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Good point. Now … Regurgitatin’ Eye candy fun
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For what it’s worth, I don’t like Bitch Lab, I don’t read her, I don’t think she’s very bright, and I think the main thing she piggybacked on recently was a comment thread to a post she didn’t author. Nice appropriation, that.
So: Don’t like Bitch Lab? Join the club, and don’t read her. Read the women she rips off instead. They’re better.
So: Don’t like Bitch Lab? Join the club, and don’t read her. Read the women she rips off instead. They’re better.
10-07-2006
Just go ahead and bitch
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nice post bitch–not much to add except that I think that it was possibly the most annoying week of my life to be asked over and over and over again some version of the following: “so you’re saying oppression doesn’t matter as long as it is done by brown men?” It is beyond my mind how in the hell anybody came up with that conclusion based on my critique–and as you said, anybody who thinks that women of color and colonized women haven’t put forth forceful and consistant critiques of the sexism and patriarchy we all live under just hasn’t been paying much attention for the last 150 years.
ah well, i’ve vowed to stop getting my heart all in a slather over this, and let you and other amazing women like chabert and Ravenmn and veronique and so many others do the talking. people seem to hear it better coming from ya’ll, and i get so defensive from the attacks that i don’t have any patience to deal with those who are actually open to hearing things.
I appreciate how much work and thought so many of you have put into dialoguing and thinking about things. it really means a lot.
If the Majikthise post doesn’t make things clear enough, nothing will. These people aren’t too stupid to reflect rationally on the subject; it’s just that their interests lie elsewhere. So, after a week of discussion, they offer a travesty of the issues & hope to move on.
kh –
yah. i learned a long time ago that our audience should never be those who’ve dug in their heels. Most people lurk in cyberspace. I know there are lots of places where I do. That’s where I’m taking it in and learning something.
I’ve almost always learned the most when I’m just reading along, observing the way the different sides behave toward one another and listening to the arguments. Lurk’n'Learn I call it. [1]
BfP — I guess I took Cherie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua to heart many years ago. To paraphrase, they seemed to be sayng that it was white people’s job to do the explaining about how racism worked to other white people. My job isn’t to speak for you and how you feel and how racism feels to you. Instead, it’s to try to show how racism operates.
I always feel I’m walking a really fine line, though. And it will disturb the ever loving piss out of me if it IS the case that white people will only listen to other white people.
I don’t think it’s true though. I know I didn’t learn from other white people.And there are a ton of people who are obviously learning from you, BA, KAE, and the whole RWoC community. I think of the great Monday Session Angry Brown Woman has on her blog.
[1] My partner’s completely the opposite. he insists on jumping in, acting like a total a-hole, and making a fool of himself — by his own admission sometimes :) But he is also someone who, more than anyone I’ve ever seen in cyberspace, actually admits up front when he’s wrong and almost always does it with a one sentence, I’m sorry. No excuses.
BfP –
You know another thing I was thinking, I wonder if a lot of people misread that passage because they don’t even think of nationalism in third world countries at all?
That they are not even nation-states really and are just these masses of land teeming with a mass of faceless people? That they are unfamiliar with the emergence of natioanlist anti-colonialism — and the politics that played out in that context?
Thus, they saw nationalism and associated it with US nationalism, perhaps?
Dunno, just a thought.
RHODES: Your daughter, Judy, is right there with [my sister, behind the wall]. I can see them. They are kissing.
ROBIN: My daugher kissing who? Be careful what you say. She was a pure, innocent, beautiful young thing until your comrades did things to her and slit her throat.
RHODES: She’s kissing Cecilia. They are very much in love with each other. What you did to both of them left them with nothing but sheer disgust for men. For this world. [Pauses. Looks away]
I’m wondering about this ‘white people will only listen to white people’ thing as well. I also get uncomfortable when I see that while I’m saying the exact same thing a WOC said before me, I still get more respectful attention and real listening than she does.
Here’s what I have seem to observed so far, mainly in academia (with students or colleagues): the ‘racism 101′ and ‘imperialism/colonialism 101′ talk seem to go better if it’s a white person talking to other white people. WP seem, in this case, to be a bit less defensive. Once the basics of racism/imperialism/colonialism as systems of oppression have been explained to them, then, it seems to me, WP are more open, and less defensive when engaging in a discussion on these issue with POC. So, it’s as if the workings of oppression need to have been explained to us by a WP before we are able to react to a critic by a POC without going into the ‘but i’m not a racist’/'this is not what i meant’/'you’re the racist one’ defense.
