Rape: What Men Can Do About It

photograph is from here

Links at the end of this post were added on 28 May 2011.

I've just finished reading a piece of thoughtful writing about rape, including the rape by a man that she survived, by feminist Suzanne Moore, a British white woman at The Guardian. Please see *here* for that, if you wish. What follows is a response the the men who she sites in her article. And to the men who continue to deny rape is something men must be responsible for ending.

Crafters and protectors of existing rape laws in whitehetmale-dominated countries like England should endeavor to make them more effective in ending rape of all women across class and political conditions (including, for example, being an immigrant, not being in the land of one's upbringing, being poor, being a prostitute, being Indigenous, being a girl in one's own home raped by one's father). But to do this, rape must be framed as a class-based form of gender terrorism and a key part of men's overall war against women.

Rape ought to be seen and responded to as a practice of social-sexual subordination by men of women and girls, as a component of the overall the gross and systematic destruction of women's and girls' social status and of women's and girls' self-esteem, self-worth.

Men's commitment of it and to it ought to be understood as one of many means by which men control female human beings and prevent them from attaining the same status and rights as men. This is to say: rape is not just an interpersonal crime committed by one man or by many men at a given time, or against one woman or many women serially.

We are, by any meaningful comprehension of morality, by basic regard for human life, required to view rape as both interpersonal and institutional, both personal and social, both a singular action and the manifestation of deeply embedded structures of misogynist, male supremacist oppression.

Is rape understood to be a violation of women's human rights or is it viewed solely as a violent crime against her personhood, with both the raper's and the harmed person's "personhood" presumed to not be gendered? Do we hold onto an assumption that rape is one of many other violent interpersonal crimes that "people seriously harm people and there ought to be legal remedies when such serious harm happens"? It is that, but is that all rape is? Which political groups get to define "harm" and "serious" in law, and which political groups determine whether law is the appropriate means through which to end an atrocity--that being not only rape, but the overall social-sexual-economic-religious subordination of women to men, by men?

Let's consider this tidbit from *here*, in a piece not written by Suzanne Moore, also at The Guardian.

Miliband told Clarke at prime minister's questions: "The role of the justice secretary is to speak for the nation on matters of justice and crime. This morning, the justice secretary was on the radio suggesting that there were serious rapes and other categories of rapes.

What is the role of a justice secretary in ending the oppression of men against women? This question seems to elude the questioners. Why? Is that political objective seen as being beyond the scope of someone allegedly empowered to address and end "injustice" and "crime"? Is men's oppression of women seen as either of those? And, if not, what is it in addition to injustice and crime? Can criminal lawyers state this clearly? Can their legal tools and the perspective on society in which these tools are made to work to remedy the problem (occasionally or allegedly, depending on what groups you are part of)? I'd say no, because law is so crafted within a context in which women are presumed to be "just human" or "not quite human" but never as fully human as men, while positioned differently (in an inferior place regarding social status and stigma) in society, structurally, by men--including by men's laws.

Whose interests are represented by people who obtain positions of parliamentary or governmental political power in a country? Are women, as a class of people? Are poor women? Are women who do not have race, ethnic, religious, and citizenship privileges and entitlements, who may not have access to the courts at all? Ought such women have remedies to stop rape? Ought men protect and support such remedies, if men say they are against any form of rape happening at all?

Here are some remedies:

1. The removal of rapists from society is understood to be a social good. Men who breach women's human rights by raping them, by domestically terrorising them, by systematically degrading them, by repeatedly procuring girls and women for sexual exploitation, are understood to not be socially valuable members of society.

Also men are seen to be dangerous, immoral, and engaging in criminal activities if they participate in the protection of any of the following:
--systems or industries of exploitation,
--practices of physical violation,
--cultural, religious, and legal defenses of discrimination,
--policy-making which effectively supports gendered, economic, or raced subordination of women by men, and
--laws refusing to acknowledge rape and other forms of interpersonal terrorism as not just interpersonal terrorism, but also as class-based terrorism, as terroristic and terrifying as any other form of terrorism recognised by law and dominant, pro-status quo society.

2. The oppression (including: discrimination, subordination, exploitation, degradation, violation, and terrorism) of women by men is both recognised and opposed. And whatever women need to do to end it is considered a social good, is considered to be politically necessary, and no men will be allowed to stand in the way of activists seeking an end to such oppression.

3. Whenever rape is discussed publicly or socially, including in reading materials, it is discussed as one of many manifestations of male supremacy and men's oppression of women, globalised across the world. The crafters of educational materials, medical reports, media statements, and news programs, must discuss rape in those terms.

4. When a girl or woman is raped by a man, the woman is presumed to be truthful, rather than the accused raper being presumed to be innocent. Law flows from this presumption, not the one that puts the interests of rapists above those of the raped.

5. Boys--all of them--are required to learn how to not rape or otherwise terrorise and degrade girls. They are taught that rape is part of a larger problem: men's domination of women, and that boys have an important role in ending this.

Social-political solutions ought not place the burden on women and girls to prevent or curb men's violence against women as by modifying girls' and women's behavior. Rape is understood to be a problem of what men and boys do that is wrong, dangerous, and shameful, not what girls and women do that is wrong, dangerous, and shameful.

Rape ought to be understood as an  intimate and intricate reinforcer of several forces, not only male supremacist war on women. Also: heterosexism, white supremacy, globalised capitalism, genocide of Indigenous People, and gross destruction of non-human animals and other Life, including the Earth. And it ought never be viewed as not male supremacist, regardless of the gender of the abused and abusers.

Now, men: get busy ending rape and all the other manifestations of men's global war against women. And stop pretending the war doesn't exist to benefit your social status as men-not-women, preserve your entitlements as men-not-women, and protect your material well-being as a member of a gendered class of people: men, not women.

