brownfemipower of flip flopping joy is back with two guest posts on Wikileaks, state sexual violence, & infowars. The first installment is below. Originally posted here.
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So, in perhaps the most ignored declaration of the year–a war has begun.
And I’ve been trying to think through thoughts on it, but like I said, it’s been largely ignored. Which is a little disturbing to me, seeing as well, pretty much everybody connected to the internet (readers, writers, etc) should have some sort of vested interested in a war being declared on our own turf.
I can’t get my thoughts organized–but I am noticing a lot of patterns. And maybe just putting them out there will help.
* Davy D wrote a bit ago about Homeland Security and ICE shut down a big group of hip/hop websites:
Understand this.. the seizure of websites without due process, corporate interests lobbying and then writing laws that allow them to be the police and t personally enforce, the battle over net neutrality is all about concentrating power in the hands of a few. This is about controlling the flow of information and being a gate keeper in the communications arena. Its the first step in moving a democracy toward a dictatorship. The next step is getting a population to endure fianacial upheavels and hardships.
* The Guardian (who is actually reporting on the cables) is reporting that the US asked Uganda to tell the US when Uganda planned on committing war crimes–but did nothing to stop the war crimes themselves. Oh, and Uganda just so happens to have a finger in the crap going on in the Congo:
During the past two years the Ugandan army has deployed 4,000 troops in Operation Lightning Thunder to chase the LRA out of Uganda into the Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Sudan and now into the Central African Republic where, 800 miles from its original area of operation, the rebel group is thought to have fewer than 300 followers. Several of the LRA’s senior commanders have been killed or captured but Kony is believed to remain alive.
Yeah–the same Congo that has been dealing with astronomical sexual violence. Oh, and Hillary Clinton demanded arrests be made against those committing sexual violence.
* And then there’s the cables about the parties in Afghanistan that had a Texas company pimping out little boys for sexual use by men–and that US diplomats helped to cover up:
But according to the leaked document, Atmar, the Afghani interior minister, was terrified this story would catch a reporter’s ear. He urged the US State Department to shut down a reporter he heard was snooping around, and was horrified that a rumored videotape of the party might surface. He predicted that any story about the party would “endanger lives.” He said that his government had arrested two Afghan police and nine Afghan civilians on charges of “purchasing a service from a child” in connection with the party, but that he was worried about the image of their “foreign mentors,” by which he apparently meant DynCorp. American diplomats told him to chill. They apparently had a better handle on our media than Atmar, because when a report of the party finally did emerge, it was neutered to the point of near-falsehood.
* And in probably the most surprising non-surprising releases, it turns out the Vatican put pressure on the Irish government to basically look the other way on the priest sex abuse in Ireland. Oh, and somehow the US has a finger in that too:
The U.S. ambassador to the Holy See also condemned the leaks and said in a statement that the Vatican and America cooperate in promoting universal values.
The thing I couldn’t stop thinking as I typed all the above info in was how above and beyond Julian Assange–it is the US government that seems to have perfected the role of patriarchal duality that we have all assigned to Assange. The advocate for the dispossessed rolled into a messy soup with dirty slimy scum bag that beats his girlfriend on the side.
It is the US government that is both rapist and activist. It is the US government that we all pretend not see hear the beating on the other side of the wall–because it’s doing such good for the community!
Just as we have to wonder why it makes sense to tell soldiers or policemen that it’s ok to kill when they have a certain uniform on, but not when they’re wearing clothes bought at Target–we have to wonder why it makes sense to condemn men who rape and abuse in private, while willfully and continuously ignoring the private rape and assaults of our government in the name of the “good” it does in public.
And that’s not to say that we let the man off scott free–but rather instead to question: if our goal is to stop rapes before they happen–how do we negotiate the dissonance of the “model” of public advocate/private rapist the US reinforces continuously with the idea of “anti-gender violence citizen”?
Specifically: how will gendered violence ever end when gendered violence remains, at the core, a esteemed value of the US government that we all live under?
Other thoughts:
* what is the connection between Homeland Security’s attack on hip/hop sites and it’s gendered violence against immigrant women?
* not many people are talking about how many rape survivors have used the bureaucracy to report the violence perpetrated against them (think: the blackwater woman who was raped and then held and imprisoned by blackwater, the woman soldier who reported a rape and wound up dead “by suicide” and many others)
* what does it mean that the actions of a sexist misogynistic community that has attacked the feminist community previous is the only community that has had a response to the declaration of war?
* In almost all the above cases, women have been up front advocates in speaking out against the sexual violence being committed against various communities. think: the women in the Congo and Sinead O’Conner. What does it mean that as these women are speaking out and attempting to organize–the US government is directly involved in working against them–again, *even as it claims to be working *with* them*? (and on a side note, I hope every single person in the US hangs their head in shame over what they did to Sinead O’Conner)
* What does this treatment mean for other women who have spoken out against war, sexual violence, genocide, etc over the years? Think: the Dixie Chicks, Angela Davis, Joan Baez, and thousands of unknown women etc.
* What does it mean when citizenship and nationalism is expressly based on silencing and even eliminating the people who SPEAK?
* What does it mean that the US government is so expressly and intimately connected to covering up and perpetrating sexual violence–and 99% of feminist bloggers remain focused on the debate of Julian Assange: hero or rapist?
* What does it mean that bloggers that are NOT corporate backed are being targeted by Homeland Security and ICE in the name of corporate enforcement of copyright violations? What does it mean that corporate backing is an effective way to “decriminalize” your writing in the eyes of the government? What does it mean that corporate backed newspapers are getting a free pass in the wake of wikileaks, whereas wikileaks and Julian Assange are subject to murder threats, harassment by various governments, imprisonment, etc?
* What does it mean that so many feminist bloggers are not talking about this targeting? And does it make a difference that so many feminist bloggers are corporate backed (i.e. paid for their production of thought [full transparency: I have been paid for essays I’ve written] or writing for a corporate owned blog)?
* What does it mean to be a “professional feminist” in light of the current atmosphere?
* What does it mean that Homeland Security and ICE have the ability to shut down blogs/communities with little to no oversight at all–for those of us who blog about immigration? And sexual violence perpetrated by ICE?
* And finally–what does it mean that consistently, the biggest intervention against sexual violence by those of us who have experienced it is to SPEAK!–and consistently, *F*eminists tell us who have experienced that violence that the most powerful force against SPEAKing is a viable tool in our liberation?
This is just some of the shit I”m thinking through–other thoughts include how incredibly terrifying Joe Lieberman has become, how so much of this crap going on right now (right down to the shutting off of funding) has been practiced and perfected and justified as necessary on Arabs and Muslims in the US, what my role is in all this as somebody who has done plenty of my own freelance work, what a queer/LGBT analysis of a lot of this same information looks like, and much more.
But I guess I’ll stop there.
I’d be interested in hearing what your thoughts are…
**Oh, and one last thing–why, exactly, does the nation/state get to define what rape is? Is there no amount of irony and just–mind blowing dissonance that even feminists are arguing in all seriousness that rape in the US is different than rape in Sweden? Really? Does a woman in Sweden feel less raped than a woman in the US when she is raped? Or vise-versa? Would we all agree that the man who is raping and beating his wife gets to define what rape is in the greater community? Why do we then unquestionably accept the nation/state telling us what sexual violence is?
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