Which, in many ways, is not very different than my own experience. I came to anti-racism and post-colonial theory and practice through (mostly white/western) feminism. I think the reason I was opened to the critique of white feminist by WOC/post-colonial feminists is because to me, seeing them as feminists, I saw them as allies from the start, rather than as a threat to what feminism had accomplished for me, and to what I was trying to accomplished through feminism. But, I was really more resistant to, say, malestream Marxism (and I must admit, still am for the most part), because of all the problem I saw in its limited understanding of power and subject-identity production.
I would have to theorize it a bit more clearly, but what do you think? And if this is not just in my imagination, what does it say in terms of resistance and strategizing?
Well, on the “white people only listening to white people” thing, one doesn’t have to go much further than Lindsay’s post… where she completely erased the people of color from the debate (even though a good portion of it took place on their sites), except as a sort of briefly dismissed surround sound, that she controlled the volume of.
An extremely dishonest - but instructive - post.
I don’t know if that is the default… it’s really not in my personal interactions with white people, but then again, the people (of all cultures, ethnicities, etc) I tend to spend time with are ones that, while still learning, as we all are (or should be) daily, started ‘unpacking their knapsacks’ long ago.
There was so much brought out in the many conversations about this that I’m grateful this post captures much of it all in one place.
I still need to read through the threads again, though, to catch up on all the stuff I didn’t quite absorb the first time. Or the second. chaberg, for one, takes a lot of absorbing!
Fascinating stuff.
(Oh gee… what do so many people have against “preview” nowadays?)
While reading over at BfP’s place I clicked on some of the people’s names to see their websites and came across UmmAli’s site “This Here Garden” and this poem say it all.
No More
I will no longer be the pin-up girl for your wars,
oppressed and veiled whore
to be pimped to the masses
for “feminist†causes.
From this moment on
this struggle will no longer be
all about you
and your agenda
for me.
I will not offer apologies
for refusing to melt my soul
and pour it into the mold
that you have shaped for me.
Take back your hands and their intent.
you cannot reshape me
into your image
of liberty.
You cannot liberate me
and simultaneously negate me,
alienate me,
berate me.
Know this, sweet sister,
I have the final say over my destiny.
My fashion decisions do not oppress.
These tightly woven strands of cloth on my head
do not compare
to the weight
of your foot
on my neck.
We will never succeed if each time i try to lift up
from the oppressive depths of obscurity,
you tear away at my beliefs
Some of us want to be heard
and not seen
and some of us want everything.
You know
and I know
and I know that you know:
power and freedom of choice
are not directly proportional
to the amount of flesh that I show.
===
I also posted it over at Majikthise
It’s good to see a lucid discussion of cultural conflicts and power dynamics in the context of one culture’s feminist movement criticizing patriarchal oppression in country they’re colonizing.
Outside of that, however, there’s a whole world of cultures who talk about oppression or cultural conflict in other cultures.
What’s been fascinating to me is to see how non-western cultures deal with each other. For instance, how 2 intertwined southeast Asian cultures, Malaysia and Singapore deal with issues of oppression in each other. Malaysia has a Chinese minority, and Singapore has a Malay minority and a Chinese majority. Both oppress the minority, but in different ways. Singapore is more subtle, in that Malays have to deal with issues similar to minorities in America. Malaysia is more brutally direct, having created laws designed to elevate native Malays, and hold back the Chinese (Wikipedia link), and claim to be motivated by the Chinese being too favored by western cultures who colonized. To some extent, that’s true, but the Chinese also suffer from some fairly nasy racism and discrimination in Indonesia. It’s too tempting not to view them in a similar way as the Jews were viewed in Europe pre WWII.
Those are some interesting cases, because in a sense, they talk about a non western form of colonization. Chinese colonization.
There’s also Japanese colonization, which has impacted the region as well. When talking about the “the specter of the third world prostitute”, I seldom see much mention of how that iconic figure was *not* 100% created by the west, but owes a lot to Japan and China, and also to how the home country views sex , prostitution, and the rights of women internally.
Pulling back to a discussion on feminism in the context of the burqa, on a persona note, having been to Malaysia often, I’ve seldom seen many burqa or even Chador clad women outside of visitors from Saudi Arabia or Iran. Most of my Iranian fronds hated the fact that, had they started, they would have at least had to wear a severe buknuk and abaya, and the ones who wore them were content with a simple hijab, or even a glitzy hjiab, as those were stylish in Malaysia.
