Andrea Dworkin, The Fairy Tales from her first feminist classic, Woman Hating

What follows was found online, with Andrea's last name spelled wrong and some formatting problems, some of which remain, some of which were corrected here by me. The original location, of course, is in Andrea's first feminist book, Woman Hating (Plume, 1974). The online version I found is from *here*.

For an EXCELLENT feminist discussion of the book, please see, from the blog LonerGrrrl, this post titled Re-reading Andrea Dworkin's 'Woman Hating'. In that post, LonerGrrrl revisits some important points from Dworkin's introduction on the necessity of radical feminism contending with gender, sexuality, race, and class. She also discusses to what degrees the book accomplishes this intersectional approach to understanding the condition of women's oppression. And she corrects flawed analysis of the book promoted later in the Academy. Thank you, LonerGrrrl!

For excerpts from other sections of Woman Hating, please see this website: http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/WomanHating.html, which also links to other writings by Andrea Dworkin, including from other books, speeches, and essays. With gratitude to Andrea Dworkin and especially Nikki Craft for making those writings so available to anyone with access to an internet connection. Thank you so very much, Nikki!

And now, let's venture back into the patriarchal life of Western Fairy Tales.

Andrea Dworkin, The Fairy Tales, 1974. 1. You cannot be free if you are contained within a fiction Julian Beck, The Life of Theatre Once upon a time there was a wicked with and her name was Lilith Eve Hagar Jezebel Delilah Pandora Jahi Tamar And there was a wicked with and she was also called goddess and her name was Kali Fatima Artemis Hera Isis Mary Ishtar And there was a wicked with and she was also called queen and her name was Bathsheba Vashti Cleopatra Helen Salome Elizabeth Clytemnestra Medea And there was a wicked witch and she was also called witch and her name was Joan Circe Morgan le Fay Tiamat Maria Leonza Medusa And they had this in common: that they were feared, hated, desired and worshipped. When one enters the world of fairy tales one seeks with difficulty for the actual place where legend and history part. One wants to locate the precise moment when fiction penetrates into the psyche as reality, and history begins to mirror it. Or vice versa. Women live if fairy tale as magical figures, as beauty, danger, innocence, malice and greed. On the personae of the fairy tale - the wicked witch, the beautiful princess, the heroic prince - we find what the culture would have us know about who we are. The point is that we have not formed that ancient world - it has formed us. We ingested it as children whole, had its values and consciousness imprinted on our minds as cultural absolutes long before we were in fact men and women. We have taken the fairy tales of childhood with us into maturity, chewed but still lying in the stomach, as real identity. Between Snow White and her heroic prince, our two great fictions, we never did have much of a chance. At some point, the Great Divide took place: they (the boys) dreamed of mounting the Great Steed and buying Snow White from the dwarfs; we (the girls) aspired to become that object of every necrophiliac's lust - the innocent, victimized, Sleeping-Beauty, beauteous lump of ultimate, sleeping   good. Despite ourselves, sometimes unknowingly, sometimes knowing, unwilling, unable to do otherwise, we act out the roles we were taught. Here is the beginning, where we learn who we must be, as well as the moral of the story. 1. Onceuponatime: The Roles Death is that remedy all singers dream of Allen Ginsberg The culture predetermines who we are, how we behave, what we are willing to know, what we are able to feel. We are born into a sex role which is determined by visible sex, or gender. We follow explicit scenarios of passage from birth into youth into maturity into old age, and then we die. In the process of adhering to sex roles, as a direct consequence of the imperatives of those roles, we commit homicide, suicide and genocide. Death is our only remedy. We imagine heaven. There is no suffering there, we say.  There is no sex there, we say. We mean, there is no culture there. We mean, there is no gender there. We dream that death will release us from suffering - from guilt, sex, the body. We recognize the body as the source of our suffering. We dream of a death that will mean freedom from it because here on earth, in our bodies, we are fragmented, anguished - either men or women, bound by the very fact of a particularized body to a role which is annihilating, totalitarian, which forbids us any real self-becoming or self-realization. Fairy tales are the primary information of the culture. They delineate the roles, interactions and values which are available to us. They are our childhood models, and their fearful, dreadful content terrorizes us into submission - if we do not become good, then evil will destroy us; if we do not achieve the happy ending, then we will drown in the chaos. As we grow up, we forget the terror - the wicked witches and their smothering malice. We remember romantic paradigms: the heroic prince kisses Sleeping Beauty; the heroic prince searches his kingdom for Cinderella; the heroic prince marries Snow White. But the terror remains as the substratum of male-female relation - the terror remains, and we do not ever recover from it or cease to be motivated by it. Grown men are terrified of the wicked witch, internalized in the deepest parts of memory. Women are no less terrified, for we know that not to be passive, innocent and helpless is to be actively evil. Terror, then, is our real theme. The mother as figure of terror Whether "instinctive" or not, the maternal role in the sexual constitution originates in the fact that only the woman is necessarily present at birth. Only the woman has a dependable and easily identifiable connection to the child - a tie on which society can rely. This maternal feeling is the root of human community. George Gilder Sexual Suicide. Snow White's biological mother was a passive, good queen who sat at her window and did embroidery. She pricked her finger one day - no doubt an event in her life - and 3 drops of blood fell from it onto the snow. Somehow that led her to wish for a child "as white as the snow; as red as blood, and as black as the wood of the embroidery frame. " Soon after, she had a daughter with "skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood, and hair as black as ebony." Then, she died. A year later the king married again.  His new wife was beautiful, greedy, and proud. She was , in fact, ambitious and recognized that beauty was coin in the male realm, that beauty translated directly into power because it meant male admiration, male alliance, male devotion. The new queen had a magic mirror and she would ask it" "Looking glass upon the wall, Who is fairest of us all?"  