MILITARY QUOTES BEGIN HERE * by Flick Ruby The battlefield in the war against women is in the workplace, on the streets, in our homes, in our most intimate relationships. It is physical and psychological, visited upon us by others and internalized within ourselves. It crosses class and racial boundaries, compounding other oppressions. Its is manifested in atomic power development and ecological destruction. The mentality that builds nuclear weapons is the same one that rapes women and destroys the natural environment. No political philosophy or strategy for peace can be complete without addressing sexual politics. 1 War produces casualities of all kinds - shattered minds and spirits, as well as battered bodies. Part of the work of confronting misogyny is to heal and empower victims of physical violence. An entire industry has arisen to do the job. Women from the front lines with black eyes, burned arms, broken legs and split vaginas arrive daily on the doorsteps of battered womens's shelters. 2 It is no accident that patriarchy related history is the history of war - that is precisely their history. In remembering their battles, the fathers recall the deep experience of their own violent tendencies and relieve the euphoria of those ultimate moments of male bonding. The history of war speaks volumes about national will in a patriarchal culture. Wars are nothing short of rituals of organized killing presided over by men deemed "the best". The fact is - they are. They have absorbed in the most complete way the violent character of their own ethos. These are the men who design missiles and technologies are extensions of themselves. These are the men ready to anniahilate whole societies. These are the men honoured as heroes with steel minds, resolute wills, insatiable drives for excellence, who are capable of planning demonic acts in a detached, non-emotional way. These are hollow men, capable of little but violence." 3 While films like SNUFF 'entertain' male viewers, the military has offered hands-on expereince. Veterans Richard Hale reports that on the way to Vietnam troops were told, "There's a lot of loose ass over there men, and they just love GI dick. And best of all they are only Gooks, so if you get tired ofthem, you can cram a greanade up their cunt and 'waste' them " Many soldiers seized the opportunity; stories of wartime atrocities abound. "This is my rifle," the troops chant,"This is my gun," they slap their crotches;"One is for killin, the other's for fun." Four hundred thousand Bengali women were systematically raped by Pakistani soldiers; how many women have our boys raped? After all women have been bounty in every war. Misogyny and homophobia are basic components in military indocrination. "When you want to create a solidarity (sic) group of male killers," goes the Marine philosophy, "you kill 'the woman' in them." 4 In my view, any commitment to nonviolence which is real, which is authentic, must begin in the recognition of the forms and degrees of violence perpetrated against women by the gender class men. Any analysis of violence, or any commitment of act against it, that does not begin there is hollow, meaningless, a sham which will have as its direct consequence, the perpetuation of our servitude. In my view, any male apostle of so-called nonviolence who is not committed, body and soul, to ending the violence against us is not trustworthy....he is someone to whon our lives are invisible." 5 Without the propaganda of the hero myth, murder is a sordid business. With the hero myth, any act of violence is made not only possible but inevitable: the rapist is transformed into the seducer, the tyrant rules by divine righ,t the terrorist reconsitiutes the hero. 6 At the moment of this writing- and, for that matter, at the moment of your reading - one third of a million women are in labor. 300,000 human beings are right now hunched over in contractions, screaming or whimpering or panting in pain. Most are anemic or malnourished, some are starving, most lack modern medical aid, some even lack village midwives, many are genitally mutilated by clitoridectomies or infibulations, many will die in childbirth, many will give birth to still born or anemic or drug addicted or diseased or deformed infants, some are mere children themselves, giving birth at age twelve, some are in labor with their 14th or 15th child. By this time tommorrow one third of a million women - sweat-drenched, blood streaked, exhausted, many only half alive, some dead in the effort - will have unlicked and released again "the flow of life into the body of the world." This is not regarded as an adventure. This is not termed the mission of the hero. This is merely "natural". 