Outside of criticisms of colonialism, there’s an Orthodox/Reform divide to be had here. There are voices inside of Islam who’re not too fond of the way women are treated by Orthodox branches of Islam.
I’m not too fond of Orthodox Islam myself. Even removing the Taliban, who I think deserve a second Godwin’s law in regards to talk about Islam, Iranian Shi’ite Immans are worth talking about in terms of policy towards women, as are Saudi religious leaders. I think westerners, especially Americans have an obligation to learn about what’s going on over there.
That said, I’m leery of offering no criticism of misogyny in cultures outside of my own, even if there’s a colonial movement going on from inside my own, because it feels dismissive not to in a similar way that ‘using’ a culture to ’score points’ feels dismissive.
# Véronique –
heh. Well, I hated white feminism (mostly) from the start. I grew up with the feminist movement burgeoning all around me (late 70s/early80s) and basically saw it as, “be all you can be,” It was what the kewl kidz were doing: mom volunteered at a rape crisis center and I did as soon as I was old enough. I babysat for women on their shifts, and also for a consciousness raising group. Mom and her friends got together every week and their koffee klatches were dedicated to discussing feminist-y types things. (They were women’s rights types, not women’s liberation types, though. big difference)
But when I started reading (I was on a course of self-education at the time) white women wrote about things and concerns that made no sense, to me.
I bolted away from that immediately.
It was only when I stumbled over women of color that I sat up and said, “I’m hearing something that makes sense to me!”
So, maybe my experience — of hearing from people of color better or first or what have you — is unique.
And it bothers the helloutta me if you’re right.
My inclination is to back off because it would be exacerbating the problem. As I said, Anzaldua, Moraga, and many others have advanced a theory for dealing with racialization and white privilege. I call it looking at racialized oppression as a process, not a product. It’s not a thing, but a process.
What that entails, then, is to take the focus off the “pathologies” of being erased, silenced, othered, racialized, and put the spotlight on the *process* of racialization — which then demands that we come to see how whiteness is simulataneously made and erased — as if whites have no race and the only place to see race is in Others.
But again, it’s a tough spot to be in if what you’re supposed to be doing is elaborating a theory of how this works to fellow white people.
This is one of the reasons I worried abt participating in Taking Place — and I could never articulate it to Kevin and I hurt his feelings.
At the time, I thought it was Kev, nubian, and BfP, maybe vegankid? I was worried that I’d become the go-to white person for other white people:
Explain to me why these people are so mad!
So, in a sense, I was already aware of this phenom. My earlier statement was a wish.
:(
I just scanned through the comments at Lindsay’s blog.
KH, I guess you’re right. When I first looked, there were just three comments. Now, it is filled with people defending their right to continue to be racists.
(I’m sick of the meme that says we can’t call it what it is and if anyone feels they got their fee fees hurt, you have to apologize for describing what they’re doing as what it is: racist.)
They superficially ‘get’ the role played by the US, but they don’t get the role played by the US in utterly squashing egalitarian social movements — whether purposefully through directly funding repressive regimes or by simply ensuring that these places experience nothing but economic warfare in our quest to dominate the world.
The utterly amazing thing is, if you know one single bit about the history of Victorian Womanhood in this country — when women here embraced Victorian ideals of womanhood — they did the same thing as women in colonized countries: they embraced images of themselves as Republican Mothers who would hold the fledging nation together, the moral compass who soothed the furrowed brown of the man after a day of pursuing competitive individualism in the market and forum.
In other words, in our very own country, under the onslaught of industrialization, modernization — capitalist fucking development — in our own terror at the changes wrought by those process we, too, were worried about moral decay, about the rise of hyper-competitive individualism, etc.
Ahhh. fuck me. I’m so irritated right now I could spit.
Lindsay has issues with understanding when she’s invalidating POC, she did something similar during a spark up on Feministe over whether it’s okay for a white woman to ask a black woman if “their” skin acts like a heat sink.
Her opinion was that this was a valid question to ask someone as small talk, because apparently the term “african-american” doesn’t answer the question in and of itself, or africa is a much colder country than I remember it being, and more prone to inclemental weather too.
You get the impression that for a reform jew she really doesn’t understand how racism works all to well. Like it’s so utterly alien an experience to her that her ability to empathise at all with people who have experienced it is just nonexistent.