And, inevitably, the queen was the fairest )had there been anyone fairer, we can presume the king would have married her). One day the queen asked her mirror who the fairest was and the mirror answered: "Queen, you are full fair, 'tis true, but Snow White fairer is than you." Snow White was seven years old. The queen became "yellow and green with envy and from that hour her heart turned against Snow White, and she hated her. And envy and pride like ill weeds grew in her heart higher every day, until she had no peace…" Now, we all know what nations will do to achieve peace, and the queen was no less resourceful (she would have made an excellent head of state). She ordered a huntsman to take Snow White to the forest, kill her, and bring back her heart. The huntsman, an uninspired good guy, could not kill the sweet young thing, so he turned her loose in the forest, killed a boar, and took its heart back to the queen. The heart was "salted and cooked, and the wicked woman ate it up, thinking that there was an end of Snow White." Snow White found her way to the home of the 7 dwarfs, who told her that she could stay with them "if you will keep our house for us, and cook, and wash, and make the beds, and sew and knit, and keep everything tidy and clean." They simply adored her. The queen, who can now be called with conviction the wicked queen, found out from her mirror that Snow White was still alive and fairer than she. She tried several times to kill Snow White, who fell into numerous deep sleeps but never quite died. Finally, the wicked queen made a poisoned apple and induced the ever-vigilant Snow White to bit into it. Snow White did die, or became more dead than usual, because the wicked queen's mirror then verified that she was the fairest in the land. The dwarfs, who loved Snow White, could not bear to bury her under the ground, so they enclosed her in a glass coffin and put the coffin on a mountaintop. The heroic prince was just passing that way, immediately fell in love with Snow-white-under-glass and bought her (it?) from the dwarfs who loved her (it?). As servants carried the coffin along behind the prince's horse, the piece of poisoned apple that Snow White had swallowed "flew out of her throat." She soon revived fully, that is to say, not much. The prince placed her squarely in the "it" category, and marriage in its proper perspective, too, when he proposed wedded bliss -- "I would rather have you than anything in the world." The wicked queen was invited to the wedding, which she attended because the mirror told her that the bride was fairer than she. At the wedding "they had ready red-hot iron shoes in which she had to dance until she fell down dead." Cinderella's mother-situation was the same.  Her biological mother was good, pious, passive and soon dead.  Her step-mother was greedy, ambitious and ruthless. Her ambition dictated that her own daughters make good marriages. Cinderella meanwhile, was forced to do heavy domestic work, and when her work was done her stepmother would throw lentils into the ashes and make Cinderella separate the lentils fro the ashes. The stepmother's malice toward Cinderella was not free-floating and irrational. On the contrary, her own social validation was contingent on the marriages she made for her own daughters. Cinderella was a real threat to her.  Like Snow White's stepmother, for whom beauty was power and to be the most beautiful was to be the most powerful, Cinderella's stepmother knew how the social structure operated, and she was determined to succeed on its terms. Cinderella's stepmother was presumably motivated by maternal love for her own biological offspring. Maternal love is known to be transcendent, holy, noble and unselfish. It is coincidentally also a fundament of human (male0dominated) civilization and it is the real basis of human (male-dominated) sexuality: When the prince began to search for the woman whose foot would fit the golden slipper, the two sisters were very glad, because they had pretty feet. The eldest went to her room to try on the shoe, and her mother stood by. But she could not get her great toe into it, for the shoe was too small; her mother handed her a knife, and said: "Cut off the toe, for when you are queen you will never have to go on foot." So the girl cut her toe off and squeezed her foot into the shoe, concealed the pain, and went down to the prince. Then he took her with him on his horse as his bride… Then the prince looked at her shoe, and saw the blood flowing. And he turned his horse round and took the false bride home again, saying that she was not the right one, and that the other sister must try on the shoe. So she went into her room to do so, and got her toes comfortably in, but her heel was too large. Then her mother handed her the knife saying "Cut a piece off your heel; when you are queen you will never have to go on foot."                 So the girl cut off a piece of her heel, and thrust her foot into the shoe, concealed the pain, and went down to the prince, who took his bride….                 Then the prince looked at her foot, and saw how the blood was flowing… Cinderella's stepmother understood correctly that her only real work in life was to marry off her daughters. Her goal was upward mobility, and her ruthlessness was consonant with the values of the market place.*  She loved her daughters the way Nixon loves the freedom of the Indochinese, and with much the same result. Love in a male-dominated society certainly is a many-splendored thing.  *This depiction of woman as flesh on an open market, or crippling and mutilation for the sake of a making a good marriage is not fiction. cf chapter 6 Gynocide: Chinese footbinding. Rapunzel's mother wasn't exactly a winner either.  She had a maternal instinct all right - she had "long wished for a child, but in vain." Sometime during her wishing, she developed a craving for rampion, a vegetable which grew in the garden of her neighbor and peer, the witch. She persuaded her husband to steal rampion from the witch's garden, and each day she craved more. When the witch discovered the theft, she made this offer …you may have as much rampion as you like, on one condition 0 the child that will come into the world must be given to me.  It shall go well with the child, and I will care for it like a mother." Mama didn't think twice - she traded. Rapunzel for a vegetable. Rapunzel's surrogate mother, the witch, did not do much better by her: When she was twelve years old the witch shut her up in a tower in the midst of a wood, and it had neither steps nor door, only a small window above. When the witch wished to be let in, she would stand below and cry, "Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair!" The heroic prince, having finished with Snow White and Cinderella, now happened upon Rapunzel. When the witch discovered the liaison, she beat up Rapunzel, cut off her hair, and cloistered her "in a waste and desert place, where she lived in great woe and misery."  The witch then confronted the prince, who fell from the tower and blinded himself on thorns. (He recovered when he found Rapunzel, and they lived happily ever after.) Hansel and Gretel had a mother, too. She simply abandoned them: I will tell you what, husband… we will take the children early in the morning into the forest where it is thickest; we will make them a fire, and we will give each a piece of bread, then we will go to our work and leave them alone; they will never find the way home again, and we shall be quit of them" Hungry, lost, frightened, the children find a candy house which belongs to an old lady who is kind to them, feeds them, houses them. She greets them as her children, and proves her maternal commitment by preparing to cannibalize them. These fairy tale mothers are mythological female figures. They define for us the female character and delineate its existential possibilities. When she is good, she is soon dead. In fact, when she is good, she is so passive in life that death must be only more of the same. Here we discover the cardinal principle of sexist ontology - the only good woman is a dead woman. When she is bad she lives, or when she lives she is bad. She ahs one real function, motherhood. In that function, because it is active, she is characterized by overwhelming malice, devouring greed, uncontainable avarice. She is ruthless, brutal, ambitious, a danger to children and other living things.  Whether called mother, queen stepmother or wicked witch, she is the wicked witch, the content of nightmare, the source of terror. The Beauteous Lump of Ultimate Good What can it do? It grows It bleeds, it sleeps It walks it talks Singing, "love's got me, got me." Kathleen Norris For a woman to be good, she must be dead. Catatonia is the good woman's most winning quality. Sleeping Beauty slept for 100 years, after pricking her finger on a spindle. The kiss of the heroic prince woke her. He fell in love with her while she was asleep, or was it because she was asleep? Snow White was already dead when the heroic prince fell in love with her. "I beseech you," he pleaded with the 7 dwarfs. "to give it to me, for I cannot live without looking upon Snow White." It wake was not readily distinguishable from it asleep. Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Rapunzel - all are  characterized by passivity, beauty, innocence and victimization.  They are archetypal good women - victims by definition. They never think, act, initiate, confront, resist, challenge, feel, care or question. Sometimes they are forced to do housework. They have one scenario of passage. They are moved, as if inert, from the house of the mother to the house of the prince.  First they are objects of malice, then they are objects of romantic adoration. They do nothing to warrant either. That one other figure of female good, the good fairy, appears from time to time, dispensing clothes or virtue.  Her power cannot match, only occasionally moderate, the power of the wicked witch. She does have one physical activity at which she excels - she waves her wand. She is beautiful, good and unearthly. Mostly she disappears. These figures of female good are heroic models available to women. And the end of the story is, it would seem, the goal of female life. To sleep, perchance to dream? The Prince, the Real Brother The man of flesh and bone; the man who Is born, suffers, and dies - above all, who Dies; the man who east and drinks and Plays and sleeps and thinks and wills; the Man who is seen and heard; the brother, The real brother. Miguel de Unamuno Tragic Sense of Life He is handsome and heroic. He is a prince, that is, he is powerful, noble and good. He rides a horse. He travels far and wide. He has a mission, a purpose. Inevitably he fulfills it. He is a person of worth and a worthwhile person. He is strong and true. Of course, he is not real, and men do suffer trying to become him. They suffer, and murder, and rape, and plunder. They use airplanes now. What matters is that he is both powerful and good, that his power is by definition good. What matters is that he matters, acts, succeeds. One can point out that in fact he is not very bright. For instance, he cannot distinguish Cinderella from her two sisters even though he danced with her and presumably conversed with her. His recurring love of corpses does not indicate a dynamic intelligence either. His fall fro the tower onto thorns does not suggest that he is even physically coordinated, though, unlike his modern counterparts, he never falls off his horse or annihilates the wrong village. The truth is that he is powerful and good when contrasted with her. The badder she is, the better he is. The deader she is, the better he is. That is one moral of the story, the reason for the dual role definition, and the shabby reality of man as hero.  The husband, the real father The desire of men to claim their children may be the crucial impulse of civilized life George Gilder, Sexual Suicide Mostly they are kings, or noble, or rich.  They are aging, by definition, powerful and good. They are never responsible or held accountable for the evil done by their wicked wives. Most of the time, they do not notice it. There is, of course, no rational basis for considering them either powerful or good. For while they are governing, or kinging, or whatever it is that they do, their wives are slaughtering and abusing their beloved progeny. But then, in some cultures nonfairy-tale fathers simply had their female children killed at birth. Cinderella's father saw her every day.  He saw her picking lentils out of the ashes, dressed in rags, degraded, insulted.  He was a good man.   The father of Hansel and Gretel also had a good heart. When his wife proposed to him that they abandon the children in the forest to starve he protested immediately "But I really pity the poor children." When Hansel and Gretel finally escaped the witch and found their way home "they  rushed in at the door and fell at the father's neck. The man had not had a quiet hour since he left his children in the wood (Hansel, after all, was a boy) but the wife was dead."' Do not misunderstand  - they did not forgive him, for there was nothing to forgive. All  malice  originated with  the woman. He was a good man. Thought eh fairy tale father marries the evil woman in the first place, has no emotional connection with his child, does not interact in any meaningful way with he, abandons her and worse does not notice when she is dead and gone, he is a figure of male good. He is the patriarch, and as such he is beyond moral law and human decency. The roles available to women and men are clearly articulated in fairy tales. The characters are vividly described, and so are the modes of relationship possible bwteen them. We see that powerful women are bad, that good women are inert. We see that men are always good, no matter what they do, or do not do. We also have an explicit rendering of the nuclear family  In that family, a mother's love is destructive, murderous. In that family, dauighters are objects, expendable. The nuclear family, as we find it delineated in fairy tales, is a paradigm of male being-in-the-world, female evil and female victimization. It is a crystallization of sexist culture - the nuclear structure of that culture.   2. Onceuponatime:  The Moral of the Story Fuck that to death, the dead are holy, Honor the sisters of your friends. Pieces of ass, a piece of action, Pieces. The loneliest of mornings Something mopes about in the mirror. A slave's trick, survival. I remember thinking, our last time: If you killed me, I would die. Kathleen Norris I cannot live without my life.              Emily Bronte   The lessons are simple, and we learn them well. Men and women are different, absolute opposites. The heroic prince can never be confused with Cinderella, or Snow White or Sleeping beauty. She could never do what he does at all, let alone better. Men and women are different, absolute opposites. The good father an never be confused with the bad mother. Their qualities are different, polar. Where he is erect, she is supine. Where he is awake, she is asleep. Where he is active, she is passive.  Where she is erect, or awake, or active, she is evil and must be destroyed. It is, structurally at least, that simple. She is desirable in her beauty, passivity and victimization. She is desirable because she is beautiful, passive and victimized. Her other persona, the evil mother, is repulsive in her cruelty. She is repulsive and must be destroyed. She is the female protagonist, the nonmale source of power which must be defeated, obliterated before male power can fully flower. She is repulsive because she is evil. She is evil because she acts. She, the evil persona, is a cannibal. Cannibalism is repulsive. She is devouring and magical. She is devouring and the male must not be devoured. There are two definitions of woman. There is the good woman. She is a victim. There is the bad woman. She must be destroyed. The good woman must be possessed. The bad woman must be killed or punished. Both must be nullified. The bad woman must be punished, and if she is punished enough, she will become good. To be punished enough is to be destroyed. There is the good woman. She is the victim. The posture of victimization, the passivity of the victim demands abuse. Women strive for passivity, because women want to be good. The abuse evoked by passivity convinces women they are bad. The bad need to be punished, destroyed, so that they can become good. Even a woman who strives conscientiously for passivity sometimes does something. That she acts at all provokes abuse. The abuse provoked by that activity convinces her that she is bad. The bad need to be punished, destroyed, so that they can become good. The moral of the story should, one would think, preclude a happy ending. It does not. The moral of the story is the happy ending.  It tells us that happiness for a woman is to be passive, victimized, destroyed, or asleep. It tells us that happiness is for the woman who is good - inert, passive, victimized - and that a good woman is a happy woman. It tells us that the happy ending is when we are ended, when we live without our lives or not at all.

