“Do you know what really happens to the lives we lock away?” A provocative flyer advertising the Balch Auditorium panel discussion from Crossroads residents, a half-way house for women recently released from prison, asks student-passerby’s hurridly walking through Seal Court.
At the talk, the small group of diverse women (young and older, white and black) seated at the well-lit stage, each took turns speaking on a particular topic in relation to their incarceration experiences and the injustices they have suffered at the hands of the U.S. criminal justice system. The place is filled almost completely with a sea of student faces. I had the pleasure of having known one of the women up on the stage intimately from my senior year of college. She had been gracious enough to share with me her words of wisdom for my senior thesis entitled “The Gulag Speaks Back: What Formerly Incarcerated African-American Women Can Teach Us About Living Between the Politics of the Corporate-Prison-Industrial Complex and The War On Drugs.” I was happy to see my old friend doing well, confident in her ability to raise awareness about issues important to her and many others. My connection to her, and another woman from Crossroads not on the panel but most certainly sitting in the front rows, have made me a better woman today. No kidding. I am sincerely grateful to both of these women and the four others that contributed so much to my life, through the undergraduate thesis interviewing process and beyond. They taught me about how to understand the cruelty of horrible violence and the great depths of unconditional love.
I am especially grateful in this space online to the women from the panel of the talk. In the lives of these self-empowered women, such as the women of Crossroads panelists, we can all learn about how in the lived reality of formerly incarcerated women, activism and Feminism are not independent practices of one another, as they shouldn’t be within academia. Far too long have the Feminists of the ivory tower excluded the voices of women of color, women formerly incarcerated, working class and poor. It is finally time that we, as academic Feminists, began to ask the marginalized Feminists how to proceed with a cohesive Feminist movement. Competancy is a non-issue.
I stood in awe of the panelists accomplishments despite all the terrible hardships in their lives. Here are some stats on the panelists of the talk:
*134 years of Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous Attendance
*1 GED
*5 AA degrees
*1 Bachlor of Science Degree
*Substance Abuse Program-Peer Counselor
*Faith Based Program-2 Years
*Christian Twelve Step Facilitator
*Books on Tape for the Blind
*Carpenter, Electrician, Masonry…
*College Reading and Language Arts Tutor
*Computer Programming
*Graphic Arts Vocational Certificate
And Many, Many others…
These accomplishments say something about the women’s individual courage, and the strength of the Crossroads formula to help the recently released prisoners, especially “lifer’s” get back on their feet again. Although I am an aetheist and many of the women are Christian, this has never been a divisive issue that kept us from our discussions. Getting involved means listening, not just talking and acting. This is one lesson I learned from the current Crossroads program director.
Furthermore, the words of these women were bitter like acid when describing pregancy in prison, for example. The experience described of living the instant separation of mother from infant, not to mention, the shackling of the mother’s feet directly pre and post labor is heartbreaking. If you don’t know how to start practicing Feminism, I would like to encourage readers to start by listening to what women in prison/formerly released have to say.
I would like to conclude with a few outrageous statistics about women in prison:
*The number of owmen in prison has increased at nearly double the rate of men
since 1985: 404% vs. 209%.
*More than half of women incarcerated under state jurisdiction report that they had experienced either sexual or physical abuse before their admission to prison.
*Only 4 in 10 women are able to find employment in the regular labor market within one year of release.
*States are authorized to initiate termination of parental rights when a child has been living under foster care for 15 of the last 22 months.
*1 in 3 mothers has never spoken with her children by phone while incarcerated.
supersonic debbie
Monday, December 13, 2010
Nuclear Disaster: A Science Fiction Dystopia in Digital Storytelling
Introduction
Is future nuclear disaster predictable today? Maybe. Maybe not. The genre of this video, as I classify it, is science fiction horror. I am not making any conspiracy theory type predictions; this is a digital story first and foremost. The question at hand is: how will our technological advances impact the dystopia digital story’s plot line? I want to test the boundaries of the digital storytelling mode in utilizing text to form a mental picture, instead of relying on the “universal” language of viseral imagery. I use the genre of science fiction to transgress boundaries of truth, time and place, creating a digital no man’s land. Larry Friedlander explains in “Narrative Strategies in a Digital Age” that “It is a work of art whose purpose is to express. It is totally and thoroughly artificial. Each of its elements-space, time, objects, beings, and actions-can be selected, arrange and transformed for the needs of an aesthetic experience.” I envisioned a digital story unique in it’s treatment of our current political anxiety to produce fear and overwhelming dread by creating an anti-aesthetic experience through a nuclear dystopia.
In envisioning this horrific disaster, I ask my audience to reflect about their apathy in today’s political climate of hostile militarism and the war on terror’s state of high-alert. The rhetoric of crisis has effectively normalized the stringent public “safety” measures that the U.S. government orders us as citizens to comply with on a regular basis. I play with this well-known suspenseful feeling we share while living in times of economic distress and political crisis, war, nuclear proliferation. Through sound and text primarily, but also with select imagery, I define digital storytelling as Professor Alex Juhasz put’s it: “production of written text to exist on an online space.” When working with text in this video, versus photography, I play with the boundaries between video and hypertext for a digital story. I ask, can the same sensations of fear be produced through words as are produced by the images in the video’s “Born Free” by M.I.A and “The Raven” by Ricardo de Montreuil?
The central conflict and main emphasis of “Nuclear Disaster” is on the unknown future in which total nuclear war has destroyed the cyber-world we know today. I show no violence, no blood and no gore. The storyline is embedded with elements of alarm (“The city has been totally destroyed”) that heighten the viewers panic (“I don’t know if this is the end for all humankind”), and bring forth from the depths of the human psyche’s our fear of the unknown (“White supremacist World War III”/ “Corporate Take-over of U.S. Government”/ ending with “Hello?”). Hopefully, the viewer is transported from passification of the war on terror propaganda and made hyper-aware of what the extreme conclusion of a state of crisis could sound like.
My stylistic voice has a tone of urgency that propells the audience to read on further, regardless of the lack of imagery on the screen to elucidate what’s happening. I use a bomb alarm to heighten the tension in the story. The audio (sound, exclamatory text, noises, music) component of this piece sets the tone, mood, and style of writing. I have a monologue of text that sounds like a conversation because I attempt to incorporate the viewer’s responses into my dialogue. The text is formatted as a story but reads like a poem. The background noises give an aura that is mysteriously intense, fearful and suspenseful throughout only lifting up a bit to provide relief upon seeing my face on the webcam for a few seconds. I experimented with various combinations of noises, and single story lines together. Through text predominantly, I attempt to subvert conventions of linear time because the prospective future is a location created through dialogue, not spatial observations like in the video’s “Born Free” and “The Raven.” The text scrolling across the bottom of the screen intentionally parody’s CNN’s use of text similarly showen when giving breaking news updates.
Almost at the end of the clip, I inform the audience that I have a webcam and that I am trying to adjust it to see the outside; to see the world wide web after the destructive aftermath. Why? “The presence of the camera is a kind of passport that opens all doors and enables every kind of scandal possible.” Truly. The male gaze is subverted temporarily as I can “see” the audience before the internet connection is lost. Although the viewer sees me at the other end of the video screen, it is unclear if I can see them back. The point of this twist is to create a place to challenge the imagination of the viewers. Are the photographs of lights shown what they expected? What did my audience image a post-nuclear disaster world would look like? The viewer has been ‘cammed’ in the sense that I am having a dialogue with them as if they were on another webcam at some other location. In the end, the viewer only sees me to rupture the fantasy of what they imagine a post-nuclear disaster survivor to look like. My face is the only viseral comfort I give.
Digital Influences and Their Public Comments
A. Music video for the song “Born Free” by artist M.I.A and directed by Romain-Gavras. (2010) Photography Director: Andre Chemetoff. Producer: Mourad Belkeddar. Production Company: elnino.tv
a. http://vimeo.com/11219730
b. The zooming in and out of a white, U.S. military soldier is where the video opens and ends. It is clearly a critique of the military-industrial-complex for the exception of one minute detail. The soliders are abducting, torturing and murdering red haired-white people; not Afghanistani, Pakistani, Iraqi or Iranian people of color. This substitution of white people for people of color is no accident, ofcourse. The point is if red haired civilians were being massacred the way black haired civilians are currently being exterminated, then perhaps there would be major world outcry, like there was about the making of this video that depicts violence against whites by whites. U.S. soldiers are killing innocent noncombatants in Iraq/Afghanistan almost every day, while we still do not have an exit strategy on the horizon, and there is almost zero public anti-war demonstrations by the American people. I found this video to promote a push out of passification to create anti-war activist digital story.
c. For the making of this video, many bloggers have hypocritically intimidated M.I.A because she is used excessive violence against certain groups based on their physical appearance or for not having a strong ‘theme’:
i. Paxson Woelber : “I have to admit I laughed out loud at the first shot of the bus full of sullen ginger kids. It's like something from South Park. Also, the combination of the absurd symbolism of the redheads with the real American flag made the concept feel confused and kind of petty. If this is some warning against discrimination in general why single out America in particular? Alternately, if you want to criticize the United States, why not represent a case of real discrimination (god knows there are plenty to choose from)? I thought it was an interesting video (and MIA rocks) but conceptually just kind of blah.”
ii. Telemaak: “Sorry guys, I'm french, I've gone to college and I've probably known M.I.A. way before you have and I know she's keen on denouncing world's injustice but this time, I don't understand why she uses violence so much. Yes, the world is violent. Yes, it's sadly becoming more and more ordinary but why the hell keepin on thinking that showing it will calm the situation... When I look at all the comments, I'm quite deperate.. Stray Films, please start stopping telling people are idiots and then post a comment on mine.”
iii. jorge gonzalez graupera:M.I.A. will tell you she's against violence, yet she lends herself to a video like this where a child gets a bullet in the head. Furthermore, if you go to one of her shows you will hear machine gun samples every 30 seconds. Sorry folks, but I think this is bullshit; you can't have it both ways. This just further exacerbates the problem of violence and hatred in this world. In this day and age this kind of imagery reveals nothing and makes no kind of statement when you can go online and see actual footage (youtube.com/ watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0) of what the US military does to innocent people. Which brings me to ANOTHER point: The US is not the only aggressor in the world; In Africa black people slaughter and rape and in the Arab world Sunnis kill Shiites and vice versa. Etc., etc. Violence and hatred is a HUMAN thing, not an AMERICAN thing. So can we please stop with the double standard already? Enough is enough. Finally, from an artistic point of view, this video is way too heavy handed and "clever", trite and redundant (the track is pretty bad-ass sounding though). Anyway, just my opinion; please spare me all the hate e-mails and comments.
d. Other bloggers have come to M.I.A’s defense posting the following:
i. Matt DL: To Telemaak: MIA is not using violence in an exploitative way. She is showing [actually the director is showing] that violence is terrible and unacceptable. And he does this by turning the tables a bit on racial profiling. This video is the opposite of most Hollywood films because it is not pleasing or 'good' violence. I think it makes it's point quite effectively.
ii. Martin Maden :“Wow. Incredible video. Reminds me of the thousands of Iranian boys who walked to their deaths to clear the minefields during the war between Iran and Iraq.” matthiaskuentzel.de/ contents/ ahmadinejads-demons
iii. GageParker: “Wow some of you guys are pretty dense, this has nothing to do with ginger people being discriminated against. It is an analogy (you know being artistic and creative, and not being so literal) of how all kinds of groups are persecuted for being different. If that point was lost on you your not much of genius either. And no I do not think he had any intention of trying to be funny with this video. Who would watch this and start laughing?!”
iv. Brett Harvey: Jorge, with all due respect, your logic is flawed. You continue to iterate that there is a dissonance between this video's obscene violence and M.I.A's speaking out against violence. It seems odd that you would say this considering you just said the message was too obvious. I'm going to assume that you think the message is to shock people and warn them the dangers of a big, over-policed government being able to potentially commit unwarranted, heinous acts of violence. If that's the case, how could you NOT depict it in this manner? In what way would you convey the same message and themes? Also, just because you felt that the message was too obvious and utilized a cheap device doesn't mean that this won't impact other people. You're misusing the word gratuitous: this video is using violence for something more than the sake of the violent acts. While you may think that this may be a cheap device to convey a simple message, the violence is still not gratuitous. Why not make a statement about violence in general? Because the song and the video are making a statement about feeling oppressed by a big government. Why pick on the U.S.? Who knows? As an American, I personally wasn't offended by it and felt that the government depicted could have been as easily interchangeable with any other superpower (China, Russia, UK, etc), much in the same way that gingers could be exchanged for any other group of people (blacks, gays, Jews, etc) and still have a similar impact and meaning. Chalking this video up as simply a knock of of an action movie is an insult to the people who made this film, and to think that there was no message other than to glorify violence seems sensationalist itself.
v. Mr. J M Stevens:Yo, I didn't read your whole conversation and this point might have already been made but i just wanted to point it out. My interpretation of the video is an act of hacktivism (which m.i.a keeps going on about lately too) and it seems to be a reinactment of the video aired on channel 4 where tamil tigers where being shot by sri lankan soldiers... it seems to me like they have replaced the tamil tigers with ginger haired people... it also relates to all descrimination that occurs across the world... obviously channel 4 did not show the people getting shot but m.i.a wants to make an impact and show what actually happens in the world as sometimes people do need to see it... i could imagine she was pretty angry not only at the video but the fact that the government said that the video was fabricated etc....thats my take it anyway :)
B. “Ducked and Covered: A Survival Guide to the Post Apocalypse” Video written, directed, produced, and edited by Nathaniel Lindsay (Comic Relief!)
a. http://vimeo.com/8149690
b. “An instructional public information film desgined to assist the general population with surviving life in Australia after a nuclear war. Produced by the Australian Board of Civil Defense during the early 1980’s…”
c. On behalf of my audience, I included this video in my analysis for comic relief, parody and amusement. It also lended me with wonderful ideas for my storyline and plot.