I’m awestruck by how the fuck to even approach this level of Not Getting It - I’m erring towards snark obviously but you know…
Tagging this so it’ll let me know if there are future responses
Bitch –
Same here. When I started reading women of color and post-colonial writers, that’s when I finally realized that there *were* people who had been writing and giving a vocabulary to what I had been thinking, seeing, feeling, but was unable to express very well.
Process over ‘thing’: Ya, right on. But I also think that white people are very resistant to see racialized oppression (or any other system of oppression) as a process. Because then, it means that we can’t remove ourselves from it, we can’t merely blame the bad guys in the administration, and we can’t have as easy solution such as non-discrimination laws or affirmative action and think that we have solved the problem. But the most difficult one to accept: we can’t anymore see our ‘progressive’ politics and commitments as protecting us from being implicated in the problems we’re trying to fight against. I think that this is the hardest part for most people. Because it appears as an attack/threat to our identity as ‘critical’, ‘progressive’ subject; in other words, it threatens the very core of ourSelves, it implies a questioning of our most intimate investements and desires in our self-portrayal as ‘progressives’. I know that for me, that’s the hardest one — and there’s also a very fine line between being self-critical about ourselves, and (re)centering ourselves.
I cross posted this on my own website.
A Memory seems apropos
In the mid 1980s I was involved in political activity against the U.S. invasions in Central America. I helped to build several very large mass demonstrations in St. Paul. Local activists worked with the Catholic church to hold memorial services on March 24, the anniversary of the assassination of Archibishop Oscar Romero by death squads in San Salvador. We’d have an inter-faith service at the Cathedral and a march down the street to a political rally at the Capitol.
One of the traditions in the movement was to carry several hundred white crosses with the names of the dead and disappeared in EL Salvador. Sometimes we would pound them into the soil outside the Cathedral of St. Paul. Sometimes we would carry them on our marches. Often we would read the names and shout, “!Presente!” in unison to honor their lives.
One year it was particularly cold and dark due to clouds and an impending snow storm. Somebody got the idea of bringing those tiki-type burners to the rally. They would provide light and keep us warm on a freezing day in Minnesota.
I swear, it was not until we saw a couple of thousand people walking down the streets of St. Paul with flaming torches and white crosses that we realized what a colossal error that particular image presented. Some of the Episcopal preachers leading the march had long flowing white robes as well.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
No, we had not meant to be racist. And we certainly weren’t opening a new branch of the klan in our state. Perhaps if we had more black people in on the planning we could have envisioned the outcome better,. But we didn’t.
We created an incredibly racist image. Hell, I’m a white northerner and I saw it the minute I stepped out into the street.
Any one of us can inadvertently create a racist image. There is something wrong if we can’t acknowledge that. We are wrong if we can’t listen to people who have responses that differ from our own. We must try to avoid such mistakes in the future.
I know I will never combine white crosses and torches in a mass demonstration ever again. I feel awful for having done it only once. And, no, we did not get any blowback from that march. Not one complaint. It was still wrong. And we were lucky we didn’t get our asses kicked for allowing it to happen.
Véronique Says:
*nod* *nod* *nod* *nod* *nod* *nod* *nod* *nod* *head falls off*
This is when I whip out Angela Mitropoulos on “the fantasy of being outside ideology”:
But, speech acts is all we do here (in cyberspace), which has the effect of making racism and sexism, as well as a discussion of them, more pronounced and more troubling. If I write:
“no one, least of all those of us who think these are not a matter of personal whim, would deny that they are racist or sexistâ€Â
then this should have been a fairly clear gesture toward those who here have both claimed that racism and sexism are not a matter of intentional decision (that it consists of structures which exceed any of our intentions) and who, simultaneously, respond to claims that they are being (in this instance) sexist with nothing other than denial.
That is, such a denial from this perspective is absurd. And what it shows clearly is that those who are often most keen to dispense their judgements on others are absolutely unwilling to countenance such implications in regard to themselves, thus flying in the face of what they simultaneously assert about the ubiquity of racism and sexism.
And it’s this initial judgement that I would say yes, is indeed about enjoyment: that is, the enjoyment of distinction, superiority, the fantasy of being outside fantasy… A fantasy held onto at all cost, including a refusal to deal at all with what they claim they are most concerned with: racism, sexism, etc.
I happen to think there is always space for that discussion and debate, and I would much prefer it if it was banalised by a recognition that racism and sexism permeates what we do here than to shift it into the realm of rhetorical insult (as if it is some kind of willful malevolence), which is largely and unfortunately where it remains now.
