April 8 Movie Night, and What to Call the War

What are you doing next Friday, April 8?

If you want to see two inspiring movies, you should join us at the Electric Earth Cafe at 7:30 pm. (That's at 546 West Washington Ave in Madison; a $5 donation at the door is suggested.)

We'll be screening Women Against Wars,Wars Against Women, a Z Video production filmed at the 2004 World Social Forum in India. The excerpt we'll show features talks by Saher Saba, a member of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, and Irene Khan, an amazing Bangladeshi activist who became the first woman, first Muslim and first Asian to head Amnesty International.

The other film of the evening is Standing On My Sisters' Shoulders, an award-winning documentary, directed by Laura J. Lipson, that tells the history of the Mississippi women who played a crucial role in the U.S. civil rights movement. The movie website has information about the amazing grassroots leaders profiled, including Unita Blackwell, a sharecropper who became Mississippi's first Black woman mayor.

If you've seen the emails, posters or other announcements for our movie night, you know that we're calling it Women for Peace: From Civil Rights to the "War on Terror", with a disclaimer that "Women for Peace does not endorse war on nouns... or any war, in fact."

In a recent planning meeting for our movie night, Women for Peace members discussed what phraseology we should use for the ill-defined, multi-country, seemingly irrational and open-ended state of U.S. international aggression we find ourselves in (and, as women for peace, work to end). We went with the "war on terror," to avoid confusion, but agreed that -- much like the "war on drugs" -- the "war on terror" is more a slick marketing phrase than an accurate description.

As Tom Engelhardt wrote recently in Mother Jones magazine, "Since WWIV ["World War IV"] and GWOT [the "Global War on Terror"] are the allied rubrics under which our world is being reorganized, it's worth taking a look at them and how well or poorly they describe the world." Both phrases "implicitly advance political programs," making them "remarkably useful" to the political right and suggesting that the correct response to September 11, 2001 is "cataclysmic, singular and even apocalyptic."

Engelhardt's close study of post-9/11 U.S. aggressions and their impact on global terrorism -- "one small proxy war (very low-level guerilla attacks still ongoing); one colonial-style war and occupation (ongoing); scattered terror attacks (ongoing)" -- suggests that the WWIV / GWOT rhetoric is overblown. Worse, that framing denies the complicated nature of the real world, including terrorist actions. It silences much-needed thoughtful analysis and deligitimizes creative, nonviolent responses to terrorist groups, to turn U.S. foreign policy into "the Schwarzenegger movie from Hell."

Rest assured, our April 8 movie night is Schwarzenegger-free, literally and figuratively.