C. “The Raven”-720 HD Video
a. http://vimeo.com/channels/86588
b. A film by Ricardo de Montreuil. Written by Ricardo de Montreuil and Antonio Perez. Produced: Ricardo de Montreuil and Eliz Eskeranli. Co-produced: Jesus Hernandez. (2010) Cinematographer: Andres Sanchez. Music: Angelo Milli. Special Effects: Aaron Burns. 3D Modeling and Animation: Juan Somarriha and Francisco Concha
c. Although I love the science fictional location of the video and the HD quality of the images, I found the piece to lack a sharp storyline. The main character has super-human powers and is able to remain at large by the end. Are we, the audience, left to speculate about how much longer the heroic fugitive can outlast the overbearing robotic Big Brother’s to conclude he will eventually succumb? Regardless, I found the work useful in crafting my own digital story. I looked closely at the comments as well as the video because it helped me find a voice. Here are some of the more interesting comments:
i. THE RAVEN FILM: “Thanks Ayz.It was shot on RED using Ultraprime lenses. The budget was $5k. And is based on a treatment I wrote for a trilogy.We shot it in Downtown LA in 2 days. You can see some production stills in The Raven facebook”: facebook.com/ pages/ THE-RAVEN-FILM/ 110828695622564?ref=mf
ii. Youssef Ezzeddine: ”hmm.. good work especialy on special effects and color correction..However, the script could be more interesting..whatever, good job.”
iii. Halivud Estevez: “I agree, good job, but flat "story". Good for a trailer, or pilot. If i was a producer, I would give you a screenwriter creative team.”
Conclusion
Overall, my digital story “Nuclear Disaster” is simplistic, the tone is urgent and the hypertext situated within an aura of crisis and a dystopian tale. In closing, I leave the audience wondering, suspencefully, if humankind has survived or if I will even survive. I refused to terminate a dystopia with a happy ending that leaves us all feeling cozy and safe. The world I have created in “Nuclear Disaster” is as Friedlander writes, “the world is both real and virtual, the story is both a human and a technological production and the user both makes and consumes the product.”
Is future nuclear disaster predictable today? Maybe. Maybe not. The genre of this video, as I classify it, is science fiction horror. I am not making any conspiracy theory type predictions; this is a digital story first and foremost. The question at hand is: how will our technological advances impact the dystopia digital story’s plot line? I want to test the boundaries of the digital storytelling mode in utilizing text to form a mental picture, instead of relying on the “universal” language of viseral imagery. I use the genre of science fiction to transgress boundaries of truth, time and place, creating a digital no man’s land. Larry Friedlander explains in “Narrative Strategies in a Digital Age” that “It is a work of art whose purpose is to express. It is totally and thoroughly artificial. Each of its elements-space, time, objects, beings, and actions-can be selected, arrange and transformed for the needs of an aesthetic experience.” I envisioned a digital story unique in it’s treatment of our current political anxiety to produce fear and overwhelming dread by creating an anti-aesthetic experience through a nuclear dystopia.
In envisioning this horrific disaster, I ask my audience to reflect about their apathy in today’s political climate of hostile militarism and the war on terror’s state of high-alert. The rhetoric of crisis has effectively normalized the stringent public “safety” measures that the U.S. government orders us as citizens to comply with on a regular basis. I play with this well-known suspenseful feeling we share while living in times of economic distress and political crisis, war, nuclear proliferation. Through sound and text primarily, but also with select imagery, I define digital storytelling as Professor Alex Juhasz put’s it: “production of written text to exist on an online space.” When working with text in this video, versus photography, I play with the boundaries between video and hypertext for a digital story. I ask, can the same sensations of fear be produced through words as are produced by the images in the video’s “Born Free” by M.I.A and “The Raven” by Ricardo de Montreuil?
The central conflict and main emphasis of “Nuclear Disaster” is on the unknown future in which total nuclear war has destroyed the cyber-world we know today. I show no violence, no blood and no gore. The storyline is embedded with elements of alarm (“The city has been totally destroyed”) that heighten the viewers panic (“I don’t know if this is the end for all humankind”), and bring forth from the depths of the human psyche’s our fear of the unknown (“White supremacist World War III”/ “Corporate Take-over of U.S. Government”/ ending with “Hello?”). Hopefully, the viewer is transported from passification of the war on terror propaganda and made hyper-aware of what the extreme conclusion of a state of crisis could sound like.
My stylistic voice has a tone of urgency that propells the audience to read on further, regardless of the lack of imagery on the screen to elucidate what’s happening. I use a bomb alarm to heighten the tension in the story. The audio (sound, exclamatory text, noises, music) component of this piece sets the tone, mood, and style of writing. I have a monologue of text that sounds like a conversation because I attempt to incorporate the viewer’s responses into my dialogue. The text is formatted as a story but reads like a poem. The background noises give an aura that is mysteriously intense, fearful and suspenseful throughout only lifting up a bit to provide relief upon seeing my face on the webcam for a few seconds. I experimented with various combinations of noises, and single story lines together. Through text predominantly, I attempt to subvert conventions of linear time because the prospective future is a location created through dialogue, not spatial observations like in the video’s “Born Free” and “The Raven.” The text scrolling across the bottom of the screen intentionally parody’s CNN’s use of text similarly showen when giving breaking news updates.
Almost at the end of the clip, I inform the audience that I have a webcam and that I am trying to adjust it to see the outside; to see the world wide web after the destructive aftermath. Why? “The presence of the camera is a kind of passport that opens all doors and enables every kind of scandal possible.” Truly. The male gaze is subverted temporarily as I can “see” the audience before the internet connection is lost. Although the viewer sees me at the other end of the video screen, it is unclear if I can see them back. The point of this twist is to create a place to challenge the imagination of the viewers. Are the photographs of lights shown what they expected? What did my audience image a post-nuclear disaster world would look like? The viewer has been ‘cammed’ in the sense that I am having a dialogue with them as if they were on another webcam at some other location. In the end, the viewer only sees me to rupture the fantasy of what they imagine a post-nuclear disaster survivor to look like. My face is the only viseral comfort I give.
Digital Influences and Their Public Comments
A. Music video for the song “Born Free” by artist M.I.A and directed by Romain-Gavras. (2010) Photography Director: Andre Chemetoff. Producer: Mourad Belkeddar. Production Company: elnino.tv
a. http://vimeo.com/11219730
b. The zooming in and out of a white, U.S. military soldier is where the video opens and ends. It is clearly a critique of the military-industrial-complex for the exception of one minute detail. The soliders are abducting, torturing and murdering red haired-white people; not Afghanistani, Pakistani, Iraqi or Iranian people of color. This substitution of white people for people of color is no accident, ofcourse. The point is if red haired civilians were being massacred the way black haired civilians are currently being exterminated, then perhaps there would be major world outcry, like there was about the making of this video that depicts violence against whites by whites. U.S. soldiers are killing innocent noncombatants in Iraq/Afghanistan almost every day, while we still do not have an exit strategy on the horizon, and there is almost zero public anti-war demonstrations by the American people. I found this video to promote a push out of passification to create anti-war activist digital story.
c. For the making of this video, many bloggers have hypocritically intimidated M.I.A because she is used excessive violence against certain groups based on their physical appearance or for not having a strong ‘theme’:
i. Paxson Woelber : “I have to admit I laughed out loud at the first shot of the bus full of sullen ginger kids. It's like something from South Park. Also, the combination of the absurd symbolism of the redheads with the real American flag made the concept feel confused and kind of petty. If this is some warning against discrimination in general why single out America in particular? Alternately, if you want to criticize the United States, why not represent a case of real discrimination (god knows there are plenty to choose from)? I thought it was an interesting video (and MIA rocks) but conceptually just kind of blah.”
ii. Telemaak: “Sorry guys, I'm french, I've gone to college and I've probably known M.I.A. way before you have and I know she's keen on denouncing world's injustice but this time, I don't understand why she uses violence so much. Yes, the world is violent. Yes, it's sadly becoming more and more ordinary but why the hell keepin on thinking that showing it will calm the situation... When I look at all the comments, I'm quite deperate.. Stray Films, please start stopping telling people are idiots and then post a comment on mine.”
iii. jorge gonzalez graupera:M.I.A. will tell you she's against violence, yet she lends herself to a video like this where a child gets a bullet in the head. Furthermore, if you go to one of her shows you will hear machine gun samples every 30 seconds. Sorry folks, but I think this is bullshit; you can't have it both ways. This just further exacerbates the problem of violence and hatred in this world. In this day and age this kind of imagery reveals nothing and makes no kind of statement when you can go online and see actual footage (youtube.com/ watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0) of what the US military does to innocent people. Which brings me to ANOTHER point: The US is not the only aggressor in the world; In Africa black people slaughter and rape and in the Arab world Sunnis kill Shiites and vice versa. Etc., etc. Violence and hatred is a HUMAN thing, not an AMERICAN thing. So can we please stop with the double standard already? Enough is enough. Finally, from an artistic point of view, this video is way too heavy handed and "clever", trite and redundant (the track is pretty bad-ass sounding though). Anyway, just my opinion; please spare me all the hate e-mails and comments.
d. Other bloggers have come to M.I.A’s defense posting the following:
i. Matt DL: To Telemaak: MIA is not using violence in an exploitative way. She is showing [actually the director is showing] that violence is terrible and unacceptable. And he does this by turning the tables a bit on racial profiling. This video is the opposite of most Hollywood films because it is not pleasing or 'good' violence. I think it makes it's point quite effectively.
ii. Martin Maden :“Wow. Incredible video. Reminds me of the thousands of Iranian boys who walked to their deaths to clear the minefields during the war between Iran and Iraq.” matthiaskuentzel.de/ contents/ ahmadinejads-demons
iii. GageParker: “Wow some of you guys are pretty dense, this has nothing to do with ginger people being discriminated against. It is an analogy (you know being artistic and creative, and not being so literal) of how all kinds of groups are persecuted for being different. If that point was lost on you your not much of genius either. And no I do not think he had any intention of trying to be funny with this video. Who would watch this and start laughing?!”
iv. Brett Harvey: Jorge, with all due respect, your logic is flawed. You continue to iterate that there is a dissonance between this video's obscene violence and M.I.A's speaking out against violence. It seems odd that you would say this considering you just said the message was too obvious. I'm going to assume that you think the message is to shock people and warn them the dangers of a big, over-policed government being able to potentially commit unwarranted, heinous acts of violence. If that's the case, how could you NOT depict it in this manner? In what way would you convey the same message and themes? Also, just because you felt that the message was too obvious and utilized a cheap device doesn't mean that this won't impact other people. You're misusing the word gratuitous: this video is using violence for something more than the sake of the violent acts. While you may think that this may be a cheap device to convey a simple message, the violence is still not gratuitous. Why not make a statement about violence in general? Because the song and the video are making a statement about feeling oppressed by a big government. Why pick on the U.S.? Who knows? As an American, I personally wasn't offended by it and felt that the government depicted could have been as easily interchangeable with any other superpower (China, Russia, UK, etc), much in the same way that gingers could be exchanged for any other group of people (blacks, gays, Jews, etc) and still have a similar impact and meaning. Chalking this video up as simply a knock of of an action movie is an insult to the people who made this film, and to think that there was no message other than to glorify violence seems sensationalist itself.
v. Mr. J M Stevens:Yo, I didn't read your whole conversation and this point might have already been made but i just wanted to point it out. My interpretation of the video is an act of hacktivism (which m.i.a keeps going on about lately too) and it seems to be a reinactment of the video aired on channel 4 where tamil tigers where being shot by sri lankan soldiers... it seems to me like they have replaced the tamil tigers with ginger haired people... it also relates to all descrimination that occurs across the world... obviously channel 4 did not show the people getting shot but m.i.a wants to make an impact and show what actually happens in the world as sometimes people do need to see it... i could imagine she was pretty angry not only at the video but the fact that the government said that the video was fabricated etc....thats my take it anyway :)
B. “Ducked and Covered: A Survival Guide to the Post Apocalypse” Video written, directed, produced, and edited by Nathaniel Lindsay (Comic Relief!)
a. http://vimeo.com/8149690
b. “An instructional public information film desgined to assist the general population with surviving life in Australia after a nuclear war. Produced by the Australian Board of Civil Defense during the early 1980’s…”
c. On behalf of my audience, I included this video in my analysis for comic relief, parody and amusement. It also lended me with wonderful ideas for my storyline and plot.
C. “The Raven”-720 HD Video
a. http://vimeo.com/channels/86588
b. A film by Ricardo de Montreuil. Written by Ricardo de Montreuil and Antonio Perez. Produced: Ricardo de Montreuil and Eliz Eskeranli. Co-produced: Jesus Hernandez. (2010) Cinematographer: Andres Sanchez. Music: Angelo Milli. Special Effects: Aaron Burns. 3D Modeling and Animation: Juan Somarriha and Francisco Concha
c. Although I love the science fictional location of the video and the HD quality of the images, I found the piece to lack a sharp storyline. The main character has super-human powers and is able to remain at large by the end. Are we, the audience, left to speculate about how much longer the heroic fugitive can outlast the overbearing robotic Big Brother’s to conclude he will eventually succumb? Regardless, I found the work useful in crafting my own digital story. I looked closely at the comments as well as the video because it helped me find a voice. Here are some of the more interesting comments:
i. THE RAVEN FILM: “Thanks Ayz.It was shot on RED using Ultraprime lenses. The budget was $5k. And is based on a treatment I wrote for a trilogy.We shot it in Downtown LA in 2 days. You can see some production stills in The Raven facebook”: facebook.com/ pages/ THE-RAVEN-FILM/ 110828695622564?ref=mf
ii. Youssef Ezzeddine: ”hmm.. good work especialy on special effects and color correction..However, the script could be more interesting..whatever, good job.”
iii. Halivud Estevez: “I agree, good job, but flat "story". Good for a trailer, or pilot. If i was a producer, I would give you a screenwriter creative team.”
Conclusion
Overall, my digital story “Nuclear Disaster” is simplistic, the tone is urgent and the hypertext situated within an aura of crisis and a dystopian tale. In closing, I leave the audience wondering, suspencefully, if humankind has survived or if I will even survive. I refused to terminate a dystopia with a happy ending that leaves us all feeling cozy and safe. The world I have created in “Nuclear Disaster” is as Friedlander writes, “the world is both real and virtual, the story is both a human and a technological production and the user both makes and consumes the product.”
Thursday, December 9, 2010
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
What Can Today's U.S. Tea Party Followers and Progressives Learn From the 1930's Nazi Party Followers?
“If Fascism came to America, it would be on a program of Americanism.”
-Huey P. Long
Introduction
In 1932, Nazi party pioneer Dr. Albert Krebs wrote in his personal journal,
“My expulsion is directed against the German spirit of freedom of conscience. The Nazi party permits no one in its ranks who thinks independently and dares to express those thoughts. The Hamburger Tageblatt was practically the last Nazi newspaper which, disregarding the tactic of wooing certain economic circles, tried to express socialist views of Nazism. In the future that will now cease. The Nazi party has, in order to maintain the benevolence of business barons and reactionary cliques, thrown out one of its oldest members. That affects the party, not me. I remain what I was at the beginning of my political endeavors: a national socialist.”