7 The sons, dispossessed, did have a choice: to bond with the fathers to crush the women or to ally themselves with the women against the tyranny of all phallic power, including their own. The sons, faithful to the penis, bonded with the fathers who had tried to kill them.... Only in this alliance could they find the social and political power that could compensate them for their waning virility. Only in this alliance could they gain access to the institutionalized brute force necessary to revenge themselves on the women who had left them. The perfect vehicle for forging this alliance was pornography. 8 "If we have any true love for the stars, planets, the rest of Creation, we must do everything we can to keep white men away from them. They who have appointed themselves our representatives to the rest of the universe. They who have never met any new creature without exploiting, abusing or destroying it . They who say we poor and colored and female and elderly blight neighborhoods, while they blight worlds. What they have done to the Old, they will do to the New. Under the white man every star would become a South Africa, every planet a Vietnam. Fatally irradiating ourselves may in fact be the only way to save others from what Earth has already become. And this is a condideration that I believe requires serious thought from every one of us. However, just as the sun shines on the godly and the ungoldy alike, so does nuclear radiation. And with this knowledge it becomes increasingly difficult to embrace the thought of extinction purely for the assumed satisfaction of it from the grave, achieving revenge. Or even of accepting our demise as a planet as a simple and just preventative medicine administered to the Universe. Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it. In any case, Earth is my home-though for centuries white people have tried to convince me I have no right to exist, except in the dirtiest, darkest corners of the globe. So let me tell you: I intend to protect my home. Praying-not a curse-only the hope that my courage will not fail my love. But if by some miracle, and all our struggle, the earth is spared, only justice to every living thing (and everything is alive) will save humankind. And we are not saved yet. ONLY JUSTICE CAN STOP A CURSE. 9 "Militarism consumes the strogest and most productive elements of each nation. Militarism swallows the largest part of the national revenue. Almost nothing is spent of education, art, literature and science compared with the amount devoted to militarism in times of peace, while in times of war everything else is set at naught; all life stagnates, all effort is curtailed; the very sweat and blood of the masses are used to feed this insatiable-militarism. Under such circumstances, it must become more arrogant, more aggressive, more bloated with its own importance. If for no other reason, it is our of suplus energy that milatrism must act to remain alive; therefore it will seek an enemy or create one artificilly. In this civilized purpose and method, militarism, is sustained by the state, protected by the laws of the land, forstered by the home and the school, and glorified by public opinion. In others words, the function of militarism is to kill. It cannot live except through murder. But the most iminant factor of miliary preparedness and the one which inevitably leads to war, is the creation of group interest which conscioulsy and deliberately work for the increase of armament whose purposes are furthered by creating the war hysteria. This group interest embraces all those involved in the manufacture and sale of munitions and in military equipment for personal gain and profit. 10 But even if we decide that patriarchal values are self-destructive, and must be changed, we find ourselves blocked. The insitiutions of any society funcion almost automatically to maintain that society as it is; and the ideology of any society functions to justify that status quo as being both necessary and beneficial. In capitalist and socialist states alike, enormous sums of money and great numbers of people are dependent upon the production of weapons. In each kind of state this situation is "justified" by ideology that emphasizes the threat posed by the otherkind of state; the moral argument is that amassing arms is necessary to protect a beneficial way of life. The ideology heightens the sense of conflict and fear, which in turn stimulates greater emphasis on defense, offense, and weaponry. This vicious cycle guarantees its own continuation: it is inconceivable that either side will stop or slow production of weapory without some massive worldwide intervention by citizens. 11 Twenty four multinations corporations dominate the nuclear industry in America and as the New York Times puts it, consitiutes "what may be the single most powerful business enterprise in history." Nineteen of these companies rank among the 150 largest in the U.S., and are closely associated with eight of the country's nine largest bank, its seven largest insurance companies, and many of its most important investment and law firms. These compaies exert tremendous influence over both political parties and our political system. A Harvard Business School energy project - among many others has shown that a national policy of conservation and solar energy would produce more jobs, create economic growth, and greater national security than nuclear energy. 