File spoon-archives/postcolonial.archive/postcolonial_2001/postcolonial.0110, message 478


From: "Africa Diaspora" <oridota-AT-online.fr>
Subject: Re: 
Date: Mon, 22 Oct 2001 23:34:44 +0200



I. A. Oridota, oridota-AT-online.fr
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Africa Diaspora
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----- Original Message ----- 
From: Kamran D. Rastegar <kdr7-AT-columbia.edu>
To: <postcolonial-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu>
Sent: Monday, October 22, 2001 5:08 PM


> 
> I'm sorry if I'm sending information that has already been posted to this
> list - but I don't think I've seen any discussion of this issue here yet.
> 
> Kamran 
> 
> -------
> 
>  FYI - This is a statement from UBC (University of British Columbia in 
> > Vancouver, 'Canada') Womens' Studies Professor Sunera Thobani. Two weeks she 
> > was accused of spreading anti-american hate crimes while speaking at a 
> > womens'  forum to discuss opposition to Canada's involvement in the 'war 
> > against terrorism' .  The hate crime claim was filed by the CEO of an 
> > american company (Imperial Parking) who resides in Vancouver and sits on the 
> > university's alumi funding body. He has encouraged other funders of the 
> > univeristy to withhold funding and force the university to fire her.  She 
> > has not been fired and the investigation into her alledged 'hate crime' 
> > continues.  Her recalling of the story and her response to it all, follows.
> > 
> > >Enclosed is Sunera Thobani's response to the recent chilling attacks 
> > >against her attempt to voice genuine and informed opposition to the war
> hysteria
> > >that continues to sweep North America.
> 
> WAR FRENZY
> 
> Sunera Thobani
> 
> My recent speech at a women*s conference on violence against women has
> generated much controversy.  In the aftermath of the terrible attacks of
> September 11, I argued that the U.S. response of launching *America*s new
> war* would increase violence against women.  I situated the current crisis
> within the continuity of North/South relations, rooted in colonialism and
> imperialism.  I criticized American foreign policy, as well as President
> Bush*s racialized construction of the American Nation.  Finally, I spoke
> of the need for solidarity with Afghan women*s organizations as well as
> the urgent necessity for the women*s movement in Canada to oppose the war.
> 
> Decontextualized and distorted media reports of my address have led to
> accusations of me being an academic impostor, morally bankrupt and
> engaging in hate-mongering.  It has been fascinating to observe how my
> comments regarding American foreign policy, a record well documented by
> numerous sources whose accuracy or credentials cannot be faulted, have
> been dubbed *hate-speech.* To speak about the indisputable record of U.S.
> backed coups, death squads, bombings and killings ironically makes me a
> *hate-monger.* I was even made the subject of a *hate-crime* complaint to
> the RCMP, alleging that my speech was a *hate-crime.*
> 
> Despite the virulence of these responses, I welcome the public discussion
> my speech has generated as an opportunity to further the public debate
> about Canada*s support of America*s new war.  When I made the speech, I
> believed it was imperative to have this debate before any attacks were
> launched on any country.  Events have overtaken us with the bombing of
> Afghanistan underway and military rule having been declared in Pakistan.  
> The need for this discussion has now assumed greater urgency as reports of
> casualties are making their way into the news.  My speech at the women*s
> conference was aimed at mobilizing the women*s movement against this war.  
> I am now glad for this opportunity to address wider constituencies and in
> different fora.
> 
> First, however, a few words about my location: I place my work within the
> tradition of radical, politically engaged scholarship.  I have always
> rejected the politics of academic elitism which insist that academics
> should remain above the fray of political activism and use only
> disembodied, objectified language and a *properly* dispassionate
> professorial dimeanor to establish our intellectual credentials.  My work
> is grounded in the politics, practices and languages of the various
> communities I come from, and the social justice movements to which I am
> committed.
> 
> ON AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY
> 
> In the aftermath of the terrible September 11th attacks on the World Trade
> Centre and the Pentagon, the Bush administration launched *America*s War
> on Terrorism.* Eschewing any role for the United Nations and the need to
> abide by international law, the US administration initiated an
> international alliance to justify its unilateral military action against
> Afghanistan. One of its early coalition partners was the Canadian
> government which committed its unequivocal support for whatever forms of
> assistance the United States might request.  In this circumstance, it is
> entirely reasonable that people in Canada examine carefully the record of
> American foreign policy.
> 
> As I observed in my speech, this record is alarming and does not inspire
> confidence.  In Chile, the CIA-backed coup against the democratically
> elected Allende government led to the deaths of over 30,000 people.  In El
> Salvador, the U.S. backed regime used death squads to kill about 75,000
> people.  In Nicaragua, the U.S. sponsored terrorist contra war led to the
> deaths of over 30,000 people.  The initial bombing of Iraq left over
> 200,000 dead, and the bombings have continued for the last ten years.  