And, it’s as insult that it becomes enjoyment and the basis for identification, both for those who do the calling and those who are called. That is, there should always be a debate and discussion on whether or not some comment or perspective is racist.
What happens more often than not however is that discussion is halted, usually at the line of ‘if a woman says x is sexist then it is true‘; this is all too troubling so we should stop now; ‘you are being racist when you say x‘; ‘you are/you aren’t‘; etc…
What would it hurt other than my leftist pride if someone said I was being racist? I’ll ask for evidence and I will most likely debate it, but it doesn’t destroy my sense of self. Why should it? What do I stand to lose other than my fantasy of being outside ideology?â€Â
Holy shit! I got entangled at Majikethise with (I feel like banging my head against a wall) Amanda over something called “false consciousness” (which I gotta tell you sounds like something straight outa animal farm) — and then check in here to see what is being chatted about and see that there is a theory afloat that it could have something I wrote in a comment here?????
Well I am old enough to remember “male identified” — and it is in plain english so it wouldn’t be hard to figure out if I hadn’t heard it.
Anyway — I can’t keep up with alot of the vocabulary used here and around, but i will say this: the more things change, the more they don’t. Because what I am seeing is an awful lot of extremely priveleged women (and some men) going on and on and on about how “good” they are, which makes everyone who is not-them, by implication, not-so-good.
ugh.
Sunrunner –
no theory.
my argument was that no one used any of those terms wrt burqas.
you and i and lots of others complained that they were being silenced — their agency denied.
they were being treated as if they were ’stupid’ when they chose to wear headcoverings and, as you noted on my blog, they did choose to wear burqas in certain places outside afghanistan.
thus, when lindsay said someone mentioned that they chose to wear burqas that someone (you) wasn’t talking about afghanistan or even necessarily burqas.
iow, she’s confused.
i guess i was too subtle. and should have just said: y’all can’t read.
Sunrunner –
R is working on a secretly formula shampoo for everyone: Wash that wall head right outta your hair.
I don’t know about you, but wall head is really irritating and doesn’t not flatter my muffin top either!
I think i emailed this link to the Bitch, but I may have been confused by my computer.
Anyway taking one small point, re. third world sex workers being the ultimate in poor them, i found this great link
http://www.infochangeindia.org/analysis138.jsp
notice that the poor little third world sex workers are organising themselves and view sex work as a human right. but these must be the priviliged and therefore unworthy sex workers, who are really students who want to have a lot of orgasms or something.
I’d like to recommend this excellent article on Afghanistan. I have found it very illuminating on the interconnections of class, imperialism and gender. It was written in 1981, so at the time of the Soviet invasion, but goes back to the British invasions of 1838 and 1878, their impact on class and gender relations, the development of a tradition of resistance under the banner of Islam, etc.
Lurk’n’Learn I call it.
This has become my overarching principle lately. Some people (marc and amanda and myself are included) open their mouths before they think. I’ve lately learned to just shut the fuck up. I rarely have much to add and there are people who say things better than I do, so…Lurk’n'Learn™(B|L).
I finally got to go over and read this whole post. This is much of what I was trying to say in the Alas thread that greenconciousness derailed.
I still wish all those people throwing around “relativism” and getting their panties in a bunch would also grapple with their ethnocentrism.
I think that Veronique’s first comment is right. I have even had students say things in evaluations like: “This course taught me a lot about racism, I never knew that it was that common, and coming from a white person it made me think about it more.” Those types of comments have appeared more than once on my evaluations.
Front page of NYT, Wed., Oct 11, 2006:
Dan Bilefsky & Ian Fisher, “Across Europe, Worries on Islam Spread to Center.”
Brussels, Oct. 10 – Europe appears to be crossing an invisible line regarding its Muslim minorities: more people in the political mainstream are arguing that Islam cannot be reconciled with European values. …
For years those who raised their voices were mostly on the far right. Now those normally seen as moderates – ordinary people as well as politicians – are asking whether once unquestioned values of tolerance and multiculturalism should have limits.
“Jihad versus McWorld” seems apropos here, again.
they become mutually reinforcing antagonists. not just Islam (and yes, the racism/colonial crap makes it that much more complex and loaded), but also: it’s increasingly hardline fundamentalism versus increasingly overarching advanced capitalism/corporate rule.