See also these posts and readings:
http://www.xyonline.net/content/where-men-stand-men%E2%80%99s-roles-ending-violence-against-women

http://radicalprofeminist.blogspot.com/2009/12/100-male-privileges-checklist.html

http://radicalprofeminist.blogspot.com/2009/11/pop-quiz-on-dishonesty-deception-and.html

Thank you activists in Madrid, Spain: "The Revolution Will Be Feminist Or it Will Not Be!"

Maybe when the US grows up, it can have a Socialist-Feminist party too. All that follows is from *here* at aljazeera.net.

Spanish anti-crisis protesters defy ban

Thousands of angry protesters press with rallies against economic crisis despite government ban on demonstrations.

Demonstrators have camped in Madrid's central Puerta del Sol square and in cities around the country since the weekend [AFP]

Several thousand protesters, angry over Spain's economic crisis and soaring jobless rate, have defied a ban by Madrid authorities and pressed with demonstrations ahead of weekend local elections.

Demonstrators have camped in Madrid's central Puerta del Sol square and in cities around the country since the weekend, responding to calls on online social networks and by the Real Democracy protest organisation.

Some have vowed to stay until the regional and municipal elections on Sunday.

If police try to "remove us we will sit down, everything will be peaceful, and if we are eventually dispersed we will come back tomorrow." A spokesman for the organisers, Juan Rubio, said.
However, electoral authorities in the Madrid region denied an official request by organisers to hold a rally in the Puerta del Sol from 8:00 pm (1800 GMT) on Wednesday.

The request was not submitted with 24 hours' notice as required by law, and the demonstration "could affect the electoral campaign and the freedom of citizens with the right to vote," a spokeswoman for the election authority in the region said.

About 15 police vehicles took up positions in and around the square on Wednesday evening but police took no action and the police presence diminished later.

By midnight, most of the protesters were starting to disperse as rain fell.

Hundreds also defied bans in the southern cities of Granada and Seville, Spanish media said. Protests have been held in Barcelona, Valencia, Zaragoza and Palma de Majorca.

Economic crisis
Spain's jobless rate hit 21.19 per cent in the first quarter of this year, the highest in the industrialised world. For the young, the situation is more desperate: 44.6 per cent unemployment for under-25s in February.

Carrying placards reading "Make the guilty pay for the crisis" and chanting "They call this democracy but it is not", the protesters hope to be heard in Sunday's elections.

Mostly peaceful, the protests began on May 15, lamenting Spain's economic crisis, politicians in general, and corruption.

"This is a movement that is under construction, we are still gathering ideas, organising gatherings for social change," said Rubio.

The protests seem to have caught political parties by surprise.

Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero's ruling Socialist Party was "alarmed" by the protesters, fearing them to be disaffected left-wing supporters who would abandon the party at the ballot box, the leading daily El Pais said.

Weekend polls forecast devastating losses for the Socialists as voters punish them for the government's handling of the economic crisis, including painful austerity measures.

Mariano Rajoy, leader of the conservative Popular Party, which stands to make huge gains in the elections, said he could understand the protesters' motives.

The youth unemployment rate was "terrible" and unacceptable in a country like Spain, he said.
Polls published in the centre-left El Pais and the conservative El Mundo predicted broad losses for the Socialists including in strongholds such as Barcelona, Seville and the Castilla-La Mancha region. The Socialist Party is "on the edge of a catastrophe," El Mundo predicted.

Harold Camping: Another 15 Minutes of Rapture

These white Christian fundamentalist evangelists are violent. Their heterosexism, sexism, racism, and moralistic CRAP is a form of social violence against many groups of people: women, people of color, the poor, Indigenous people, and LGBTIA (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intergender, Intersex, Asexual) folks. That means their violence harms most of us. And, contrary to some of their beliefs, they aren't leaving some time today. They may well be packed and ready. But they're unfortunately not going anywhere.

One day, perhaps, these white racist, heterosexist, pro-patriarchal paliens will be taken from Earth leaving the non-human animals, non-Christian fundamentalist evangelists, air, plant life, sea, and land to live together in peace. This gay, intergender, profeminist Jew will pray this to happen sooner than later.

***Here is more on this from HuffPo***.

Dark Daughta, Priya Kandaswamy, Marlon M. Bailey, Matt Richardson, Kenyon Farrow, Dean Spade, and more Great People: Is the Same-Sex Marriage Agenda Racist? ... among other problems

photo of Priya Kandaswamy is from here

photo of Marlon M. Bailey, PhD is from here

photo of Dean Spade is from here

Some of what follows is from makezine.enoughenough.org/prop8

I Still Think Marriage is the Wrong Goal 

Resources for Further Reading

The Beyond Marriage Statement
www.beyondmarriage.org/BeyondMarriage.pdf
Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage, by Nancy Polikoff
Book website (Introduction free to download)
The Audre Lorde Project's statement on marriage
http://www.alp.org/whatwedo/statements/marriage
"Is Gay Marriage Anti-Black?" by Kenyon Farrow
http://www.nathanielturner.com/isgaymarriageantiblack.htm
"Ban Marriage," by Craig Willse
http://makezine.enoughenough.org/banmarriage.html
"Is Gay Marriage Racist" by Marlon M. Bailey, Priya Kandaswamy and Matt Richardson
download pdf
"Freedom in a Regulatory State? Lawrence, Marriage and Biopolitics" by Dean Spade and Craig Willse
download pdf
"Intimate Investments: Homonormativity, Global Lockdown and the Seductions of Empire" by M.D. Bassichis, Anna M. Agathangelo and Tamara L. Spira
download pdf

Join the discussion on Facebook.