Dr. Laura, Dr. Oz, and Dr. Phil: one of the three "get it" about White Het Male Supremacist Abuse and Terrorism: can you guess which one?

photo of Dr. Mehmet Oz is from here

photo of Dr. Phil McGraw is from here

These are two white het male doctors who owe their fame and great financial success to Oprah Winfrey: Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz. (We get to Dr. Laura shortly.)

The first man, who has a PhD in Clinical Psychology, supported her during a trial the commercial/atrocity-protecting meat industry put her through for simply stating her own point of view on the subject of burgers. The second is am M.D. who is a heart surgeon and is a proponent of complimentary medicine, to promote several less invasive methods of treating heart disease. He's also more infamously known for showing Oprah's audiences deceased humans' diseased organs and talking about healthy pooping. He's got some very good things to say--generally I like him and his style, and he's got a good bed-side manner, unless you're a battered woman in a hospital bed, that is. I also sometimes like Dr. Phil, when he isn't using his television series to exploit conditions and people and instead sincerely tries to alleviate human suffering, usually in the context of personal relationships. While I've seen Dr. Phil hold men accountable for the violence they do to women, I've never seen Dr. Oz do this.

I realise he didn't study sociology, social psychology, or the sexual politics of psychopathology, but Dr. Oz couldn't be more clueless about the reality and dynamics of men's war against women. He actually discusses inner brain structure to explain why it may be that some women kill their terrorist husbands or battering boyfriends. He doesn't seem to get that women who are terrorised and sadistically abused do not usually kill anyone, while the terrorists often kill a whole lot of people: most commonly the women in their lives, the women who leave them, and their children, in disgustingly horrid ways. But Dr. Oz's brain structure discussion isn't about THE TERRORISTS. He's concerned about the brain structures of the TERRORISED WOMEN who [usually don't] kill. What are the sexual politics of THAT?

In a case linked to below, he tries to explain to the audience why a woman guest may have killed the male terrorist in her life. He is wrong at every turn, and fortunately he has another "expert" guest on to set the audience clear on what is really going on. Unfortunately, it is yet another white man. (To be clear: Dr. Oz's family's background is Eastern European and Turkish. Dr. Phil is all white.) How it is that white and light-skinned het men have become the people women should turn to for expert advice on anything and everything, is a trick of the trades called WHM supremacist media and education. What undermines feminist knowledge and activists, scholars and doctors, is the owners and producers of mass media talk shows refusing to make women of any color the experts in matters that impact women--and men.

Well, there IS Dr. Laura, who has a PhD in physiology--which is not at all why she's on the air. At least Dr. Oz and Dr. Phil are discussing matters that usually fall within their own educational areas of study. She gives anti-woman, overtly racist, anti-gay relationship advice. She's way more WHM supremacist than Dr. Phil or Dr. Oz in her public advice. She should be removed from the airwaves. Immediately, as she should have been years ago for calling "homosexuals" deviant.

photo of Dr. Laura Schlessinger is from here

She is in the news this week for her arrogantly privileged racist-misogynist assault against a Black woman caller who wanted wise counsel on how to deal with a white husband who, along with his friends, makes racist remarks in front of her. He obviously enjoys trying to humiliate her. Would Dr. Laura pick up on that? Well...

Dr. Laura used the question--while berating and abusing the questioner--as an opportunity to pretend that THE ISSUE is African Americans who are the problem population who uses the n-word and COMPLAIN when whites do the same. Dr. Laura managed to work the word into her radio show eleven times in way fewer minutes than that. The caller, understandably, was totally taken aback and very respectfully attempted to call Dr. Laura's attention to the problem of turning this problem back on a Black woman, which only led Dr. Laura to intensify her own vitriolic volume, utterly silencing the woman seeking wise counsel. Dr. Laura understood the caller's predicament about as well as Dr. Oz understands why [very few] women kill terroristic men. NOT. AT. ALL.

While I think Dr. Phil makes mistakes many times with regard to appropriate forms of advocacy for women-in-patriarchy, too often presuming a kind of level playing field that patriarchal societies will never let exist, I'll say this: he's way ahead of where Dr. Oz and Dr. Laura will probably ever be on the matter of understanding that far too many men terrorise and grotesquely abuse women--and that men's use of physical violence is NEVER the women's fault! Proof of this difference between the two male doctors is in very intense (and potentially very triggering) programs each recently did about the subject of domestic violence leading to murder.

Dr. Oz's show wasn't about patriarchal abuse. It was about how the brain sometimes doesn't work right so some people cannot moderate their violent impulses. And he means women's violent impusles, not men's!

Dr. Phil's program was a VERY good program, if also deeply disturbing and triggering, about the FAILURE of FAMILY COURTS across the U.S. when it comes to adequately protecting children and women from adult male terrorists. His show centered around one case, in which a woman's baby was murdered by her ex- and the baby's father, after she repeatedly went to the court for orders of protection for herself and the baby--each time she was told by the white het male misogynistic judge that she was lying and had no evidence, even when she brought evidence. But there was another interview he did with a teenaged young woman who is a survivor of incest and witnessed a court give custody of her little sister to the incest perpetrator, after she testified about his abuse of her. Yes. It happened. The audience was also filled with women who had similar stories to tell, which appeared to have a VERY supportive effect on anyone who spoke out on this horrendous issue of VIRULENT PATRIARCHAL PREDATION PROTECTIONISM in family courts across the country.

What gets revealed is that the terrorists and their attorneys, along with generally misogynistic society, have effectively convinced the courts to not believe mothers if they raise "domestic violence" as a factor in why those mothers should get custody of their children, not the fathers. Even the women's attorneys are counseling women to not bring up the fact that the ex-husband is a batterer or incest perpetrator because too many judges hear that as a big ol' lie--an allegedly sure sign that the woman is trying to manipulate the court against the interests of the fathers' "right" to have more access to their children. When it comes to court manipulation, however, look no further than the battering, raping, incesting men and their attorneys, who convince the courts that the lack of evidence presented means they aren't sadistic brutes. In this case, the rule "presumed innocent until proven guilty" cannot apply, because no one's attorney will let the proof into the courtroom to begin with.

This is the case across the white het male supremacist globe, from the U.S., to the UK, to Australia. That there are WHM organising to undermine women's credibility in the courtroom even more is despicable and evil. There's nothing loving or just about such efforts by these misogynazis (fascistic, terrorising woman-haters) at all.

To note how this impacts U.S. women, compare these two episodes of programs that, one would hope, are supporting both physical/emotional health and human rights:

Dr. Oz: http://www.doctoroz.com/videos/tuesday-dr-oz

vs.

Dr. Phil: http://www.drphil.com/shows/show/1442/ 

But I cannot write about Dr. Phil without noting this CLEAR FORM OF MISOGYNY he regularly engages in. HE REFUSES TO STOP SAYING THE B WORD WHEN REFERRING TO WOMEN, and as an adjective (b-word with a y at the end). He a conservative guy, socially-politically, in many ways, and doesn't welcome cursing on his show, generally. I'm not sure you can get away with saying ASS on his show without it being bleeped! But he says the b word like it's going out of style, which of course it won't while he and other major media personalities keep legitimising it on TV. Please write to him and ask him why that's the only derogatory curse term he allows on his show.

And visit *here* for more on the Dr. Laura story of the week. TRIGGER WARNING for OVERTLY RACIST LANGUAGE AND GROSS MISTREATMENT OF A BLACK WOMAN BY A WHITE WOMAN.

Reality-check: U.S. Government and TIME are Selling More Big Lies about Afghanistan (there's nothing good for Aghan women about U.S. invasion and occupation)

All that follows is from RAWA's website *here*.


France. 24, Aug. 1, 2010: Malalai Joya, a leading Afghan activist for women's rights and politican who featured among Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people in 2010, spoke out against what she calls the manipulation of public opinion over the plight of Afghan women: There is no doubt that the Taliban are misogynist barbarians but the US can be a good match for them for the war crimes that it has committed in these nine years, killing around 8,000 civilians in their military operations.

