[Peace-discuss] Sexism, racism and the war

[C. G. Estabrook]

During the Green party campaign in 2002, an elderly academic wrote to the
News-Gazette to announce that, on the basis of his professional
competence, he was able to descry, from my writings on political subjects,
what might not be evident to the unknowing laity: that I was an
anti-Semite. Evidence for the charge not being forthcoming, I concluded
that it was a cover for an unwillingness or inability to discuss the
issues in question, viz., the nature of the state of Israel and its role
in American foreign policy.

Perhaps the charge of sexism works the same way.  To repeat what I asked
before (to no effect), what do you think would count as my having my
sexism removed? How would you know that I'd done it?  Is it sexist by
definition, e.g., to hold that abortion is unethical?

As I've said, I think that a concentration on sexism -- and in a sense on
racism -- can be distracting.  That sort of concentration is (or has been)
fashionable among the self-styled "radicals" of Post-modernism, who
substituted a preoccupation with these issues ("identity politics") a
generation ago for an earlier generation's revolutionary enthusiasms, now
regarded as naive and unrealistic (and also career-destroying).

We've seen graphically recently how racism is bound up with the torture,
including rape and murder, "for information" that is a necessary and not
accidental characteristic of the US concentration camps in Iraq and
elsewhere.  The Americans who perpetrate these crimes -- which we're
responsible for, because we have the power to stop them and haven't done
so -- are able to do them more easily because of racist assumptions about
Arabs, Iraqis and even Muslims.  Foreign commentators have remarked on the
similarity of the prison photos to pictures of lynchings from the last
century.  But the war is not caused by racism but by rational political
programs (rational in a sense that may finally destroy us all, of course).

The critic Terry Eagleton, in his recent book After Theory, writes of
Post-modernism that, "With the launch of a new global narrative of
capitalism, along with the so-called war on terror ... it cannot afford
simply to keep recounting the same narratives of class, race and gender,
indispensable as these topics are..."

But it should be noticed that the Post-modernist trinity of class, race,
and gender (unlike the Christian trinity) is not co-equal.  Struggles over
race and gender can in principle be overcome by agreement and
reconciliation, but that's not true of class struggles.  The Rodney King
solution to the struggle among those who have different roles in the
process of production ("Can't we all just get along?") is not available.  
In fact the 20th century attempt to enforce it -- to overcome class
struggles by agreement and reconciliation -- is called corporatism
(fascism); the attempt (largely US-backed) to impose such a solution by
force in the Third World has been called sub-fascism, owing to its lack of
popular support in comparison with actually-existing fascism of the early
20th century.

That's what the government that we're responsible for is imposing in Iraq
and indeed around the world.  And that's what we should be working
against.

Regards, Carl

On Tue, 4 May 2004, Alfred Kagan wrote:

> Perhaps Carl would like to have a similar operation.
> 
> At 3:36 PM -0500 5/3/04, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
> >Having his sexism removed?
> >
> >On Mon, 3 May 2004, Linda Evans wrote:
> >
> >>  I heard the Lynn Sprout case has been post-poned due to 
> >>  an emergency operation for one of the lawyers.  True?
> >