Statement
by Dean Spade & Craig Willse

A lot of stories are circulating right now claiming that Black and Latino voters are to blame for Prop 8 passing. Beneath this claim is an uninterrogated idea that people of color are "more homophobic" than white people. Such an idea equates gayness with whiteness and erases the lives of LGBT people of color. It also erases and marginalizes the enduring radical work of LGBT people of color organizing that has prioritized the most vulnerable members of our communities.

Current conversations about Prop 8 hide how the same-sex marriage battle has been part of a conservative gay politics that de-prioritizes people of color, poor people, trans people, women, immigrants, prisoners and people with disabilities. Why isn't Prop 8's passage framed as evidence of the mainstream gay agenda's failure to ally with people of color on issues that are central to racial and economic justice in the US?

Let's remember the politics of marriage itself. The simplistic formula that claims "you're either pro-marriage or against equality" makes us forget that all forms of marriage perpetuate gender, racial and economic inequality. It mistakenly assumes that support for marriage is the only good measure of support for LGBT communities. This political moment calls for anti-homophobic politics that centralize anti-racism and anti-poverty. Marriage is a coercive state structure that perpetuates racism and sexism through forced gender and family norms. Right wing pro-marriage rhetoric has targeted families of color and poor families, supported a violent welfare and child protection system, vilified single parents and women, and marginalized queer families of all kinds. Expanding marriage to include a narrow band of same-sex couples only strengthens that system of marginalization and supports the idea that the state should pick which types of families to reward and recognize and which to punish and endanger.

We still demand a queer political agenda that centralizes the experiences of prisoners, poor people, immigrants, trans people, and people with disabilities. We reject a gay agenda that pours millions of dollars into campaigns for access to oppressive institutions for a few that stand to benefit.

We are being told marriage is the way to solve gay people's problems with health care access, immigration, child custody, and symbolic equality. It does not solve these problems, and there are real campaigns and struggles that would and could approach these problems for everyone, not just for a privileged few. Let's take the energy and money being put into gay marriage and put it toward real change: opposing the War on Terror and all forms of endless war; supporting queer prisoners and building a movement to end imprisonment; organizing against police profiling and brutality in our communities; fighting attacks on welfare, public housing and Medicaid; fighting for universal health care that is trans and reproductive healthcare inclusive; fighting to tax wealth not workers; fighting for a world in which no one is illegal.

Now, check out this awesome comment from Dark Daughta, which will close this post because it's so awesome.

photo of my friend Dark Daughta is from here

Dark Daughta said...
I think that as the different segments of various movements spend more time interacting with each other and reading each other there will be a kind of coalescing of political agendas. I will definitely appreciate lefty men developing a layered analysis that includes the people of colour and native people they oppress. I'd also appreciate the middle classes of various communities who do radical work to incorporate an analysis of status, hierarchy, class and career that points fingers back at them. I'd like people of colour who are immigrants like me to think and read and write more about the relationship between their immigration, their status as low level settler occupiers and the plight of native and inuit peoples. I'd like married radical political folk to think more regularly about queers and nonmonogamists. I'd like to have more conversations with people about the politics of aging both in and outside communities of resistance. I'd like to talk more about beauty, evil limited construct, with people inside communities of resistance who nonetheless set up artificial standards related to who is attractive and who is not. If I see one more bony jutting hipped white dyke or transman with limp jauntily cut kewl hair presented as the epitome of what it means to be politically radical, conscious and kewl, I'm gonna scream. Well...err...not scream, really. :) But it's just that every community, instead of obliterating oppressive standards and beliefs based in hierarchy seems really comfortable creating new ways to exclude and/or raise up a handful. It's frustrating.

George Takei's response to the Tennessee, USA "Don't Say Gay!" bill

So, if we can't say "Gay", can we say "Lesbian"? And if we can't say Gay or Lesbian, can we say "Bi"? I'd love to see them try and regulate the use of that word.

Hmmmm. Saying "good-bye" would take on a whole new meaning.

Maybe we can finally get the homophobic slur, "That's so gay!" cleared from school hallways and playgrounds. Yeah, let's do what George is suggesting. Please buy your t-shirt or button in time for your city's Pride Celebration. And then we can watch anti-gay/anti-lesbian fascistic white Christian harassers try and ban the word "Takei".

image is from here

I'll mention that I'm concerned the replacement phrase could get used in some very white places where sensitivity to racism regarding Japanese-American and Japanese people is low to non-existent. I think The Vapors really fucked up with their one-hit wonder, Turning Japanese. This whole campaign could "go there".

Lesbian news reporter and commentator Rachel Maddow, has declared this "the best new thing!" And she may be right. We'll see. Personally, I'm for replacing the word "gay" when used that way with the term "het".

And, I love George Takei's very clever forms of activism for LGBTIA people. Yay, George!!!!

Noam Chomsky on the Death of bin Laden

photo of Noam Chomsky is from here

I like and respect Noam Chomsky. It is not an accident that he's a Jew. Jews in Amerikkka, due entirely to social-structural location, not genes, have a long history of radical social protest and for being outspoken in a drowning sea of white Christian silence and white Gentile acquiescence. The voices of Jews media most promotes are usually liberal and almost entirely Ashkenazi, but there are Jews of color--Sephardi and Mizrahi, within and beyond the US, who also share in the traditions of radically speaking out against injustice.

What I hope is that Noam increasingly incorporates radical feminist and pro-Indigenist political analysis into his work. When I hear Noam speak out against patriarchal abuses of women and girls, as such, and against Western Civilisation's assault against Indigenous People and people of color worldwide, as such, I'll respect him even more.

All that follows is from ZNet and ZCommunications.org.