[From what follows beyond the excerpts:]

The people with blood on their hands are the U.S. military and the politicians who continue to support and fund the war--and their cheerleaders in the mainstream media.


[...]

Time magazine made the point starkly on the cover of this week's edition--it features a photo of a young Afghan woman named Aisha whose nose and ears were cut off by her Taliban husband after she ran away from him. "What happens if we leave Afghanistan?" reads the headline.

There's something unspeakably cynical about Time's use of such a heart-wrenching image in a calculated attempt to gloss over the cold facts revealed by WikiLeaks and others about the violence and devastation that the U.S. occupation is inflicting in Afghanistan.

In fact, the young woman pictured on the Time cover was mutilated not in the "long ago" days of Taliban rule, but last year, when tens of thousands of U.S. "liberators" were occupying her country.

[...]

FOR MORE than a century, every imperial conquest carried out by the U.S. has been cloaked in more noble and palatable terms. Political leaders talk about "justice" and "liberty" and "democracy," rather than the truth--conquest, colonization and exploitation.

The victims of the American empire don't have any difficulties seeing through the rhetoric. Like Samia, a 26-year-old woman who participated in a demonstration of hundreds of Afghans on August 1 in Kabul. The protesters directed their anger at both the Taliban and the U.S. In particular, they were demonstrating about a deadly traffic accident in late July involving an SUV driven by DynCorp International contractors that killed four Afghans.

As Samia told the Washington Post:

Many times, NATO troops and these cars have killed our innocent people. They never care whether we are Afghans or animals. We want NATO troops and American troops to leave Afghanistan. Even with their huge army, they couldn't do anything in the past 10 years. And in the future, they won't be able to do anything. The result will be just death and casualties, and our innocent Afghan women and children will die.

Selling the big lie

Aided by a compliant media, the Obama administration and Pentagon officials are trying to spin a new crop of lies about the necessity of war to "liberate" the Afghan people.


AS MORE revelations about the brutality and barbarism of the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan emerge, the Obama administration and the Pentagon are countering the truth with more lies--and a shameful public relations offensive aimed at passing off endless war as "liberation."

Meanwhile, the voices of ordinary Afghans--and the toll of the U.S. war on their lives--are being ignored by politicians and the media alike.

The release of nearly 92,000 classified documents relating to the war by the WikiLeaks Web site has helped expose the facts about the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan.

For one thing, they reveal the extent to which Washington's war, now the longest ever fought by the U.S., has done what seemed impossible a few years ago--rehabilitate the image of the Taliban, the country's formerly despised ex-rulers. The WikiLeaks documents also reveal the terrible impact on ordinary Afghans--subjected to indiscriminate bombings, massacres by U.S. soldiers, and rampant corruption by U.S.-installed stooges.

But the Obama administration and the military is responding to these facts with lies.

First, they claimed that the documents didn't matter because they only covered the period up to December 2009--before Obama's "surge" strategy went into effect. Then, the line was that the WikiLeaks information was "old news" that didn't reveal anything new about the war.

When it became clear that those explanations were falling on deaf ears, the White House and Pentagon escalated. They now accuse those who leaked the documents of endangering the lives of both U.S. military personnel and Afghan civilians who may have worked with coalition forces. "The truth is [those who leaked the information] might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family," said Adm. Michael Mullen, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

In other words, accuse the messenger of murder.

Salon.com's Glenn Greenwald wasn't alone in pointing out that the WikiLeak documents weren't responsible for putting Afghans at risk, but rather "ten years of bombings, air raids, checkpoint shootings [and] drones." Add to that the Obama administration's green light to a new surge of combat forces and stepped-up "targeted assassinations."

The people with blood on their hands are the U.S. military and the politicians who continue to support and fund the war--and their cheerleaders in the mainstream media.

Just how craven has the media response been? On the Washington Post Web site, former Bush administration speechwriter and torture proponent Marc Thiessen called--literally--for war on WikiLeaks founder Julien Assange.

"Assange is a non-U.S. citizen operating outside the territory of the United States," Thiessen claimed. "This means the government has a wide range of options for dealing with him. It can employ not only law enforcement but also intelligence and military assets to bring Assange to justice and put his criminal syndicate out of business."

Thiessen went on to argue that the U.S. has the legal authority to kidnap "Assange or his co-conspirators anywhere in the world," even if such a kidnapping violates international law.

This begs the question: Does Thiessen think the U.S. ought to use Predator drones against Assange? Or perhaps a Navy SEALS assassination team?

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

FOR THOSE who aren't convinced that Julian Assange is responsible for all war-related deaths in Afghanistan, the political-media establishment is sending another message--that the leakers are obstructing the U.S. from all the good it's doing in Afghanistan.

Time magazine made the point starkly on the cover of this week's edition--it features a photo of a young Afghan woman named Aisha whose nose and ears were cut off by her Taliban husband after she ran away from him. "What happens if we leave Afghanistan?" reads the headline.

There's something unspeakably cynical about Time's use of such a heart-wrenching image in a calculated attempt to gloss over the cold facts revealed by WikiLeaks and others about the violence and devastation that the U.S. occupation is inflicting in Afghanistan.

In fact, the young woman pictured on the Time cover was mutilated not in the "long ago" days of Taliban rule, but last year, when tens of thousands of U.S. "liberators" were occupying her country.

The U.S. has failed utterly to marginalize the Taliban since they were toppled at the end of 2001--on the contrary, support for the Taliban has only grown with the crisis of the occupation. What's more, the U.S.-backed regime in Kabul is dependent on support from warlords whose behavior toward women is every bit as savage as the Taliban, as even U.S. officials admit in their honest moments.

But all this seems to have escaped the U.S. media. On her first show as the new host of ABC's This Week, for example, Christiane Amanpour thrust the Time cover at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and demanded: "Look, Time magazine, this week, has this as its cover--a girl whose had her nose and ears cut off by the Taliban. You know, to put it right down to its basics, is America going to abandon the women of Afghanistan, the people of Afghanistan again?"

Pelosi responded: "Well, first of all, we're in Afghanistan because it's in our strategic national interests to be so, for our own national security, to stop terrorism, to increase global security. The women of Afghanistan have been a priority for many of the women in Congress--and men, too, but the women have taken a special interest."

It's true. The women of Afghanistan have been a "priority"--every time U.S. leaders need a rationale for staying in Afghanistan or a claim of what the war has accomplished to counter the overwhelming evidence of destruction suffered by ordinary Afghans.

But it is a false claim. Women in Afghanistan have not been liberated--on the contrary, they continue to suffer terrible oppression at the hands of the U.S.-backed regime and its warlord allies.

In fact, Pelosi's first sentence contained the truth of why the Obama administration remains committed to staying in Afghanistan--because it's "in our strategic national interest."

Time isn't alone in having suddenly "rediscovered" the question of women's rights at a moment of crisis for the occupation. It was a favorite topic for the right-wing, anti-women Bush administration in the early days of the war, and it has been a popular excuse for liberals to climb on the pro-war bandwagon.

