in a monogamous heterosexual relationship for the rest of her life and at the same time valued her relationship with her partner. Since then, they had a threesome with another woman, an experience they are both open to repeating. Melissa was excited about the increasing openness of their discussions and was looking forward to future possibilities of the threesome with another man or having multiple partnerships, though she's concerned about pushing boundaries. Maintaining a good relationship, especially long-distance, is difficult enough, she said, without pushing.

Anne also wants to have a more open relationship and at the same time was aware of her own insecurities.

I feel constrained by the norm, by monogamy [...], but then at the same time as I've said, I think I'd feel quite threatened if [he] and I did actually have an open relationship. So I want me to have an open relationship and him to not have. [laughter]

Perhaps this, too, could be considered an expression of intimate nomadism which is never an achievement of complete comfort with sexuality and relationships, but an ongoing process of questioning and undermining the rigid borders of state-forms while acknowledging one's own and others emotional needs for boundaries. This runs parallel to anarchist and anti-authoritarian discussions of democracy as an ongoing, open, participatory and egalitarian process of asking questions rather than as any authoritative advocacy of a particular system of organisation or governance (see Notes from Nowhere, 2003; Nunes, 2005; Sitrin, 2006). At the same time, I read her laughter as a sign of shame (Scheff, 1990) for expressing the statist fantasy that security comes from control.

Douglas, meanwhile, emphasised the strength of the emotional bond he shares with his wife in the context of their nonmonogamy.

It was reassuring for her always to meet the men that I was close to because she liked them. She liked them. She enjoyed them. She realised this wasn't some horrific thing that was ... that was OK. If she met someone that she could relax physically with who happened to be a woman, who was totally accepted with me, that would be fine too. Or [end p262] men. But we do ... the thing is that we do have a very strong loyalty to each other, that's very emotional. We would cross bridges to sort things out for each other.

For Erica, too, spaces of acceptance of diverse possibilities were liberating, and a clear contrast to her experiences of homonormative policing of lesbian and gay spaces.

I remember being at [a queer, autonomous] sex party and just being so happy because my lover was there somewhere and I was doing my thing and I knew he was doing his thing and then we got together at some time in the morning and I just thought `oh, this so blissful'. [...] I felt 'this is OK. This is like just being ourselves and being together' and we hadn't had a dirty look from anybody. Yeah. That was nice.

Another crucial aspect of the anarchist tradition is the importance of people joining together freely into relationships for particular purposes (e.g., running a social centre or raising kids, organising a protest or running an erotic games night). Voluntary disassociation always remains an option (Mueller, 2003). I see this as being very different from the State which is based on a story justifying its continued existence indefinitely. Whether the story is the divine right of kings or the one about a social contract that we all agreed to before we were born, State relationships are not voluntary. Indeed, a number of feminists have compared the social relationship of the State to domestic violence (e.g., Brown, 1995; Bumille, 2008) — what else is a relationship where someone says that whatever they do is for your own protection and that you can never leave them to organise your own relationships on different terms? Perhaps then practicing relationships in unState-like ways includes accepting that they end.

Only a few people talked openly about the possibility of their relationships ending in their interviews. Undermining a romantic story of everlasting love, Sandra and her partner have openly acknowledged that it may not be “until death do us part”.

We also, along with our monogamy agreement, we also have made it very plain [ ...] if we broke up I would be very upset and cry a lot and things like that but I can live without you and I know that and you know that. So I suppose that kind of tempers any over-emotionalism that goes with feeling jealous or if he was to find somebody else ... I'd be upset no matter who it was but, at the same time, I know I would go on.

While this may seem a pessimistic approach to relationships, it seems to me that just as many people find profound emotional strength in the acceptance of their own mortality (Batchelor, 1998), some might also find a [end p263] profound sense of freedom in accepting that relationships, too, are organic, living, mortal things which always necessarily involve change including growth, death, decay and rebirth. To deny these possibilities, it seems to me, necessarily takes a great deal of emotional energy. Rich might agree, suggesting as she did that “the lie of compulsory female heterosexuality [...] creates, specifically, a profound falseness, hypocrisy, and hysteria in the heterosexual dialogue, for every heterosexual relationship is lived in the queasy strobelight of that lie. However we choose to identify ourselves, however we find ourselves labeled, it flickers across and distorts our lives” (p.215). Intertwined with the lie of compulsory heterosexuality is the lie of compulsory monogamy, that desire for romantic and erotic intimacy with only one other person is natural, unaffected by economic, social and political patterns of a culture. A sense of empowerment, then, may be found in the profound awareness that there are other possibilities, whether or not one is drawn to them at any given time.

For freedom is meaningless unless it includes the freedom to say ‘no’. A segment of my interview with Douglas discussing the challenges of being married and also wanting to deeply and openly explore relationships with other men illustrates this well.

I said “look, maybe we should just pack it in. Maybe we should just live separately and see each other and be friends and ...”. She said “no, I don't want that.” I said “but I want to have relationships. I feel bad that I'm exploring this bit of me that's been on ice for a long time and you're not.” She said “I don't need it. That's not what I'm looking for”. And she's very straightforward about that. [...] we're lucky that we've got what we've got.

This example might seem very unusual in comparison to many people's relationships. But, I suggest such open discussion about future possibilities may make explicit what happens implicitly. Partnerships, like any form of social organisation, are not fixed objects but ongoing processes. They are continuously produced and negotiated. If we fail to recognise our capacity to change our relationships, whether with friends, partners, neighbours, colleagues or `authorities', we are doomed to remain trapped within the borders of State. While this nomadism shares a certain similarity to the freedom of Giddens' (1992) concept of the “pure relationship”, which he also suggests should not necessarily last until death, I suggest that there are crucial differences. His notion of a transformation of intimacy depends on a story of gender equality in the context of global capitalism that I, among others, find inconsistent with our own experiences and with empirical research (see e.g., Jamieson, 1999; Tyler, 2004; Wilson, 2004). I suggest Giddens, with his commitments to a third way between a free market and a welfare state (2000), understates the ways in which experiences of intimate relationships [end p264] are intimately intertwined with the patterns of gendered, sexualised and racialised hierarchies and the profit-orientated relations of domination essential to state and capital.

Love/Anarchy: An erotic continuum

My own life has been deeply enriched by my awareness of polyamourous existence and I fully support efforts to share that knowledge, to help others imagine their own lives differently (Le Guin, 2004). At the same time, I want to stretch the concept of polyamory potentially even to its own undoing, much as Rich aimed to do with lesbianism. Don't most people have multiple loves? What happens when romantic love is separated from love for family or friends, for plants, animals and land, for oneself and for life itself? Klesse reminds us of a strong feminist tradition questioning the dangers, for women particularly, of idealising romantic love (2006), a concern that also applies to the love of nature (Heller, 1999). How can we be our own lovers (Heckert, forthcoming), lovers of the land (Dunbar-Ortiz, 2008; Macy, 2007; Starhawk, 2004; Sullivan, 2008), lovers of diverse others in diverse ways? “What we must work on, it seems to me, is not so much to liberate our desires but to make ourselves infinitely more susceptible to pleasure” (Foucault, 1989:310). For me, this has meant a (continual) letting go moral high ground. Why? Both because hierarchies of values or pleasure involve a form of representation, of speaking for others[4] (Rubin, 1984/1993), AND because I understand moralising as a strategy for denying pain (Nietzsche, 1969; for discussion, see also Brown, 1995; Newman, 2004). While the State, with it's attendant psychologies of control, constructs pleasure and pain as distinct and opposite, all the better for utilising (threats of) torture, poverty or shame and (tantalising hints of) ecstasy, wealth or community as tools of manipulation, I know pleasure and pain are not opposites. Both are an awareness of life, and what is the erotic if not a profound awareness of being alive?

Anarchy, like polyamory, is so often rejected as nice sounding but fundamentally impossible. Rejections for both range from unquestionable, and unquestioning, claims about human nature to a somewhat more open, but still `realistic', assessment of what the people around them, or even themselves, are like. Graffiti from the anarchistic student-worker uprising of May 1968 in Paris, proclaimed “Be realistic, demand the impossible” (see also Marshall, 2007). I love the way in which this questions any supposed border between the realistic and impossible and I recognise how, in its historic context, it suggested the possibility of more profound transformations than wage reforms demanded by bureaucratic unions. At the same time as I am inspired by that moment in history, my gut flinches at the word ‘demand’. Of whom do I demand? I'm weary of demands in relationships, including the one I have with myself. Indeed, it seems to me [end p265] that openness in relationships involves a letting go of demands. I prefer to invite the impossible, experiencing grief when `reality' seems all too solid and unforgiving or joy when I find what I imagined impossible happening (and I often do!).

References
[see original]


Footnotes

[1]^ Deleuze & Guattari refer to this pattern, at both macro and micro levels, as the state-form.

[2]^ At the same time, I'm wary of romanticising these relationships, one of which I was later told by an interview partner that she had come to understand as an abusive relationship.

[3]^ A form of polyamorous group marriage wherein all members consider each other to be primary partners and agree to be sexual only with other members of this group (Wikipedia, 2009).

[4]^ They may, of course, simultaneously express other things, including fear or fury over sexual violence and a powerful desire for mutuality, empathy and respect.

[American Dream]

“The time has come to tell the truth. Again. There is no love without justice. Men and women who cannot be just deny themselves and everyone they choose to be intimate with the freedom to know mutual love. If we remain unable to imagine a world where love can be recognized as a unifying principle that can lead us to seek and use power wisely, then we will remain wedded to a culture of domination that requires us to choose power over love.”

— bell hooks (Communion: The Female Search for Love)

[American Dream]

http://theanarchistlibrary.org/HTML/Jam ... onomy.html

Jamie Heckert

Nurturing Autonomy

There's a story, you may have heard it. It has many forms and goes something like this. Some people are powerful. They are the ones in charge, in control. They make things happen. If you or me or anyone else who isn't rich, isn't powerful wants to see things change, we have to ask them to make changes for us. The other side of this story is that we, that you and I, are powerless. Do you tell yourself this story? I do, sometimes. It's just the way things are. There's nothing we can do. Those are the rules.