There is Much More to Say

By Noam Chomsky
Friday, May 20, 2011

After the assassination of bin Laden I received such a deluge of requests for comment that I was unable to respond individually, and on May 4 and later I sent an unedited form response instead, not intending for it to be posted, and expecting to write it up more fully and carefully later on. But it was posted, then circulated. It can now be found, reposted, at http://www.zcommunications.org/my-reaction-to-osama-bin-laden-s-death-by-noam-chomsky.

That was followed by a deluge of reactions from all over the world. It is far from a scientific sample of course, but nevertheless, the tendencies may be of some interest. Overwhelmingly, those from the “third world” were on the order of “thanks for saying what we think.” There were similar ones from the US, but many others were infuriated, often virtually hysterical, with almost no relation to the actual content of the posted form letter. That was true in particular of the posted or published responses brought to my attention. I have received a few requests to comment on several of these. Frankly, it seems to me superfluous. If there is any interest, I’ll nevertheless find some time to do so.

The original letter ends with the comment that “There is much more to say, but even the most obvious and elementary facts should provide us with a good deal to think about.” Here I will fill in some of the gaps, leaving the original otherwise unchanged in all essentials.

Noam Chomsky

May 2011



On May 1, 2011, Osama bin Laden was killed in his virtually unprotected compound by a raiding mission of 79 Navy Seals, who entered Pakistan by helicopter. After many lurid stories were provided by the government and withdrawn, official reports made it increasingly clear that the operation was a planned assassination, multiply violating elementary norms of international law, beginning with the invasion itself.

There appears to have been no attempt to apprehend the unarmed victim, as presumably could have been done by 79 commandos facing no opposition - except, they report, from his wife, also unarmed, who they shot in self-defense when she “lunged” at them (according to the White House).

A plausible reconstruction of the events is provided by veteran Middle East correspondent Yochi Dreazen and colleagues in the Atlantic (http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/05/goal-was-never-to-capture-bin-laden/238330/). Dreazen, formerly the military correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, is senior correspondent for the National Journal Group covering military affairs and national security. According to their investigation, White House planning appears not to have considered the option of capturing OBL alive: “The administration had made clear to the military's clandestine Joint Special Operations Command that it wanted bin Laden dead, according to a senior U.S. official with knowledge of the discussions. A high-ranking military officer briefed on the assault said the SEALs knew their mission was not to take him alive.”

The authors add: “For many at the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency who had spent nearly a decade hunting bin Laden, killing the militant was a necessary and justified act of vengeance.” Furthermore, “Capturing bin Laden alive would have also presented the administration with an array of nettlesome legal and political challenges.” Better, then, to assassinate him, dumping his body into the sea without the autopsy considered essential after a killing, whether considered justified or not – an act that predictably provoked both anger and skepticism in much of the Muslim world.

As the Atlantic inquiry observes, “The decision to kill bin Laden outright was the clearest illustration to date of a little-noticed aspect of the Obama administration's counterterror policy. The Bush administration captured thousands of suspected militants and sent them to detention camps in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay. The Obama administration, by contrast, has focused on eliminating individual terrorists rather than attempting to take them alive.” That is one significant difference between Bush and Obama. The authors quote former West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, who “told German TV that the U.S. raid was ‘quite clearly a violation of international law’ and that bin Laden should have been detained and put on trial,” contrasting Schmidt with US Attorney General Eric Holder, who “defended the decision to kill bin Laden although he didn't pose an immediate threat to the Navy SEALs, telling a House panel on Tuesday that the assault had been ‘lawful, legitimate and appropriate in every way’.”

The disposal of the body without autopsy was also criticized by allies. The highly regarded British barrister Geoffrey Robertson, who supported the intervention and opposed the execution largely on pragmatic grounds, nevertheless described Obama’s claim that “justice was done” as an “absurdity” that should have been obvious to a former professor of constitutional law (http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-05-03/osama-bin-laden-death-why-he-should-have-been-captured-not-killed/). Pakistan law “requires a colonial inquest on violent death, and international human rights law insists that the ‘right to life’ mandates an inquiry whenever violent death occurs from government or police action. The U.S. is therefore under a duty to hold an inquiry that will satisfy the world as to the true circumstances of this killing.” Robertson adds that “The law permits criminals to be shot in self-defense if they (or their accomplices) resist arrest in ways that endanger those striving to apprehend them. They should, if possible, be given the opportunity to surrender, but even if they do not come out with their hands up, they must be taken alive if that can be achieved without risk. Exactly how bin Laden came to be ‘shot in the head’ (especially if it was the back of his head, execution-style) therefore requires explanation. Why a hasty ‘burial at sea’ without a post mortem, as the law requires?”

Robertson attributes the murder to “America’s obsessive belief in capital punishment—alone among advanced nations—[which] is reflected in its rejoicing at the manner of bin Laden’s demise.” For example, Nation columnist Eric Alterman writes that “The killing of Osama bin Laden was a just and necessary undertaking.”

Robertson usefully reminds us that “It was not always thus. When the time came to consider the fate of men much more steeped in wickedness than Osama bin Laden -- namely the Nazi leadership -- the British government wanted them hanged within six hours of capture. President Truman demurred, citing the conclusion of Justice Robert Jackson that summary execution ‘would not sit easily on the American conscience or be remembered by our children with pride…the only course is to determine the innocence or guilt of the accused after a hearing as dispassionate as the times will permit and upon a record that will leave our reasons and motives clear’."

The editors of the Daily Beast comment that “The joy is understandable, but to many outsiders, unattractive. It endorses what looks increasingly like a cold-blooded assassination as the White House is now forced to admit that Osama bin Laden was unarmed when he was shot twice in the head.”