Both theocratic Islam and Capitalism are colonizing cultures, so it’s unsurprising that they’re coming into conflict, much like communism and capitalism have.
Communism seems to have been infected with capitalist elements or overthrown. To some extent we’re seeing this in Islam too.
And, of course there are areas that Islam colonized that fought back, and then were later colonized by western powers, like India.
I think classing the conflict as jihad vs. mcworld is a bit too simplistic.
>I’m awestruck by how the fuck to even approach this level of Not Getting It - I’m erring towards snark obviously but you know…>
yah, i had the same reaction. she’s strangely affectless about it, too. “does not compute.” -whirrr-. shrug. not worth analyzing, really, i just found it very odd.
and, sadly, there is no lack of similar levels of clue-impairment wrt race or many other things among My People, Reform or otherwise.
Josh : “Both theocratic Islam and Capitalism are colonizing cultures, so it’s unsurprising that they’re coming into conflict, much like communism and capitalism have.”
I don’t think this is correct : capitalism and communism can’t avoid being in contradiction, it is the very essence of communism to be the abolition of capitalism - another thing being whether what passed as “communism” in the Soviet Union or similar countries really was any such thing.
Not so with capitalism and theocratic islam. Imperialist powers have spent a great deal of energy propping up theocratic capitalist muslim states such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait…
There is no inherent contradiction between capitalism and theocratic islam. What there is is that after the failure of the left in many countries has led to certain kinds of political islam being seen in certain instances as a more efficient means of resisting imperialism, dictatorship, neo-liberalism.
I have found this text is quite illuminating on the subject.
I think it also may be oversimplifying the colonial impulse of western cultures to make the conflict capitalism vs. communism. Russia had a long history before communism as a colonial power, and has that level of racial European nationalism since communism lost ground.
I agree that there’s no inherent conflict between capitalism and Islam, but there *is* an inherent conflict between colonial powers in the world, and there always has been when they bump up against each-other. What I was arguing was that Islam has a history as a colonial power to some extent.
Sure it does have that history, but history is all it is since the fall of the Ottoman empire. I can only think of small pockets of the Muslim world that haven’t lived most of their recent history as colonised countries or under direct imperialist rule. That is why the affirmation of one’s muslim identity can be seen as a form of anti-imperialist protest today. But in no place on earth does “I love McDonald’s” be understood as anti-imperialist protest.
Also I want to emphasise : capitalism is a mode of production, i.e. an objective set of social relations, islam is a religion, i.e. a fiction. Ideologies don’t have a power on their own.
Iran too is a capitalist country, in fact the Ayatollahs were great at freeing up the market, smashing trade unions, and all the things capitalists love. It was only because this regime was born of a genuine popular anti-imperialist revolution which it deflected and effectively hijacked that relations with the US became extremely tense. But relations with other imperialist powers with fewer military claims in the region such as France and Germany are pretty good, and Iran is well inserted in the world economy.
The reason this is important is in order to get rid of the “clash of civilizations” nonsense, which sometimes clouds our vision even as we partly challenge it. It’s important to see that, although people may protest in different ways in different parts of the world against capitalism imperialism, etc. they are still up against forces which are fundamentally the same, and that the potential for unity exists.
ilestre –
in #30
well, hang on there. ideologies, in cluding religion, are reflective of their material base — shaped by it, yes?
and class warfare is never fought as an explicit battle between competing economies. no one is really called to arms in order to defend profit. they are called to arms and asked to spare their lives for an ideology — was just glancing through something the other day about the way the Germans advanced an ideology to get peasants on board with bourgeois revolution . the paper was showing how they interpreted that ideological agenda to their owns.
(which, grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr, is another good example of how people are never dupes of ideology or culture or whatever. they of appropriate that ideology in unique and interesting ways that actually reflect their material circumstances.
ilestre, I think you’re missing a good portion of Islamic history in Asia. The conflict between the various European colonial powers and Islamic colonization all over Asia is not restricted to that time frame.
I agree. Now - how many of those countries were Islamic at the outset? Islamic countries are both colonized and colonizers.
I see your point, and I wasn’t disagreeing that there’s a large element of anti-colonial ardor in Islamism today. What I’m getting at is that there has been a history of colonization in Islam, and that it’s neither gone, nor irrelevant to consider as part of the motive of Islamism, and radical Islam, even internally to Islamic cultures today.
The imposition of conservative Sharia courts on liberal nations is an ongoing conflict internal to Islam, and is related to the colonial impulse in Islamism.