12 Stratificaions, insistence on conformity, obedience and the unworthiness, the depravity of "man" have always characteriszed partriarchy, but now leaders are empowered by technology and industrialization, so patriarchal systems can reach clear across the globe and affect every creature on it. In this new and threateneing ambience, few people can maintain complacency; fear and mistrust color the lives even of the fortunate, the peaceable, and the relatively secure. 13 The intisutions of domonation play on that terror. We are threatened with loss of approval, esteem, even livlihood if we fail in their schools or on their jobs. If we directly confront their authority we must face the reality of their power to annihilate the power of the courts, the prisons, the guns. Every experience within an institution is a confrontation with the self hater on its home ground. The self hater within is not just an international institution, however, nor is it an international person. It is a thing that embodies the relationship of domination, it makes us victim and persecutor both. The monster is not just the agent sqeezing Joy to death; it is also her sense of helplessness, her conviction that she cannot win the battle. We dominate ourselves more thoroughly than institutions can. 14 "The possibility of changing a person's mental state without them realising it has spurred on the worlds intelligence sevices. A CIA memo commented that behavioural experiments could be used for enhancing consciousness or for re-arranging it. The theory is that if human brain waves can be turned to a different frequency, then it could be possible to change a person's mood, and ultimately their character. The CIA spent an estimated 10 million dollars on experiments with LSD and other mind expanding drugs inthe 60s in their MKULTRA or mind control programme. Published work of Mr Robert Becker of the USA talks of specific frequencies producing confusion, fear and anxiety. His unpublished work is said to include bizarre experiments in which he has disorientated other sceintists, changed their moods from elation to depression and to have shown that he can make fellow diner in a restaurant talk more loudly or quietly by emmitting a magnetic pulse from a device which looks like an ordinary wrist watch. Electromagnetic weapons are a new conept. They are here with us now. We can't imagine the destructive power of such things. 15 It is impossible to review the present state of the world and not percieve in the actions of humans the self-hatred, hatred of humanity itself, that is implicit in the origin of patriarchy. The need to transcend arises from hatred of that which must be transcended: for millennia that has been called "nature", as if our bodies created cruelty. By defining man as something man can never be, patriarchists betray a powerful impulse toward suicide, a drive to kill the real human in order to manufacture a "better". 16 Male discourse separates the sexual, emotional and personal from the workings of bureaucratic rationality. Women's experience makes clear that these areas are central in bureaucratic power structures. They are not marginal, nor are they a mere reminant from the past; it suits men to have this believed, for it means that a silence, an invisibilty is maintainted about male sexual power, which women for the most part accept as natural and inevitable. 17 Women in unison, are moving through despair to action, confronting the manifestations of violence in the world - angry international posturing, war games, rape. We want to end violence on planet Earth once and for all. We want reverberating internatioal threats to cease. We want neighborhood squabbles that turn into bloodbaths to stop. We want human behavior to reflect caring instead of fear. We want violence to be socially unacceptable. We want peace to be the norm. 18 Justice is not a passive notion. It requires dilegence, perserverance, awareness, work. We can't be innocent readers, paralysed by military mania, and bring about justice in the world. 19 1. It'll make a man out of you 2. Cheatham & Powell This Way Daybreak Comes New Society Press 1986 3. Zanotti, Barbara, Patriarchy: A State of War in Reveaving the Web 4. Warnock, Donna Patriarchy is a killer in Reweaving the Web 5. Dworkin, Andrea Redefining Nonviolence 6. Morgan, Robin The Demon Lover Norton 1989 7. ibid 8. Dworkin, Andrea Why so-called radical men love and need pornography in Letters from the War Zone 9. Walker, Alice in Reweaving the Web, Feminsm and Nonviolence New Society Press 1982 10. Goldman, Emma Red Emma Speaks 11. French, Marylin On Women Men and Morals 12. ibid 13. ibid 14. We dominate ourselves more 15. Beasley, Kim Spare Rib Reader, Pandora Press 1987 16. Create a better 17. Quote written in a diary, opps! no details..at least im honest 18. This Way Daybreak Comes 19. ibid