The fascinating story of Dr. Krebs and countless other nationalist socialist dissenters has been easily forgotten; buried amongst dusty shelves of university libraries. Uncovering the narratives left behind by the early Nazi party followers is a precious find for someone interested in the study of leader and follower-ships. Nazi historian Sherman Allen introduces his English translation of the Dr. Kreb’s German journal to readers with these words:
“What is most important to understand is how the ultimate qualities of Nazism were implicit in its original ideas and methods. Thus, Dr. Krebs does the great service of reminding us that the early Nazis were not all freakish aberrations so totally foreign as to be comfortably discounted but fellow human beings with understandable aspirations who took a dreadfully wrong approach. Some were simply swine. Many others are more frightening because they were not monsters but men with whom we find at least a modicum of identity. On the basis of this recognition we can begin to sort out what made them go wrong.”
A. The Responsibility of Followers
I argue there are many continuities between the political times of Dr. Kreb’s early Nazi regime and our own. This brief essay zooms in on the Nazi Party followers and the middle class German citizenry, while temporarily relegating Hitler’s leadership role to the margins. Adolph Hitler was not appointed Chancellor of Germany in 1933 simply because he had charisma. The German followers of the Nazi Party and the ‘average’ German people supported, funded and fueled Hitler’s fascist agenda. The volk (German folks) therefore were not mere victims as Hitler would have German history believe; they were also instigators as well as accomplices. They had a grave responsibility to stop Hitler as their leader, but they didn’t. Perhaps beyond a certain point, not even his intimate followers could stop him single-handedly. The purpose of analyzing German followers as legitimate players in the early stages of the Third Reich is to unravel how their actions, or lack of actions, impacted the virulency of the Holocaust? What can we as followers of the 2010 U.S. political system learn from their murderous oversight and behaviors? Louisiana Senator Huey P. Long advised fellow socialist followers to watch out for the U.S. hyper-nationalist, militant groups before being silently assasinated very early on his political career. Are we on the road to an American brand of fascism driven by “business barons and reactionary cliques?”
I compare the Nazi Party followers, like Dr. Krebs, of the 1930’s to the 2009-2010 followers of three groups from the Tea Party movement and draw three lessons. I compare followers of only three out the six Tea Party factions; 1.Tea Party Patriots, 2. FreedomWorks Tea Party, and 3. the 1776 Tea Party. The German “followers” here are defined as the volk; the middle class people who knew about the scapegoating of other Germans (specifically German Jews, communists, socialists, any political opposition and homosexuals), participated by being apathetic, choosing to remain blissfully ignorant of the human rights violations in their communities and/or agreed that the Nazi’s were justified to persecute those not purely Aryan. (Panayi, 2001) I analyze how the Tea Party’s followers platform of supporting an exclusively Christian, pro-corporate, free-market, small-government, and anti-Communist agenda backhandedly attracts some people that are either or xenophobic, racist, anti-Semitic, misogynists and homophobes.
The year two-thousand and ten and something is very wrong with U.S. democracy for the diverse multitudes that are angry at the economic, social, and political status quo. Professor Lipman-Blumen asks that followers think, “Does the [party’s] vision turn evil into moral virtue or moral virtue into human weakness? Does the vision cloak evil in self sacrificial or virtous garb, like Henrich Himmler’s speech ‘thanking the members and leaders of the SS for shouldering the terrible but unaviodable task of exterminating millions of people?” Generally speaking, we as followers have a collective obligation to withdraw or give legitimacy to our system of governance. If we do not agree politically, then we must agree that using violence and hatred are not acceptable forms of communicating anger. I encourage the progressives to have tolerance for racist/anti-Semitic white people and the Tea Party followers to respect the humanity of people who are not similar to themselves. As novelist Chuck Palahniuk frankly sums it up, “you are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else and we are all part of the same compost pile.”
The idea of comparing the contemporary Tea Party followers with the Nazi Party followers came directly from the mouth of one well-known Tea Party’s spokesperson; Glen Beck. Beck flagrantly fetishizes the Nazis and the Nazi party during his television program on the Fox News Channel. According to the Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank who has been keeping count, Beck has mentioned Nazis or Nazism a brief two-hundred and two times from January 2009 (President Barak Obama’s inauguration) to June 2010. The Tea Party leadership and certain followers readily associate with the neo-Nazi movements and unabashingly embrace the cruelty of the historical Nazi Party. For example, in the last congressional elections, the GOP candidate for Ohio-9 and Tea Party favorite, Rich Iott, is also a Nazi SS Waffen re-enactor. (Rosenberg, 2010) Historical ties between groups that are advocating fascim, racial hatred in a corporate sponsored astroturf movement and extreme Christian militarism do not appear and then disappear overnight.
B. Brief Historical Timeline of the Nazi Party’s Ascendence to Political Dominance
(The Third Reich lasted in power from 1933 to 1945)
This timeline has information about unemployment, Nazi voting statistics, Hitler’s power consolidation, and the beginning of the crimewave against “enemies” of the German state.
*The Weimar Republic lasts from 1919-1933.
*1931-1932: An economic recession with nine million unemployed and a quarter of
those employed work less than full time.
*In the 1932 elections, fourteen million people voted for the Nazi Party.
*January 1933: Adolph Hitler is appointed Chancellor by President Hindenburg.
*February 1933: the Reichstag Fire -A national state of emergency is declared.
*”After the March 11, 1933 elections, Hitler’s party was given over seventeen million
votes (43.9% of the electorate)…”
*The German ‘Miracle’ from 1933-1937: The unemployment levels are slashed
from six million to two million.
*June 1934, the Night of the Long Knives. Hitler’s opposition leaders were murdered while asleep in their beds.
*“In August 1934, thirty-eight million Germans (90% of registered voters) approved
Hitler’s own election to the party-state position of Fuhrer and Reich Chancellor
with full emergency powers. Only just over four million opposed him.”
*The Press Law passed in 1934 reversed the birthright of German citizenship for Jews.
*The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 effectively revoked civil rights and
human rights for Jews.
*In 1938, labor shortages emerge.
*November 1938: seven thousand synagoges burned down at the same time in Berlin.
*October 1942: The deporations of German Jews to concentration camps begin.
C. Brief Timeline of the U.S. Tea Party’s Movement’s Ascendence Towards Political Notoriety
(The Rise of the Tea Party Movement in 2009 to the Present)
This timeline displays information regarding official unemployment statistics, Tea Party voting figures, Tea Party mobilization and legislation.
*October 26, 2001: The USA Patriot Act (HR 3162) was passed to help stop “terrorism.”
*2008: The official unemployment rate is averaging at 6.1%
*January 20, 2009: President Barak Obama is inaugurated.
* The nationwide Tea Party Coalition is founded on February 20, 2009. The 1776 Tea Party Patriots become officially established.
*The FreedomWorks Tea Party is formalized: February 27, 2009.
*Tea Party Patriots are founded on March 10, 2009.
*April 2009: Bill H.R.1868 is introduced to the House of Representatives by a Tea Party affliated legislator. It seeks to end birthright citizenship by overturning the 14th Amendment.
*The September 12, 2009 “Take America Back” March on Washington lead by
demagogue Glen Beck.
*The 2009 Official unemployment rate on average was 9.3%. More than fourteen
million U.S. citizens without work.
*2009: Membership of the Tea Party National Coalition (all 6 branches) is 16- 18% of the adult population with millions of sympathizers.
*April 2010: Arizona’s Bill SB 1070 is signed into law by Governor Jan Brewer.
Local police are to enforce national immigration law through racial profiling of the Latino community. It is currently being contested in the court system.
*August 28, 2010: The Tea Party rally “Restoring Honor,” was lead by unabashed anti-Semite, Racist, and Sexist spokesperson Glen Beck on the same day/place as the Anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘I Have A Dream Speech.’ Civil Rights activist Al Sharpton holds a counter-rally on the same day.
*October 2010: The unemployment rate is at 9.6% Fifteen million are unemployed.
*October 21, 2010: A Wall Street Journal poll found that the Tea Party attracts more than 35% of adult voters.
*November 30, 2010: Unemployment rose to 9.8%
Lesson #1: Beware of the “State of Emergency” Legislation and the Legalization of Systematic Murder
The greatest irony of Hitler’s political takeover is that he used the democratic process provided through the Weimar Constitution to dismantle the Weimar Republic and establish his dictatorship. By declaring a “State of Emergency,” Hitler gained additional support from certain factions of the German public after his appointment as Chancellor. (Berghoff, 2001; McGowan, 2001; Panayi, 2001) The people’s beloved Fuhrer schemed a plan that set afire the German Reichstag , then having successfully blamed a scapegoat (the mythical Bolshevik-Jewish conspiracy), he declared a state of emergency and further consolidated his political power. Hitler shouted ‘fire’ to alert of a national crisis, but he started the fire; not the Jews. The epicenter of the anti-Semitic hatred may have begun arguably at Hitler’s policy table nevertheless, it extended through a noteworthy fraction of civilians at the street level. (Berghoff, 2001; Gellately, 2001) Hartmut Berghoff clarifies, “Nazism was rooted in crisis, and its whole system of politics was geared, in effect, to the maintenance of crisis as a permanent state.”
The Reichstag Fire Decree assured the Jews that they would be taken into “protective custody” by the Gestapo (German police) to keep them “safe” from the raging agitation of the “general” populace. In practice “protective custody” functioned as one of the initial steps on the path to systematic genocide. The deceptive, sugar-coated rhetoric as a measure of public safety legitimized the arrests and deportation measures. Berghoff explains, “As Germans watched these events unfold they believed that the communists had attempted to seize power illegally.” The overall populace may have not been sure of what was transpiring at the beginning, yet the Nazi’s were obviously buckling tightly against certain minority groups of society. Despite the initial confusion, numerous Nazi party followers remained apathetic and/or expressed their hatred outright advocating extermination for those deemed not part of the Aryan-only German volk. After the bloody crackdown upon Jews, Sinti and Roma (Gypsies), Communists, homosexuals, and foreign workers escalated, there was hardly any coordinated opposition. On the infamous “Night of the Long Knives,” Hitler ordered his subordinates to murder the opposition party leaders; a mission they carried out sucessfully.
It was not a secret that the Nazi’s were virulently Judeophobic underneath the thin guise of maintaing law and order in a state of crisis. Those nationalist socialistswho did not agree with the direction the Nazi movement took for example Dr. Krebs, were weeded out the party ranks early on. The Press Law of 1934 rescinded the 1914 Law of Naturalization that gave Jews born in Germany full citizenship. The Nuremberg Laws passed in 1935 legally made Jews less than fully equal to Germans by forbidding inter-marriage, confiscated property, and called for further boycotts/attacks upon Jewish businesses. Under the cut-throat punitive state of emergency legislation, corruption was engendered within the society. Crimes of opportunism rose dramatically. Anyone with a grudge against a family member, neighbor, or co-worker had the opportunity to send the police to fulfill their personal vendettas. Inevitably, nepotism became widespread. Gellately found in his research that the Gestapo depended primarily on the denunciations of the public to go after the ‘traitors’ in their home front. “In fact the Gestapo tended to be reactive and waited for information…most of it came from ‘ordinary’ Germans, that is, civilians who were not even members of the Nazi Party.”
As followers, we all have a civic responsibility to learn from toxicity of Nazi Party followers. Most recently Tea Party followers, and certain conservative extremist groups agreeing with their core beliefs but aren’t card carrying members, have visibly espoused, racism, xenophobia and sexism within their ranks. (IREHR, 2010) The state of emergency rhetoric that justified the Reichstag Fire Decree sounds like the “War on Terror” legislation passed by the George W. Bush Administration after September 11, 2001. The U.S.A. Patriot Act, overwhelmingly approved in the House and the Senate, rescinded many civil rights of Muslim Americans, in addition to Middle Eastern migrants, Mexican migrants, other minority groups, and vulnerable people. In the name of public safety, those deemed ‘terrorists’ and ‘illegal aliens’ are being systematically detained, deported and sometimes tortured, killed. Is American “democracy” becoming disabled by fearmongering and a false political crisis ?
Like the Press Law redefined German citizenship in 1934, the Tea Party supporters of the bill H.R. 1868 are attempting to nullify the birthright provision of the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution in an effort to legally redefine the concept of U.S. citizenship to exclude Mexican migrant’s children born here. While tempting to be seduced by the tale of a likely social scapegoat, it is utmost important to ask tough questions about the validity of a Jewish–Bolshevik or Muslim-Terrorist or Mexican-immigrant take-over. In the 2010 report Tea Party Nationalism, independent researchers, Devin Burghart and Leonard Zeskind, for the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights elaborate on the specific type of U.S. nationalist brand the extreme fringes of the Tea Party followers have internalized.
“It is a [U.S.] nationalism that excludes those deemed not to be ‘real Americans’; including the native-born children of undocumented immigrants (often despised as ‘anchor babies’), socialists, Moslems, and those not deemed to fit with a ‘Christian nation.’ The ‘common welfare’ of the constitution’s preamble doesn’t complicate their ideas about individual liberty… a bright white line of racism threads through this nationalism...It is inchoate as it is super-patriotic. It is possibly an embryo of what it might yet become.”
Indeed. The Republican party has a dark history of courting former Nazi’s and recruited other white supremacist militants into its ranks. This well-documented alliance may not come as a surprise for many highly media literate followers. (Russ, 1991; Rosenberg , 2010). As investigative journalist Paul Rosenberg reveals,
“The last thing that current-day resentment cheerleaders-from [Glen] Beck on down-want is for folks to start poking into the past, and laying out exactly how they (not liberals) are the ones with specific, historical connections with Nazi Germany, and the greatest death panels of all time.”
Lesson #2: Resist Social Darwinism; Oppose Racism, Anti-Semetisim, Sexism, Homophobia and Xenophobia
The Nazi obsession with ethnic and racial purity of the body politik led to deadly consequences against those deemed impure. The final solution, endlossung,to the great problems of Germany could be solved if only the ‘vermon’ or ‘parasites’ (as Hitler referred to the Jews) that plagued society were to be eradicated. Lee McGowen pens, “Nazi propaganda proclaimed the superiority of the German race and its right to rule while, in contrast, it condemned ‘inferior’ peoples to a state of enslavement and drudgery or even extermination.” Clearly, unpacking the myth of racial purity is key to unraveling what type of thinking lead to the atrocities of genocide and the Holocaust. Why did the Nazi followers believe this illogical hatred so profoundly? Panikos Panayi suggests the mass media propaganda, the intensity of the repressive circumstances, and a dramatically reduced unemployment rate all contributed to the legitimacy of the Furher’s party.