And the same goes, apparently, for the CIA. As Luncinda Marshall of the Feminist Peace Network pointed out, one of the WikiLeaks documents is a CIA memo citing flagging support for the war among NATO allies, including Germany and France--and it includes a section titled "Appeals by President Obama and Afghan Women Might Gain Traction."

The memo states: "Afghan women could serve as ideal messengers in humanizing the [International Security Assistance Force] role in combating the Taliban because of women's ability to speak personally and credibly about their experiences under the Taliban, their aspirations for the future, and their fears of a Taliban victory."

As Marshall writes, "Whether it is possible that Time published this piece as a concerted part of a government public relations effort is not clear, and I'm not suggesting that it was, although it should certainly be investigated. But what is clear is that such a campaign exists with callous disregard of the human rights of Afghan women or respect for a free press."

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

FOR MORE than a century, every imperial conquest carried out by the U.S. has been cloaked in more noble and palatable terms. Political leaders talk about "justice" and "liberty" and "democracy," rather than the truth--conquest, colonization and exploitation.

The victims of the American empire don't have any difficulties seeing through the rhetoric. Like Samia, a 26-year-old woman who participated in a demonstration of hundreds of Afghans on August 1 in Kabul. The protesters directed their anger at both the Taliban and the U.S. In particular, they were demonstrating about a deadly traffic accident in late July involving an SUV driven by DynCorp International contractors that killed four Afghans.

As Samia told the Washington Post:

Many times, NATO troops and these cars have killed our innocent people. They never care whether we are Afghans or animals. We want NATO troops and American troops to leave Afghanistan. Even with their huge army, they couldn't do anything in the past 10 years. And in the future, they won't be able to do anything. The result will be just death and casualties, and our innocent Afghan women and children will die.

Samia is right. The U.S. war on Afghanistan won't bring "liberation"--not to women or anyone else--because it is fundamentally about ensuring and expanding U.S. power in the region, not delivering democracy to people who are seen as expendable by U.S. rulers.

As Malalai Joya, a former member of the Afghan parliament who was thrown out for challenging the U.S.-backed regime, said in a speech in New York City last year:

From the sky, the bombs of the occupation forces are falling, killing civilians. And on the ground, there is the Taliban, and also these warlords. So we have three kinds of enemies. But the withdrawal of one enemy--these U.S. occupation forces whose government sends them for war, and that also support the corrupt mafia system of Hamid Karzai with more money and guys--will make it much easier to fight the enemies that are left...

No nation can bring liberation to another nation. These are nations that can liberate themselves. The nations that pose themselves as liberators to others will lead them into slavery. What we have experienced in Afghanistan and in Iraq proves this point.

Category: US-NATO, HR Violations, Corruption

Related 30.07.2010: The terrible truth about the “good war”
28.07.2010: Afghanistan leak exposes NATO’s incoherent civilian casualty policy
28.07.2010: Helmand residents accuse NATO of deliberate attack on civilians killing 52
24.07.2010: 40 innocent civilians killed, 34 injured by US air strikes in Helmand
24.07.2010: Seven children injured in Helmand airstrike
10.07.2010: NATO says “errant rounds” killed six Afghan civilians
28.06.2010: Police official says eight Afghan civilians killed in NATO raid
17.05.2010: Civilian Casualties Raise Afghan Ire at U.S.
14.05.2010: Afghans protest against NATO, say 12 civilians killed
13.05.2010: Afghans protest against “refugee executions” in Iran
25.04.2010: Protestors burn 16 NATO tankers in Logar to protest killing of civilains
23.04.2010: Killing of Five Afghan Civilians by US Troops Sparks Protest in Logar
22.04.2010: Afghanistan War ‘A Waste of Blood and Treasure’
22.04.2010: No friendly waves only hatred for British troops in Afghan town
21.04.2010: The Politics of Counting Dead Afghan Civilians
20.04.2010: Officials: NATO forces kill four Afghan school students
19.04.2010: McCHRYSTAL LOST IN AFGHANISTAN, IS IGNORANCE THE REAL EXCUSE?
19.04.2010: Rising Anti-Westernism in Afghanistan
17.04.2010: Afghans blame troops and Taliban
16.04.2010: ‘Blood money’ angers Afghans
16.04.2010: Chilling Afghan claims
16.04.2010: The end game in Afghanistan
13.04.2010: Anti-American anger grows in Afghanistan
12.04.2010: NATO troops kill 4 Afghans on bus - provincial official
05.04.2010: Wikileaks reveals video showing US air crew shooting down Iraqi civilians
05.04.2010: US special forces ‘tried to cover-up’ botched Khataba raid in Afghanistan
03.04.2010: German forces kill 6 Afghan soldiers
30.03.2010: The Nightmare Will End When We Wake Up! America, Please Open Your Eyes!
28.03.2010: Bush, Obama and the Corporate Media: Eight Years of Immaculate Deception about America’s Afghan War
27.03.2010: NATO Tries to Silence a Truth-Teller in Afghanistan After Killing Pregnant Women
25.03.2010: A Guantanamo Bay in Afghanistan?
25.03.2010: AFGHANISTAN: Human rights under pressure
25.03.2010: NATO mortar shell kills a couple and injures woman and children in Khost
14.03.2010: Nato ‘covered up’ botched night raid in Afghanistan that killed five
04.03.2010: Afghan survivors describe NATO helicopter assault
24.02.2010: UN: 346 Afghan children killed in 2009, more than half by NATO
23.02.2010: Afghans call for Nato to leave after airstrike kills 27 civilians

The Western World Needs to Listen More Often and More Carefully to Iraqi Feminist Yanar Mohammed

photograph of Yanar Mohammed speaking to one of millions of people who need to hear what she has to say

What follows is an assessment of current political tensions and parties attempting to rule a country the U.S. has been trying to rule through military force. To whom do we turn for guidance. At the end of the article Federico speaks with one of the women who has the most knowledge about what her country needs, in order to become more democratic and humane; she also ought to be consulted on international matters with regard to human rights for women. Getting the U.S. military out would be a good first step, imo. Getting the U.S. out of the whole of Central Asia would also be useful to all those who live in the region and are working for justice and national self-determination. What follows may be linked back to by clicking on the title. It is from the Huffington Post.

Making Sense of Iraq's Political Deadlock

Federico Manfredi
Posted: August 11, 2010 09:59 AM

Baghdad -- A popular refrain throughout the Middle East is that "the Arabs agree to disagree." And in fact this is what appears to be happening in the top political circles of Iraq today, where the only issue on which the various leaders seem to agree is that their differences cannot be reconciled.

More than five months after the March 7 general election, Iraq still does not have a new government. Ayad Allawi, whose secular list Iraqiya won the most seats, 91 out of a total of 325, maintains that under the constitution he has the right to form a new government. But the wording of the constitution is vague and open to interpretation, and Iraq's Supreme Court has ruled that the right to form a government belongs to the largest coalition--regardless of whether that coalition was formed before or after the elections.

