Feminist Human Rights vs. the Conning of Patriotism
by Kathleen Barry
On The Issues Magazine: December 29, 2010
http://www.ontheissuesmagazine.com/cafe2/article/130
Although more women are joining the military than ever before and some are
seeing combat, women's primary role, as far as the military is concerned, is
patriotic. Not just any kind of patriotism is expected of women; they are
expected to eagerly send their sons and husbands and lovers and partners and
fathers off to combat.
Then women are to turn away and not see what actually occurs in combat.
Under cover of sacrificing their lives for the United States of America,
their loved ones are killing randomly, without remorse, otherwise known as
murder. That is how they are trained, actually brainwashed.
"Collateral Murder," the WikiLeaks video, allegedly leaked by Private First
Class Bradley Manning, is what remorseless killing looks like. As civilians
are mowed down from a hovering helicopter, the soldiers are joking and
cheering. In research for Unmaking War, Remaking Men, I found that random
killing is everyday life for U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
As a feminist, it is not difficult to see how the military exploits
masculinity for war. Regardless of the gender of the soldier dropping the
bomb or pulling the trigger, violent, aggressive masculinity underpins the
military's amorality of remorseless killing, institutionalizes it and
rewards it.
Nevertheless, in writing about combat in Iraq and Afghanistan to understand
the wars we have to unmake, I found myself confronted with conflicting
"values," using the term loosely for a moment. Most blatant is how the value
of patriotism in wartime elevates sacrifice for one's country over the value
of human life. The military, claiming to defend its country, teaches
soldiers to value the lives of their buddies over their own, which keeps
them fighting, as it would be unmanly to not protect your buddy. Meanwhile,
they treat anyone who is not their military buddy in a combat zone as an
enemy whose life has no value, who the soldiers are trained to think of as
not even having a life.
Yet, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights assures all human beings of
their right to live, and to live in dignity and peace. This is where I began
in constructing the feminist human rights paradigm that shaped the book I
was writing. Refusing to allow this study of masculinity and war to be
driven by beliefs -- in patriotism, in religion with all of their
patriarchal trappings -- I consider the value of human beings' lives to be
sacrosanct, beyond debate, and like universal human rights, unconditional.
Likewise, for me, being human is being interconnected with each other, that
is, to be very clear, each with all others. Soldiers' revulsion to killing
other human beings is but one evidence of how deep that interconnection
goes. It is driven by our life force (or spirit) that propels human beings
to save others whose lives are at risk. That is why the military must train
them intensively if they are to get them to kill without remorse.
The issue of feminist values then is not what one believes but how we frame
the knowledge upon which we act. In the case of masculinity and war, even
the Geneva Conventions -- which accepts war as inevitable -- was of no use
to me in establishing the values from which my book would be written.
Finally, I defined the values underpinning my study of war in this way:
"This new framework of understanding is a human rights paradigm because it
places the dignity of human beings and their rights above all other
considerations. It is a feminist paradigm because it confronts the power of
masculinity as it is socialized and constructed for war as well as female
complicity in that power. And yet because shared human consciousness
transcends nationalities (nationalism), races, ethnicities, classes and
gender, this feminist human rights paradigm is global, encompassing all
human beings."
Feminists, bless our hearts, are everywhere, including in war zones, where
clarity of values is a matter of life or death. I see it in Afghan women who
reject "fundamentalist warlords and misogynist terrorists," as Malalai Joya
identifies the enemies of women in her homeland. I see it in Code Pink
activism. And I see it in men in combat who are refusing to fight and kill.
Our activism in concert with universal human rights becomes a feminist human
rights paradigm that reaches many.
[Kathleen Barry, Professor Emerita, is a sociologist and feminist activist
whose first book, Female Sexual Slavery (1979) launched a global movement
against trafficking in women. Her latest book, Unmaking War, Remaking Men:
How Empathy Can Reshape Our Politics, Our Soldiers and Ourselves was
published in October, 2010. See www.unmakingwar.net ]
___________________________________________
Portside aims to provide material of interest to people
on the left that will help them to interpret the world
and to change it.
Submit via email: portside@portside.org
Sub/Unsub: http://portside.org/subscribe-and-unsubscribe
Search Portside archives: http://portside.org/archive
Contribute to Portside: https://portside.org/donate
No comments:
Post a Comment