Another particularly powerful reason had to do with the language used to justify scientific racism as based ‘objectively’ in human biology and nature. Social Darwinism holds the fallacious impression that people who are more fit to ‘survive’ will do so and reproduce. This view is racist and wrong, but it tempts powerless people to narcissistically categorize themselves as the racially superior while simultaneously degrading those not like them to a subhuman status. Even blonde and blue eyed German citizens born with physical disabilities, genetic disorders and psychological impairments were stolen or willingly handed over to the Nazi’s to be euthanized, murdered or worse, used as guinea pigs in live experiments. (Panikos, 2001; Gellately, 2001)
As the Nazi party’s political power increased, more and more ‘average’ Germans were accosted, deported and killed for minor transgressions. The main problem with the law and order system of Social Darwinism is as professor of Leadership Studies, Jean Lipman-Blumen foresees, “If the leader/savior destroys your enemy…what are the guarantees that those same destructive forces will not be turned next against those who are…your family and ultimately you?” This myth of scientific racism ,that justifies dehumanization when enforced by law, must be rebuked for the safety of the party followers themselves.
Tea Party followers would be wise to disassociate themselves from that type of barbaric ideology that relies on differentiating people based on socially constructed categories like ‘legal’ versus illegal,’ white versus color, man versus woman, heterosexual versus homosexual .The “Restore Honor” and “Take America Back” rallies led by charlatan Beck rings clearly of the Nazi infatuation with the concept of endlossung. The neo-Nazi movement’s slogan “Nation is Race” isn’t ambigious about its problematic definition of U.S. nationalism. The “us” versus “them” differentiation isn’t a sidenote to the Tea Party followers that self-identify as white supremacists; the movement’s agenda is to completely eradicate the other.
Lesson #3: Beware of the Demands for Grossraum (Economic Space) and of Corporate Funding
Grossraum translates from its Nazi ideological context to mean the symbolic and literal economic space Aryan people deserve because of their white supremacy. It means the non-white others need to be uprooted and removed to satisfy the growth process of the privileged white minority. The anti-democratic proposition of economic space harkens back to the Nazi party followers but also to the contemporary Republican party followers in the United States. The “Take America Back” rally hosted by the Tea Party displays an American adaptation to the concept of grossraum. The enemies Glen Beck sees are not the greedy corporate sponsors of the Tea Party (like his boss, Rupert Murdoch) that have infiltrated their ranks.
Economist Paul Krugman regards the Tea Party national coalitions as an ‘astroturf’ movement meaning the outward appearance of the group is grassroots but behind closed doors, the party is administrated by corporate elites like David and Charles Koch and Rupert Murdoch . Dr. Krebs warned the early Nazi party about the dangers of “wooing certain economic circles.” The money trail leading out the back door of the Nazi Party can explain who backed Hitler’s economic expenses. Who Financed Hitler, indicates that “[Martin] Black represented a secret group of twelve Ruhr industrialists called the Ruhrlade, ‘the most powerful secret organization of big business that existed during the Weimar period [before the Nazi take-over]. The Ruhrlade and Martin Blank became committed to funding the rise” of the Nazi party. Some German big businesses funded Hitler because in a Hobbesian sense, they felt entitled to pursue their best self-interest at the cost of millions of innocent lives. Many other German businesses and even transnational corporations profitted greatly from the free slave labor of the concentration camps, and by mass producing war time goods. These businesses include Siemens, AEG, Vereinigle Stahlwerke, Krupp, GHH, Daimler-Benz, and IG Farben. (Tooze, 2001; Panayi, 2001)
Regulating the interests big business inside private party politics is critical for the success of the party followers. The corporate idea of grossraum conveniently accommodates racists, anti-Semites, and xenophobes because it builds on contemporary neoliberal ideologies that personally enrich corporation owners at the expense of the most vulnerable sections of the population. Progressive investigative reporter Adele Stan briefs Alternet.org readers about the “Tea Party Inc.; The Big Money and Powerful Elites Behind the Right Wing’s Latest Uprising.”
But by 2009, with the collapse of the economy and the election of the nation’s first African-American president, the suppy chain of rage was complete, and the Tea Party came roaring to life. Rupert Murdoch gave the new movement legitimacy by means of sympathetic columns in the the Wall Street Journal, boosterism from Sean Hannity and Glen Beck and a regular media platform on Fox News Channel for Tea Party personalities and candidates.”
The first “non-negotiable” core belief on the list of the teaparty.org website is “Illegal aliens are here illegally.” The recent immigration law SB 1070 was wildly popular amongst some Tea Party followers. Grossraum is unmistakably embedded within this piece of legislation. SB 1070 harkens back to the Nuremberg laws passed for the deportation and detention practices under the guise of law and order. Although still being contested in court, the law would require local law enforcement officers to verify and uphold national immigration policies through racial profiling. The Latino migrants living in Arizona unable to prove “legality” are then instantly arrested in detention centers and inhumanely deported. The other name for SB 1070 is inappropriately “Support our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act,” cleverly disguising the private prison industry’s agenda of detaining migrants, including women and children, for a huge profit. Well intentioned followers, be weary of blindly accepting policies that demand the forced removal of politically debilitated populations to make room for ‘real’ Americans. Ted Rall’s newest work invites us to seriously consider what is at stake when we followers do not act before it’s too late to stop the atrocities against fellow human beings against that cannot politically defend themselves. Rall warns, “Once you commit yourself to apathy, laziness, and tacit consent to mass murder and rampant injustice, your miserable, wasteful choice can end only with death.”
Conclusion
On August of 1934, Dr. Albert Krebs wrote in his journal,
“We [national socialists] were all strongly opposed to collaboration with the ‘patriotic bourgeoisie’ of the right-wing parties... My colleagues feared a ‘watering down of the goal’ through the infiltration of reactionary attitudes formed spiritual fact that the party and its leaders were going to turn into a political and constitutional reality…But above all I could not longer visualize or accept the Nazi party as the instrument, nor its leadership with Hitler at the head, as the honest servants of this ‘goal,’ whether the goal was clear or not. I saw only a power bloc consisting of and driven by idealistic and demonic forces.”
Like Dr. Krebs, we must ask ourselves, are we being driven by ‘idealistic and demonic forces’ even if they may have originally promised insightful change? Leadership Studies scholar Ronald Heifetz writes, “the accumulation of evil never resides in one person at the top because no one gets to the top without representing the interests of the dominant factions in the system.” The leader (Hitler) that reduced unemployment from six million to one million within a five-year span increased his control of the state apparatus through overwhelmingly popular support. In fact, the Nazi’s public relations division was incredibly important to the regime’s rapid censure of the German state’s resources, institutions and public opinion (for example, the police, military, public funds/taxes, property, legal instruments) for without a willing constituency, Hitler’s agenda was unattainable. Why does it matter in the short/long run if we are not cautious about keeping an eye on our own barbaric political hatred and biases? Contemporary followers, both progressives or Tea Party followers, must be watchful of charismatic leaders that promise to restore prosperity to some at the expense of the less powerful.
Bibliography
Allen, Sherman. The Infancy of Nazism (New York: New Viewpoints, 1976) x, xiii, 36
Belant, Russ. Old Nazis, the New Right and The Republican Party (Boston: South End
Press, 1971)
Berghoff, Hartmut. “Did Hitler Create A New Society?” Ed. Panayi, Panikos. Weimar
and Nazi Germany, Continuities and Discontinuities, (London: Longman Press, 2001)
Dolan, Eric. “NAACP Exposes Ties Between Tea Party and Racist Extremist Groups,”
10/21/10 from
http://www.alternet.org/rights/148569/naacp_exposes_ties_between_tea_party_and_racist_extremist_groups.
Gellately, Robert. Backing Hitler, Consent & Coercion in Nazi Germany (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2001)
Heifetz, Ronald. Leadership Without Easy Answers, (London: Belknap Press, 1994)
Krugman, Paul. “Tea Parties Forever,” New York Times (4/12/2009)
Lipman-Blumen, Jean. The Allure of Toxic Leaders (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2001), 223-225
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/13/opinion/13krugman.html
McGowan, Lee. “The Extreme Right,” Ed. Panayi, Panikos. Weimar and Nazi Germany,
Continuities and Discontinuities (London: Longman Press, 2001)
Palahniuk, Chuck. Fight Club, (Norton and Co, 2005), ch. 17
Panayi, Panikos. Weimar and Nazi Germany, Continuities and Discontinuities, (London:
Longman Press, 2001)
Rall, Ted. Anti-American Manifesto, (Seven Stories Press, 2010)
Rosenberg, Paul. “Nazi Re-enactor Just the Tip of the Iceberg: The GOP’s Long History
with Nazi Allies,” (10/12/10) from OpenLeft.com http://www.openleft.com/diary/20471/nazi-reenactor-is-just-the-tip-of-the-iceberg-the-gops-long-history-with-nazi-allies
Shah, Adam. “Rand Paul Headstomper Just the Latest Violent Right-Winger: 17 more
instances of Recent Violence by Conservatives.” (10/27/2010)
MediaMattersforAmerica.org
http://www.alternet.org/teaparty/148645/rand_paul_headstomper_just_the_latest_violent_right-winger%3A_17_more_instances_of_recent_violence_by_conservatives/
U.S. Department of Labor Statistics, http://www.bls.gov/cps
Tea Party Nationalism-NAACP Report, 2010;
PDF:http://www.teapartynationalism.com/pdf/TeaPartyNationalism.pdf
The official Tea Party website, (11/29/2010) http://teaparty.org/about.php
-Huey P. Long
Introduction
In 1932, Nazi party pioneer Dr. Albert Krebs wrote in his personal journal,
“My expulsion is directed against the German spirit of freedom of conscience. The Nazi party permits no one in its ranks who thinks independently and dares to express those thoughts. The Hamburger Tageblatt was practically the last Nazi newspaper which, disregarding the tactic of wooing certain economic circles, tried to express socialist views of Nazism. In the future that will now cease. The Nazi party has, in order to maintain the benevolence of business barons and reactionary cliques, thrown out one of its oldest members. That affects the party, not me. I remain what I was at the beginning of my political endeavors: a national socialist.”
The fascinating story of Dr. Krebs and countless other nationalist socialist dissenters has been easily forgotten; buried amongst dusty shelves of university libraries. Uncovering the narratives left behind by the early Nazi party followers is a precious find for someone interested in the study of leader and follower-ships. Nazi historian Sherman Allen introduces his English translation of the Dr. Kreb’s German journal to readers with these words:
“What is most important to understand is how the ultimate qualities of Nazism were implicit in its original ideas and methods. Thus, Dr. Krebs does the great service of reminding us that the early Nazis were not all freakish aberrations so totally foreign as to be comfortably discounted but fellow human beings with understandable aspirations who took a dreadfully wrong approach. Some were simply swine. Many others are more frightening because they were not monsters but men with whom we find at least a modicum of identity. On the basis of this recognition we can begin to sort out what made them go wrong.”
A. The Responsibility of Followers
I argue there are many continuities between the political times of Dr. Kreb’s early Nazi regime and our own. This brief essay zooms in on the Nazi Party followers and the middle class German citizenry, while temporarily relegating Hitler’s leadership role to the margins. Adolph Hitler was not appointed Chancellor of Germany in 1933 simply because he had charisma. The German followers of the Nazi Party and the ‘average’ German people supported, funded and fueled Hitler’s fascist agenda. The volk (German folks) therefore were not mere victims as Hitler would have German history believe; they were also instigators as well as accomplices. They had a grave responsibility to stop Hitler as their leader, but they didn’t. Perhaps beyond a certain point, not even his intimate followers could stop him single-handedly. The purpose of analyzing German followers as legitimate players in the early stages of the Third Reich is to unravel how their actions, or lack of actions, impacted the virulency of the Holocaust? What can we as followers of the 2010 U.S. political system learn from their murderous oversight and behaviors? Louisiana Senator Huey P. Long advised fellow socialist followers to watch out for the U.S. hyper-nationalist, militant groups before being silently assasinated very early on his political career. Are we on the road to an American brand of fascism driven by “business barons and reactionary cliques?”
I compare the Nazi Party followers, like Dr. Krebs, of the 1930’s to the 2009-2010 followers of three groups from the Tea Party movement and draw three lessons. I compare followers of only three out the six Tea Party factions; 1.Tea Party Patriots, 2. FreedomWorks Tea Party, and 3. the 1776 Tea Party. The German “followers” here are defined as the volk; the middle class people who knew about the scapegoating of other Germans (specifically German Jews, communists, socialists, any political opposition and homosexuals), participated by being apathetic, choosing to remain blissfully ignorant of the human rights violations in their communities and/or agreed that the Nazi’s were justified to persecute those not purely Aryan. (Panayi, 2001) I analyze how the Tea Party’s followers platform of supporting an exclusively Christian, pro-corporate, free-market, small-government, and anti-Communist agenda backhandedly attracts some people that are either or xenophobic, racist, anti-Semitic, misogynists and homophobes.
The year two-thousand and ten and something is very wrong with U.S. democracy for the diverse multitudes that are angry at the economic, social, and political status quo. Professor Lipman-Blumen asks that followers think, “Does the [party’s] vision turn evil into moral virtue or moral virtue into human weakness? Does the vision cloak evil in self sacrificial or virtous garb, like Henrich Himmler’s speech ‘thanking the members and leaders of the SS for shouldering the terrible but unaviodable task of exterminating millions of people?” Generally speaking, we as followers have a collective obligation to withdraw or give legitimacy to our system of governance. If we do not agree politically, then we must agree that using violence and hatred are not acceptable forms of communicating anger. I encourage the progressives to have tolerance for racist/anti-Semitic white people and the Tea Party followers to respect the humanity of people who are not similar to themselves. As novelist Chuck Palahniuk frankly sums it up, “you are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else and we are all part of the same compost pile.”
The idea of comparing the contemporary Tea Party followers with the Nazi Party followers came directly from the mouth of one well-known Tea Party’s spokesperson; Glen Beck. Beck flagrantly fetishizes the Nazis and the Nazi party during his television program on the Fox News Channel. According to the Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank who has been keeping count, Beck has mentioned Nazis or Nazism a brief two-hundred and two times from January 2009 (President Barak Obama’s inauguration) to June 2010. The Tea Party leadership and certain followers readily associate with the neo-Nazi movements and unabashingly embrace the cruelty of the historical Nazi Party. For example, in the last congressional elections, the GOP candidate for Ohio-9 and Tea Party favorite, Rich Iott, is also a Nazi SS Waffen re-enactor. (Rosenberg, 2010) Historical ties between groups that are advocating fascim, racial hatred in a corporate sponsored astroturf movement and extreme Christian militarism do not appear and then disappear overnight.