That ruling favored Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki, who is vying to retain his position at the helm of the Iraqi government. After his State and Law list came in second, with 89 seats, Maliki, sought to outflank Allawi by establishing an alliance with the other Shi'a bloc, the National Alliance, which is dominated by the followers of the populist cleric Moqtada Al-Sadr and those of Hammar Al-Hakim, leader of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, an influential political party with ties to Iran.

Together, Maliki's list and the National Alliance would have had 159 seats, just four short of the majority required to form a new government. But after months of talks this "all Shi'a coalition" fell apart, due to disagreements over who would obtain the coveted post of prime minister.

The National Alliance requested that the new prime minister be either Ibrahim Al-Jafaari, the preferred choice of the Sadrists, or Adel Abdul Mahdi, one of the two vice-presidents of Iraq. In any case, the Sadrists were seemingly prepared to accept anyone but Maliki, whom they loathe for having launched a series of successful military offensives against the Mahdi Army in the southern city of Basra and in the Sadr City suburb of Baghdad.

Maliki, however, is firm in his determination to serve another term as prime minister, and this eventually led the National Alliance to withdraw from talks with his list.

"Maliki does not want to give up power. He is acting like a dictator," said Jalal Al-Din Ali Al-Saghir," a prominent Shi'a cleric and a member of parliament for the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq. "We will not join any government in which Maliki is the prime minister. Our doors are tightly closed to him," he said.

Now the National Alliance may decide to form a coalition with Allawi, even though he heads a secular list. Wahil Abdul Latif, a judge and a member of parliament within the National Alliance bloc, told me that he personally supports Allawi because of his ability to reach out to the Sunni minority. He also said that the National Alliance would be willing to join forces with Allawi and support his bid to become the new prime minister, if only he accepted to remove certain "tainted" Sunni leaders from his list. Among these, he named Vice-President Tariq Al-Hashimi, the leader of one of the main Sunni political parties, and Saleh Al-Mutlak, another Sunni, whom he accused of conspiring with Ba'athist reactionaries to overthrow the Iraqi government.

Allawi, however, is unlikely to exclude these individuals from his list, since they represent pillars of his cross-sectarian outreach strategy.

When I asked Abdul Latif how long it might take the various leaders to reach an agreement on the formation of a new government he laughed and said: "This could take another two months. Perhaps more." Such a delay, though, could severely strain Iraq's fragile institutions, since it would not only protract the current state of governmental paralysis but might also lead the army and police to question the constitutional authority of their leadership.

"They continue talking but they cannot agree," said Mahmoud Othman, an independent member of parliament within the Kurdish bloc. Intrigued by the use of the pronoun "they" I asked him to elaborate. "The Kurds are not part of this conflict. We have no preference as to who gets to form the new government," he said. Indeed, the conventional wisdom in Iraq is that the Kurdish leaders are ready to make a deal with whichever coalition is willing to grant the most autonomy to their region. Othman agreed with this assessment. "Yes, of course, we will shift to the side that offers us the most," he said.

The prospects for a speedy resolution of Iraq's political deadlock do not look bright, particularly if we keep in mind the track record of similar political stalemates in the region. In Lebanon, for instance, the negotiations leading to the appointment of the current president, Michel Suleiman, took more than six months.

As Iraqis brace for the holy month of Ramadan with little or no electricity in the sweltering summer heat, their only consolation is that at least for the time being these power struggles have not led to violent clashes between rival party militias. When I asked Yanar Mohammed, the President of the Organization of Women's Freedom in Iraq, what she thought about the current stalemate, she said: "At least they are fighting in parliament and not in the streets. Hopefully the sectarian war of 2006 and 2007 has transformed itself into a political dispute among competing parties."

Promoting the Books of Dr. Vandana Shiva, on Sustainable Peace through Social, Economic, and Environmental Justice

photograph of Dr. Vandana Shiva is from here

I am increasingly convinced that any G8 plans and policies, before moving forward in any regard, ought to be accepted or rejected by Dr. Vandana Shiva. Any practices, principles, and paradigms that promote globalisation as the West defines it "positively" must meet with Dr. Shiva's approval or disapproval.

We are lucky to live in a time with this brilliant author, lecturer, philosopher, physicist, environmentalist, and feminist with a cogent knowledge of how the Global North impacts the Global South, how the so-called First World negatively and destructively impacts the Second, Third, and Fourth Worlds. I hope that all those with Western, white, male, and Global Northern and/or "First" World privileges, entitlements, and power defer their sense of right and wrong, helpful and harmful, sustainable and unsustainable, to Dr. Shiva. I pray they realise that their political positions, globally mean that they are not well-positioned to know much about the consequences of actions which are in service to the most wealthy at the expense of the most poor, in service to the most privileged by gender and race at the expense of those without either.

In the name of She, the G-d whose name cannot be said, I pray.

All that follows is from *here* at zcommunications.org.

Shiva: Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development

Book, August, 10 2010

By Vandana Shiva

In this pioneering work, Vandana Shiva looks at the history of development and progress, stripping away the neutral language of science to reveal third-world development policy as the global twin of the industrial revolution.

Shiva: Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace

Book, August, 10 2010

By Vandana Shiva

Starting in the 16th century with the initial enclosure of the British commons, Shiva reveals how the commons continue to shrink as more and more natural resources are patented and privatized.

Shiva: Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply

Book, August, 10 2010

By Vandana Shiva

Vandana Shiva continues her path-breaking work on uncovering the devastating human and environmental impacts of corporate-engineered international trade agreements.

Shiva: Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis

Book, August, 10 2010

By Vandana Shiva

With Soil Not Oil, Vandana Shiva connects the dots between industrial agriculture and climate change. Shiva shows that a world beyond dependence on fossil fuels and globalization is both possible and necessary.

Shiva: Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profit

Book, August, 10 2010

By Vandana Shiva

A world-renowned environmental leader presents an expose of the privatization of water that threatens the livelihood of the people in the South.

"The [U.S.] Middle Class is Under Assault" says HuffPo. And what about Poor Women in the U.S.? Is that called NON-Assault?

image is from here

Arianna Huffington, founder of the Huffington Post, is writing about the assault against the predominantly white middle class. (Intro and link are below.) The predominantly white middle class are suffering in the U.S., due in large part to fucked up ways of maintaining and intensifying economic injustice and corporate, government, and military corruption put in place by the last several presidents--whose platforms and policies criss-cross and weave together Republican and Democratic lines.

What makes me a bit furious about stories like this isn't the focus on how the middle class is suffering, exactly. I know too many people who have been living middle class who are currently out of work and whose unemployment checks have finally run out. This has happened because the Congress and the Senate would rather support a CORRUPT war in Afghanistan than extend benefits allowing unemployed people who are looking for work every damn day and who cannot find jobs, to be able to pay for food and housing. (And the U.S. government's completely illegal war in Iraq isn't over yet, either.) The U.S. government's war on people of color globally, and within the U.S. specifically, is still going on and given the ageist, gendered, and raced political nature of poverty, that means U.S. poor people = children and women of color--disproportionately.Which brings me to the matter of being furious.

