As Ramadan begins, more than 100 hunger-strikers in Guantánamo Bay continue their protest. More than 40 of them are being force-fed. A leaked document sets out the military instructions, or standard operating procedure, for force-feeding detainees. In this four-minute film made by Human Rights organisation Reprieve and Bafta award-winning director Asif Kapadia, US actor and rapper Yasiin Bey (formerly known as Mos Def), experiences the procedure.
Watch the video here.
If you’re a white anti-racist who claims to know what all people of color think (like Tim Wise) then, chances are, you’re not as “anti-racist”, “progressive”, “liberal”, “radical”, or “revolutionary” as you project yourself to be. What you’re doing is engaging in incredibly terrible politics and reinforcing the very thing you claim to oppose — racism. You can’t generalize about an entire demographic with its own internal divisions and nuances. People of color don’t need you to speak for us. We can speak for ourselves. I know plenty of principled white progressives who get this and many who don’t.
Houria Bouteldja: Ainsi, la violence masculine qui est une réalité préoccupante dans les quartiers populaires où vivent la majorité écrasante des populations indigènes (je pense notamment à la violence physique, au viol, au contrôle familiale des femmes et de leur corps, à la rigidification des rôles sociaux des hommes et des femmes qui immobilise les femmes dans des rôles strictes de mères et d’épouses…) ne sont que des oppressions parmi d’autres. J’ajoute à cela la charge très négative du mot « féminisme ». Il est perçu avant tout comme une arme de l’impérialisme et du racisme et par les hommes et par les femmes. D’où la difficulté pour les femmes conscientes de la nécessité d’une lutte contre le patriarcat de s’en emparer comme identité assumée car elles sont susceptibles de susciter – peut-être pas l’opprobre générale – mais des suspicions. Ainsi, le strict combat contre le sexisme peut avoir des effets pervers. Il peut contribuer à renforcer la domination masculine des hommes indigènes.
En effet, le patriarcat raciste blanc a depuis longtemps compris qu’il avait intérêt à combattre le patriarcat des hommes of color. Pendant le colonialisme, l’un des axes stratégiques de la politique coloniale fut justement de libérer les femmes jugées opprimées alors même que les femmes en France n’avaient pas le droit de vote. Fanon en a largement parlé dans l’an V de la révolution algérienne. Le dévoilement public des femmes a été l’une des armes privilégiées pour détruire le patriarcat des indigènes. Ainsi, ce n’est pas les femmes indigènes qui ont affaiblit le patriarcat indigènes mais les blancs, et cela fait toute la différence. Car en Europe, ce sont bien les mouvements féministes blancs qui ont attaqué leur patriarcat, pas des puissances étrangères. Cela mérite d’être souligné pour comprendre le malaise de nombre de femmes confrontées à la notion de féminisme. Cette politique est toujours en vigueur.
La France post-coloniale poursuit son rêve de s’approprier le corps des femmes indigènes et de déposséder l’homme indigène, c’est-à-dire de le faire abdiquer de son seul pouvoir réel. L’homme indigène n’a aucun pouvoir : ni politique, ni économique, ni symbolique. Il ne lui reste que celui qu’il exerce sur sa famille (femmes et enfants). Dans le cadre de la bataille entre les deux patriarcats, celui blanc et dominant, celui indigène et affaiblit, les femmes ont le choix entre jouer un rôle passif et se soumettre à l’un ou à l’autre ou au contraire jouer un rôle actif et mettre en place des stratégies pour desserrer l’étau sur elles et se frayer des chemins pour la liberté. Il faut bien comprendre que la marge de manœuvre est très faible. C’est pourquoi, le premier conseil, celui qui consiste à articuler anti-racisme et féminisme est inopérant, car plutôt que de desserrer cet étau, souvent, il le resserre. C’est pourquoi, le deuxième conseil, qui consiste à préconiser l’entre soi des femmes est également inopérant car il suppose la volonté de créer un rapport de force des femmes contre les hommes de la communauté. La non mixité politique est efficace en milieux blanc, mais pas en milieux indigène.
C’est mon avis mais bien sûr il est à débattre. Je précise au passage que la non mixité sociale, c’est-à-dire la séparation physique entre les hommes et les femmes, est une pratique courante. Je parle donc bien ici de la non mixité politique qui se fait en toute conscience et qui a pour objectif d’exclure les hommes pour construire un pouvoir féminin. Je n’ai rien contre cette démarche dans l’absolu car je suis convaincue qu’elle est efficace dans certains contextes mais pas dans le notre. Pourquoi ? Parce que le colonialisme et le racisme, ont justement séparé les hommes et les femmes indigènes lorsqu’ils ont accusé l’homme of color d’être l’ennemi principal de la femme of color. Ce qu’il faut comprendre, c’est que nous sommes déjà séparés, déjà divisés, déjà construits comme ennemis les uns des autres et que le colonialisme a fait pénétrer dans le cœur des femmes la haine de l’homme indigène.