B. Brief Historical Timeline of the Nazi Party’s Ascendence to Political Dominance
(The Third Reich lasted in power from 1933 to 1945)
This timeline has information about unemployment, Nazi voting statistics, Hitler’s power consolidation, and the beginning of the crimewave against “enemies” of the German state.
*The Weimar Republic lasts from 1919-1933.
*1931-1932: An economic recession with nine million unemployed and a quarter of
those employed work less than full time.
*In the 1932 elections, fourteen million people voted for the Nazi Party.
*January 1933: Adolph Hitler is appointed Chancellor by President Hindenburg.
*February 1933: the Reichstag Fire -A national state of emergency is declared.
*”After the March 11, 1933 elections, Hitler’s party was given over seventeen million
votes (43.9% of the electorate)…”
*The German ‘Miracle’ from 1933-1937: The unemployment levels are slashed
from six million to two million.
*June 1934, the Night of the Long Knives. Hitler’s opposition leaders were murdered while asleep in their beds.
*“In August 1934, thirty-eight million Germans (90% of registered voters) approved
Hitler’s own election to the party-state position of Fuhrer and Reich Chancellor
with full emergency powers. Only just over four million opposed him.”
*The Press Law passed in 1934 reversed the birthright of German citizenship for Jews.
*The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 effectively revoked civil rights and
human rights for Jews.
*In 1938, labor shortages emerge.
*November 1938: seven thousand synagoges burned down at the same time in Berlin.
*October 1942: The deporations of German Jews to concentration camps begin.
C. Brief Timeline of the U.S. Tea Party’s Movement’s Ascendence Towards Political Notoriety
(The Rise of the Tea Party Movement in 2009 to the Present)
This timeline displays information regarding official unemployment statistics, Tea Party voting figures, Tea Party mobilization and legislation.
*October 26, 2001: The USA Patriot Act (HR 3162) was passed to help stop “terrorism.”
*2008: The official unemployment rate is averaging at 6.1%
*January 20, 2009: President Barak Obama is inaugurated.
* The nationwide Tea Party Coalition is founded on February 20, 2009. The 1776 Tea Party Patriots become officially established.
*The FreedomWorks Tea Party is formalized: February 27, 2009.
*Tea Party Patriots are founded on March 10, 2009.
*April 2009: Bill H.R.1868 is introduced to the House of Representatives by a Tea Party affliated legislator. It seeks to end birthright citizenship by overturning the 14th Amendment.
*The September 12, 2009 “Take America Back” March on Washington lead by
demagogue Glen Beck.
*The 2009 Official unemployment rate on average was 9.3%. More than fourteen
million U.S. citizens without work.
*2009: Membership of the Tea Party National Coalition (all 6 branches) is 16- 18% of the adult population with millions of sympathizers.
*April 2010: Arizona’s Bill SB 1070 is signed into law by Governor Jan Brewer.
Local police are to enforce national immigration law through racial profiling of the Latino community. It is currently being contested in the court system.
*August 28, 2010: The Tea Party rally “Restoring Honor,” was lead by unabashed anti-Semite, Racist, and Sexist spokesperson Glen Beck on the same day/place as the Anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘I Have A Dream Speech.’ Civil Rights activist Al Sharpton holds a counter-rally on the same day.
*October 2010: The unemployment rate is at 9.6% Fifteen million are unemployed.
*October 21, 2010: A Wall Street Journal poll found that the Tea Party attracts more than 35% of adult voters.
*November 30, 2010: Unemployment rose to 9.8%
Lesson #1: Beware of the “State of Emergency” Legislation and the Legalization of Systematic Murder
The greatest irony of Hitler’s political takeover is that he used the democratic process provided through the Weimar Constitution to dismantle the Weimar Republic and establish his dictatorship. By declaring a “State of Emergency,” Hitler gained additional support from certain factions of the German public after his appointment as Chancellor. (Berghoff, 2001; McGowan, 2001; Panayi, 2001) The people’s beloved Fuhrer schemed a plan that set afire the German Reichstag , then having successfully blamed a scapegoat (the mythical Bolshevik-Jewish conspiracy), he declared a state of emergency and further consolidated his political power. Hitler shouted ‘fire’ to alert of a national crisis, but he started the fire; not the Jews. The epicenter of the anti-Semitic hatred may have begun arguably at Hitler’s policy table nevertheless, it extended through a noteworthy fraction of civilians at the street level. (Berghoff, 2001; Gellately, 2001) Hartmut Berghoff clarifies, “Nazism was rooted in crisis, and its whole system of politics was geared, in effect, to the maintenance of crisis as a permanent state.”
The Reichstag Fire Decree assured the Jews that they would be taken into “protective custody” by the Gestapo (German police) to keep them “safe” from the raging agitation of the “general” populace. In practice “protective custody” functioned as one of the initial steps on the path to systematic genocide. The deceptive, sugar-coated rhetoric as a measure of public safety legitimized the arrests and deportation measures. Berghoff explains, “As Germans watched these events unfold they believed that the communists had attempted to seize power illegally.” The overall populace may have not been sure of what was transpiring at the beginning, yet the Nazi’s were obviously buckling tightly against certain minority groups of society. Despite the initial confusion, numerous Nazi party followers remained apathetic and/or expressed their hatred outright advocating extermination for those deemed not part of the Aryan-only German volk. After the bloody crackdown upon Jews, Sinti and Roma (Gypsies), Communists, homosexuals, and foreign workers escalated, there was hardly any coordinated opposition. On the infamous “Night of the Long Knives,” Hitler ordered his subordinates to murder the opposition party leaders; a mission they carried out sucessfully.
It was not a secret that the Nazi’s were virulently Judeophobic underneath the thin guise of maintaing law and order in a state of crisis. Those nationalist socialistswho did not agree with the direction the Nazi movement took for example Dr. Krebs, were weeded out the party ranks early on. The Press Law of 1934 rescinded the 1914 Law of Naturalization that gave Jews born in Germany full citizenship. The Nuremberg Laws passed in 1935 legally made Jews less than fully equal to Germans by forbidding inter-marriage, confiscated property, and called for further boycotts/attacks upon Jewish businesses. Under the cut-throat punitive state of emergency legislation, corruption was engendered within the society. Crimes of opportunism rose dramatically. Anyone with a grudge against a family member, neighbor, or co-worker had the opportunity to send the police to fulfill their personal vendettas. Inevitably, nepotism became widespread. Gellately found in his research that the Gestapo depended primarily on the denunciations of the public to go after the ‘traitors’ in their home front. “In fact the Gestapo tended to be reactive and waited for information…most of it came from ‘ordinary’ Germans, that is, civilians who were not even members of the Nazi Party.”
As followers, we all have a civic responsibility to learn from toxicity of Nazi Party followers. Most recently Tea Party followers, and certain conservative extremist groups agreeing with their core beliefs but aren’t card carrying members, have visibly espoused, racism, xenophobia and sexism within their ranks. (IREHR, 2010) The state of emergency rhetoric that justified the Reichstag Fire Decree sounds like the “War on Terror” legislation passed by the George W. Bush Administration after September 11, 2001. The U.S.A. Patriot Act, overwhelmingly approved in the House and the Senate, rescinded many civil rights of Muslim Americans, in addition to Middle Eastern migrants, Mexican migrants, other minority groups, and vulnerable people. In the name of public safety, those deemed ‘terrorists’ and ‘illegal aliens’ are being systematically detained, deported and sometimes tortured, killed. Is American “democracy” becoming disabled by fearmongering and a false political crisis ?
Like the Press Law redefined German citizenship in 1934, the Tea Party supporters of the bill H.R. 1868 are attempting to nullify the birthright provision of the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution in an effort to legally redefine the concept of U.S. citizenship to exclude Mexican migrant’s children born here. While tempting to be seduced by the tale of a likely social scapegoat, it is utmost important to ask tough questions about the validity of a Jewish–Bolshevik or Muslim-Terrorist or Mexican-immigrant take-over. In the 2010 report Tea Party Nationalism, independent researchers, Devin Burghart and Leonard Zeskind, for the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights elaborate on the specific type of U.S. nationalist brand the extreme fringes of the Tea Party followers have internalized.
“It is a [U.S.] nationalism that excludes those deemed not to be ‘real Americans’; including the native-born children of undocumented immigrants (often despised as ‘anchor babies’), socialists, Moslems, and those not deemed to fit with a ‘Christian nation.’ The ‘common welfare’ of the constitution’s preamble doesn’t complicate their ideas about individual liberty… a bright white line of racism threads through this nationalism...It is inchoate as it is super-patriotic. It is possibly an embryo of what it might yet become.”
Indeed. The Republican party has a dark history of courting former Nazi’s and recruited other white supremacist militants into its ranks. This well-documented alliance may not come as a surprise for many highly media literate followers. (Russ, 1991; Rosenberg , 2010). As investigative journalist Paul Rosenberg reveals,
“The last thing that current-day resentment cheerleaders-from [Glen] Beck on down-want is for folks to start poking into the past, and laying out exactly how they (not liberals) are the ones with specific, historical connections with Nazi Germany, and the greatest death panels of all time.”
Lesson #2: Resist Social Darwinism; Oppose Racism, Anti-Semetisim, Sexism, Homophobia and Xenophobia
The Nazi obsession with ethnic and racial purity of the body politik led to deadly consequences against those deemed impure. The final solution, endlossung,to the great problems of Germany could be solved if only the ‘vermon’ or ‘parasites’ (as Hitler referred to the Jews) that plagued society were to be eradicated. Lee McGowen pens, “Nazi propaganda proclaimed the superiority of the German race and its right to rule while, in contrast, it condemned ‘inferior’ peoples to a state of enslavement and drudgery or even extermination.” Clearly, unpacking the myth of racial purity is key to unraveling what type of thinking lead to the atrocities of genocide and the Holocaust. Why did the Nazi followers believe this illogical hatred so profoundly? Panikos Panayi suggests the mass media propaganda, the intensity of the repressive circumstances, and a dramatically reduced unemployment rate all contributed to the legitimacy of the Furher’s party.
Another particularly powerful reason had to do with the language used to justify scientific racism as based ‘objectively’ in human biology and nature. Social Darwinism holds the fallacious impression that people who are more fit to ‘survive’ will do so and reproduce. This view is racist and wrong, but it tempts powerless people to narcissistically categorize themselves as the racially superior while simultaneously degrading those not like them to a subhuman status. Even blonde and blue eyed German citizens born with physical disabilities, genetic disorders and psychological impairments were stolen or willingly handed over to the Nazi’s to be euthanized, murdered or worse, used as guinea pigs in live experiments. (Panikos, 2001; Gellately, 2001)
As the Nazi party’s political power increased, more and more ‘average’ Germans were accosted, deported and killed for minor transgressions. The main problem with the law and order system of Social Darwinism is as professor of Leadership Studies, Jean Lipman-Blumen foresees, “If the leader/savior destroys your enemy…what are the guarantees that those same destructive forces will not be turned next against those who are…your family and ultimately you?” This myth of scientific racism ,that justifies dehumanization when enforced by law, must be rebuked for the safety of the party followers themselves.
Tea Party followers would be wise to disassociate themselves from that type of barbaric ideology that relies on differentiating people based on socially constructed categories like ‘legal’ versus illegal,’ white versus color, man versus woman, heterosexual versus homosexual .The “Restore Honor” and “Take America Back” rallies led by charlatan Beck rings clearly of the Nazi infatuation with the concept of endlossung. The neo-Nazi movement’s slogan “Nation is Race” isn’t ambigious about its problematic definition of U.S. nationalism. The “us” versus “them” differentiation isn’t a sidenote to the Tea Party followers that self-identify as white supremacists; the movement’s agenda is to completely eradicate the other.
Lesson #3: Beware of the Demands for Grossraum (Economic Space) and of Corporate Funding
Grossraum translates from its Nazi ideological context to mean the symbolic and literal economic space Aryan people deserve because of their white supremacy. It means the non-white others need to be uprooted and removed to satisfy the growth process of the privileged white minority. The anti-democratic proposition of economic space harkens back to the Nazi party followers but also to the contemporary Republican party followers in the United States. The “Take America Back” rally hosted by the Tea Party displays an American adaptation to the concept of grossraum. The enemies Glen Beck sees are not the greedy corporate sponsors of the Tea Party (like his boss, Rupert Murdoch) that have infiltrated their ranks.
Economist Paul Krugman regards the Tea Party national coalitions as an ‘astroturf’ movement meaning the outward appearance of the group is grassroots but behind closed doors, the party is administrated by corporate elites like David and Charles Koch and Rupert Murdoch . Dr. Krebs warned the early Nazi party about the dangers of “wooing certain economic circles.” The money trail leading out the back door of the Nazi Party can explain who backed Hitler’s economic expenses. Who Financed Hitler, indicates that “[Martin] Black represented a secret group of twelve Ruhr industrialists called the Ruhrlade, ‘the most powerful secret organization of big business that existed during the Weimar period [before the Nazi take-over]. The Ruhrlade and Martin Blank became committed to funding the rise” of the Nazi party. Some German big businesses funded Hitler because in a Hobbesian sense, they felt entitled to pursue their best self-interest at the cost of millions of innocent lives. Many other German businesses and even transnational corporations profitted greatly from the free slave labor of the concentration camps, and by mass producing war time goods. These businesses include Siemens, AEG, Vereinigle Stahlwerke, Krupp, GHH, Daimler-Benz, and IG Farben. (Tooze, 2001; Panayi, 2001)
Regulating the interests big business inside private party politics is critical for the success of the party followers. The corporate idea of grossraum conveniently accommodates racists, anti-Semites, and xenophobes because it builds on contemporary neoliberal ideologies that personally enrich corporation owners at the expense of the most vulnerable sections of the population. Progressive investigative reporter Adele Stan briefs Alternet.org readers about the “Tea Party Inc.; The Big Money and Powerful Elites Behind the Right Wing’s Latest Uprising.”
But by 2009, with the collapse of the economy and the election of the nation’s first African-American president, the suppy chain of rage was complete, and the Tea Party came roaring to life. Rupert Murdoch gave the new movement legitimacy by means of sympathetic columns in the the Wall Street Journal, boosterism from Sean Hannity and Glen Beck and a regular media platform on Fox News Channel for Tea Party personalities and candidates.”