Sound familiar?

The thing is, these are just stories. I know they are not true.

Don't get me wrong, I love stories. One of my favourite is writers, Ursula Le Guin, once wrote ‘All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. If we don’t, our lives get made up for us by other people’.[1] The guides, for her, are stories. With other stories, we might imagine other possibilities. ‘Another world is possible’, says the global justice movement. Another Dorset is possible, too. Another you. Another me.

How do I know this? Observing nature, I see only change. Life is a continuous cycle of birth, growth, decay, death and rebirth. And when I say nature, I include human nature. We too are nature; we too change.

How will we change? What does the future hold? I don't know. I do know that far more is possible that we are led to believe, then we lead ourselves to believe.

I remember an experience I had in a yoga class. The instructor was inviting me to try a new posture. I told him I couldn't, that I wasn't that strong. In my mind's image of myself, I was weak. He smiled and encouraged me to try. To my astonishment and exhilaration, I did it.[2]

Have you had an experience like that? Have you ever surprised yourself, discovering you are capable of more than you realised? If so, you know what I mean. And if you haven't, would you like to?

* * *

On a train home from London one afternoon, two young men boarded in the New Forest and sat opposite me. They spoke loudly, sharing stories of military training. In these stories, they described pushing their injured bodies, following orders. I felt such pain imagining myself in these situations and was moved to respond.

‘Hey, lads, can I ask you a question?’

‘Yes.’ An immediate response. Were they telling these stories loudly because they were eager to be listened to?

‘I feel confused hearing your stories,’ I said. ‘They sound to me like torture and yet you sound proud at the same time. Can you help me understand?’

The young man on the right gave me a series of slogans that, I imagined, he had been fed by his so-called superiors. ‘Pain is temporary, pride is forever’ and something about wanting to be ‘the best’ .

‘Ah, thank you — I understand a bit better now. That's interesting to me because it's so different from my own perspective. I'm inspired by the anarchist tradition and part of that is learning to listen to your own body, to your own authority. Who is this guy who convinces you to hurt yourself based on his idea of the best? It seems to me he's trying to break your spirit, to teach you obedience.’

The young man on the left side, slowly, ‘I think I see where you're coming from.’

The train had arrived in Bournemouth and I got off, thanking them on my way for sharing their stories. They stayed in their seats, continuing on their own journeys.

* * *

Many of us these days are feeling concern, fear and frustration witnessing the effects of human behaviour on the rest of the natural world. What can we do? How can we develop a truly sustainable culture? I love Gary Snyder's reminder that ‘The term culture

... is never far from a biological root meaning as in “yogurt culture” — a nourishing habitat.’[3] To be sure, our current culture is nourishing or else it wouldn't exist. As much as it pained me to listen, I don't think these young men were fools to be in the military. Obviously, it offered them some nourishment — perhaps a sense of identity in a culture that values masculinity, a sense of security and of contributing to the security of others. And, of course, the military creates a long of jobs for a lot of people. It's one way to get money, which in turn is one way to get food, to get nourishment.[4]

At the same time, armies and wars harm lives, cultures and ecosystems. First, there is the violence, the violation, of training young women and men to disconnect from their own compassionate nature, to follow orders, to kill. ‘Discipline is necessary to make people obey unreasonable, inhumane, and dangerous orders that benefit someone else. The irony in our modern, free nations is that soldiers are ordered to fight for democracy while being denied any experience of the concept’.[5] Second, there is the violent impact of guns and bombs on body and soil. And third, the military serves a global economic system whose bottom line is always profit over all else. The needs of rivers and forests, plants and animals, communities and individuals, are made subservient to the need for economic growth.[6]

I acknowledge that our current official political/economic system of government, military and corporations does work in a way, does keep some of us fed, clothed, housed and protected. I would certainly not wish it to all disappear at once because my life, too, is dependent at the moment on oil and supermarkets and transportation systems and a system of order. And what I said earlier that I don't know what the future holds, I do know that life will not carry on exactly as it is now. To live is to change. Besides, how can an economy grow forever in a world that is only so big?[7]

Did you know that one of the first people to famously question the official system of State and capitalism is buried in the heart of Bournemouth? William Godwin, companion to the revolutionary feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and father to the imaginative storyteller Mary Shelley, has been called the first exponent of anarchism. Godwin, like a long line of anarchists to follow, argued that the State, far from producing a society of equality and freedom, exists to promote the interests of the wealthy. He wrote, in his most famous work Enquiry Concerning Political Justice: ‘The rich are in all such countries directly or indirectly the legislators of the State; and of consequence are perpetually reducing oppression into a system, and depriving the poor of that little commonage of nature which might otherwise still have remained to them.’[8]

An evolving tradition, anarchism offers inspiration for — and practical methods of — radically egalitarian and co-operative alternatives to armies, corporations and States [9]. Instead of a small group of people claiming the authority to make decisions for others, anarchism involves nurturing autonomy. This means direct democracy in communities, workplaces, schools and homes. It means creating cultures which are deeply nurturing, deeply nourishing, honouring the needs (food, shelter, community, intimacy) of all [10]. It means supporting each other to develop our capacities to listen, to cooperate, to connect, to share, to imagine. Nurturing autonomy, then, is empowerment — the realisation that power isn't something that other people have, it's something we do together. In the military or other situations of domination, power means obediently working together according to some claim of authority. In autonomy, power means working together by listening to each other, caring for each other [11].

People sometimes say autonomy can't work, that it goes against human nature. I wonder, how do we know what we are capable of? How can we know when we confuse our potential, our possibilities with the stories we tell ourselves, with the images of ourselves in our minds? [12]

Practice. Autonomy is not something that is achieved, it's not simply replacing one system with another. It is a process of growing, of changing, of empowerment. It is how we realise that we are not who we think we are. It is how we come to imagine our own lives.

I'm also in agreement with those who argue that cooperation, mutual care, autonomy is more fundamental to nature, to human nature, than hierarchy, competition and greed. Ecosystems develop in ways that make conditions suitable for more and more forms of life. Leave a patch of ground alone for long enough and it will evolve into a more complex system; in Britain, ultimately a forest. It does this without any authority. The jungle needs no king. Instead, pioneer species, like dandelion, alders and sycamore contributes to the soil, changing the conditions and preparing the way for other species like oak and hazel [13]. Similarly, humans are relatively vulnerable on our own — we need each other to thrive. We would not have survived as a species without cooperation [14].

We can find this, too, in the history of Dorset. I offer here only two of many examples: one from Godwin's time and one from the very recent past. In the transition from feudalism to capitalism, much commonland in Dorset and elsewhere in Britain was privatised, enclosed, depriving common folk of their means of livelihood. This is a process that continues, both here and around the world. As Mike Hannis writes, ‘Development has always involved separating people from land.’ [15] This so-called progress led to starvation in Dorset as it does today in much of the world. ‘The effects of the enclosures were felt hard in the corn-growing chalk lands of North Dorset. Food was scarce and prices were high. In 1795 there was a “housewives revolt” — a non-violent protest led by women in which expensive food was seized and sold to the poor at prices the mob considered fair. The original owner received the proceeds — often considerably lower than he had expected’ [16]. More recently, surfers in Dorset have protested military occupation of beaches, challenging military authority and arguing for the importance of pleasure and connection with nature [17]. In anarchism, both food and play are deeply important.

If autonomy is more sustainable, and more sustaining, how can it be nurtured when the forces of States and corporations seem so overwhelmingly powerful? The key is, they only seem powerful. For States and corporations do not exist — they are imaginary monsters, legal fictions, abstractions. You cannot talk to a State or argue with a corporation. They are not beings in themselves, they are patterns of relationships: ‘The state is a relationship between human beings, a way by which people relate to one another; and one destroys it by entering into other relationships, by behaving differently to one another.’ [18].

Nurturing autonomy, then, is about our relationships. How can we create nurturing relationships with ourselves, each other and the natural world all around us? For me, this means learning to listen less to the stories of what I should be doing, what I should want, and more to what I need to be well in body and spirit. It means practising the crafts of writing, of growing and gathering foods and medicines, of continually learning to care for myself and others. It means listening to those stories that help me imagine my own life. It means seeking out others who share my concerns and to practice together ways of living with the challenges we face. And it means learning to get along with those I don't seek out, those who already live around me. What amazing relationships might I come to have with my neighbours that I can't yet imagine?

What might nurturing autonomy in Dorset, in your own life, mean for you?



[1]^ Le Guin, Ursula K. 2004. ‘The Operating Instructions’ in The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination. Boston, MA: Shambhala.

[2]^ See http://integralyogadorset.org/

[3]^ Snyder, Gary (1990). The Practice of the Wild. San Fransisco: North Point Press p15; Online at http://www.scribd.com/doc/5992818/snyde ... n-buddhism

[4]^ Lakey, George (1987). Powerful Peacemaking: A Strategy for Living Revolution. Philadelphia: New Society Publishers.

[5]^ Leier, Mark (2006). Bakunin: The Creative Passion. New York: St Martin's Press. p38

[6]^ See, e.g., Sanders, Barry. 2009. The Green Zone: The Environmental Costs of Militarism. Oakland, CA/Edinburgh: AK Press.

[7]^ McBurney, Stuart 1990. Ecology into Economics Won't Go: Or Life Is Not a Concept. Foxhole, Green Books.

[8]^ Marshall, Peter, ed. 1986. The Anarchist Writings of William Godwin. London: Freedom Press, pp89-90.