From Google Translate, quickly corrected/edited by myself:
Thus, male violence is a disturbing reality in the neighborhoods where the overwhelming majority of indigenous people live (I am thinking of physical violence, rape, control over women’s bodies, inflexible social structures which constrain women and keep them trapped in the role of mother and wife, etc) but these are only some oppressions amongst many others. I must talk about the negative connotation of the word “feminism.” It is seen primarily as a weapon of imperialism and racism. This makes it difficult for women who are aware of the need to struggle against patriarchy to assume an identity which is likely to produce – perhaps not general opprobrium – but suspicion. Thus, the fight against sexism can have perverse effects. It can help strengthen the male domination of indigenous men.
Indeed, white racist patriarchy has long understood its interest in fighting the patriarchy of men of color. One of the strategic pillars of colonial policy was to liberate oppressed indigenous women when women in France didn’t even have the right to vote. Fanon spoke about this at length in the year V of the Algerian revolution. The public unveiling of women was one of the favored weapons used to destroy indigenous patriarchy. In such cases, it’s not indigenous women who weaken indigenous patriarchy but the white establishment, and that makes all the difference. In Europe, white feminists fought patriarchy, not foreign powers. This should be emphasized so as to understand the discomfort many women face with the notion of feminism. These politics are still at work.
Post-colonial France continues to pursue its dream of owning the bodies of indigenous women and dispossessing native men, that is to say, to make indigenous men abdicate their only real power. The native man has no power: political or economic or symbolic. He only has some power over his family (women and children). As part of the battle between the two patriarchies (dominant white and weakened indigenous) women have the choice between playing a passive role and submitting to one or the other patriarchy or playing an active role and implementing strategies that end their oppression and help them forge a path to freedom. It should be understood that women must tread that path very carefully. That is why the first advice given to us, which is to articulate anti-racism and feminism is irrelevant, because rather than loosen the vice of oppression, often it tightens it. The second advice, which is to advocate amongst women exclusively is also ineffective because it requires a willingness to create a power struggle between women and the men in their community. This policy of separateness is effective in white circles, but not in native environments.
That’s my opinion but of course it is open to debate. I note in passing that separateness, that is to say, the physical separation between men and women is common practice in native communities. But I speak here of political separateness which is a conscious exclusion of native men in order to build native feminine power. I have nothing against this approach in absolute terms because I am convinced that it is effective in some contexts but not in ours. Why? Because colonialism and racism have separated indigenous men and women by accusing the man of color to be the main enemy of the woman of color. What must be understood is that we are already separated, already divided, already defined as enemies of each other – colonialism has filled the hearts of native women with hatred for the native man.
More here.
Jonathan Jones: Arshile Gorky (1904-48), one of the greatest American painters, was so uncertain about how to make sense of his Armenian origins that he adopted a Russian name, telling people he was the nephew of the writer Maxim Gorky – implausibly, since this was a pen name. Arshile Gorky’s real name was Vostanig Adoian. Born in Khorkom, on the shores of Lake Van in eastern Turkey, he had a childhood dominated by nature, folklore and religion, marred only by the departure of his father for America. In 1915 Turkey decided to get rid of its Armenian minority. Throughout eastern Turkey, Armenian men were taken out of their villages and murdered, women and children driven on forced marches causing mass starvation. An estimated million people died. Gorky’s family fled to Yerevan, now capital of Armenia.
After his mother died of starvation in 1918, Gorky made it to Ellis Island. With a habit of making up stories about his meetings with famous artists, he became an art teacher and avant-garde painter in New York. He was connected with artists who would, with him, become known as the Abstract Expressionists – including his pupil Mark Rothko and close friend Willem de Kooning. Gorky hit his stride when he returned imaginatively to the landscape of Lake Van, resurrecting it in dream paintings such as The Waterfall (1943) in Tate Modern. In 1948 Gorky – who had jokingly given himself a first name that in Armenian means “accursed” – hanged himself.
Subject: Shushan der Marderosian was widowed with two daughters when she married Gorky’s father at the age of 16 – both had lost spouses in a Turkish massacre of Armenians in 1896. Shushan was a pious woman with a deep feeling for the Van landscape. When they fled she became malnourished, and although Gorky and his sister desperately tried to get food, she made them eat it. On the morning she died in March 1918 she was dictating a letter in which she said she wanted to go back to Van.