The first “non-negotiable” core belief on the list of the teaparty.org website is “Illegal aliens are here illegally.” The recent immigration law SB 1070 was wildly popular amongst some Tea Party followers. Grossraum is unmistakably embedded within this piece of legislation. SB 1070 harkens back to the Nuremberg laws passed for the deportation and detention practices under the guise of law and order. Although still being contested in court, the law would require local law enforcement officers to verify and uphold national immigration policies through racial profiling. The Latino migrants living in Arizona unable to prove “legality” are then instantly arrested in detention centers and inhumanely deported. The other name for SB 1070 is inappropriately “Support our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act,” cleverly disguising the private prison industry’s agenda of detaining migrants, including women and children, for a huge profit. Well intentioned followers, be weary of blindly accepting policies that demand the forced removal of politically debilitated populations to make room for ‘real’ Americans. Ted Rall’s newest work invites us to seriously consider what is at stake when we followers do not act before it’s too late to stop the atrocities against fellow human beings against that cannot politically defend themselves. Rall warns, “Once you commit yourself to apathy, laziness, and tacit consent to mass murder and rampant injustice, your miserable, wasteful choice can end only with death.”
Conclusion
On August of 1934, Dr. Albert Krebs wrote in his journal,
“We [national socialists] were all strongly opposed to collaboration with the ‘patriotic bourgeoisie’ of the right-wing parties... My colleagues feared a ‘watering down of the goal’ through the infiltration of reactionary attitudes formed spiritual fact that the party and its leaders were going to turn into a political and constitutional reality…But above all I could not longer visualize or accept the Nazi party as the instrument, nor its leadership with Hitler at the head, as the honest servants of this ‘goal,’ whether the goal was clear or not. I saw only a power bloc consisting of and driven by idealistic and demonic forces.”
Like Dr. Krebs, we must ask ourselves, are we being driven by ‘idealistic and demonic forces’ even if they may have originally promised insightful change? Leadership Studies scholar Ronald Heifetz writes, “the accumulation of evil never resides in one person at the top because no one gets to the top without representing the interests of the dominant factions in the system.” The leader (Hitler) that reduced unemployment from six million to one million within a five-year span increased his control of the state apparatus through overwhelmingly popular support. In fact, the Nazi’s public relations division was incredibly important to the regime’s rapid censure of the German state’s resources, institutions and public opinion (for example, the police, military, public funds/taxes, property, legal instruments) for without a willing constituency, Hitler’s agenda was unattainable. Why does it matter in the short/long run if we are not cautious about keeping an eye on our own barbaric political hatred and biases? Contemporary followers, both progressives or Tea Party followers, must be watchful of charismatic leaders that promise to restore prosperity to some at the expense of the less powerful.
Bibliography
Allen, Sherman. The Infancy of Nazism (New York: New Viewpoints, 1976) x, xiii, 36
Belant, Russ. Old Nazis, the New Right and The Republican Party (Boston: South End
Press, 1971)
Berghoff, Hartmut. “Did Hitler Create A New Society?” Ed. Panayi, Panikos. Weimar
and Nazi Germany, Continuities and Discontinuities, (London: Longman Press, 2001)
Dolan, Eric. “NAACP Exposes Ties Between Tea Party and Racist Extremist Groups,”
10/21/10 from
http://www.alternet.org/rights/148569/naacp_exposes_ties_between_tea_party_and_racist_extremist_groups.
Gellately, Robert. Backing Hitler, Consent & Coercion in Nazi Germany (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2001)
Heifetz, Ronald. Leadership Without Easy Answers, (London: Belknap Press, 1994)
Krugman, Paul. “Tea Parties Forever,” New York Times (4/12/2009)
Lipman-Blumen, Jean. The Allure of Toxic Leaders (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2001), 223-225
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/13/opinion/13krugman.html
McGowan, Lee. “The Extreme Right,” Ed. Panayi, Panikos. Weimar and Nazi Germany,
Continuities and Discontinuities (London: Longman Press, 2001)
Palahniuk, Chuck. Fight Club, (Norton and Co, 2005), ch. 17
Panayi, Panikos. Weimar and Nazi Germany, Continuities and Discontinuities, (London:
Longman Press, 2001)
Rall, Ted. Anti-American Manifesto, (Seven Stories Press, 2010)
Rosenberg, Paul. “Nazi Re-enactor Just the Tip of the Iceberg: The GOP’s Long History
with Nazi Allies,” (10/12/10) from OpenLeft.com http://www.openleft.com/diary/20471/nazi-reenactor-is-just-the-tip-of-the-iceberg-the-gops-long-history-with-nazi-allies
Shah, Adam. “Rand Paul Headstomper Just the Latest Violent Right-Winger: 17 more
instances of Recent Violence by Conservatives.” (10/27/2010)
MediaMattersforAmerica.org
http://www.alternet.org/teaparty/148645/rand_paul_headstomper_just_the_latest_violent_right-winger%3A_17_more_instances_of_recent_violence_by_conservatives/
U.S. Department of Labor Statistics, http://www.bls.gov/cps
Tea Party Nationalism-NAACP Report, 2010;
PDF:http://www.teapartynationalism.com/pdf/TeaPartyNationalism.pdf
The official Tea Party website, (11/29/2010) http://teaparty.org/about.php
Saturday, December 4, 2010
Departing from the Current Sexist Theory of the State and the Male Standard
As a Feminist political scientist, I argue that not all people are created equal under United States law. This is because as a Mexican American woman I have lived, observed, and studied how/why some people are priviledged, allowed access to resouces, opportunities and institutional power-making decisions while ‘others’ are not. Feminist political theorist Zillah Eisenstein accurately notes, “we need a starting place other than Jefferson’s ‘all men are created equal,’ because it leaves us with a vision that equality can be articulated through a homogenous standard: men.” The point of deconstructing the “standard” is not simply to incorporate women into the law. Women have different needs since we have different bodies, experiences, and perspectives therefore, a more nuanced approach is necessary than demanding exact equality with men. The state is a sexist institution from its ideological core. Displacing men’s exclusive priviledge from inside the core is more productive than attempting to add women within the state’s sexist framework. In other words, women have different conceptions about pregnancy and rape than do men and our expetise should be inculcated into the state’s ideological core, instead of only aiming to incorporate greater numbers of women within the state’s legal system.
The central question investigated assumes a Radical Feminist lens; what’s the state’s ideological core from the perspective of women in Eisenstein’s second chapter of The Female Body and the Law and MacKinnon’s Towards a Feminist Theory of the State and how can we re-imagine a Feminist ideological core for the state? The state is a patriarchal apparatus from multiple viewpoints, but I will specifically focus on power and women’s exclusion from the gender “neutral” legal theories. In Part I, I zoom into the Hobbesian definition of power and how a woman’s standpoint formulated from the experience of having a pregnant body can re-establish a different understanding of what power is, as well as reimaging the legal ideological core with a Feminist analysis. In Part II, I analyze the male-centered theory behind rape laws as an attempt to further Catherine MacKinnon’s project of constructing a Feminist theory of the state by including women’s experiences with rape. The absense of women’s bodies and experiences from the state’s ideologies are clearly responsible for protecting men’s privacy at the expense of women. The perpetraitor regards rape as his male right, while the state legitimizes and protects his right.
Part I: Power and The Pregnant Body
Hobbes defines power as the passions.
“The causes of this difference of wits, are in the passions; and the difference of passions proceedeth, partly from the different constitution of the body…The passions that most of all cause the difference of wit, are principally…the desire of power, of riches, of knowledge, and of honour. All which may be reduced to the first, that is, desire of power.”
If the Hobbesian narrative on power is argueably one core ideology behind the state, then it has failed to explain the reality of women’s lives because it does not account for the female body and the complexity of pregnancy, even when referring specifically to “the body.” Clearly, Hobbes was never pregnant and his writings reflect an ignorance of women’s realities. In certain cases where women choose pregnancy, it is not a matter of power play, but of giving life. Bringing a child to birth is about love for another as much as it is about loving the self; not power, not riches, not knowledge, not honour. It takes setting aside the self’s identity, wants, or needs to priviledge the internal ‘other.’ Consider this; sometimes our lives are genuinely enriched by supporting others rather than our own self-interest. My point is not to essentialize the pregnant or female body but to suggest an alternative to the current political narratives and open up possibilities for pragmatic discourse in the theory of the law which inadequately defines men as the standard.
Women are deeply shaped through their exclusion of the state’s core narratives and definitions of power when they encounter the law as defendents, plaintiffs, judges, lawyers, etc. Men cannot set the standard of humanity within law because they systematically exclude the pregnant body, important to women. The Hobbesian male thinks power is expressed through aggression, greed and coersion because the self deserves everything. The Eisensteinian Feminist thinks power is moreso about relationships through “radical egalitarianism” because the other was first part of the body of another woman before she/he became independent. All people come from a woman, a pregnant body, but this is not the basis for today’s legal core narrative.
Part II: Rape within the State’s Core Narratives of the Private Domain
Catherine MacKinnon suggests there is no public or private sphere for women because rape data disproves the safety of the home and the “protection” men offer in the home is not always benevolent. More women have been raped by someone they know, than by someone they don’t. The majority of rape vicitims happen to be female and men are more likely to be doing the raping. The private domain from a MacKinnon Feminist standpoint is only private for men, at the expense of women’s well-being. The private versus public divide means the state acknowledges that it is prohibited from entering the bedroom of individual men and regulating their behavior, even if it is violent, such as the case of marital rape. MacKinnon elaborates,
“From a woman’s point of view, rape isn’t prohibited; it is regulated. Even women who know they have been raped don’t believe that the legal system will see it the way they do…Rather than determining or avenging rape, the State…perpetuates it.”
MacKinnon orients the readers attention to women’s different experiences with rape rather than assuming the male-given interpretations. The misogynistic core Liberal ideology behind the law is responsible for teaching that; “women is part of nature; man like law, must sometimes tame and control her.” When a woman reports a rape but has little evidence to prove it, her accusation is hastily discredited. Rape is not taken seriously as a crime because it is considered a violation only by the woman whose personhood is not the standard for the law, therefore upholding men’s right to privacy and rape. When faced with a trial, rape survivors are often re-traumatized/ “raped again” by the incredulty of the court, the rapist’s legal council, and the media. The legal system treats rape survivors as if they had committed a crime against the privacy of their perpetraitor. “In conceiving a cognizable injury from the viewpoint of the reasonable rapist, the rape law affirmatively rewards men with aquittals for not comprehending women’s point of view on sexual encounters.” The majority of rape cases go unreported, and from those that are reported, greater than half never make it past the District Attorney’s office.
What would a Feminist revision of this private divide within the state’s core ideology look like? Certainly, women’s accusations of rape would be taken seriously if men weren’t priviledged as the law. The protection of rapists must end by deconstructing the state’s role in regulating men’s right to tame women through sexual force. Instead of equating men with law and women with nature, Feminists Eisenstein and MacKinnon regard gender as socially constructed by men. To re-construct gender according to both women and men, the personhood of pregnant women under the law and rape laws must change.
Conclusion:
One meaningful reason why Feminist political scientists should de-center the male body within the state’s misogynistic core narratives is because women’s continued exclusion from public positions of authority that are esteemed to interpret the law as “fact” such as judges, committee chairs of Congress and the Senate, not to mention law professors, have a serious impact upon women’s lives. The majority of key governance positions are reserved for men only, one obvious example is the current presidency of the United States. By simply adding more women into the legal system, Feminists will not be able to accurately challenge the legal rape discourse, nor advocate for the rights of pregnant women, including the right to terminate pregnancy. Feminists need a theory of the state, a new ideology about power, pregnancy, the private domain and rape.
The central question investigated assumes a Radical Feminist lens; what’s the state’s ideological core from the perspective of women in Eisenstein’s second chapter of The Female Body and the Law and MacKinnon’s Towards a Feminist Theory of the State and how can we re-imagine a Feminist ideological core for the state? The state is a patriarchal apparatus from multiple viewpoints, but I will specifically focus on power and women’s exclusion from the gender “neutral” legal theories. In Part I, I zoom into the Hobbesian definition of power and how a woman’s standpoint formulated from the experience of having a pregnant body can re-establish a different understanding of what power is, as well as reimaging the legal ideological core with a Feminist analysis. In Part II, I analyze the male-centered theory behind rape laws as an attempt to further Catherine MacKinnon’s project of constructing a Feminist theory of the state by including women’s experiences with rape. The absense of women’s bodies and experiences from the state’s ideologies are clearly responsible for protecting men’s privacy at the expense of women. The perpetraitor regards rape as his male right, while the state legitimizes and protects his right.
Part I: Power and The Pregnant Body
Hobbes defines power as the passions.
“The causes of this difference of wits, are in the passions; and the difference of passions proceedeth, partly from the different constitution of the body…The passions that most of all cause the difference of wit, are principally…the desire of power, of riches, of knowledge, and of honour. All which may be reduced to the first, that is, desire of power.”
If the Hobbesian narrative on power is argueably one core ideology behind the state, then it has failed to explain the reality of women’s lives because it does not account for the female body and the complexity of pregnancy, even when referring specifically to “the body.” Clearly, Hobbes was never pregnant and his writings reflect an ignorance of women’s realities. In certain cases where women choose pregnancy, it is not a matter of power play, but of giving life. Bringing a child to birth is about love for another as much as it is about loving the self; not power, not riches, not knowledge, not honour. It takes setting aside the self’s identity, wants, or needs to priviledge the internal ‘other.’ Consider this; sometimes our lives are genuinely enriched by supporting others rather than our own self-interest. My point is not to essentialize the pregnant or female body but to suggest an alternative to the current political narratives and open up possibilities for pragmatic discourse in the theory of the law which inadequately defines men as the standard.
Women are deeply shaped through their exclusion of the state’s core narratives and definitions of power when they encounter the law as defendents, plaintiffs, judges, lawyers, etc. Men cannot set the standard of humanity within law because they systematically exclude the pregnant body, important to women. The Hobbesian male thinks power is expressed through aggression, greed and coersion because the self deserves everything. The Eisensteinian Feminist thinks power is moreso about relationships through “radical egalitarianism” because the other was first part of the body of another woman before she/he became independent. All people come from a woman, a pregnant body, but this is not the basis for today’s legal core narrative.
