quote:
ANTI-TERROR/ANTI-MALE VIOLENCE
While the sound of liberals collapsing to the right has long since drowned out the echoes of falling rubble in North America, we proclaim the deep racism of Western culture every time we say that the world changed on September 11.The location of the targets changed, as did the colour of most of the bodies, but the dominant way of the world has become more entrenched:massive violence in retaliation – male violence.Some terrorism is more relevant.Some is more widespread.Some crimes get all the attention. Others get little.According to the 2000 United Nations State of the World Population report, 'around the world at least one woman in every three has been beaten, coerced into sex, or
otherwise abused in her lifetime.Most often the abuser is a member of her own family."In Canada, " 20 per cent of women in a intimate relationship have been assaulted by their male partner" with dozens of women killed by those current and former partners annually.According to Statistics Canada, 96,359 women and dependent children found refuge at women's shelters across the country in 1999-2000.According to Statistics Canada, that number represents less than 10% of the estimated need.
The terrorism that drives women into shelters, the violence that makes rape crisis centres necessary, the physical, sexual and emotional abuse that shatters lives globally, female and male, is practiced overwhelmingly by males. Let us have the courage, integrity and honesty to name it.
Now is a time for treason – against the war-making state, certainly, but more fundamentally against the global and entrenched notions of masculinity that fill the women's shelters, that establish and maintain systems of violence, oppression, exploitation and terror " with a global reach," such as those head-quartered at the Pentagon and the World Trade Centre, and the notions of masculinity that encourage men to hijack airplanes and smash them into such buildings in revenge.
Western states have practiced treason against their own nations for decades, let alone the traditions of criminal aggression those states have inflicted upon civilian populations of poorer regions which do not accept their station in the dominant order (the mass murder of Iraqi civilians through 10 years of bombing and sanctions of mass destruction and the bombing of Yugoslavia, to cite but two recent examples).And we are surprised that the policies and massacres committed in our name, if not chiefly in our interest, have pissed some people off. Long before September 11, our own democratic institutions were hijacked by those who front for money and private power although they didn't use exacto knives or do it all in one morning.
Males must become traitors to masculinity, not the biological reality, but to the social reality that uses the biology as a pretext for the distribution
of privilege and misery.Of course, the privilege ain't divvied up equal, as the violent class and racial divisions between males (and females) will readily attest.As males we must confront our fear of non-conformity and the misogyny and homophobia that we routinely employ to police one another in the service of male privilege.As males we must confront the routine terrorism that creates an internal population of female and child refugees throughout North America, where we live and practice this terror, laugh along with it or adopt silence in the face of it.
Notwithstanding the dearth of recent evidence, I believe that human beings can do better.Women have been doing so for some time. When the self - admitted terrorist for male privilege committed his 'political act' of mass murder at L'Ecole Polytechnique on December 6, 1989 – snuffing out the lives of 14 women for the "crime" of wanting to become engineers having been born female – he had already labelled them feminists first, although not on account of their personal political positions, aside from their obvious belief in the right to self-determination.When the terrorist asked men to leave the room so that he could "murder feminists," that is what they did.
When feminist groups began to respond on December 7, they did not pick up guns and start shooting males in revenge.They continued their task of
picking up the pieces and working for change to make males safe for feminism and the women's equality and self-determination at its core, certainly as defined by males who hate the word.The organized courage and effort of the feminist movement has done more (along with labour, environment, peace, gay and lesbian rights and anti-racism movements) that any of our supposedly great men of state, commerce and god to bring to reality the Western civilization that Gandhi, when asked, suggested was a good idea.
The female, and feminist, response to male violence in Canada and globally is over-whelmingly non-violence.This is the hope for females and males alike: non-violence, not the passivity, obedience and complicity of those males who so easily proclaim themselves against all violence, while doing nothing to stop any violence, usually naming female violence in the process.Rather, active resistance to injustice: withdrawal of obedience from the cultural, political and economic institutions of violence and privilege.If that resistance is based upon a willingness to endure suffering while refusing to inflict it upon others we can call it non-violence.
Our first premise must be that we do not wish horrors upon other human beings, no matter what their crimes.There must be consequences for those who inflict and practice injustice, violence and oppression, but they must not offend the goals of a humane and compassionate world of justice and equality, let alone liberal norms of due and open process.As Gandhi insisted, this is the core of non-violence:there can be no distinction between means and ends.The path to justice is the path of justice.
For most males, the risks of suffering are minimal for even significant acts of non-violent anti-terrorism and solidarity with women.The fact is that most men do not care about the welfare of women as a group, or are simply too afraid of the costs of non-conformity to make their concern public.It is a great advantage of those who hold power in our culture that the systems of mass indoctrination have succeeded in privatizing the best and most unifying elements of Western moral code to the strictly personal actions of individuals, where indeed they must apply although not to the exemption of powerful institutions, those who direct them, and those whose interests they truly serve.
While liberals are falling all over themselves in a mad rush for credibility with the nascent military-police state (losing the right to remain silent is just a nice way of saying "torture"), proving how well they can herd the masses, or how quickly they can jettison their "principles" in favour of "security," it is well worth
remembering that principles are truly worthy of the name only if we hold on to them precisely when it is most difficult to do so.
Males who believe in the principles of democratic self-determination and political and economic equality, males who count themselves opposed to the terrorism and violence that restrict these rights to privileged sectors, males who extend these principles to the majority of humanity know as "female", these males must proclaim these principles publicly for they are empty without the matching behaviour that validates them.
While all citizens who believe in these most basic rights must honestly examine their complicity with the forces that routinely violate them – stop paying war taxes, stop rewarding criminal syndicates with votes – it is we males who must shift our priorities from the sports sections, capitalist casinos and violent petty empires that command our loyalties and teach us the social value of masculinity at the expense of women's lives.It won't hurt us to do so since most of the violence that males experience is male violence to begin with.
"You're playing like a bunch of girls out there!" Try saying it as the compliment that it should be, not the insult we've made it.
It would be a terrible shame to surrender this planet to those who terrorize its inhabitants, to those who destroy it for profit, to those who have
perfected the means to obliterate it for reasons of empire.We are surrounded by great beauty everywhere, much of it human in nature, all of it worth struggling to preserve, to share, to enjoy.If the other bits of paper hanging on the walls in this room have anything to do with these words, then maybe that is it.
(This statement was part of a show of Marc's paintings at Gallery 1313 in Parkdale).
Whether we act to end our complicity is the question for all of us.
Marc Brzustowski
Parkdale, December 1, 2001
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posted 30 November 2006 04:16 AM