[9]^ See, e.g., Notes from Nowhere. 2003. We Are Everywhere: the irresistible rise of global anticapitalism. London, Verso. Trapeze Collective, ed. 2007. Do It Yourself: a Handbook for Changing Our World. London/Ann Arbor: Pluto Press. Ward, Colin. 2004. Anarchism: a very short introduction. Oxford, Oxford University Press. An Anarchist FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) online at http://www.infoshop.org/faq/index.html

[10]^ On needs, I'm inspired by http://cnvc.org/en/learn-online/needs-l ... -inventory

[11]^ Begg, Alex (2000) Empowering the Earth: Strategies for Social Change. Foxhole, Green Books.

[12]^ One book that has helped me see this more clearly is Chödrön, Pema 2002. Comfortable with Uncertainty: 108 Teachings on Cultivating Fearlessness and Compassion. Boston, MA: Shambhala.

[13]^ See e.g., http://www.pfaf.org/leaflets/pioneer.php for more details

[14]^ See e.g., Graeber, David. 2004. Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. Chicago, Prickly Paradigm Press; also online at http://www.prickly-paradigm.com/paradigm14.pdf. Kropotkin, Petr. 2009. Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. London: Freedom Press.

[15]^ From “Reconnecting Land & People?” Permaculture Magazine, Autumn 2009, p 8. See also Farlie, Simon. 2009. “A Short History of Enclosure in Britain” in The Land, Issue 7, pp. 16-31.

[16]^ See http://www.keepmilitarymuseum.org/socia ... &dx=1&ob=3

[17]^ See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/dorset/8110953.stm

[18]^ Landauer, G. (1910/2005). ‘Weak Statesmen, Weaker People,’ Der Sozialist. Excerpted in Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas — Volume One: From Anarchy to Anarchism (300CE-1939), ed. Robert Graham. Montreal: Black Rose Books.

[American Dream]

http://theanarchistlibrary.org/HTML/Err ... chism.html

Errico Malatesta

Towards Anarchism

It is a general opinion that we, because we call ourselves revolutionists, expect Anarchism to come with one stroke — as the immediate result of an insurrection which violently attacks all that which exists and which replaces all with institutions that are really new. And to tell the truth this idea is not lacking among some comrades who also conceive the revolution in such a manner.

This prejudice explains why so many honest opponents believe Anarchism a thing impossible; and it also explains why some comrades, disgusted with the present moral condition of the people and seeing that Anarchism cannot come about soon, waver between an extreme dogmatism which blinds them to the realities of life and an opportunism which practically makes them forget that they are Anarchists and that for Anarchism they should struggle.

Of course the triumph of Anarchism cannot be the consequence of a miracle; it cannot come about in contradiction to the laws of development (an axiom of evolution that nothing occurs without sufficient cause), and nothing can be accomplished without adequate means.

If we should want to substitute one government for another, that is, impose our desires upon others, it would only be necessary to combine the material forces needed to resist the actual oppressors and put ourselves in their place.

But we do not want this; we want Anarchism which is a society based on free and voluntary accord — a society in which no one can force his wishes on another and in which everyone can do as he pleases and together all will voluntarily contribute to the well-being of the community. But because of this Anarchism will not have definitively and universally triumphed until all men will not only not want to be commanded but will not want to command; nor will Anarchism have succeeded unless they will have understood the advantage of solidarity and know how to organise a plan of social life wherein there will no longer be traces of violence and imposition. And as the conscience, determination, and capacity of men continuously develop and find means of expression in the gradual modification of the new environment and in the realisation of the desires in proportion to their being formed and becoming imperious, so it is with Anarchism; Anarchism cannot come but little by little slowly, but surely, growing in intensity and extension.

Therefore, the subject is not whether we accomplish Anarchism today, tomorrow, or within ten centuries, but that we walk towards Anarchism today, tomorrow, and always.

Anarchism is the abolition of exploitation and oppression of man by man, that is, the abolition of private property and government; Anarchism is the destruction of misery, of superstitions, of hatred. Therefore, every blow given to the institutions of private property and to the government, every exaltation of the conscience of man, every disruption of the present conditions, every lie unmasked, every part of human activity taken away from the control of the authorities, every augmentation of the spirit of solidarity and initiative, is a step towards Anarchism.

The problem lies in knowing how to choose the road that really approaches the realisation of the ideal and in not confusing the real progress with hypocritical reforms. For with the pretext of obtaining immediate ameliorations these false reforms tend to distract the masses from the struggle against authority and capitalism; they serve to paralyse their actions and make them hope that something can be attained through the kindness of the exploiters and governments. The problem lies in knowing how to use the little power we have — that we go on achieving, in the most economical way, more prestige for our goal.

There is in every country a government which, with brutal force, imposes its laws on all; it compels all to be subjected to exploitation and to maintain, whether they like it or not, the existing institutions. It forbids the minority groups to actuate their ideas, and prevents the social organisations in general from modifying themselves according to, and with, the modifications of public opinion. The normal peaceful course of evolution is arrested by violence, and thus with violence it is necessary to reopen that course. It is for this reason that we want a violent revolution today; and we shall want it always — so long as man is subject to the imposition of things contrary to his natural desires. Take away the governmental violence and ours would have no reason to exist.

We cannot as yet overthrow the prevailing government; perhaps tomorrow from the ruins of the present government we cannot prevent the arising of another similar one. But this does not hinder us, nor will it tomorrow, from resisting whatever form of authority — refusing always to submit to its laws whenever possible, and constantly using force to oppose force.

Every weakening of whatever kind of authority, each accession of liberty will be a progress towards Anarchism; always it should be conquered — never asked for; always it should serve to give us greater strength in the struggle; always it should make us consider the state as an enemy with whom we should never make peace; always it should make us remember well that the decrease of the ills produced by the government consists in the decrease of its attributions and powers, and the resulting terms should be determined not by those who governed but by those were governed. By government we mean any person or group of persons in the state, country, community, or association who has the right to make laws and inflict them upon those who do not want them.

We cannot as yet abolish private property; we cannot regulate the means of production which is necessary to work freely; perhaps we shall not be able to do so in the next insurrectional movement. But this does not prevent us now, or will it in the future, from continually opposing capitalism or any other form of despotism. And each victory, however small, gained by the workers against their exploiters, each decrease of profit, every bit of wealth taken from the individual owners and put at the disposal of all, shall be a progress — a forward step towards Anarchism. Always it should serve to enlarge the claims of the workers and to intensify the struggle; always it should be accepted as a victory over an enemy and not as a concession for which we should be thankful; always we should remain firm in our resolution to take with force, as soon as it will be possible, those means which the private owners, protected by the government, have stolen from the workers.

The right of force having disappeared, the means of production being placed under the management of whoever wants to produce, the result must be the fruit of a peaceful evolution.

Anarchism could not be, nor would it ever be if not for these few who want it and want it only in those things they can accomplish without the co-operation of the non-anarchists. This does not necessarily mean that the ideal of Anarchism will make little or no progress, for little by little its ideas will extend to more men and more things until it will have embraced all mankind and all life's manifestations.

Having overthrown the government and all the existing dangerous institutions which with force it defends, having conquered complete freedom for all and with it the means of regulating labour without which liberty would be a lie, and while we are struggling to arrive at this point, we do not intend to destroy those things which we little by little will reconstruct.

For example, there functions in the present society the service of supplying food. This is being done badly, chaotically, with great waste of energy and material and with capitalist interests in view; but after all, one way or another we must eat. It would be absurd to want to disorganise the system of producing and distributing food unless we could substitute for it something better and more just.

There exists a postal service. We have thousands of criticisms to make, but in the meantime we use it to send our letters, and shall continue to use it, suffering all its faults, until we shall be able to correct or replace it.

There are schools, but how badly they function. But because of this we do not allow our children to remain in ignorance — refusing their learning to read and write.

Meanwhile we wait and struggle for a time when we shall be able to organise a system of model schools to accommodate all.

From this we can see that, to arrive at Anarchism, material force is not the only thing to make a revolution; it is essential that the workers, grouped according to the various branches of production, place themselves in a position that will insure the proper functioning of their social life — without the aid or need of capitalists or governments.

And we see also that the Anarchist ideals are far from being in contradiction, as the “scientific socialists” claim, to the laws of evolution as proved by science; they are a conception which fits these laws perfectly; they are the experimental system brought from the field of research to that of social realisation.

[American Dream]

http://theanarchistlibrary.org/HTML/Rox ... ants_.html

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Stop Saying This Is a Nation of Immigrants!

A nation of immigrants: This is a convenient myth developed as a response to the 1960s movements against colonialism, neocolonialism, and white supremacy. The ruling class and its brain trust offered multiculturalism, diversity, and affirmative action in response to demands for decolonization, justice, reparations, social equality, an end of imperialism, and the rewriting of history — not to be “inclusive” — but to be accurate. What emerged to replace the liberal melting pot idea and the nationalist triumphal interpretation of the “greatest country on earth and in history,” was the “nation of immigrants” story.

By the 1980s, the “waves of immigrants” story even included the indigenous peoples who were so brutally displaced and murdered by settlers and armies, accepting the flawed “Bering Straits” theory of indigenous immigration some 12,000 years ago. Even at that time, the date was known to be wrong, there was evidence of indigenous presence in the Americas as far back as 50,000 years ago, and probably much longer, and entrance by many means across the Pacific and the Atlantic — perhaps, as Vine Deloria jr. put it, footsteps by indigenous Americans to other continents will one day be acknowledged. But, the new official history texts claimed, the indigenous peoples were the “first immigrants.” They were followed, it was said, by immigrants from England and Africans, then by Irish, and then by Chinese, Eastern and Southern Europeans, Russians, Japanese, and Mexicans. There were some objections from African Americans to referring to enslaved Africans hauled across the ocean in chains as “immigrants,” but that has not deterred the “nation of immigrants” chorus.