> UNICEF estimates that over one million Iraqis have died, and that 5,000
> more die every month as a result of the U.N. imposed sanctions, enforced
> in their harshest form by U.S. power.  The list does not stop here.  
> 150,000 were killed and 50,000 disappeared in Guatemala after the 1954
> CIA-sponsored coup; over 2 million were killed in Vietnam; and 200,000
> before that in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear attacks.  Numerous
> authoritarian regimes have been backed by the United States including
> Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the apartheid regime in South Africa, Suharto*s
> dictatorship in Indonesia, Marcos in the Philippines, and Israel*s various
> occupations of Lebanon, the Golan Heights and the Palestinian territories.  
> The U.S. pattern of foreign intervention has been to overthrow leftist
> governments and to impose right wing regimes which in turn support U.S.
> interests, even if this means training and using death squads and
> assassinating leftist politicians nd activists.  To this end, it has a
> record of treating civilians as entirely expendable.
> 
> It is in this context that I made my comment that the United States is the
> largest and most dangerous global force, unleashing horrific levels of
> violence around the world, and that the path of U.S. foreign policy is
> soaked in blood.  The controversy generated by this comment has
> surprisingly not addressed the veracity of this assessment of the U.S.
> record.  Instead, it has focused on my tone and choice of words
> (inflammatory, excessive, inelegant, un-academic, angry, etc.).
> 
> Now I have to admit that my use of the words *horrific violence* and
> *soaked in blood* is very deliberate and carefully considered.  I do not
> use these words lightly.  To successive United States administrations the
> deaths resulting from its policies have been just so many statistics, just
> so much *collateral damage.* Rendering invisible the humanity of the
> peoples targeted for attack is a strategy well used to hide the impact of
> colonialist and imperialist interventions.  Perhaps there is no more
> potent a strategy of dehumanization than to proudly proclaim the accuracy
> and efficiency of *smart* weapons systems, and of surgical and
> technological precision, while rendering invisible the suffering bodies of
> these peoples as disembodied statistics and mere *collateral damage.* The
> use of embodied language, grounded in the recognition of the actual blood
> running through these bodies, is an attempt to humanize these peoples in
> profoundly graphic terms.  It compels us to recognize the sheer
> corporeality of the terrain upon which bombs rain and mass terror is
> waged.  This language calls on *us* to recognize that *they* bleed just
> like *we* do, that *they* hurt and suffer just like *us.* We are complicit
> in this bloodletting when we support American wars.  Witness the power of
> this embodiment in the shocked and horrified responses to my voice and my
> words, rather than to the actual horror of these events.  I will be the
> first to admit that it is extremely unnerving to *see* blood in the place
> of abstract, general categories and statistics.  Yet this is what we need
> to be able to see if we are to understand the terrible human costs of
> empire-building.
> 
> We have all felt the shock and pain of repeatedly witnessing the searing
> images of violence unleashed upon those who died in New York and
> Washington.  The stories we have heard from their loved ones have made us
> feel their terrible human loss.  Yet where do we witness the pain of the
> victims of U.S. aggression?  How do we begin to grasp the extent of their
> loss?  Whose humanity do we choose to recognize and empathize with, and
> who becomes just so much *collateral damage* to us? Anti-colonial and
> anti-imperialist movements and theorists have long insisted on placing the
> bodies and experiences of marginalized others at the centre of our
> analysis of the social world.  To fail to do so at this moment in history
> would be unconscionable.
> 
> In the aftermath of the responses to my speech, I am more convinced than
> ever of the need to engage in the language and politics of embodied
> thinking and speaking.  After all, it is the lives, and deaths, of
> millions of human beings we are discussing.  This is neither a
> controversial nor a recent demand.  Feminists (such as of Mahasweta Devi,
> Toni Morrison, Gayatri Spivak and Patricia Williams) have forcefully drawn
> our attention to what is actually done to women*s bodies in the course of
> mapping out racist colonial relations.  Frantz Fanon, one of the foremost
> theorists of decolonization, studied and wrote about the role of violence
> in colonial social organization and about the psychology of oppression;
> but he described just as readily the bloodied, violated black bodies and
> the *searing bullets* and *blood-stained knives* which were the order of
> the day in the colonial world.  Eduardo Galeano entitled one of his books
> The Open Veins of Latin America and the post-colonial theorist Achille
> Mbembe talks of the *mortification of the flesh,* of the *mutilation* and
> *decapitation* of oppressed bodies.  Aime Cesaire*s poetry pulses with the
> physicality of blood, pain, fury and rage in his outcry against the
> domination of African bodies.  Even Karl Marx, recognized as one of the
> founding fathers of the modern social sciences, wrote trenchant critiques
> of capital, exploitation, and classical political economy; and did not
> flinch from naming the economic system he was studying *vampire
> capitalism.* In attempting to draw attention to the violent effects of
> abstract and impersonal policies, I claim a proud intellectual pedigree.