Part II: Rape within the State’s Core Narratives of the Private Domain
Catherine MacKinnon suggests there is no public or private sphere for women because rape data disproves the safety of the home and the “protection” men offer in the home is not always benevolent. More women have been raped by someone they know, than by someone they don’t. The majority of rape vicitims happen to be female and men are more likely to be doing the raping. The private domain from a MacKinnon Feminist standpoint is only private for men, at the expense of women’s well-being. The private versus public divide means the state acknowledges that it is prohibited from entering the bedroom of individual men and regulating their behavior, even if it is violent, such as the case of marital rape. MacKinnon elaborates,
“From a woman’s point of view, rape isn’t prohibited; it is regulated. Even women who know they have been raped don’t believe that the legal system will see it the way they do…Rather than determining or avenging rape, the State…perpetuates it.”
MacKinnon orients the readers attention to women’s different experiences with rape rather than assuming the male-given interpretations. The misogynistic core Liberal ideology behind the law is responsible for teaching that; “women is part of nature; man like law, must sometimes tame and control her.” When a woman reports a rape but has little evidence to prove it, her accusation is hastily discredited. Rape is not taken seriously as a crime because it is considered a violation only by the woman whose personhood is not the standard for the law, therefore upholding men’s right to privacy and rape. When faced with a trial, rape survivors are often re-traumatized/ “raped again” by the incredulty of the court, the rapist’s legal council, and the media. The legal system treats rape survivors as if they had committed a crime against the privacy of their perpetraitor. “In conceiving a cognizable injury from the viewpoint of the reasonable rapist, the rape law affirmatively rewards men with aquittals for not comprehending women’s point of view on sexual encounters.” The majority of rape cases go unreported, and from those that are reported, greater than half never make it past the District Attorney’s office.
What would a Feminist revision of this private divide within the state’s core ideology look like? Certainly, women’s accusations of rape would be taken seriously if men weren’t priviledged as the law. The protection of rapists must end by deconstructing the state’s role in regulating men’s right to tame women through sexual force. Instead of equating men with law and women with nature, Feminists Eisenstein and MacKinnon regard gender as socially constructed by men. To re-construct gender according to both women and men, the personhood of pregnant women under the law and rape laws must change.
Conclusion:
One meaningful reason why Feminist political scientists should de-center the male body within the state’s misogynistic core narratives is because women’s continued exclusion from public positions of authority that are esteemed to interpret the law as “fact” such as judges, committee chairs of Congress and the Senate, not to mention law professors, have a serious impact upon women’s lives. The majority of key governance positions are reserved for men only, one obvious example is the current presidency of the United States. By simply adding more women into the legal system, Feminists will not be able to accurately challenge the legal rape discourse, nor advocate for the rights of pregnant women, including the right to terminate pregnancy. Feminists need a theory of the state, a new ideology about power, pregnancy, the private domain and rape.
Sunday, November 28, 2010
Gender in the Series Planet Earth (The Jungle Episode)
The BBC’s special wildlife series Planet Earth takes hightech cameras and video equipment into the great outdoors on a mission to film this planet’s “greatest natural spectacles.” The radiant landscapes and vibrant wildlife are breathtakingly captured for the marvel of us, the human spectators residing in the “developed” world. The narrator David Attenborough, informs the audience of what is being presented through the footage of the screen. The style of narration, aptly described as the voice-of-God technique in documentary making, suggests the narrator is stating absolute fact, scientifically concluded through the study of biologists and other qualified academics. This is problematic for many reasons, beginning with the context of colonization in which the filming project treats native peoples as non-existant within the geographical places they reside and concluding towards the objectivity of the videomakers (white, high/middle class, British men) to rationally name, describe, and classify natural phenomenon as truth. I’ll delve onto a few examples to make a stronger case that Planet Earth fails to escape or quell the hegemonic and patriarchal traditions of its creators.
In the Episode, “Jungles” the captive explorer (sitting comfortably in front of her/his monitor screen) is helicopter flown through the foggy clouds across the sky towards the density of the lush forest. Attenborough informs us that we are in Papua, New Guinea on the quest for the male Blue Bird of Paradise’s courtship dance. The language the narrator uses to explain the bird’s ritual is blatantly gendered through contemporary social standards of masculinity and femininity. The male is actively displaying his virility to a potential female mate that watches passively. She, the “picky”/ “choosey” female, can either accept his request or deny him based on appearance. Other examples of such male-centric descriptions of ‘natural’ animal behavior abound.
At the Amazon Rainforest, we are priviledged to observe the bright green, Gliding Leaf Frogs copulating on the dewy leaves overhanging the ground. Attenborough again attributes socially constructed gender categories onto the frogs as if the behavior was determined by biological forces devoid of human biases. The females are occassionaly forced to accept ‘sneaky interceptions’ by younger males wanting to beat the older males in the race to mate. The insensitivity applied towards female sexuality of any species can be seen as symptomatic of the filmmakers upbringing in a male priviledged society, not as naturally occuring.
Last but not least, in the Congo we are to find a large group of Chimpanzees carefully stalking another group. Attenborough tells us a territorial dispute is transpiring. He alerts us that a female Chimpanzee has been cornered by three rival males and that she is lucky to escape with her life. The mother has lost her infant to the attackers and it’s tiny body is cannibalized. Attenborough acknowledges the uncertainty of explaining why the Chimpanzees acted this way, but nevertheless, the spectator is left to wonder if sexist territorial aggression is justified in the nature of our closest primate relative.
The gender biases and the colonizer’s perspective masquerading as objective are two outright troubles recorded within the Western’s scientific traditions by scores of Feminists, Critical Race theorists, and social activists. Technoscience Feminist Donna Haraway aptly describes one case study examining how biology textbooks have historically reflected the social perspective of the Western world as legitimated through a command of scientific knowledge grounded in the observation nature. Haraway unravels how
"Sociologist Eric Engels examined a large body of pre-World War II U.S. biology texts and educators writings. Content with the great divide between nature and culture, biology textbooks tend to explain the ‘social’ in terms of the ‘natural.’ Biology texts, in educating ‘adolescents’…about the living world ‘constructed that world in particular ways generally consistent with commodification, capital accumulation, the bureaucratization of society, the strenthening of professional and technocratic authority, the marginalization of people of color and women, and the priviledging of heterosexuality and the nuclear family.” (Engels, 1991)
Some of the same problems persistent for Engels’ study are prevalent in the work of the Planet Earth series. In New Guinea, the Huli people are totally ignored, only to be shown at the end of the episode under the title Planet Earth Diaries, as extras living one step above the hunter-gatherer phase of “development.” This relegation of the people into the margins denies them their expertise of the land and the wildlife.
Haraway provides another example to explain how she formulated her critical awareness about the unobjectivity of science when she was teaching biology and the history of science at the University of Hawaii. She writes of her experience,
Without for a minute giving up our commitments to biology as knowledge, many of us [professors and students] left that period of activism and teaching committed to understanding the historical specificity and conditions of solidity of what counts as nature, for whom, and at what cost.”
Haraway is wise to remind us that the power to name nature is not genderblind or colorblind. Nature is a socially determined category, just like civilization, technology, and science.
Haraway, Donna. Modest Witness@Second Millennium.FemaleMan Meets OncoMouse, 1997. 103
Haraway, Donna. Modest Witness@Second Millennium.FemaleMan Meets OncoMouse, 1997. 104
In the Episode, “Jungles” the captive explorer (sitting comfortably in front of her/his monitor screen) is helicopter flown through the foggy clouds across the sky towards the density of the lush forest. Attenborough informs us that we are in Papua, New Guinea on the quest for the male Blue Bird of Paradise’s courtship dance. The language the narrator uses to explain the bird’s ritual is blatantly gendered through contemporary social standards of masculinity and femininity. The male is actively displaying his virility to a potential female mate that watches passively. She, the “picky”/ “choosey” female, can either accept his request or deny him based on appearance. Other examples of such male-centric descriptions of ‘natural’ animal behavior abound.
At the Amazon Rainforest, we are priviledged to observe the bright green, Gliding Leaf Frogs copulating on the dewy leaves overhanging the ground. Attenborough again attributes socially constructed gender categories onto the frogs as if the behavior was determined by biological forces devoid of human biases. The females are occassionaly forced to accept ‘sneaky interceptions’ by younger males wanting to beat the older males in the race to mate. The insensitivity applied towards female sexuality of any species can be seen as symptomatic of the filmmakers upbringing in a male priviledged society, not as naturally occuring.
Last but not least, in the Congo we are to find a large group of Chimpanzees carefully stalking another group. Attenborough tells us a territorial dispute is transpiring. He alerts us that a female Chimpanzee has been cornered by three rival males and that she is lucky to escape with her life. The mother has lost her infant to the attackers and it’s tiny body is cannibalized. Attenborough acknowledges the uncertainty of explaining why the Chimpanzees acted this way, but nevertheless, the spectator is left to wonder if sexist territorial aggression is justified in the nature of our closest primate relative.
The gender biases and the colonizer’s perspective masquerading as objective are two outright troubles recorded within the Western’s scientific traditions by scores of Feminists, Critical Race theorists, and social activists. Technoscience Feminist Donna Haraway aptly describes one case study examining how biology textbooks have historically reflected the social perspective of the Western world as legitimated through a command of scientific knowledge grounded in the observation nature. Haraway unravels how
"Sociologist Eric Engels examined a large body of pre-World War II U.S. biology texts and educators writings. Content with the great divide between nature and culture, biology textbooks tend to explain the ‘social’ in terms of the ‘natural.’ Biology texts, in educating ‘adolescents’…about the living world ‘constructed that world in particular ways generally consistent with commodification, capital accumulation, the bureaucratization of society, the strenthening of professional and technocratic authority, the marginalization of people of color and women, and the priviledging of heterosexuality and the nuclear family.” (Engels, 1991)
Some of the same problems persistent for Engels’ study are prevalent in the work of the Planet Earth series. In New Guinea, the Huli people are totally ignored, only to be shown at the end of the episode under the title Planet Earth Diaries, as extras living one step above the hunter-gatherer phase of “development.” This relegation of the people into the margins denies them their expertise of the land and the wildlife.
Haraway provides another example to explain how she formulated her critical awareness about the unobjectivity of science when she was teaching biology and the history of science at the University of Hawaii. She writes of her experience,
Without for a minute giving up our commitments to biology as knowledge, many of us [professors and students] left that period of activism and teaching committed to understanding the historical specificity and conditions of solidity of what counts as nature, for whom, and at what cost.”
Haraway is wise to remind us that the power to name nature is not genderblind or colorblind. Nature is a socially determined category, just like civilization, technology, and science.
Haraway, Donna. Modest Witness@Second Millennium.FemaleMan Meets OncoMouse, 1997. 103
Haraway, Donna. Modest Witness@Second Millennium.FemaleMan Meets OncoMouse, 1997. 104
Sunday, November 21, 2010
Friday, October 29, 2010
Respect The Lesbians
Respect The Lesbians
If the Feminist Revolution were to happen today, would all women be ‘liberated’ come tomorrow? Before attempting to answer this question one might ask, ‘well, what exactly is a woman?’ This is a critical question helpful in guiding the vision of a sucessful Feminist Revolution. Who are Feminists fighting a revolution for? The revolution would fail without taking into account the multiplicity of women’s identities, especially when it comes to sexual expression and relationships. I argue that for the Feminist Revolution to be truly globalized, Feminists must specifically address the problems rooted within heterosexual hegemony, in addition to eradicating the oppressive social constructions stemming from race, class and age discrimination. My focus here is on validating female sexual expression, specifically the lesbian sexual desire as one of the greatest sources of tension and strength within Feminist theory and its Feminist movement.
Defining Woman, the Subject
“I love to you.”[1] This ‘woman’ must fundamentally love herself first before she can fully immerse herself in love with other ‘women.’ I am not essentializing all women by attempting to define woman as only lesbian but, loving our human essence is a little bit lesbian. [2] This rubric of self-love recasts heterosexuality in role of abnormality that is currently reserved for homosexuality and my objective is not to revert the paradigm but, to acknowledge the multiplicity of female sexual desire and open up space for lesbians to become socially, culturally and politically accepted in their identities and expression. A woman is a subject that defines herself primarily and not only as she is defined by the patriarchal category of ‘woman’ used to oppress. Illich states that “gender is vernacular,” as “there are no two socieites where tools or tasks are divided between genders in the same way,” therefore our sexual expresions as women are as shaped and adapted to the pressures of gender constructions (the woman), especially for lesbians in the face of cumpulsory heterosexualtiy.[3] Sarah Hoagland problematices the term ‘woman’ and argues for it’s replacement. While I utilize Hoagland to articulate the lesbian perspective in this paper, I agree that the term is useful only when we define it first.
Is Feminist Theory Possible without Lesbians Sexual Desire? Is Feminist Theory Possible without ‘Straight’ Women with Heterosexual Desire?
The overarching agenda of the phallocracy is to kill women’s love for themselves and other women because it facilitates the continued exploitation of women’s labor, love and bodies. The purpose of Feminist Theory is to imagine a counter-strategy against those patriarchal systems of oppression which dehumanize women. Radical Feminist Theorist, Sarah Hoagland elucidates how the heterosexual arm of the phallocracy is especially punitive against female sexual desire for women. She writes, “while I agree that we are living in a heterosexist society, I think the wider problem is that we live in a hetero-relational society where most of women’s personal, social, professional, and economic relations are defined by the ideology that women is for man.”[4][Emphasis mine] If women were not deskilled, infantilized and treated as second class citizens, then maybe more women would feel comfortable embracing the lesbian love within themselves and other women. Sonia Johnson describes the fear of men’s violence against women who refuse to ignore their sexual demands and focus on their own sexual needs. “Our conviction that if we stop studying and monitoring men and their latest craziness…they will go beserk and kill us…with our eyes fully upon them, they kill us daily; with our eyes riveted upon them they have gone beserk.”[5] The urgency of discussing these questions, these needs to express sexual pleasure in the face of overwhelming pain, cannot be ignored or subsumed by other social concerns. The Feminist Revolution must have considered the question of lesbian’s freedom to be fully ‘liberating.’
Women’s lesbian identity is problematized by society, but also by other ‘straight’ women that define themselves as Feminist yet do not want female sexual desire for other women to be expressed. Shane Phelan’s (Be)Coming Out: Lesbian Identity and Politics, sheds light over the debate on who is truly a better Feminist, lesbian women or straight women and how the peaceful resolutions can be reached by not allowing lesbians to become “assimilated into mainstream,” nor “withdraw in search of an authentic community,” by critiquing heteropatriarchy’s power together.[6] I agree with the first premise that is lesbians should not seek to be assimilated, however I disagree with Phelan’s second conclusion that the withdrawl and regrouping strategy is ineffective and I align with Sarah Hoagland. Finally, Phelan is right to emphasize heteropatriarchy must be critiqued by women that do not find other women sexually attractive as well as women that are lesbians because the denial of female love is over-archingly objectifying of all women.