Why aren't the lives of Black, Brown, and Indigenous women centered in the discussion of "Who is Being Assaulted in the U.S.A."? Because poor women of color face assault from a whole helluva lot of sources: the U.S. government and its agencies and representatives, white people of all genders, the rich/wealthy and their tax breaks and various forms of corporate welfare, as well as evading taxes by having billions in Swiss and other foreign bank accounts--never reported to the IRS. And last but not least, MEN. Each of these groups systematically stigmatises and degrades the public image and social personhood of poor women of color in the U.S., and rarely are the crimes against WOC's humanity discussed in open debate by mainstream media.

An occasional report will surface about some "greater health risk" to African Americans*1, perhaps. And all the sexism and misogyny that Black women in the U.S. endure will be left out of the story.

Or Amnesty International may come out with a particularly searing report on how one in three American Indian [Indigenous] women are raped*2, overwhelmingly by white men they do not know who come onto reservation land to commit this act of disgusting violating and degradation and violence on land that isn't governed by U.S. federal laws the way non-res U.S. land is. So the white rapists know they are more likely to get away with it, for all kinds of despicable reasons.

*1. See, for example, the article below, in which a white woman is an "expert" on African American health-risk factors. Note how she DOESN'T state that LIVING IN A RACIST SOCIETY is harmful to African American people's health, including by taking a FUCKING HUGE TOLL on their cardiovascular systems! Now how can it be that an "expert" AND The American Heart Association doesn't KNOW THAT? (More commentary and analysis follows.)

Why African-Americans At Greater Risk of Cardiovascular Disease

Related: Heart Disease, High Cholesterol, diabetes, African-American , [and what about WHITE MALE SUPREMACY????  -- JUST ASKING.  -- Julian]


Melanie Thomassian
Monday, August 24, 2009

Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death for all racial and ethnic groups in the U.S.—but this is even more evident in the African-American community.
The American Heart Association state that:

• Compared to the general public, African-Americans have a higher risk of diabetes, high blood pressure, and vascular dementia.
• More than 40 percent of African-Americans have high blood pressure and are at risk for stroke, which can lead to greater risk for developing Alzheimer’s.
• African-Americans, as a group, are at greater risk for heart disease and stroke.
• Every year more than 100,000 African-Americans have a stroke.

According to the American Heart Association's, “Heart Disease and Stroke Statistics,” the total cardiovascular heart disease prevalence in 2006 was:

• 45.9% male, 45.9% female for Blacks
• 37.8% male, 33.3% female for Whites
• 26.1% male, 32.5% female for Mexican-Americans

But, why is there such a significant difference in these statistics?

Given that fact that African-Americans tend to have higher blood pressure levels than Caucasians, this increases the risk of heart disease.

It’s also true that African-Americans tend to have a much higher risk of disability and death from a stroke than Caucasians, partly due to high blood pressure as mentioned, and also because of higher rates of diabetes, which causes complications.

To clarify, the major modifiable risk factors for cardiovascular disease include:

• Having high blood pressure
• Having high blood cholesterol
• Smoking cigarettes
• Being overweight or obese
• Being physically inactive
• Having type 2 diabetes
• Some other factors to note include high stress levels and drinking too much alcohol

What needs to be realized is that these conditions, and their resulting complications do need have to be a way of life for African-Americans—heart disease is not necessarily an inevitable outcome for you.

Perhaps you have a family history of heart problems, if you already know you have an elevated risk, one of the most important things you can do is to visit your doctor at least once each year for a general health check-up.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be focusing on specific ways to reduce your risk of suffering heart disease complications, including looking at what you can do right now to lesson these complications, and also taking a look at diet and exercise, etc, so stay tuned!

Don't forget to drop me a line with any queries or concerns and I'll try to answer them promptly!

Do you struggle with healthy eating or weight loss? Get your free ebook on how to break bad habits by visiting the award winning Dietriffic.com. Authored by registered dietitian, Melanie Thomassian.

*          *          *

So what "bad habits" is any Black person in the U.S. supposed to break that will cause "other factors" to be less harmful? Aren't "high stress levels" caused by the myriad ways white supremacy bears down ruthlessly and relentlessly hard on anyone who endures it daily? Perhaps some deep, relaxing breathing? Pilates classes? I don't fucking think so!

Here's the goddamned sad reality: if you're not Black, you don't know what white supremacy feels like to a person who is Black. And most people who are not Black don't want to know--don't care to find out, don't want to empathise, and, especially, will not organise to end white supremacy's devastating harm to African Americans currently living in the U.S.

To Melanie and to the AHA: please update your recommendations to include radical systemic, institutional change, organised by anyone and everyone with full accountability directly to African American women, to weed out all expressions and manifestations of white supremacy as a PRIMARY way to positively impact the cardiovascular health of African Americans.

*2. When will dominant media report and make recommendations that the following MUST END: the RAPE, BATTERY, HARASSMENT, OBJECTIFICATION, PIMPING, TRAFFICKING, and other forms of male aggression, violence, violation, degradation, humiliation, assault, and indignity against the personhood and humanity of women of color? When will THE SYSTEMATIC RAPE OF WOMEN OF ALL COLORS BE TERMED "AN ASSAULT" akin to the one Ariana Huffington notes is currently happening to the U.S.'s "middle class"? When will the poverty and sexual assault that women of color endure in the U.S. be seen as news-worthy? When will the stories and realities of what Indigenous North American women matter as much to Arianna Huffington and the largely white MALE press people who report on matters of "assault" against various demographics of people in the U.S.?

See below for Arianna Huffington's report on the disproportionately white middle class. And please don't forget that except perhaps for life on reservations in this country--people who are part of the Fourth World, most people in the U.S. have no idea what life in many parts of the Third World is like. And those of us in the Last World will have to establish respectful, mutual relationships with people, in which we are not materially or emotionally exploiting and psychically pillaging the lives of people who live in the Third World.

Arianna Huffington: Third World America: Chronicling the Assault on America's Middle Class...and the Solutions

Arianna Huffington: From foreclosures to unemployment to household debt to bankruptcies, the American middle class is under assault -- and America is in danger of becoming a Third World nation. That's why, in conjunction with the publication of my upcoming book, Third World America, HuffPost is launching a "Third World America" section to bear witness to what is happening to the American middle class in small towns and big cities all across the country. Every day, we will also focus on the solutions that are making a difference in the lives of ordinary Americans, and offer many ways for you to get involved -- things we can all do to make sure we never find ourselves living in Third World America. Start by watching this video, taking our Pledge for the American Dream, and sharing your story. Click here to read more of Arianna Huffington's report.