I agree that the difference between a religion trying to spread it’s self and capitalism spreading its self is important, but my point was that Islam has the drive to spread its self by practicing colonization, even today.
While I agree that the general “clash of civilizations” concept coming form conservatives is useless, I don’t want to paint this as a conflict that leaves out important elements of motivation in the actions of Islamism.
And I think it’s important to see that thee forms of protest are frequently subjugated by people who’re having a go at grabbing power, and will essentially create just the same situation that the original protest was against, only with a new suit of clothes.
I get what you’re saying, and I agree with most of it, but I’m not sure you see the point I’m trying to make, which is not a defense of capitalism, or an attack on Islam, or even Islamism. It’s a theory that the motives behind the resistance you’re talking about is not singularly anti-western, anti-capitalist, or even anti-western-capitalist-colonization. To some extent, it’s a continuation of the old call to colonize for religious reasons that Islam still has active in certain sections of it’s culture.
Mmmm. Yes of course ideologies are reflective of their mateiral base and of the class forces whose aspirations they express. Which in the case at hand means something else which is useful to remember : islam is not a monolith. Some forces (ruling classes such as the Saudi) will stress the conservative aspects, others (a resistance group such as Hizbullah) will stress the resistance to opression, etc.
ilestre –
#33
:)
I was trying to figure out a way to explain that whatever “colonial” impulses existed prior to Western colonialism, the impulse of Romans and Muslims were shaped by completely different economies.
And it seems to me that, i’m sure you’ll agree, what is really going on is this particular area of the world’s version of industrialization, capitalist rationalization, ‘modernization’ — yes?
or no?
In other words — and you may not agree with this — a few people have argued that the reason why the Russian Revolution, China, etc. didn’t quite work out was that Communist ideology was used as a spur to that particular area of the world’s rise of own kind of class warfare. Because they weren’t as Marx predicted they should be — they weren’t capitalist yet. So, communist ideologies were used in the service of creating the kind of industriali, ratioanlized infrastructure necessary to capitalism.
capitlist development murdered millions in its own bizarre ways (which “we” never count because it’s considered “natural”). it required the use of state violence, also, to force people to become “free labor” !
I’m pretty sure you know the rave, so the argument goes that Communist ideology had to be put in the service of transforming an economy from feudal to communist, skipping capitalism. Whereas our history normalizes the death, destruction, and outright murder of a citizenry to capitalist ends — every body rags on “The Little Black Book of Communism”. blahblah.
So, I’m thinking, likewise with Islam — it’s own method of _Nationalizing_. Because the rise of capitalism went hand in hand with nationalizing a people. (E.g., Anderson’s _Imagined Communities_ — where he shows how discourses were needed in order to unite a vast group of people.)
Am I making any sense at all.
I’m thinking that, what appears to be a call to arms to colonize, is really a call to arms to create a shared national identity — or even pan-national (which gets interesting especially in Middle East).
bitchlab
#34
Yes, I think we very much agree. Perhaps not on details, but hey. I’m going to expand a bit.
Yes, Roman and Muslim imperialism were different creatures to capitalist imperialism, in that they were driven by different economic dynamics, different class conflicts.
Yes, what happened in Russia and China was the development of capital accumulation on the backs of Russian and Chinese workers and for the benefit of the ruling strata of these countries.
Important difference between the two is that in Russia there was a genuine revolution with the working class playing a leading role in association with the peasants, and that the reason it then went back into counter-revolution wasn’t just that Russia was undeveloped, but crucially that revolution failed in the West (most dramatically Germany), that the bureaucratic layer of the Communist Party then chose to consolidate its power at the expense of Russian workers etc. In China and many other countries where “socialist” governments came to power in the 50’s-60’s there were revolutions led by middle class forces, with very much the modernising project at the fore from the very beginning. Importantly for our purpose Egypt, Algeria, Iraq. That was also the ideology informing many national liberation movements in the middle East.
So perhaps you see where I’m going : the process of modernisation has largely already occured : Algeria, Egypt, Tunisia, Iraq are (was in the case of Iraq) quite modern economies, albeit with crippling poverty in their midst, and dictatorial ruling cliques at their head, and the rise of political islam comes as a reaction to the failure of these processes to deliver what they promised (prosperity for all, independance from imperialism), and the failure of the left movements to mount an effective opposition to these governments (one anecdote on this : one Algerian comrade who related to me how in the 60’s her husband was in the Communist Party, was for this put in prison by the regime - but he still followed the Moscow line of praising the “positive aspects” of the regime and saying nothing of the “negative aspects” !).