In societies that profess some respect for law, suspects are apprehended and brought to fair trial. I stress “suspects.” In June 2002, FBI head Robert Mueller, in what the Washington Post described as “among his most detailed public comments on the origins of the attacks,” could say only that “investigators believe the idea of the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon came from al Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan, the actual plotting was done in Germany, and the financing came through the United Arab Emirates from sources in Afghanistan…. We think the masterminds of it were in Afghanistan, high in the al Qaeda leadership.” What the FBI believed and thought in June 2002 they didn’t know eight months earlier, when Washington dismissed tentative offers by the Taliban (how serious, we do not know) to extradite bin Laden if they were presented with evidence. Thus it is not true, as the President claimed in his White House statement, that “We quickly learned that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by al Qaeda.”

There has never been any reason to doubt what the FBI believed in mid-2002, but that leaves us far from the proof of guilt required in civilized societies – and whatever the evidence might be, it does not warrant murdering a suspect who could, it seems, have been easily apprehended and brought to trial. Much the same is true of evidence provided since. Thus the 9/11 Commission provided extensive circumstantial evidence of bin Laden’s role in 9/11, based primarily on what it had been told about confessions by prisoners in Guantanamo. It is doubtful that much of that would hold up in an independent court, considering the ways confessions were elicited. But in any event, the conclusions of a congressionally authorized investigation, however convincing one finds them, plainly fall short of a sentence by a credible court, which is what shifts the category of the accused from suspect to convicted. There is much talk of bin Laden's “confession,” but that was a boast, not a confession, with as much credibility as my “confession” that I won the Boston marathon. The boast tells us a lot about his character, but nothing about his responsibility for what he regarded as a great achievement, for which he wanted to take credit.

Again, all of this is, transparently, quite independent of one’s judgments about his responsibility, which seemed clear immediately, even before the FBI inquiry, and still does.

It is worth adding that bin Laden’s responsibility was recognized in much of the Muslim world, and condemned. One significant example is the distinguished Lebanese cleric Sheikh Fadlallah, greatly respected by Hizbollah and Shia groups generally, outside Lebanon as well. He too had been targeted for assassination: by a truck bomb outside a mosque, in a CIA-organized operation in 1985. He escaped, but 80 others were killed, mostly women and girls, as they left the mosque – one of those innumerable crimes that do not enter the annals of terror because of the fallacy of “wrong agency.” Sheikh Fadlallah sharply condemned the 9/11 attacks, as did many other leading figures in the Muslim world, within the Jihadi movement as well. Among others, the head of Hizbollah, Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah, sharply condemned bin Laden and Jihadi ideology.

One of the leading specialists on the Jihadi movement, Fawaz Gerges, suggests that the movement might have been split at that time had the US exploited the opportunity instead of mobilizing the movement, particularly by the attack on Iraq, a great boon to bin Laden, which led to a sharp increase in terror, as intelligence agencies had anticipated. That conclusion was confirmed by the former head of Britain’s domestic intelligence agency MI5 at the Chilcot hearings investigating the background for the war. Confirming other analyses, she testified that both British and US intelligence were aware that Saddam posed no serious threat and that the invasion was likely to increase terror; and that the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan had radicalized parts of a generation of Muslims who saw the military actions as an “attack on Islam.” As is often the case, security was not a high priority for state action.

It might be instructive to ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush's compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic (after proper burial rites, of course). Uncontroversially, he is not a “suspect” but the “decider” who gave the orders to invade Iraq -- that is, to commit the “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi criminals were hanged: in Iraq, the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country and the national heritage, and the murderous sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region. Equally uncontroversially, these crimes vastly exceed anything attributed to bin Laden.

To say that all of this is uncontroversial, as it is, is not to imply that it is not denied. The existence of flat earthers does not change the fact that, uncontroversially, the earth is not flat. Similarly, it is uncontroversial that Stalin and Hitler were responsible for horrendous crimes, though loyalists deny it. All of this should, again, be too obvious for comment, and would be, except in an atmosphere of hysteria so extreme that it blocks rational thought.

Similarly, it is uncontroversial that Bush and associates did commit the “supreme international crime,” the crime of aggression, at least if we take the Nuremberg Tribunal seriously. The crime of aggression was defined clearly enough by Justice Robert Jackson, Chief of Counsel for the United States at Nuremberg, reiterated in an authoritative General Assembly resolution. An “aggressor,” Jackson proposed to the Tribunal in his opening statement, is a state that is the first to commit such actions as “Invasion of its armed forces, with or without a declaration of war, of the territory of another State….” No one, even the most extreme supporter of the aggression, denies that Bush and associates did just that.

We might also do well to recall Jackson’s eloquent words at Nuremberg on the principle of universality: “If certain acts of violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.” And elsewhere: “We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well.”

It is also clear that alleged intentions are irrelevant. Japanese fascists apparently did believe that by ravaging China they were laboring to turn it into an “earthly paradise.” We don’t know whether Hitler believed that he was defending Germany from the “wild terror” of the Poles, or was taking over Czechoslovakia to protect its population from ethnic conflict and provide them with the benefits of a superior culture, or was saving the glories of the civilization of the Greeks from barbarians of East and West, as his acolytes claimed (Martin Heidegger). And it’s even conceivable that Bush and company believed that they were protecting the world from destruction by Saddam’s nuclear weapons. All irrelevant, though ardent loyalists on all sides may try to convince themselves otherwise.

We are left with two choices: either Bush and associates are guilty of the “supreme international crime” including all the evils that follow, crimes that go vastly beyond anything attributed to bin Laden; or else we declare that the Nuremberg proceedings were a farce and that the allies were guilty of judicial murder. Again, that is entirely independent of the question of the guilt of those charged: established by the Nuremberg Tribunal in the case of the Nazi criminals, plausibly surmised from the outset in the case of bin Laden.