Misrepresenting the process of European colonization of North America, making everyone an immigrant, serves to preserve the “official story” of a mostly benign and benevolent USA, and to mask the fact that the pre-US independence settlers, were, well, settlers, colonial setters, just as they were in Africa and India, or the Spanish in Central and South America. The United States was founded as a settler state, and an imperialistic one from its inception (“manifest destiny,” of course). The settlers were English, Welsh, Scots, Scots-Irish, and German, not including the huge number of Africans who were not settlers. Another group of Europeans who arrived in the colonies also were not settlers or immigrants: the poor, indentured, convicted, criminalized, kidnapped from the working class (vagabonds and unemployed artificers), as Peter Linebaugh puts it, many of who opted to join indigenous communities.

Only beginning in the 1840s, with the influx of millions of Irish Catholics pushed out of Ireland by British policies, did what might be called “immigration” begin. The Irish were discriminated against cheap labor, not settlers. They were followed by the influx of other workers from Scandinavia, Eastern and Southern Europe, always more Irish, plus Chinese and Japanese, although Asian immigration was soon barred. Immigration laws were not even enacted until 1875 when the US Supreme Court declared the regulation of immigration a federal responsibility. The Immigration Service was established in 1891.

Buried beneath the tons of propaganda — from the landing of the English “pilgrims” (fanatic Protestant Christian evangelicals) to James Fennimore Cooper's phenomenally popular “Last of the Mohicans” claiming “natural rights” to not only the indigenous peoples territories but also to the territories claimed by other European powers — is the fact that the founding of the United States was a division of the Anglo empire, with the US becoming a parallel empire to Great Britain. From day one, as was specified in the Northwest Ordinance that preceded the US Constitution, the new republic for empire (as Jefferson called the US) envisioned the future shape of what is now the lower 48 states of the US. They drew up rough maps, specifying the first territory to conquer as the “Northwest Territory,” ergo the title of the ordinance. That territory was the Ohio Valley and the Great Lakes region, which was filled with indigenous farming communities.

Once the conquest of the “Northwest Territory” was accomplished through a combination of genocidal military campaigns and bringing in European settlers from the east, and the indigenous peoples moved south and north for protection into other indigenous territories, the republic for empire annexed Spanish Florida where runaway enslaved Africans and remnants of the indigenous communities that had escaped the Ohio carnage fought back during three major wars (Seminole wars) over two decades. In 1828, President Andrew Jackson [1] (who had been a general leading the Seminole wars) pushed through the Indian Removal Act to force all the agricultural indigenous nations of the Southeast, from Georgia to the Mississippi River, to transfer to Oklahoma territory that had been gained through the “Louisiana Purchase” [2] from France. Anglo settlers with enslaved Africans seized the indigenous agricultural lands for plantation agriculture in the Southern region. Many moved on into the Mexican province of Texas — then came the US military invasion of Mexico in 1846, seizing Mexico City and forcing Mexico to give up its northern half through the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Texas were then opened to “legal” Anglo settlement, also legalizing those who had already settled illegally, and in Texas by force. The indigenous and the poor Mexican communities in the seized territory, such as the Apache, Navajo, and Comanche, resisted colonization, as they had resisted the Spanish empire, often by force of arms, for the next 40 years. The small class of Hispanic elites welcomed and collaborated with US occupation.

Are “immigrants” the appropriate designation for the indigenous peoples of North America? No.

Are “immigrants” the appropriate designation for enslaved Africans? No.

Are “immigrants” the appropriate designation for the original European settlers? No.

Are “immigrants” the appropriate designation for Mexicans who migrate for work to the United States? No. They are migrant workers crossing a border created by US military force. Many crossing that border now are also from Central America, from the small countries that were ravaged by US military intervention in the 1980s and who also have the right to make demands on the United States.

So, let's stop saying “this is a nation of immigrants.”

* * *

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is a long-time activist, university professor, and writer. In addition to numerous scholarly books and articles, she has written three historical memoirs, Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie (Verso, 1997), Outlaw Woman: Memoir of the War Years, 1960-1975 (City Lights, 2002), and Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War (South End Press, 2005) about the 1980s contra war against the Sandinistas.

Footnotes

[1]^ http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=25

[2]^ http://www.historycooperative.org/journ ... omson.html

[American Dream]

http://theanarchistlibrary.org/HTML/Ang ... ement.html

Angela Beallor

Sexism In The Anarchist Movement

This article is an attempt to add to the discourse that is (or should be) occurring around sexism within the very movements that purport to be fighting it. It was a hard process to distinguish between sexism within the anarchist movement and the general sexism within society because so many of the criticisms that can be leveled against the anarchist movement are criticisms of the greater society. There is a void where critical anarchist feminist/anti-sexist critiques should be which has lead to a lack of dialogue and concrete action around sexism. This critique will be based upon many of the weaknesses within the Anarchist movement, which are often compounded around issues of sexism (and other forms of oppression). There is a continuum of thought and concrete action which anarchists must address or take up in order to combat our own sexism and sexism in the greater society.

Challenging Ideas and Behaviors

The continuum begins with our personal thoughts and behavior. Growing up in a sexist society imbues within us the idea that women are inferior to men. Unless these ideas are thoroughly challenged, in every aspect of our lives, every waking minute, then these ideas are allowed to flourish in our behavior. Many may feel this is an obvious point, but as Kevin Powell wrote in a recent Ms. article, “Everyday I struggle within myself not to use the language of gender oppression, to see the sexism inherent in every aspect of America, to challenge all injustices, not just those that are convenient for me.”

Anti-sexism is not just about fighting overt forms of sexism — violent rape, domestic violence, overtly sexist words — it is also about challenging our relationships, the ideas that create a rape culture, the way people are socialized, etc. These are not convenient issues to struggle around for they involve digging deep within ourselves, traveling back in our development, and dedicating time to the difficult process of self-change. We must challenge the ideas and behaviors that promote sexism to other men and alienate women-both in personal relationships and in organizations.

Recognizing that anti-sexist work is a deep, hard process is very important but a point many miss. All too often men who are genuinely against sexism fail to acknowledge and challenge the sexism that lies within themselves. “I AM an anti-sexist,” they proclaim. But it is said so loudly that they fail to hear the voices of women. It becomes a label to proudly sport instead of a serious and difficult process. Don't get me wrong, if a man is indeed anti-sexist, he needs to display it, but this is accomplished through his actions and in his explanations of our current reality- especially to other men. Men must become examples to challenge the mainstream notions of masculinity and that takes more than a simple label.

Often complexities arise, however, when women challenge “anti-sexist” men. Men get defensive when women critique their oppressive and sexist behaviors. Rather than listening and benefiting from criticism, a defensive stance is taken and women's voices are ignored once again. No one is above being questioned, as there should be no unnecessary hierarchy. The lack of principled criticism and self-criticism within the anarchist movement is the first problem that is then compounded when applied to issues of sexism and other forms of oppression. Women must be genuinely listened to and, if the criticisms are valid, men should seek to change their thoughts and their actions.

Political Study

Understanding sexism is important to all within the anarchist movement. However, as a woman, it is not my duty to always answer questions and educate men on how sexism affects my life. Many anarchist groups already have a program or project in place that could be utilized to gain a better understanding of sexism without burdening women with the task of explaining our lives: the political study group. When was the last time you or your group read something on women, sexism, feminism, or women's liberation?

Many times, and I have been guilty of this, we feel that readings on women's issues are not as important as readings on capitalism or anarchism or anti-colonial struggle, etc. We have to stop considering women's liberation as a side project or issue and view it as an integral part of the liberation struggle. These writings do not have to be specifically Anarchist or even revolutionary to give us good insights. When was the last time you read something by Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Barbara Smith, Angela Davis, Patricia Hill Collins, or Emma Goldman? We must take the initiative to read that which women have placed before us.

Encouraging Women

Since I was a little girl, I was socialized to feel inferior to men. I was socialized to recognize where my “place” was in society and it was not participating in an equal dialogue with men, certainly not in any type of politics, and it was definitely not on any kind of front line of revolutionary struggle. I often look around at meetings and events (that are not women-centric) and see that I am one of a handful of women in attendance or worse yet, the only woman there. Alternately, even when there are a lot of women in the room, I find that I am the only woman contributing to the dialogue.

When examining women's involvement in political struggle, we have to examine the root causes. Women are socialized to look at politics as outside of our realm. When the politics are radical or revolutionary, the level of intimidation increases. Because of this reality, we have to exert a lot of time and energy into creating a more anti-sexist/pro-woman movement. We have to start by involving more women within our organizations and movements. This first involves putting sexism as one of the main points of organization alongside the other issues affecting women (and all humans): racism, heterosexism, ableism, colonialism, and class oppression. While we cannot place all of our energy into all of these problems at once, we must ensure we are dealing holistically with all of these issues within our focus. Second, we must actively recruit women into our organizations. This takes various forms such as tabling at women's events, consistent outreach to women and participating in women-centric struggles.

Once women are in our organizations, we must look at the level of participation of women within the organization. I have been involved with politics for 7+ years. It has only been within the past year and a half that I have fully participated in politics. This is because I have had to learn that I could speak in meetings, that I could contribute in meaningful and positive ways, and that it is my place to contribute and participate. I have had to overcome the intimidation I felt when I was working with men who I looked up to and respected. I had to overcome the mental chains that were holding me back.

A couple factors contributed to this change. A dear comrade helped me realize that I am fully capable of participating and that no one can say different. For him, it was crucial that I participate on an equal level and he put a great deal of time and energy in encouraging me. I would love to see more men take up this task. Then, my level of commitment, seriousness, and sense of responsibility to liberatory politics forced me to put my level of involvement above my sense of comfort. This was not an easy task at all and one that I still struggle with to this day. This is something that we all have to battle within ourselves; men can help women get to this point by treating women equally and respectfully. We also must analyze our organizational behaviors. Are we consistently encouraging women to take up leadership positions? Is it mostly men or women who are taking up speaking engagements? Who talks at meetings? Who facilitates meetings? Who does the work of the organization, and then, who gets credit for it? We have to be very perceptive of men talking over women, invalidating and/or ignoring a woman's words and contributions.