Distinguishing features: This is one of the most distressing and powerful of portraits. Even without knowing the story you know it is about loss. Gorky has given his mother a mask-like face, as if hewn in stone, and perhaps it is this, or the ghost-white fall of her dress, or the flatness of her body on the canvas, that tells us this is an image of someone dead. There is a monumental distance between us and her – she is remote as a statue. The boy standing by her is distant too, in his formal coat, clutching a pink flower. He has signs of life. Dressed as if he cares about himself, he is future-bound. But his face is so sad.
The wall behind them is strange, its location indiscernible. The painting is a meditation on a photograph of them taken at a studio in Van before the first world war, to send to Gorky’s father in America. Gorky found the photograph in his father’s US home in the 1920s. This painting is testimony to how much it anguished him. The transfiguration of the image into cubistic planes of colour emphasises Gorky’s complex reaction to the photograph, as he remade it in his mind. He gives it colour, animation, but cannot bring his mother back. While the boy moves in three dimensions, she remains fixed, a flat ghost. Armenia itself is a no-place. Gorky paints a brown square behind his mother’s head resembling a window. But it is opaque, no view. Her landscape is gone.
Senior National Security and Intelligence reporter for McClatchy Newspapers discusses his reporting on secret U.S. records that confirmed drone strikes carried out in Pakistan over a four-year period ran contrary to the standards set forth publicly by President Obama. Classified U.S. documents reviewed by Landay show the Obama administration targeted and killed hundreds of supposed lower-level Afghan, Pakistani and unidentified “other” militants, even though they have claimed publicly to only target senior al-Qaeda leaders and associates planning to attack the United States. Records confirm drone operators were not always sure who they were killing. More here.
AMY GOODMAN: As we continue our coverage of Edward Snowden on the run, looking for political asylum, the foreign minister of Ecuador, Ricardo Patiño, is in Vietnam holding a news conference as we broadcast. He’s holding it in Spanish, but the rough translation we have, he says that Snowden feels he will not receive a fair trial, that Ecuador will act according to the framework of human rights and international law. Again, Ecuador has received a letter from Edward Snowden, asking for political asylum. Patiño says Ecuador places principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights above its own interests. He says Snowden finds himself persecuted by those who should be providing information to the world about what Snowden has revealed. Patiño says all the citizens in the world have been affected by the U.S. surveillance programs revealed by Snowden. Patiño says Ecuador’s constitution says it will guarantee the safety of people who publish opinions through the media and work in any form of communication. He says, “No human being will be considered illegal because of his immigration status. We do not do that in Ecuador.”
Michael Ratner, an attorney for Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, praised Ecuador for standing up to the United States. “They’re trying to bully other countries, not only by pulling his passport away so that he can’t travel, but by saying, ‘Send him back to us. Don’t take him in. There’ll be consequences. But none of those are legal.” More here.
Pepe Escobar: “GUTTER PRESS AWARD OF 2013 – SO FAR… How low can the Washington Post go? Here’s the answer: it wants to give Glenn Greenwald the Manning treatment.” More here.
During the mass immigration to Israel from 1948 to the early 1950s, hundreds if not thousands of babies disappeared from immigrant absorption and transit camps throughout Israel and from the transit camp Hashed in Yemen. According to testimonies given to the Kedmi Commission (1995–2001), the absorption policy governing Yemenite Jews required separating children from their parents because the stone structures housing the babies, called baby houses, were in better condition than the tents and tin structures that sheltered the parents. Babies were usually taken from the baby houses without parental knowledge or consent. Parents who were present and refused consent reported that camp authorities forcefully took their children from them, even acting violently. Later testimonies revealed that a typical scenario was as follows: a baby was declared ill and taken to the hospital despite parental assertion that the child was healthy. The ostensibly ill baby was then taken to one of several institutions around the country, such as Wizo, an international women’s organization with recovery centers in Safad, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. The parents were then told their babies had died, even as state institutional workers later testified that these “parents were not interested in their children.”
As more complaints were filed during the mid 1960s, the Affair gained more momentum each time, causing a public outcry that was quickly suppressed and forgotten. Despite numerous, suspiciously consistent allegations that babies were kidnapped and adopted by European Jews, or sold to Jewish families abroad, the state of Israel has refused to properly investigate the matter. The establishment’s efforts to silence the story was unwavering—an effort that would not have been possible without the media’s active cooperation. More here.
Race and justice in America are inextricably linked. More here.
More than 20 actors, activists, musicians and other well-known pop culture celebrities have championed their support for Army whistleblower Bradley Manning in a video released this week.