So, like I said, I’m just bringing this into the discussion as a reinforcement of what you’re saying, really : political islam is not a “colonizing project” (if it was, where are the colonies ?), but a (pan-)national ideology of resistance to imperialism and the ravages of neoliberal capitalism. Mistaken and doomed to failure in my view, of course : they should all be sex-positive revolutionary socialists. But if one wants to understand the appeal, that’s where it lies, not in some kind of atavistic arab fanaticism.
Josh,
I think you are confusing matters by supposing that a “colonial impulse” is a motive behind the rise of political islam. If I take your conclusion :
The motives behind resistance is to get rid or attenuate what you’re resisting - so to say that the motives for resistance is a call to colonize is just confusion.
I mean, what call are we talking about ? There’s often mention in political islam that muslims of (the countries concerned) have not been pious enough, and that thence come the misfortunes of the people. But that’s a call to piety, not colonisation, and in this form it’s not even really political. It gets political when it takes the form of accusing specifically the leaders of the country of being bad muslims (corrupt, profiteering, etc.) which is also very far from a colonial project.
Much more rarely you have formulations of the dream of an entirely muslim world, but these calls are from small groups on the fringe of political islam, and even then in very abstract terms. Even Al Qaeda only gives itself the tasks of getting “infidel troops” out of the Muslim world.
Colonialism just isn’t the right word to use. What political islam is is a political theory, or rather a set of various political theories which claim to have answers to all political problems, as political theories usually do. That’s quite different. It can be dangerous, misleading, reactionary, whatever. (Hence the conflicts within the muslim world over the status of Sharia law for instance). But colonial it ain’t.
I agree with you ilestre on that anti-imperialism and pan-arabic ideology.
i wish i had time to hunt down some things i wrote analyzing this — in a pulling it out of my ass way. in my old job, i actually had to read a lot of research on terrorism. what i found interesting was that the appeal is to a middle class anger, often at denied opportunities or perception of what those opportunities should be.
so, yeah, agreed that some countries have undergound the kind of infrastructural development that i was thinking about already. most certainly Iraq. (and Saddam was once involved in pan-arabic politics, wasn’t he? wasn’t part of his venom directed precisely at his own personal anger from some of those political activities. been a long time since i read it.)
the other thing is, and no one should be surprised if they study their own nation’s reaction to modernization — to the experience of realizing that “all that’s solid melts into air” (can’t be arsed to look up the quote). one impulse has always been a conservatizing ideology, an attempt to capture an eden that existed prior to modernization, an idealization of the past.)
more later when my brain is functiong.
question: any good books analyzing this stuff from a marxist perspective? i’m sure there are tons, but looking for something recommended.
*rolls eyes* *mocks self*
“underground” should be “understood”
ye olde Bitch Slippage at work. When I’m tired, in speach I do Spoonerisms.
*sigh*
ilestre–
feeling’s mutual! smoochiez!
and yeah, i’d intended to read that this weekend — but may not be ’til next since i have a client who’s driving me batty over a $225 job. *sigh*
[...] BTW….Go check out Bitch | Lab; she has a whole collection of discussion threads on the entire controversy…far too many to link here…but this post and discussion will do as a start. [...]
That maybe if we hadn’t shattered that country with conventional and economic warfare, the struggle for women’s independence would have advanced along much further.
Or maybe not. From what I see of most countries that have been colonies (including our own, remember), oppression of women was part of the indigenous culture, and colonization by any other power, regardless of whether or not it was Western, Eastern or anyone else may have changed who got to be in charge of the oppression and how it was expressed, but not the fact that it existed/exists.
There is no contradiction between saying that some form of opression of women existed before colonialism intervened in Afghanistan (which would be before British agression in 1838)- and saying that colonial warfare has not weighed against the development of the struggle for women’s independance, and made the situation worse for women as well as men. Both are true.
Interestingly When the British first invaded Afghanistan in 1838, the Pashtuns there had a reputation in South Asia for being very relaxed about their Islam.
It is also well known that the societies of North America were considerably more egalitarian that the European societies which took over the continent, including as regards gender. Not, need it be said, because of some innate “non-western innocence”, but because hunting -gathering and horticultural societies in general have to be egalitarian in order to function efficiently.
Eleanor Leacock :
Should read “saying that colonial warfare has weighed” …