> 
> INVOKING THE AMERICAN NATION
> 
> In my speech I argued that in order to legitimize the imperialist
> aggression which the Bush administration is undertaking, the President is
> invoking an American nation and people as being vengeful and bloodthirsty.  
> It is de rigueur in the social sciences to acknowledge that the notion of
> a *nation* or a *people* is socially constructed.  The American nation is
> no exception.
> 
> If we consider the language used by Bush and his administration to
> mobilize this nation for the war, we encounter the following: launching a
> crusade; operation infinite justice; fighting the forces of evil and
> darkness; fighting the barbarians; hunting down the evil-doers; draining
> the swamps of the Middle East, etc., etc.  This language is very familiar
> to peoples who have been colonized by Europe.  Its use at this moment in
> time reveals that it is a fundamentalist and racialized western ideology
> which is being mobilized to rally the troops and to build a national and
> international consensus in defence of *civilization.* It suggests that
> anyone who hesitates to join in is also *evil* and *uncivilized.* In this
> vein, I have repeatedly been accused of supporting extremist Islamist
> regimes merely for criticizing US foreign policy and western colonialism.
> 
> Another tactic to mobilize support for the war has been the manipulation
> of public opinion.  Polls conducted in the immediate aftermath of the
> September 11 attacks were used to repeatedly inform us that the
> overwhelming majority of Americans allegedly supported a strong military
> retaliation.  They did not know against whom, but they purportedly
> supported this strategy anyway. In both the use of language and these
> polls, we are witnessing what Noam Chomsky has called the *manufacture of
> consent.* Richard Lowry, editor of the National Review opined, *If we
> flatten part of Damascus or Tehran or whatever it takes, this is part of
> the solution.* President Bush stated, *We will bear no distinction between
> those who commit the terrorist attacks and those who harbour them.* Even
> as the bombing began last weekend, he declared that the war is *broader*
> than against just Afghanistan, that other nations have to decide if they
> side with his administration or if they are *murderers and outlaws
> themselves.*
> 
> We have been asked by most public commentators to accept the calls for
> military aggression against *evil-doers* as natural, understandable and
> even reasonable, given the attacks on the United States.  I reject this
> position. It would be just as understandable a response to re-examine
> American foreign policy, to address the root causes of the violent attacks
> on the United States, and to make a commitment to abide by international
> law.  In my speech, I urged women to break through this discourse of
> *naturalizing* the military aggression, and recognize it for what it is,
> vengeful retribution and an opportunity for a crude display of American
> military might.  We are entitled to ask: Who will make the decision
> regarding which *nations* are to be labeled as *murderers* and *outlaws*?  
> Which notions of *justice* are to be upheld?  Will the Bush administration
> set the standard, even as it is overtly institutionalizing racial
> profiling across the United States?
> 
> I make very clear distinctions between people in America and their
> government*s call for war.  Many people in America are seeking to contest
> the *national* consensus being manufactured by speaking out and by
> organizing rallies and peace marches in major cities, about which there
> has been very little coverage in Canada.  Irresponsible media reporting of
> my comments which referred to Bush*s invocation of the American nation as
> a vengeful one deliberately took my words out of this context, repeating
> them in one television broadcast after another in a grossly distorted
> fashion.
> 
> My choice of language was, again, deliberate.  I wanted to bring attention
> to Bush*s right wing, fundamentalist leanings and to the
> neo-colonialist/imperialist practices of his administration.  The words
> *bloodthirsty* and *vengeful* are designations most people are quite
> comfortable attributing to *savages* and to the *uncivilized,* while the
> United States is represented as the beacon of democracy and civilization.
> The words *bloodthirsty* and *vengeful* make us confront the nature of the
> ideological justification for this war, as well as its historical roots,
> unsettling and discomforting as that might be.
> 
> THE POLITICS OF LIBERATING WOMEN
> 
> I have been taken to task for stating that there will be no emancipation
> for women anywhere until western domination of the planet is ended.  In my
> speech I pointed to the importance of Afghanistan for its strategic
> location near Central Asia*s vast resources of oil and natural gas.  I
> think there is very little argument that the West continues to dominate
> and consume a vast share of the world*s resources.  This is not a
> controversial statement. Many prominent intellectuals, journalists and
> activists alike, have pointed out that this domination is rooted in the
> history of colonialism and rests on the ongoing maintenance of the
> North/South divide, and that it will continue to provoke violence and
> resistance across the planet.  I argued that in the current climate of
> escalating militarism, there will be precious little emancipation for
> women, either in the countries of the North or the South.