Hoagland writes, “a woman that belongs to no man either: one, does not exist or two, is trying to be a man.” And, “she is cast as the virgin if she doesn’t have sex with men, or she is a whore because she engages in sexual relationships with men. Regardless of who she is as a person, women’s humanity is defined by their sexual availablility to men.” When lesbians refuse men as sexual partners, they are taking a political stance moreover than identifying their preferances because they are subverting men’s access to all women’s bodies as sexual objects. Lesbians constitute a fundamental threat to the system of heteropatriarchy simply by existing, not to mention having ‘outlaw’ sex and establishing thriving women-only communities. When straight women refuse men for sex, they are immediately relegated into either the virgin/whore dichotomy, also punished for expressing a nuanced agency to choose particular men. Feminist Theory is impossible without both lesbian and heterosexual female sexual expression because the topic of women’s autonomy to express her sexuality is heavily curtailed by patriarchy. Even when women are not lesbian, they should fundamentally be supportive of lesbian’s right to sexually desire other women and themselves.
Conclusion: “Breathing Together”
For a truly genuine Feminist Revolution to come, there must also be a lesbian driving force powering the right to choose women as sexual lovers. Certainly not all women are heterosexual, still all women should at least respect the lesbians, even when they themselves are not self-identifying as such. Hoagland reminds us, “for resistance to effect change; there must be a movement afoot, a conspiracy, a breathing together.” Both lesbian and straight women must learn to breath together.
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Monday, October 25, 2010
Productive Anger in the Theories of Materialist Feminism and Black Feminism
I recently wrote this paper for my Feminist Theory class and I deemed it blog worthy.
Peace, Love,Unity, Respect,
Supersonic d
Peace, Love,Unity, Respect,
Supersonic d
Productive Anger in the Theories of Materialist Feminism and Black Feminism
Possesed by ‘the Spirit of Independence’ I Awaken, I Self-Define, and I Innovate
I do not want to pretend that I’m a happy Feminist because I am not writing to entertain. As a Black Feminist pioneer, Maria Stewart astutely assured us in 1891,
“we [Women of Color] have never had an opportunity of displaying our talents; therefore the world thinks we know nothing…possess the spirit of independence…you can but die if you make the attempt; and we shall certainly die if you do not.”[1]
This process of writing or “possessing the spirit” is significantly powered by what can best be described as productive anger. Anger is one of the most unsettling emotions that stirs up from the depths of our female psyches a reality check about the oppression that comes with being labelled a woman. Anger can be expressed in two distinct ways: productive/positively or destructive/negatively. [2] This paper will only examine the role of productive anger within the theories of Materialist Feminism and Black Feminism. Anger transformed into a productive expression has awakened us Feminists to create a new self-definition, confront the source of our oppression, and forge a new direction for the future of gender politics. Without productive anger there can be no Feminist Revolution. Without productive anger there is no human essence to Feminist Theory. Anger gives us a necessary push out of sedation and passification. I am Possessed by the Spirit of Independence, I awaken, I self-define and I innovate. Analyzing the place and role of productive anger in Materialist Feminist Theory, according to Radical Feminist Mary Daly and Materialist Feminists Monique Wittig, plus Black Feminist Theory as penned by Patricia Hill Collins, can shed light on how these processes of awakening, self-defining and innovation occurs. Anger enables me to speak out against women’s oppression which has effectively silenced women on every part of the planet and has almost taken my voice, until today.
Productive Anger Leads to Awakening
Feminists become angry when they become aware of the exploitation, degredation, and general disrespect women endure on a daily basis simply because of their gender or sexual identity. Materialist Feminist, Christine Delphy explains that anger is the emergency response of a woman’s unconsciousness, flashing an alert to her consciousness to awaken her into rebellion. “The only basis for this consciousness is our revolt; and the only foundation for this revolt is our anger.”[3] This trigger function of anger to shake us out of our deepest depression/paralysis is especially important to other Feminist/Womanist/Gynocentric authors like Radical Feminist Theorist, Mary Daly and Black Feminist Theorist, Patricia Hill Collins.
Mary Daly names the four strategies of the fathers as erasure, reversal, false polarization, and divide and conquer.[4] Awakening requires an abrupt shattering of illusions about the self and the dominant groups in society. It requires breaking out of these four strategies.“We transmute the base metals of man-made myths by becoming unmute, calling forth from our selves and each other the courage to name the unnameable.”[5] Productive anger opens up the possibility to discuss something previously ‘unnameable,’ forcing us to confront and overcome our difficulties, anxieties, and fears. Based on experiences with identity erasure, reversal, false polarization, and divide and conqueur, women have been devalued and internalized this degredation. Anger at this leads to the awakening of the mind, body, and Feminist spirit of independence. Silence and docility means to become complicit in one’s own erasure.
Anger from the standpoint of Black Feminist Theory is part of the conscious raising process about the simultanous oppression of racism and anti-womanism. Patricia Hill Collins agrees productive anger is what sparks awareness, self-definition, and revolutionary action. Collins praises the character of ‘Peaches’ from Nina Simone’s blue’s song “Four Women.” She [Peaches] “is an especially powerful figure, because Peaches is angry. ‘I’m awfully bitter these days,’ Peaches cries out, ‘because my parents were slaves.”[6] Collins hears the expression of pain in Simone’s blues as a transformation of consciousness towards self-definition and the expression of her self definition as a form of rebellion. The expression of productive anger is not to be confused with wallowing in self-pity; it is an affirmation of one’s capacity to feel human in the most dehumanizing of conditions. The fact that women feel anger at being politically, socially, and economically objectified is an affirmation of our humanity; the full humanity men of all social categories have routinely denied to women. Picture the social order in the shape of a hierarchy where White skin is awarded a higher “humanity” than Black skin, and masculinity is preferred to femininity. Productive anger is how awareness of one’s own positionality on the hierarchy is made known to many courageously outspoken Black women.
Productive Anger Empowers Self-Definition
Angry women find the need to re-define themselves, on their own terms. The renown Materialist Feminist, Monique Wittig elucidates the precarious condition of women when her fictional female warriors express cognizance of their oppression in Les Guerilleres. “The women say, unhappy one, men have expelled you from the world of symbols and yet they have given you names, they have called you slave, you unhappy slave.”[7]The systematic devaluation of women’s knowledge and humanity is no accident but man-made, and enforced through a “matrix of domination” that parades itself as ‘natural.’ However, women’s subordination is not fixed in nature, but artificially constructed by men to suit their best interests as slavemasters. In One is Not Born a Woman, Wittig clarifies the complex relationship between self-identity and anger expressed through rebellion.
“For once one has acknowledged oppression, one needs to know and experience the fact that one can be a subject (as opposed to an object of oppression), that one can become someone in spite of oppression, that one has an identity. There is no possible fight without an identity, no internal motivation for fighting, since although I fight with others, first I fight for myself.”
Wittig exposes the rationale that to fight is to defend the self, one must first accept that she is human and is being dehumanized. The question why arises. Why are you not allowed to be free from the attacks of racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, and xenophobia? Followed by the realization that one is relegated onto a social, political, and economic hierarchy based on a given identity; an identity with no basis in nature but it certainly is a real part of most woman’s lived experiences. The power to name the self therefore comes from realizing that she has been misnamed and will ‘fight’ to change this. We cannot change our identities; we can only change how we feel about them and how we feel about others. Productive anger makes us aware that we are to define ourselves as separately than how we are defined by the phallocracy.
Productive Anger powers the process of self-definition. Collins quotes Nancy White to describe the status of Black women within the ruling establishment. “My mother used to say that Black women is the White man’s mule and the White women is his dog…but he ain’t gon’ treat neither one of us like he’s dealing with a person.”[8] The discrimation against Black women based on race and gender make for a more nuanced definition of the self. Nancy White’s mother in teaching her this lesson is preparing her to be aware of the suffering that comes with being Black and a woman in a society that hypervalues Whiteness and masculinity by degrading everything else. Add heterosexual priviledge to the list of politically constructed categories to examine and another dimension of systematic oppression is revealed. The strength and courage to self-define is made known to the self. Collins draws from the wisdom of the talented Aretha Franklin’s song, Respect. “All I’m asking is for a little Respect when you come home.”[9] The creative direction Franklin takes in demanding to be treated as she sees fit is a result of anger’s potential to be transformed for the Feminist liberation fight. The responsibility to self-define yields many possibilities to innovate.
Productive Anger Motivates Innovation
On the journey to become fully free of patriarchal restraints, both Black and Materialist Feminists have recognized the value of productive anger in shaping their ability to make contributions to the women’s liberation movement. One of the most fundamental polarizations between human beings, according to Mary Daly, is through the socio-political constructions of sex and gender. Women are the routine victims of patriarchal violence, control and exploitation from the hands of individual men to the bureaucratic arms of phallocratic states. Toppling the patriarchal state would require the simultaenously dethrowning of the God/father social order and recreating a new, Feminist order in its place. The innovation is inspired by having found strength in the power to self-define and love the self as well as other women. Previous experiences with oppression make for a compassionate innovative process founded on dialogues, not monologues . Daly encourages unity/love between Feminists or “Hags”/ “Crones” as the ultimate act of rebellion to undermine the phallocracy.
“As this Sparking communication occurs, Hags do not haggle over ‘equality,’ for we know there is no equality among unique Selves…expect and encourage each other to become sister pyrotechnists building the fire that is fueled by Fury, the fire that warms and lights the place…where we can spin and weave the tapestries of Crone-centered creation.” (My emphasis)[10]
The “Fury” that fuels the fire is what I have termed productive anger; the energy that pushes outward the spirit of independence breathes life into Materialist Feminist Theory. The Fury is what fuels the fire of revolt and the ecstasy of liberation is what follows the success of productive anger. Anger is not the ideal state of existing but only the fuel that drives us to ‘build the fire.’ By emphasizing the appraisal of different women’s unique personhoods, Daly invites women to come together over Fury of being assimilated, mutalated, or destroyed and to cast off those things which reduce women to mere wombs or sex toys; from bras to S&M chokers. She gives us space for diversity by recognizing that our uniqueness as individual women is a source of strength when building the fire as “sister pyrotechnists,” to each have an important responsibility in the process of social reconstruction.
While the goal is not to shift one set of oppressive paradigms for another (matriarchy for patriarchy), it is exigent to drastically alter gender relations for the benefit of humankind. Although Daly encourages Fury, she also draws considerable attention to the project of recreating gynocentric pleasure; ecstasy. “Gyn/Ecology is Un-Creation; Gyn/Ecology is Creation.”[11] I refer to this creation as innovation. Collins neatly sums up the ties between self-definition and innovation as she clarifies that
“by persisting in the journey towards self-definition, as individuals, we are changed. When linked to group action, our individual struggles gain meaning…perhaps that is why so many African-American women have managed to persist and ‘make a way out of no way.’ Perhaps they knew the power of self-definition.”[12]
There exists few positive role models for women in the culture of the patriarchal dominant group. The sterotypes and labels given to women, to African-Americans, to Latino/as, recent immigrants, First Nation Peoples, and the LGBT communities are meant to disassociate the anger meant for white supremacist, phallocracy and seduce us to participate in the oppression of other groups as well as ourselves. We must self-define and let our consciousness guide us, even if we must ‘make a way out of no way,’ as our Black Feminist foremothers did. The ultimate goal of Feminist Theory is to lead to Feminist praxis. Mary Daly critically asks, “how much can I say unless I’m going to do something?”
Conclusion; Collaboration between Sista ‘Pyrotechnists’
Productive anger can be defined to help awaken, self-define, and innovate through two main bodies of Feminist scholarship; Materialist Feminism and Black Feminism. Each theory uniquely possess great merit in exposing, analyzing, and preparing women to live and fight for surivial in a patriarchal world order. Collaboration between the Radical Feminists and the Black Feminists is imperative, but impossible without reaching some common ground. Productive anger can provide a solid platform from which Feminist movements to build Gyn/Ecology together.
Racism has effectively helped to expedite the divide and conquer of all women as an oppressed group. Black Feminists agree to a certain extent that men of all shades, backgrounds, and identities are slavemasters of women, but that to disregard men as enemies altogether is to replace Big (White and Brown) Brother with Big (White) Sister. Black Feminists are weary of aligning with White women’s movements based on gender because of previous racist experiences. P. Hill Collins highlights the culpability of White priviledge in thwarting efforts of women’s unity movements, currently as in the past. Black women’s struggles were marginalized at least during the first and second U.S. ‘Waves of Feminism’ by the White, upper-middle class women that set the movement’s agenda.’ Writing and discussing the subject of women’s subjugation without diverse alliances between activists is elitist in leiu of the fact that far too many women are routinely denied educational opportunities and resources to participate in the making of academia’s Women’s Studies. The standpoints of priviledged women simply do not represent women universally. The urgent success of an overarching Feminist agenda depends on strengthening political alliances between Feminist theories and practices. Women angry at each other and divided cannot resolve difficult questions such as how to effectively stop domestic violence, rape, genocide, war, corporate exploitation, and imperialism. The spirit of independence is the call for individual Feminists to come to awareness, self-definition, and innovation so as to collaborate lovingly with other sista ‘pyrotechnists.’
[1] Read from Black Feminist Thought by P. Hill Collins
[2] Destructive anger leads us down a path of suicide, madness or worse, the prolonged triumph of patriarchy.
[3] Close to Home: A Materialist Analysis, C. Delphy, 153
[4] Erasure refers to the femicide of women and girls as a method to keep women enslaved to men. Reversal in this context suggests men appropriate the labor of women. False Polarization means here that male defined ‘feminism’ is then used to offend women and keep them from reaching out to one another. Divide and Conquer as a strategy uses token women to keep other women in check.
Gyn/Ecology, M. Daly, 8
[5] Gyn/Ecology, M.Daly, 34
[6] Black Feminist Thought, P. Hill Collins, 124
[7] Les Guerilleres, M. Wittig, 112
[8] Black Feminist Thought, P. Hill Collins
[9] Black Feminist Thought, P. Hill Collins, 127
[10] Gyn/Ecology, M. Daly, 384
[11] Gyn/Ecology, M. Daly, 424
[12] Black Feminist Thought, P. Hill Collins, 132
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