We all must make an extra effort to look at the gender dynamics of our functions and meetings. Without the direct leadership of women in any movement, our important voices are left out of the dialogue and the fight against sexism.

Anarchist Organizational Structures

One of the biggest challenges to the anarchist movement is creating viable anti-authoritarian structures for our organizations. We are struggling to create new ideas of organization from the examples we have had and through new ideas and innovations. Not only are we trying to organize our movement in an anarchist fashion but it is also a testing ground for a future society.

Anarchism seeks to create a society based on a great sense of personal responsibility and accountability to ourselves and each other. We want a society based on mutual aid and communalism. This cannot happen out of spontaneous activity; it must result out of a highly organized society based on democratic, decentralized structures. I hope the anarchist movement realizes the need to work out new structural ideas for our organizations and a new society. I know many feel creating structure inherently runs counter to the ideas and principles of Anarchism. I would argue that not sitting down and forming democratic structures is counter to the ideas and principles of anarchism.

Jo Freeman wrote in The Tyranny of Structurelessness that “The idea of structurelessness does not prevent the formation of informal structures, only formal ones. A `laissez-faire' ideal for group structure becomes a smoke screen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others. Thus structurelessness becomes a way of masking power. As long as the structure of the group is informal, the rules of how decisions are made are known only to the few, and awareness of power is limited to those who know the rules.”

Structurelessness is often a means to perpetuate sexism, racism and class stratification. If men are socialized to be leaders and women are not, then it is not hard to imagine who would develop into leaders in a non-structured organization. A lack of structure provides no means of balancing those with certain privileges with those who are oppressed. We must create organizational structures that inherently guard against these forms of power imbalance.

In forming Anarchist organizational structures, we must also form structures to specifically deal with sexism in our organizations. One very sensitive issue that we have to address is sexual assault (and domestic violence). I have heard of many situations where a politically active male has sexually assaulted a fellow activist. It would be impossible to plan out all of the steps of dealing with this type of situation-especially since the survivor of sexual assault should largely control what happens-but we need a skeleton of steps to help handle this type of situation. Members of any organization should all have political education on both rape and sexual assault and how to deal when you or someone you know has been raped. Organizations should have a framework so that they are not fumbling around when sexual assault happens. Not having a framework could leave a survivor with little to no support from those whom should be providing as much support as she or he needs.

What can anarchist organizations do in these situations? What do we do if one amongst us is sexually assaulted? What do we do if one amongst us has sexually assaulted someone else? What do we do when both parties are in our organization? I challenge all organizations to consider how to prevent sexual assault from occurring in the first place, how to deal with it if it does, and how to support survivors of sexual assault to the fullest extent possible.

Taking up Womens'Struggle

The struggle against sexism is everyone's struggle. It affects everyone: men, women and transgendered peoples. It is especially important that anti-sexist men, who benefit from sexism, take up the struggle for womens' liberation. Just as it is especially important for white people to dedicate themselves to anti-racist struggle and straight people to dedicate themselves to anti-homophobia/heterosexism work, men must dedicate an intense amount of time to anti-sexist work.

For anarchist men, the question is, are you involved with struggles spontaneously taken up by women, led and organized by women, and primarily aimed at other women? If not, why? I have heard the claim that many of the struggles are “too reformist.” In some cases this is my critique as well but I do not see a revolutionary struggle in the United States that is able to aid women in the ways these movements do. The answer is not to ignore these movements but to build new movements within or without that which already exists. Are anarchists creating alternate structures for survivors of sexual assault? Are we able to aid abused women in a revolutionary fashion at this point in time?

Others brush anti-sexist struggle off as “women's work.” Others do not see anti-sexist struggle as central to the struggle for liberation. Others believe we can wait to challenge sexism when revolutionary change occurs.These analyses must change. If we truly want an egalitarian society then we must begin creating a more equitable movement-along lines of race, class, gender, and sexuality. We must make the anarchist movement a women's movement. If we want an end to sexism, our work should have began yesterday.

Forward Always, Backwards Never

Anarchists often have a good analysis of the way sexism is “a mesh of practices, institutions, and ideas which have an overall effect of giving more power to men than to women.” Beginning with an institutional analysis is correct, however, we must also translate this into our own thoughts and actions. Only then can all anarchists work together most effectively (at least along gender lines but we must also deal with homophobia, racism and class issues). To create an egalitarian society, our movement must be egalitarian and presently it is not. Working to create revolutionary change must begin today by challenging our sexist, racist, and heterosexist capitalist society. It means challenging that which is in ourselves, our families, our neighborhoods, our communities and our movements. As Kevin Powell said, “Just as I feel it is whites who need to be more vociferous about racism in their communities, I feel it is men who need to speak long and loud about sexism among each other.”

The Anarchist movement needs to be more vocal and active in the struggle against sexism. All our lives depend on it.



Notes: From Northeastern Anarchist #2
By Angela Beallor (Kent ABCF)

Source: http://nefac.net/node/50

[American Dream]

http://theanarchistlibrary.org/HTML/The ... t_Sex.html

The Class War Federation

Let's Talk About Sex

This article has a couple of local references — one to local politicians, and one to the `Carry On' films (a series of comedy films based on sexual innuendos — a bit like a less `adult' National Lampoon).


“As far as I'm concerned, working in crummy factories for disgusting pay was the most exploitative work I ever did in my life. I'm aware that, in a sense, it was Hobson's choice for me. But I maintain that I had more control over my life as a worker in the sex industry than as one as a worker in an ordinary factory.”
--Nickie Roberts, former prostitute and stripper.

Introduction

Porn...women's liberation...prostitution...sexuality...promiscuity... feminism... All these issues and struggles have been discussed, misinterpreted, used by people and groups to win some power and try to control others. Usually, in this mess, the subject of sex and sexual behaviour crops up time and time again. To win their arguments, a lot of politicians, middle class feminists, and religious bigots have launched attacks on working class people's sex lives.

The arguments and debates have been confusing and have left people feeling guilty about totally natural sexual desire and behaviour. This has not helped women, men or our class as a whole.

We have produced this article to get the juices flowing. We don't want to control or put people's lives on guilt trips, like so many others — we do want to fight for a world where sex, like every other arena of our lives, is healthy, free of unnecessary confusion, and controlled by us, not the powers that be.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s the politics of sex changed. Sex became the banner under which all women, regardless of their class, race, or nationality were supposedly united. Suddenly the bizarre idea that sex=porn=men=violence became a universal equation.

The theory was so reactionary that, at the time, it was hard to separate the voices of the radical left from the extreme right.

Story So Far

Up until this time, the battle had been to bring into the open the discrimination that women faced every day. The overall mood was that anything was possible — women were insisting on breaking out of the repressive roles that had been forced on them. They demanded that women's sexual pleasure should be a fundamental part of any heterosexual relationship.

In the 1990s, unless you're a religious or sexual bigot, this is just plain common sense. But in the 1970s the world just wasn't used to women defining themselves as sexual beings.

Women began exploring sexual possibilities, which was both a painful and a liberating experience.

However, this was a short halcyon period of time, and one that was replaced by the theory that sexual liberation was a dangerous thing — if women became too sexually liberated, then men would hold it against them. While some women were brave enough to leap into the unknown, others were claiming that women's sexuality had been so colonised and threatened that there was only one route to take: batten down the hatches, and try to get rid of everything that was, and still is, unpleasant and nasty. Because sex and desire can't be described as rational, these feelings have always been associated with chaos and non-conformity. Middle class feminists wanted the women's movement to have the aura of respectability. Due to these reactionaries, Victorian values became dressed up as feminist thought.

Some History

Middle class Victorian women and some suffragettes had established themselves as moral authorities. Even some of the most radical nineteenth century activists had accepted the overall view that men are sexual predators, and that `fallen' women were victims of them. Of course, the view also held that married middle class women were sexually pure.

The suffragette, Christobel Pankhurst, claimed that women had to be sexually above reproach to be morally worthy of the vote! Needless to say, this didn't apply to men who already had the vote and ran the world. The right, like Pankhurst, has always tried to keep women as prisoners by emphasising the idea that women's `feminine' nature is essentially different from mens'. Feminists began to fall into the trap of idealising women in much the same way — claiming that they were celebrating, rather than punishing, `difference'.

The result was whether a woman's stuck up on an angelic pedestal of purity, or stuck in the kitchen in between dropping countless babies, she's still stuck.

Then, when the middle class suffragettes, activists and right-wingers all got into bed with biological theories they turned sex into a battleground. These theories stated that women are passive nurturers and men are active aggressors.

The idea was that women have to play victim always. So it wasn't a great surprise that when the sex backlash started in the 1970s, talking about women enjoying heterosexual sex, it was seen as feminist heresy.

Sex and Sexism

Sex began to be blamed for all sexism. The fact that the way we bring up our children, and the way that women are politically and economically controlled took a back seat in the sex politics of the day — they weren't seen as keys to women's oppression. It wasn't just sexual violence and sexism, but fucking in general, that became the main issue of gender politics. Women were universal victims, having to endure whatever was forced upon them sexually, by men. The concept of consensual, exciting sex wasn't even on the agenda.

Men, especially working class men, were generally seen as timebombs, waiting to be activated by a quick glance at a wank magazine. The argument that reducing heterosexual sex to a no-go status would limit, rather than expand, women's sexual and general freedoms, was seen as an argument collaborating with the enemy.

In a world which usually relies on copulation for us to survive, gathering together to wipe out intercourse was too self-destructive, and equally un-natural, even for followers of such puritanical feminists as the American, Andrea Dworkin. As a result, many began to attack pornography, to attack sex, rather than to attack the exploitation of women. “Porn is the theory. Rape is the practice” became feminist bywords. There was little data to support the theory, but sex is too emotive an issue to need factual back-up. As a result, the struggle for women's greater economic, intellectual and sexual freedom was replaced by demands for censorship.

Porno Wars

In denouncing pornography, feminism found itself allied with right-wing fundamentalists. Church groups and right-wing pressure groups joined feminists in blaming pornography for sexism.