> 
> In the specific case of Afghanistan, it was the American administration*s
> economic and political interests which led to its initial support for, and
> arming of, Hekmatyar*s Hezb i Islami and its support for Pakistan*s
> collaboration in, and organization of, the Taliban regime in the
> mid-1990s. According to the Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, the United
> States and Unocal conducted negotiations with the Taliban for an oil
> pipeline through Afghanistan for years in the mid-1990s.  We have seen the
> horrendous consequences this has had for women in Afghanistan.  When
> Afghan women*s groups were calling attention to this U.S. support as a
> major factor in the Taliban regime*s coming to power, we did not heed
> them.  We did not recognize that Afghan women*s groups were in the front
> line resisting the Taliban and its Islamist predecessors, including the
> present militias of the Northern Alliance.  Instead, we chose to see them
> only as *victims* of *Islamic culture,* to be pitied and *saved* by the
> West.  Time and time again, third world feminists have pointed out to us
> the pitfalls of rendering invisible the agency and resistance of women of
> the South, and of reducing women*s oppression to various third world
> *cultures.* Many continue to ignore these insights.  Now, the U.S.
> administration has thrown its support behind the Northern Alliance, even
> as Afghan women*s groups oppose the U.S. military attacks on Afghanistan,
> and raise serious concerns about the record of the Northern Alliance in
> perpetuating human rights abuses and violence against women in the
> country.  If we listen to the voices of these women, we will very quickly
> be disabused of the notion that U.S. military intervention is going to
> lead to the emancipation of women in Afghanistan.  Even before the
> bombings began, hundreds of thousands of Afghan women were compelled to
> flee their homes and communities, and to become refugees.  The bombings of
> Kabul, Kandahar, Jalalabad and other cities in the country will result in
> further loss of life, including the lives of women and children.  Over
> three million Afghan refugees are now on the move in the wake of the U.S.
> attacks.  How on earth can we justify these bombings in the name of
> furthering women*s emancipation?
> 
> My second point was that imperialism and militarism do not further women*s
> liberation in westerm countries either.  Women have to be brought into
> line to support racist imperialist goals and practices, and they have to
> live with the men who have been brutalized in the waging of war when these
> men come back.  Men who kill women and children abroad are hardly likely
> to come back cured of the effects of this brutalization.  Again, this is
> not a very controversial point of view.  Women are taught to support
> military aggressions, which is then presented as being in their *national*
> interest. These are hardly the conditions in which women*s freedoms can be
> furthered. As a very small illustration, just witness the very public
> vilification have been subjected to for speaking out in opposition to this
> war.
> 
> I have been asked by my detractors that if I, as a woman, I am so critical
> of western domination, why do I live here?  It could just as readily be
> asked of them that if they are so contemptuous of the non-western orld,
> why do they so fervently desire the oil, trade, cheap labour and other
> resources of that world?  Challenges to our presence in the West have long
> been answered by people of colour who say, We are here because you were
> (are?) there!  Migrants find ourselves in multiple locations for a myriad
> of reasons, personal, historical and political.  Wherever we reside,
> however, we claim the right to speak and participate in public life.
> 
> CLOSING WORDS*.
> 
> My speech was made to rally the women*s movement in Canada to oppose the
> war.  Journalists and editors across the country have called me idiotic,
> foolish, stupid and just plain nutty.  While a few journalists and
> columnists have attempted balanced coverage of my speech, too many sectors
> of the media have resorted to vicious personal attacks.  Like others, I
> must express a concern that this passes for intelligent commentary in the
> mainstream media.
> 
> The manner in which I have been vilified is difficult to understand,
> unless one sees it as a visceral response to an *ungrateful immigrant* or
> an uppity woman of colour who dares to speak out.  Vituperation and
> ridicule are two of the most common forms of silencing dissent.  The
> subsequent harassment and intimidation which I have experienced, as have
> some of my colleagues, confirms that the suppression of debate is more
> important to many supporters of the current frenzied war rhetoric than is
> the open discussion of policy and its effects.  Fortunately, I have also
> received strong messages of support.  Day by day the opposition to this
> unconscionable war is growing in Canada and all over the world.
> 
> I would like to thank all of my family, friends, colleagues and allies who
> have supported and encouraged me.
> 
> 
> 
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> 
> 



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