A few days before the bin Laden assassination, Orlando Bosch died peacefully in Florida, where he resided along with his terrorist accomplice Luis Posada Carilles, and many others. After he was accused of dozens of terrorist crimes by the FBI, Bosch was granted a presidential pardon by Bush I over the objections of the Justice Department, which found the conclusion “inescapable that it would be prejudicial to the public interest for the United States to provide a safe haven for Bosch. ”The coincidence of deaths at once calls to mind the Bush II doctrine, which has “already become a de facto rule of international relations,” according to the noted Harvard international relations specialist Graham Allison. The doctrine revokes “the sovereignty of states that provide sanctuary to terrorists,” Allison writes, referring to the pronouncement of Bush II that “those who harbor terrorists are as guilty as the terrorists themselves,” directed to the Taliban. Such states, therefore, have lost their sovereignty and are fit targets for bombing and terror; for example, the state that harbored Bosch and his associate -- not to mention some rather more significant candidates. When Bush issued this new “de facto rule of international relations,” no one seemed to notice that he was calling for invasion and destruction of the US and murder of its criminal presidents.

None of this is problematic, of course, if we reject Justice Jackson’s principle of universality, and adopt instead the principle that the US is self-immunized against international law and conventions -- as, in fact, the government has frequently made very clear, an important fact, much too little understood.

It is also worth thinking about the name given to the operation: Operation Geronimo. The imperial mentality is so profound that few seem able to perceive that the White House is glorifying bin Laden by calling him “Geronimo” -- the leader of courageous resistance to the invaders who sought to consign his people to the fate of “that hapless race of native Americans, which we are exterminating with such merciless and perfidious cruelty, among the heinous sins of this nation, for which I believe God will one day bring [it] to judgement,” in the words of the great grand strategist John Quincy Adams, the intellectual architect of manifest destiny, long after his own contributions to these sins had passed. Some did comprehend, not surprisingly. The remnants of that hapless race protested vigorously. Choice of the name is reminiscent of the ease with which we name our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Blackhawk. Tomahawk,… We might react differently if the Luftwaffe were to call its fighter planes "Jew" and "Gypsy".

The examples mentioned would fall under the category “American exceptionalism,” were it not for the fact that easy suppression of one’s own crimes is virtually ubiquitous among powerful states, at least those that are not defeated and forced to acknowledge reality. Other current illustrations are too numerous to mention. To take just one, of great current significance, consider Obama’s terror weapons (drones) in Pakistan. Suppose that during the 1980s, when they were occupying Afghanistan, the Russians had carried out targeted assassinations in Pakistan aimed at those who were financing, arming and training the insurgents – quite proudly and openly. For example, targeting the CIA station chief in Islamabad, who explained that he “loved” the “noble goal” of his mission: to “kill Soviet Soldiers…not to liberate Afghanistan.” There is no need to imagine the reaction, but there is a crucial distinction: that was them, this is us.

What are the likely consequences of the killing of bin Laden? For the Arab world, it will probably mean little. He had long been a fading presence, and in the past few months was eclipsed by the Arab Spring. His significance in the Arab world is captured by the headline in the New York Times for an op-ed by Middle East/al Qaeda specialist Gilles Kepel; “Bin Laden was Dead Already.” Kepel writes that few in the Arab world are likely to care. That headline might have been dated far earlier, had the US not mobilized the Jihadi movement by the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, as suggested by the intelligence agencies and scholarship. As for the Jihadi movement, within it bin Laden was doubtless a venerated symbol, but apparently did not play much more of a role for this “network of networks,” as analysts call it, which undertake mostly independent operations.

The most immediate and significant consequences are likely to be in Pakistan. There is much discussion of Washington's anger that Pakistan didn't turn over bin Laden. Less is said about the fury in Pakistan that the US invaded their territory to carry out a political assassination. Anti-American fervor had already reached a very high peak in Pakistan, and these events are likely to exacerbate it.

Pakistan is the most dangerous country on earth, also the world’s fastest growing nuclear power, with a huge arsenal. It is held together by one stable institution, the military. One of the leading specialists on Pakistan and its military, Anatol Lieven, writes that “if the US ever put Pakistani soldiers in a position where they felt that honour and patriotism required them to fight America, many would be very glad to do so.” And if Pakistan collapsed, an “absolutely inevitable result would be the flow of large numbers of highly trained ex-soldiers, including explosive experts and engineers, to extremist groups.” That is the primary threat he sees of leakage of fissile materials to Jihadi hands, a horrendous eventuality.

The Pakistani military have already been pushed to the edge by US attacks on Pakistani sovereignty. One factor is the drone attacks in Pakistan that Obama escalated immediately after the killing of bin Laden, rubbing salt in the wounds. But there is much more, including the demand that the Pakistani military cooperate in the US war against the Afghan Taliban, whom the overwhelming majority of Pakistanis, the military included, see as fighting a just war of resistance against an invading army, according to Lieven.

The bin Laden operation could have been the spark that set off a conflagration, with dire consequences, particularly if the invading force had been compelled to fight its way out, as was anticipated. Perhaps the assassination was perceived as an “act of vengeance,” as Robertson concludes. Whatever the motive was, it could hardly have been security. As in the case of the “supreme international crime” in Iraq, the bin Laden assassination illustrates that security is often not a high priority for state action, contrary to received doctrine.

There is much more to say, but even the most obvious and elementary facts should provide us with a good deal to think about. 