While our society is highly controlled and deeply sexist, pornography may mirror sexism, but it never created it. Most porn is incredibly stupid and quite evidently exploits women as objects with wide-open orifices, beckoning: “I'm lovely, I'm your plaything, do what you want to me”. However, it is misleading to claim that all porn is violent and dangerous.

Anti-porn campaigners often state that all women hate pornography; adding that all women working in the sex industry are victims. Rather than calling for safer working environments for sex workers, middle class moralists, bigots and intellectuals have called for more repressive laws and social stigma. The result is that it unofficially gives the go-ahead to the way both police and punters brutalise women working in the sex industry — and that is violence and sexism.

It is ironic that police raids more often than not target gay literature and culture. While soft porn sits less than prettily on the top shelf of your local newsagents, gay bookshops have had cops stripping their shelves of Oscar Wilde's work.

Feminists, past and present, may do well to remember that when Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Neil Kinnock and Tony Blair are on your side, you've got serious problems. When politicians say that they want to legislate to help the anti-porn campaigns, then it's obviously not the status quo that they'll be legislating against.

Feminists who want the law to clamp down on porn and the sex industry claim that they are not anti-sex. When pornography has been stamped out they say they'll be more than happy to see it replaced by `erotica'.

Apparently, `erotica' is aesthetically pleasing, whereas porn is simply manipulative. But class prejudice and aesthetics go hand in hand — if the middle and ruling classes like a sexy image, they sanitise it by calling it erotic art. At the same time, the things that turn the working classes on get labelled as `smut'. We're not referring to, or advocating things like the `Carry On' films or `Hustler' magazine either.

Who then has the right to decide what's art and what's smut? Usually it's middle class academics who assume the right. They have never been known to support either class struggle, or in this case, the sexual liberation and freedoms of both working class women and men, regardless of whether they're gay, straight or bisexual.

They do, however, fulfil a very similar role to the scientists of Victorian England, with their `biological arguments', and the moralists of old who wanted women to be chaste and pure women before they had the right to vote.

Are You Protected?

Class politics are part and parcel of sexual politics. The Victorian idea that the working classes must be protected from their own foul and perverse natures is a central part of the anti-porn campaign.

The middle classes get to say what can be safely seen because they believe themselves intelligent enough to read pictures and images in more than one way. Anti-pornographers insist that working class men are incapable of seeing sexual images without being a danger to women. This paints working class men as stupid sex monsters, and reinforces the view that, sexually, men are “all potential rapists”. In fact so potential that a glance at sex in a movie or a naked woman on a page will send them all out to rape and abuse, or will damage their souls forever.

It is a damaging, hierarchical and sexist class society that introduces the idea of sexual abuse and male power and dominance over women — this is the key to exploitative attitudes and behaviour, not pictures of naked adults having sex.

When In Rome...

At the turn of the century, excavations of Roman Pompeii produced walls, doors and courtyards full of `mucky' pictures. The Victorians decided that such smut couldn't be reconciled with what they saw as a great civilisation.

All the finds were put into a locked room. When it was finally decided to show the exhibits, the room remained locked to “Women, children and the uneducated”. You see, not much has changed.

Any move back in time, any backsliding in the liberation of our bodies and minds, whether in the name of celebrating womanhood or slagging off promiscuity, is a definite step towards yet more repression — and when repression is in full swing, we lose the little right we have won to make our own decisions and control our lives, making informed choices.

Keep Pushing

Arguments over sex and sexual freedom have been paralysing the progress of the feminist movement for years. The last thing we need are new forms of guilt for women, marching under the dodgy and ever-changing banner of political correctness.

Feminism and sexual politics have to be fundamentally about choice, control over our lives and our bodies, and that must include sexual choice.

Claiming that all women are sexual victims did not unite the women's movement, it just made women feel scared, disempowered and helpless. It also drove a wedge between women and men who wanted things to change.

Avoiding sex, its complications and contradictions, its passion and energy, won't make any of us strong. It won't help us to combat sexism either. What sidestepping the issue in the name of unity and political correctness does is to ensure that middle class women continue to tell working class women (and men) what to do — both in and out of bed.

Sex Is Brilliant

It would be a huge setback for working class people to follow the confusions and morality that has been forced upon us for millennia. There are statements about how we should behave sexually dating back far beyond the Bible, and certainly that little book has been responsible for some very serious repression of women, and at times, of men, particularly gay men.

Sex can be and should be enjoyable for all those taking part in it, and we should certainly not be sanctioned and frowned upon if sex is our way of earning a living, feeding our kids, and having a life rather than just surviving.

That doesn't automatically make prostitution or porn OK — no more OK than having to get up before dawn to build homes for the rich, or clean sewers or get our brains numbed in some production line or other. Neither does this make any excuses for the social fuck-ups and inadequates who rape, molest and abuse.

Keep the Juices Flowing

Sex, and enjoying it, is natural, it's a major part of our lives. When we have consenting sex, with however many partners, male, female, gay, straight or bisexual, why shouldn't it be with passion, pride, excitement and experimentation? If no one is hurt or exploited, if power isn't used over another, then our sex is just that — our own.

It's in the interests of all our class to discuss sex and sexuality, to control our own bodies, and to learn lessons about what's good and what's not. Good medical advice aside, the moralists, politicians and middle classes have no right to hinder us or interfere.



Source: Retrieved on January 1, 2005 from http://www.cat.org.au/aprop/talksex.txt

[American Dream]

Excerpted from: http://antifascist-calling.blogspot.com ... -dope.html

SUNDAY, MARCH 18, 2012

Drugs, Guns & Nukes: Iran as the New 'Dope, Incorporated'

...Indeed, when Colombian drug lords Jorge Ochoa and Pablo Escobar began their profitable partnership, they did so alongside dope-dealing Bolivian fascists and Argentine neo-Nazi generals with long-standing ties to the CIA. As Consortium News revealed: "The putsch, which became known as the Cocaine Coup, installed [Luis] García Meza and other drug-connected military officers who promptly turned Bolivia into South America's first modern narco-state. The secure supply of Bolivian cocaine was important to the development of the Medellín cartel in the early 1980s."

In fact, it was Bolivian drug lord Roberto Suárez Goméz who financed the coup. With close ties to Pinochet's regime in Chile and Argentina's death squad generals, Suárez was a fixture amongst far-right international circles who generously distributed funds to South American affiliates of the Nazi-tainted World Anti-Communist League (WACL)...

http://libcom.org/library/latin-america

In Latin America

Stefano Delle Chiaie's first known visit to Latin America was to Chile with Prince Valerio Borghese late in 1973 after the CIA-backed coup which ousted and killed President Salvador Allende. The build-up to the Chilean coup bore numerous similarities to the events which unsettled Italy from early 1969 onwards. The two fascists' trip to Chile was ostensibly on behalf of a Madrid agency, Enesia, to establish friendly relations and encourage trade with the new regime, but in fact to discuss the setting up of an international hit squad to kill the enemies of the Junta and to neutralise all overseas opposition.

This proposal for a transnational terror network later to become known as "Operation Condor" was discussed and agreed with the Chilean Head of Station of the American CIA, Raymond Warren, responsible for running psychological warfare and paramilitary operations networks for eliminating anti-Junta dissidents in other Latin American countries and in Europe.

The first contract fulfilled was the murder in September 1974 of General Carlos Prats and his wife in Buenos Aires. The murder was carried out by the neo-fascist terrorist group Patria y Libertad, a network of right-wing criminals trained in Bolivia and at a school of the United States International Police Academy.

LAYING A FALSE TRAIL

In September 1975 Delle Chiaie travelled to Rome on a false passport where he met Michael Townley, a US-born agent of the Chilean secret service, the DINA, Townley's wife, Mariana Ines Callejas, also a DINA agent, and Virgilio Paz, an anti-Castro Cuban terrorist leader. According to a statement made by Townley to the FBI, following his successful extradition to the United States from Chile on charges of having murdered exiled Chilean leader Orlando Letelier, all three met with Delle Chiaie and his associates to discuss the proposed assassination of Bernardo Leighton.

Within a matter of days the assassination plan was finalised. Virgilio Paz and Delle Chiaie between them prepared a scenario intended to confuse the subsequent police investigation and lead it away from both DINA and the Italians.

The attempt on Bernardo Leighton's life took place in Rome on 6 October 1975, but it was unsuccessful and the would-be assassins succeeded only in wounding their target. The attempt was later described to Aldo Tisei by the would-be assassin himself, Pierluigi Concutelli: "Pierluigi described the operation to me down to the finest detail. He fired at Leighton's head, heard the wife scream, whirled around and wounded her in the throat. He was on the point of giving both the coup de grace but relented, convinced their deaths were imminent." Concutelli described it as "the only cock-up in my life."

A few days later, on 13 October, the false trail was laid when the Miami-based Cuban exile paper Diario de las Americas published a communique from an organisation calling itself Cero which claimed responsibility for the shooting. In November a further communique from Cero was received by the Miami office of the AP agency providing details of the shooting. The communique claimed responsibility for the assassination of the Cuban exile leader Rolando Masferrer on 31 October for being "a divisive influence on the Cuban exile movement"; it added: "Mr. Bernardo Leighton was shot through the back of the head in Rome. A 9mm Beretta pistol was used. We are informing you of this to contradict reports in the media and to identify them fully."

Townley later stated to the FBI that the information used in the Cero communique had been channelled by Delle Chiaie to DINA in Chile and from there to Virgilio Paz in Miami. Although annoyed at the failure of the assassination attempt, DINA paid out l00 million lire to Delle Chiaie which, according to pentito Aldo Tisei, he pocketed himself.

