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