Polo, by Ralph Lifshitz? No. Ralph Lauren, with Oprah Winfrey, have well-understood the racist, anti-Semitic society they each grew up in

photo of Oprah Winfrey and Ralph Lauren is from here

Revised quite a bit in places, on 20 May 2011.

Judging from a recent Oprah Winfrey Show, Mr. Lauren and Ms. Winfrey both appear to desire to live at the top of this allegedly only-great society. And to the casual observer, they do. But neither will, let me tell you. Neither can, because neither person is white, male, and Christian. And only white het male Christians or Gentiles can be at the tippety-top in this misogynist, racist, anti-Semitic, heterosexist, and increasingly classist country of mine.

I'm so sick of white people--women and men--telling me how powerful Oprah is, as if she's nearly as powerful as the likes of Donald Rumsfeld, GW Bush, Bill Clinton, or, even, Arnold Schwarzenegger. She isn't. She has a place in dominant cultural media. That's it. That's power too. But consider the power to control, violate, and oppress other people's lives. Oprah can get books sold and can get people to watch a TV show. She doesn't control state or other government policies which really do harm vulnerable people. She doesn't have a military or police force she can unleash onto oppressed citizens. Those kinds of destructive, inhumane power are very valued in the US.

Oprah Winfrey doesn't have or exercise that kind of power. She has participated in creating dominant society's culture and has benefited from it, building a career all around it, figuring out how to have a very financially successful life on the white skeleton of CRAP's bloody body; but her life is not stained red with the Richest White Man's blood. She, unlike so many white het men, is not a war criminal, a serial rapist of women and girls living on US, Indigenous, or another country's land. She doesn't mass produce or compulsively consume images of raped and incested girls (or boys)--grown or not. And if she spoke out too much against racism, capitalism, and misogyny (I'm not concerned she'll start doing this, by the way), she'd be not so graciously removed from public life. Her corporate and financial supporters would stop having her back.

One of the most anti-status quo things I think she's done is to be so overtly pro-lesbian and pro-gay. She has also worked to keep adult male predators away from children, for a little while. There is also the example of her life, for so many people. There's the bootstraps myth, that her life participates in: she pulled herself out of poverty and a racistly and misogynistically abusive childhood to become an ultra-successful businessperson and celebrity in what is usually a White Het Man's World. She demonstrates how to have a lot of economic power but not abuse it horrendously. That's a very rare thing and there are, weekly, rich white het men who remind us how abusively some forms of power can be expressed, with no meaningful or class-level human rights accountability keeping them or the institutions in check; it's the actions with the institutional supports that make their normalised corruption possible. The white het men who commit these egregious crimes are not charged with exploiting the powers they, alone, possess. The power they possess is socially, generally, seen as "good". But it's anything but good.

White het Christian and Gentile men have the most dominant, institutionalised destructive power in my country, exercised exploitively without any class-level relief against all women, including against white women, but additionally destructively against the lives of women of color. White het Christian or WH Gentile men also oppress and destroy men of color, and potentially any person determined by het men to be of lesser value for being not masculine or manly enough--if male. Women cannot be masculine or feminine enough to avoid the atrocities and abuses men, as a class, misogynistically commit. Either way, along any cultural continuum, the femme woman and the stud or butch, the non-gender conforming or the gender variant woman will be punished somehow, usually in more than one way, by men. Lesbians, in particular, however the appear to het men, will be oppressed by het men, institutionally and socially (structurally) if not also personally.

Ralph's ability to abusively exploit and take lives depends on his willingness to use slave labor in the production of his carefully designed clothes--clothes designed to sell back to the United Rapes of Amerikkka, and to the capitalist world, an idea of itself that is white non-Jewish male supremacist to the core of its bloody being. It depends on whether and to what degrees he reinforces dominant cultural ideals of beauty, used against just about everyone but the ideals actively enforce and support rape against girls and women by portraying women as sexxx-things for men. This is dovetailed in a way that won't create peace or social justice for people of color.

photo of model whose "looks" could locate him in a neo-Nazi Aryan Youth movement is from here

As a white Jew, I've had occasions--many recently--to observe, among whites (Jewish and not), how there are hierarchies that don't get spoken about out loud any more. Suffice it to say blond people are valued more, Christian or just plain Gentile light-whites are valued more--even while some of them get to be tan. Anyone who has a Western European patriarchal "sir" name that isn't Jewish is valued even more. Ralph knew this very well. He chose "Lauren" as his name and "Polo" as his icon because it represented an economically and ethnically-specific class of humanity to US Americans that he was not born into. He cannot ever occupy it either. He can pretend to. He, like Oprah, can acquire many of the trappings of it. But if you believe there aren't many, many places across this country, many new versions of old-fashioned country clubs, polo clubs, golf clubs, fraternities, Lion's clubs, Mason's organisations, and other whiteboys' clubs--like that of white male priests, that won't let Ralph and Oprah in their doors and won't welcome them to be members, let alone leaders, you're living in a grand or deep level of denial. There are many places in the Christian/Gentile white world that will look with strange curiosity or suspicion upon anyone who is Jewish (or Muslim).

Oprah Winfrey visited Ralph Lauren on his Colorado estate. She was impressed--"wow"ed--clearly.  This level of being impressed reminded me that even among the multi-millionaires or billionaires in the world, there are social and cultural stratifications and degrees of material status.

From the interview I learned (from Oprah, not from Ralph) that he is the son of immigrant Russian Jews. ("Russian" being a term that was, in his childhood, used as a synonym for the whole of the USSR. His family is from Belarus, not what is now the country of Russia, however.) We also learned from this show, which introduced us to his spouse and children, that his wife of many years is blond (they do seem to have a lovely and very loving relationship). We also learned about the sexual orientation of at least of his grown children: a daughter and a son, are about to be heterosexually wed to their respective fiancée/fiancé. So we have the presentation of this almost ideal nuclear family, which exists on the throats of so many who will never get what they have.