Another diplomatic murder linked with the Delle Chiaie organisation, under contract from Paladin, by now based in Zurich following exposure of its activities by the Parisian daily Liberation, was the murder of General Joaquin Zenteno Anaya. Anaya was the American-trained Ranger Commander responsible for the capture of Che Guevara in Bolivia in October 1967, and in May 1976 was the Bolivian ambassador in Paris. Although the assassination was claimed by the hitherto unknown "Che Guevara Brigade," it has been suggested (Nouvel Observateur, Paris, June 1976) that it was planned by a Bolivian intelligence officer known as Saavedra with Delle Chiaie in the Hotel Consulado in Madrid. (Anaya's politics were opposed to the then president, General Banzer. He was a supporter of ex-president Torres who was murdered shortly afterwards in Argentina.)

It would appear, then, that when Delle Chiaie and Guérin-Serac made their escape from Madrid in 1977 they found refuge and a new base for their activities in South America where they already had many friends and protectors.

MURDER UNLIMITED

The original network of pro-Nazi circles in Latin America maintained by Skorzeny, Luftwaffe hero Hans Ulrich Rudel, ex-Goebbels man Johannes von Leers and Klaus Barbie had been built on in the late sixties by the fresh blood of Aginter Press organiser Yves Guerin-Serac and his network of OAS exiles.

Many of the methods and techniques which are now the hallmark of Latin American death squads originated in the theory and practices in Algeria of the French "5th Bureau of the General Staff" (psychological operations) under Colonel Lacheroy and were honed to cruel perfection by the OAS under the direction of Colonel Jean Gardes: beheading, degenitalising and other forms of mutilation of suspects and the dynamiting of their corpses and leaving the remains in some public place. Guérin-Serac’s mentors in Lisbon and Madrid, Susini and Lagaillarde, were both proteges of the infamous 5th Bureau set up in 1957 during the Algerian War. In the late sixties, when Aginter Press spread its attention from Africa to Latin America, it is estimated that about 60 per cent of Aginter personnel were recruited from the ranks of the OAS, while the remainder were recruited from neo-Nazi organisations in Western Europe such as the Frankfurt based Kampfbund Deutscher Soldateni1 run by another ex- Goebbels man and partner of "von Schubert" in Paladin, Dr. Eberhardt Taubert, otherwise known as "the man in the white Porsche."2

A 1968 prospectus sent by Guerin-Serac to the head of Guatemala's secret police tendering for a "security contract" makes chilling reading in the light of subsequent events. It proposed: "a programme of action against Castroite subversion in Latin America" and the "placement in Guatemala of a team of specialists in subversive and revolutionary struggle, or perfectly trained politicomilitary cadres to serve as technical advisers in the elaboration of political and military action schemes to be pursued in the struggle... This action by specialists would be placed under the ultimate authority of local political leaders and perfectly coordinated with them.

Apart from setting up a headquarters study office charged with making a special study of subversion and familiarising officers with new combat methods of guerrilla warfare, infiltration, psychological warfare and the setting up of a 'special missions' centre... indeed it would be a good idea as well to extend the anti-guerrilla action to adjacent nations, Nicaragua and El Salvador, for the antiguerrilla struggle."

In June 1971, the New York Times reported that at least 2,000 people had been murdered in Guatemala between May 1968 and November 1970. An Amnesty International report estimated that upwards of 30,000 people were murdered in the decade beginning 1966, the vast majority of them between 1968 and 1971 following the assassination of US ambassador Gordon Mein. The terror campaign, modelled on the South Vietnamese "Phoenix" programme, in which an estimated 40,000 Viet Cong suspects were murdered, was masterminded and overseen by Mein's successor, Nathaniel West, a senior staff member of the US National Security Council (West was afterwards appointed US ambassador to Chile in November 1971, shortly after President Allende nationalised the copper mines) and was carried out by agencies such as the "plausibly deniable" Aginter Press. According to Patrice Chairoff, missions carried out by Aginter Press and similar front agencies in Latin America enabled, by 1977, around 560 European neo-fascists to receive in-depth training and experience in psychological warfare and terrorism.

Shortly before exiled Argentinian dictator Juan Peron's plane touched down at Ezeiza airport on his return from exile to power on 20 June 1973, death squads of the "Triple A" (Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance) organised by Peronist Interior Minister Juan Lopez Rega (later identified as a member of Lodge P2) opened fire with machineguns and threw hand grenades into the waiting crowds, massacring 300 bystanders because they were Peronist leftwingers.

According to an investigation carried out by the newspaper of the leftist Montoneros, El Descamisado, those responsible for the massacre included members of several international neo-fascist groups, including Francoise Chiappe, formerly of the Milice, the wartime Vichy-French anti-Resistance Squads, a veteran of the OAS Delta Commandos, and heavily implicated in the international drug trade.

EXTENSIVE TRAVELS

When in May 1974 investigators from the Portuguese Armed Forces Movement raided the Lisbon HQ of Aginter Press and its political wing, "Order and Tradition," they discovered Yves Guerin-Serac's last-known forwarding address: Apartado 1682, E1 Salvador.

Stefano Delle Chiaie's main base in Latin America appears to have been Buenos Aires, but he is known to have travelled extensively throughout Latin America in the company of one or two trusted companions. According to DINA sources quoted by American authors John Dinges and Saul Landau in their book Death on Embassy Row, Stefano Delle Chiaie, using the nom-de-guerre Alfredo di Stefano (a.k.a. "Topogigio"), together with two Italian companions "Luigi" (or "Gigi") and "Maurizio" (possibly Maurizio Giorgi, a go-between for Delle Chiaie and Italian secret service officer Antonio La Bruna), were provided with an office by DINA from which they operated a front news agency in Santiago which specialised in channelling pro-government articles to the Western media. The office consisted of a large apartment equipped as an office with a telex machine for their dispatches. As with Aginter Press, the news agency also appears to have provided cover for covert activities.

The three Italians are known to have established contacts in Bolivia, Paraguay, Colombia, Venezuela, El Salvador and Guatemala, as well as in their base country, Argentina. In Buenos Aires they are known to have been in contact with DINA agent Michael Townley's Milicia group, closely allied to Lopez Rega's “Triple A,” which specialised in reprinting Nazi tracts in Spanish and promoting anti-semitic literature as well as providing auxiliaries for the security services of Latin American dictatorships). It was the Milicia which assisted Townley in assassinating Chilean exiles such as General Carlos Prats.

“KIDNAP ANONYMOUS”

Although Delle Chiaie's exact activities and movements from 1977 until 1980 are a matter for conjecture (he seems to be able to go wherever he wants, whenever he wants), what is certain is that this period saw a cementing of the relationship between the neo-fascists and organised crime, the Mafia. In Italy, 1976 had witnessed an increase in the number of criminal kidnappings and there was growing evidence that the neo-fascists, particularly those linked with the Delle Chiaie network such as Pierluigi Concutelli, were deeply involved with the activities of the so-called "Kidnap Anonymous" organisation. It was also known that for some considerable time the Mafia organisations which ran the narcotics trade in the "heroin triangle" (Ostia-Acilia-Casal Palocca) had been using the neo-fascists as heavies to distribute drugs and to intimidate addicts and "neutralise" investigators.

It is not known whether Delle Chiaie attended the 12th Congress of the South Korean-based World Anti-Communist League3 hosted by President Stroessner in Asuncion, Paraguay, in 1979. But the 400 delegates from 80 countries certainly included Delle Chiaie's close comrade from Spain, Elio Massagrande. The main subject for discussion on the agenda was how to galvanise support for right-wing regimes in the vanguard of the struggle against communism.

Another more important meeting in which Delle Chiaie certainly was involved was the secret conference of Latin American security and intelligence services held in Bogota, Colombia, in November 1979. It was at this conference that Argentinian General Roberto Eduardo Viola, later to become President of Argentina, laid the foundations for the Argentinian sponsored coup which blocked the accession of the newly elected President of Bolivia, Dr. Siles Zuazo, in July 1980 (Edward S. Herman, The Real Terror Network—Terrorism in Fact and Propaganda, South End Press, Boston, 1982).

COCA-CACCOLA

If Delle Chiaie's precise movements are unknown to us, his activities are far from being obscure. He was travelling backwards and forwards between Argentina and Bolivia for some years and was directly involved in the destabilisation campaign preceding the bloody coup which overthrew Bolivia's democratically elected President Dr. Siles Zuazo on 17 July 1980.

One of the Delle Chiaie organisers in Latin America, West German Joachim Fiebelkorn (born 1947), a Paladin and Kampfbund Deutscher Soldaten veteran, as well as a Frankfurt pimp, who had worked with Delle Chiaie in Bolivia, stated later to the West German police that Delle Chiaie was the number one international middleman between the Sicilian Mafia and the Latin American cocaine producers. Based in a police barracks next to the West German Embassy in the capital, La Paz, the Delle Chiaie men, Los Novios de la Muerte — "The Fiancés of Death" — as they called themselves, were contracted as security guards and enforcers for the multinational drug empire of Roberto Suarez, described as the "King of Coca," overseeing the production, transportation, distribution and marketing of cocaine.