I had a friend once who was also Jewish, white, very heterosexual while not especially homophobic. He was pro-feminist. He only chose to date non-Jewish white women. His last name had also been anglo-sized away from being identified too readily as "Jewish" European. His family holidayed in Telluride, Colorado, which is near where the Lauren land is located.

If you go to Colorado, or Utah, or Arizona, or any other state in the union, please pay attention to where and when there are places that won't allow anyone who is Black, Brown, Indigenous, Jewish, Muslim, Arab, or Indigenous. And pay attention to how many of those places value women and gay males as much as het men.

White, economically class-privileged, het men who complain about not having enough rights, as males, are so deeply in denial about all the structural, institutional power they have--including, of course, the power to rape, the power to assault, the power to control, the power to exclude, the power to sue, the power to imprison, the power to economically and sexually exploit other human beings, that it's no wonder they view feminists as a powerful enemy. They don't know the meaning of the word "enemy". White het Christian and Gentile men, in the U.S., have no enemies. They might have people who don't respect them, although not a lot. They might have people who feel appropriately disgusted by the entitlements, privileges, and forms of power they posses quite possessively. But that's not the same thing as having the power to oppress whole classes of people. At all.

The sooner white het men admitted that, the sooner we might be able to address the many forms of social injustice and inhumanity that rule this White Het Man's world. It's most powerful citizens won't even consider me to be a man, because I'm male and so stubbornly pro-feminist, so against sucking the intellectual dicks of white men, so opposed to the unjust and evil forms of structural power they so furiously and defiantly, and secretively and privately protect.

Ralph understood what any person wants in the US: status, power, respectability. In the US, wealth is a quick ride to all of those things. It won't get you to the tippety-top, unless you've got a few other culturally and ethnically specific things going for you which are not so easily gotten rid of once you have them--the stigma of racial, sexual, regional, religious, or economic inferiority.

To those who know cultural history--and believe me, Ralph is sure hoping you don't find this out--the religious and regional roots of the game of polo take us directly to Muslim Asia. The game itself comes from Central Asia, specifically the region now known as Iran, but has been played across many regions including South Asia and Northern Africa. It is a sport that was colonised by the White British. And it is this period of its history, and its location in the US as a white Christian-statused rich man's sport of leisure, that Ralph is referencing and exploiting.

Appropriation and colonisation is what white Christian westerners do so well. If you want to see a rather obnoxious, racist display of this, just note how, in Ralph Lauren's Colorado estate, he has many well-appointed living structures (also known as teepees), and has many items throughout that have been ripped off or stolen from the societies of people the White Man killed and are still killing here. It is a sign of racial and ethnic superiority to be able to display the artifacts of the societies you destroy. No where is this more evident than in upper class and wealth class white homes, built, every one of them, on criminally stolen and corruptly named White Man's land. But on with our history lesson. From Wikipedia *here*:

From Persia, in medieval times polo spread to the Byzantines (who called it tzykanion), and after the Muslim conquests to the Ayyubid and Mameluke dynasties of Egypt and the Levant, whose elites favored it above all other sports. Notable sultans such as Saladin and Baybars were known to play it and encourage it in their court. Polo sticks were features on the Mameluke precursor to modern day playing cards.

Later on Polo was passed from Persia to other parts of Asia including the Indian subcontinent and China, where it was very popular during the Tang Dynasty and frequently depicted in paintings and statues. Valuable for training cavalry, the game was played from Constantinople to Japan by the Middle Ages. Known in the East as the Game of Kings. The name polo is said to have been derived from the Tibetan word "pulu", meaning ball.

The modern game of polo, though formalized and popularized by the British, is derived from Manipur (now a state in India) who played the game known as 'Sagol Kangjei', 'Kanjai-bazee', or 'Pulu'. It was the anglicised form of the latter, referring to the wooden ball which was used, that was adopted by the sport in its slow spread to the west. The first polo club was established in the town of Silchar in Assam, India, in 1834.

The modern sport has had difficulty grappling with the traditional social and economic exclusivity associated with a game that is inevitably expensive when played at a serious level. Many polo players genuinely desire to broaden public participation in the sport, both as an end in itself and to increase the standard of play, while others value and seek to preserve the social and economic exclusivity of the sport.

If one searched the world over, you'd find few other sports less associated with being a European Jew than polo. The internalised and externalised anti-Semitism that is revealed by Ralph making that decision to whiten (franco-anglocize) his last name is evident enough, as is his need to escape his family's cultural "trappings". And I'm sure he's not hurting all that much, as he gazes across his land to the picturesque and glorious Colorado mountaintops in the distance. Not even Oprah possesses that view, although she has envied it over the years from just beyond his fenced in land, which she apparently has driven by many times. She envies what he has exactly the way any US American is supposed to; but most of us won't visit the outside, or inside, of his visually bordered backyard. How many other Black women, or any women of color, born into poverty do you suppose Ralph and his spouse and children have had as special guests there (and not as hired staff)?

In Ralph Lauren's logo there's no indication of the Muslim or Asian roots, or South American present, of the game of polo. Below, the iconic human figure atop the horse is off-white, just like the status of many white Jews in Amerikkka, who will never, ever control this not-so-great country of mine, despite what so many non-Jewish people around the world and within Amerikkka believe is going on. A Black Christian man and, hopefully, a Christian white woman, will be president before a Jewish woman or man of any color. Ralph's home isn't filled with Belarussian Jewish cultural artifacts for a reason. They wouldn't signify him as a "great" conquering, settler white man.

image is from here