It was Roberto Suarez who put up the money and placed his neo-fascist paramilitary organisation at the disposal of General Luis Garcia Meza in his preparations for the 1980 coup which installed both Meza and his Interior Minister, the notorious Colonel Luis Arce Gomez. Arce Gomez, a close relation of Roberto Suarez, and known as "the Idi Amin of the Andes," was described by the US ambassador to Bolivia and by the US Drug Enforcement Agency as "one of the biggest cocaine dealers in the country" — after Suarez, of course. Another US Drug Enforcement Agency official claimed that "for the first time ever the drugs mafia has evidently bought itself a government." (Bolivia: Cocaine: the military connection, Latin America Regional Reports Andean Group, 29 August 1980, quoted in Edward S. Herman, The Real Terror Network. )

The amount of money involved in this lucrative trade can be gauged by Arce Gomez's own estimate in a statement to Latin America Weekly Report (13 February 1981): "Coca can produce for us 1,200 million dollars." But this was a vast understatement. The astronomical profits being made can be better judged by the fact that Roberto Suarez, in an attempt to obtain the release of his son, held in the United States on serious drug charges, offered to pay off Bolivia's entire foreign debts of $3,800m. (The son has since been released on bail and is now back in Bolivia. )

Concerning the 1980 coup in Bolivia, Venezuelan journalist Ted Cordova Laire wrote in El Nacional: ". . . all sectors agree unanimously that Argentinian, Italian, German and South American elements all participated in the coup effected by Garcia Meza and Colonel Arce Gomez. Many of the junta's prisoners were interrogated by Argentinians." The same writer also affirmed that the destabilisation campaign was begun during the regime of Argentina's Jorge Videla, another Lodge P2 Mason, and that General Galtieri himself went to La Paz to prepare the campaign and sent at least seventy Argentinian police and security specialists who operated under cover of the newly established OPSIC — the Oficina de Operaciones Psicologicas (Office of Psychological Operations) — chillingly reminiscent of the French 5th Bureau which spawned the likes of Jean-Jacques Susini, Pierre Lagaillarde and Guerin-Serac: Writer Ed Berman puts the figure at 200 military and intelligence personnel. Los Angeles Times journalist Ray Bonner quoted one US military adviser in Bolivia: "The Argentinian military did everything but tell General Garcia Meza the day to pull it off… ." (Los Angeles Times, 31 August 1981, quoted in Edward S. Herman, The Real Terror Network).

"COMMUNISTS EVERYWHERE"

The ostensible head of the new Bolivian regime, General Garcia Meza, charged his Interior Minister Arce Gomez with the job of setting up a personal bodyguard to protect him on his trips around the country. This force was recruited from the neo-fascists who had helped him to power. This parallel security force was trained and overseen by William Adgar Moffett III, a CIA paramilitary officer who had previously helped refine the methods used by Haitian dictator "Papa Doc" Duvalier's dreaded murder organisation, the Ton Ton Macoutes. Within days of Arce Gomez's statement on taking office that "All those who violate the Law of National Security will have to walk around with their last will and testament under their arm," the death squads had begun their campaign of bloody repression. Student meetings were broken up and activists and academics were beaten up and murdered; the headquarters of the main Bolivian trade union, the Central Obrero Boliviano, were gutted and militants tortured and murdered. One of the worst incidents was the carnage which took place at Caracol, a small tin-mining community near Oruro where only a few survivors lived to tell of the atrocities committed by the "Fiancés of Death." ("El Novio de la Muerte — "Fiancé of Death" — is a marching song of the Spanish Foreign Legion.) To avoid attracting attention to themselves, the "Fiancés of Death" would drive into villages or working class areas in ambulances with red crosses marked prominently on the vehicles and carry off their victims, most of whom were never seen again. Other leading members of the "Fiancés of Death" were Klaus Barbie, the "Butcher of Lyon," ex-Waffen SS officer Haus Stellfield who died shortly after the coup from injecting an overdose of cocaine, ex-Waffen SS Herbert Kopplin, Franz Josef Boefle, Hans Juergen, Kay Gwinner, Wolfgang Walterkirche, the Rhodesian Manfred Kuhlman, Heinz Lauer, Hans Landowski, Carsten Vollner, Joachim Fiebelkorn.

Apart from these mainly German and Austrian Nazis there were also at least two Frenchmen, Oliver Danet and Napoleon Leclerc, the OAS man exiled from Marseilles at the end of the "French Connection." Italian neo-fascist and P2 supergrass Elio Cioloni, involved later in the Bologna bombing investigations, described this motley collection in an interview published in the Italian weekly Panorama:

…Fiebelkorn [boss of the Bavarian operation] arrived in Santa Cruz and, little by little, built up this group of German mercenaries. First there was the middle-weight boxer "Icke" — alias Herbert Kapplin, 52 year old Berliner and veteran of the SS armoured division of General Steiner. He was a POW in Russia until 1952, expert at stripping every sort of weapon. The most likable character was Hans Juergen, formerly a railway electrician, an alcoholic who died of overdrinking. The most experienced driver was Manfred Kuhlmann, a little hothead forever in a fury with Kay Gwinner, a Chilean German in exile since Allende's day. There was also the Frenchman Jean Leclerc. His real name was Napoleon Leclerc. In Algeria, with the Legion, he had carried out a lot of torture: he always strutted about in military uniform with grenades dangling at his belt. He never paid his bills and saw communists everywhere. It Fiebelkorn's best friend was 65 year old Hans Stellfield, a Gestapo veteran who fled lo South America at the end of the war. A military instructor, potter, dealer in exotic animals and drugs, he was also a bodyguard and smuggled arms from the USA... Our nine-man group was in direct touch with the Nazi HQ in La Paz run by Klaus Barbie... From the second half of 1978 onwards we had but one aim . . . to get ourselves organised so as to display our power.

US PRESSURE

Following the success of the coup the US Drug Enforcement Agency estimated that the drug traffickers who had put up the 70 million dollars to put Garcia Meza into power increased the annual production at their refineries from 2,000 million dollars to over 7,000 million.

When the US authorities started to exert pressure on the Bolivian government to crack down on the production of cocaine, it simply provided Arce Gomez with an opportunity to corner the market for himself and Suarez. Having recruited the "Fiancés of Death" into the Bolivian National Drug Control Agency, Arce Gomez then provided them with a list of more than a hundred of the smaller independent drug producers to be dealt with. Leading units of the Bolivian army, the Nazis raided the "illegal" drug factories of the smaller producers, smashed up the equipment, impounded their stocks of cocaine and forced many of them to hand over their houses, luxury flats, aeroplanes, boats, and whatever money they had. Those who resisted were tortured and killed as examples to the others.

The story of Pierluigi Pagliai, a long-term confidant of Delle Chiaie, illustrates the activities of the neo-fascist network in Bolivia. Pagliai, born 1954, the son of a rich Milanese family and a stalwart of Italian neo-fascism in the early seventies, had gone on the run to Argentina six years previously when he had been named and, briefly, arrested in connection with the 1974 Brescia anti- fascist rally bombing mentioned earlier. In Argentina he had been recruited into that country's "special services," along with Delle Chiaie.

Known variously as "Carlos," Mario Bonomi and Bruno Costas, Pagliai was an accredited "co-ordinator" of the Bolivian National Drug Control Agency — a misnomer if there ever was one — under Colonel Renan Reque. Colonel Reque claims that Pagliai came to him with a Bolivian birth certificate and identity card in the company of an official of Department II of Bolivian Military Intelligence who "insisted" he should be accredited to the agency. According to the statement of supergrass Ciolini, who was also an agent of the Bolivian Interior Ministry, Pagliai had been described in CIA documents as a "young terrorist torture freak." The CIA blamed him directly for many of the violations of human rights perpetrated under the regime of General Meza. Pagliai's name has also been linked with a number of murders, including that of an expoliceman, Jose Abraham Batista, who was gunned down, for an unknown motive, in the Avenida Uruguay in the narco-fasicst capital of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, as well as the torture and murder on 17 July 1980 of Marcelo Quiroga Santa Cruz, the secretary-general of the Bolivian Socialist Party.

1. Kampfbund Deutscher Soldaten ("German Soldiers' Combat League"), Talstrasse 6, D-6 Frankfurt am Main. Founded by Karl Heinz Keuken,Wolfram Langer, Erwin Schonbrun and Dr. Eberhardt Taubert. The organisation which has a membership of around 1500 of whom two-thirds are under the age of thirty, publishes the monthly Unser Kampf ("Our Struggle") which is wholly controlled by Nazis. Many members of the Paladin Group were recruited from the ranks of the KDS, as were many of the mercenaries who fought in Rhodesia (39 in June, 21 in July and 34 in September 1976). The Rhodesian mercenaries were recruited and trained by Taubert's colleague Major Nicholas Lamprecht.

2. Dr. Eberhardt Taubert (died 4 November 1976) joined the Nazi party in 1931—two years before Hitler came to power. Promoted to Sturmfuhrer in legal department during Goebbels' gauleitership of Berlin, he later followed Goebbels to the Ministry of Propaganda where he was assigned the department handling "the struggle against alien ideologies, religious meddling and bolshevism at home and abroad." Dr. Taubert later took charge of "active anti- Jewish propaganda" and was subsequently assigned the "anti-Komintern" bureau which specialised in anticommunist and anti-Soviet propaganda. In 1938 Taubert was appointed Judge with the "Court of Peoples'Justice." He was later made ministerial adviser to Goebbels and headed a 450-strong team of Nazi propaganda specialists in the occupied territories. After the war Taubert went to South Africa and Iran before returning to Germany in 1950, when he was recruited into the special services section of the Gehlen organisation (BND). He was also appointed chairman of the CIA backed "National Association for Peace and Freedom". Under cover of the All-German Ministry, Taubert was an adviser to Franz Josef Strauss, Minister of Defence, and to NATO on "problems of psychological warfare." For over twenty years Taubert was the main source of finance to the neo-Nazi and extreme right groups in Europe, acting as a conduit for money from businesses and foundations such as the Staats und Wirtschaftspolitischen Gesellschaft e.v. in Cologne and Pelugan AG of Frankenthal (in 1977 this company was run by former consul Dr. Fritz Ries, one of the many straw men through whom funds are channelled to Franz Josef Strauss). According to journalist Patrice Chairoff, Taubert was also one of the "respected correspondents" of the Greek KYP through his "World Service" "press agency.'

3. World Anti-Communist League (WACL). The most sinister of all the internationally active extreme right wing organisations and pressure groups. Although founded in Seoul, South Korea, in 1966, the initial foundations were laid in Mexico in 1958 during the "World Anti-Communist Congress for Freedom and Liberation." The WACL is based on Goebbels' "Anti-Komintern" and is the main conduit for funds for extreme right wing organisations throughout the world. One of the first operations financed by the WACL shortly after its founding in November 1966 was to finance the propaganda and intelligence gathering press agency "Aginter Press."