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.

IWD and Two Years Since Invading Iraq

Whether or not you were able to join us for our International Women's Day celebration last weekend, you can see pictures from the event here. Enjoy!

If you're interested in the history behind International Women's Day and Women's History Month, read this essay. As we often point out, women have long been leaders in the peace movement:

Over the years and around the world, March 8th took on different meanings. In some years, it was an occasion for organizing against militarism and war. In the late 1950s, it was often the date of female-led anti-nuclear protests. At the same time, March 8th was a rallying point for the demands of workers. By the late 1960s, as women's liberation was spreading in the United States, many radical feminist discovered, re-discovered or decided to honor the revolutionary women and called for an American revival of International Women's Day.

And columnist Sheryl McCarthy (at the radical publication Newsday) reminds us:

In a week that celebrated International Women's Day, it's worth pointing out that the United States is one of the few countries in the world that hasn't ratified the United Nations Convention for the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, which was adopted by the UN in 1979. A kind of international bill of rights for women that set up a committee to monitor how well countries are complying, the convention was signed by President Jimmy Carter, but it never has been ratified by the Senate. Supporting broad principles like women's right to vote, to run for office, to have equal access to jobs and to get equal pay, the convention doesn't even mention anything as controversial as abortion.

Eliminating gender discrimination! Hey, it's not like the United States pretends to be the world authority on democracy. Oh, wait...

Speaking of "spreading democracy," this coming weekend is the second anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. We encourage you to mark the sad milestone on Saturday at 11:30 am, at the Army Recruiting Center and Reindahl Park, a rally organized by the Madison Area Peace Coalition (see link for more info).

Journalist Naomi Klein looks at Iraq and notes, "The problem is not that Iraqis have lost faith in the democracy for which they risked their lives on Jan. 30 - it's that the electoral system imposed on them by Washington is profoundly undemocratic."

Moreover, writes Klein, the U.S. history of heavy-handed foreign relations, its current wars and occupations, and its tendency to define "democracy" for other countries as "what the U.S. ruling powers want" has realconsequences:

By all accounts, most Lebanese would like to see Syria withdraw from their country. But as the hundreds of thousands who participated in the March 8 pro-Hezbollah demonstration made clear, they are unwilling to have their desire for independence hijacked by the interests of Washington and Tel Aviv. By linking Lebanon's independence movements to American designs for the region, the Bush administration is weakening Lebanon's secularists and religious moderates and increasing the power of Hezbollah. Which is precisely what Bremer did in Iraq: Whenever he needed a good news hit, he had his picture taken at a newly opened women's center, a trick that set the feminist movement back decades. (The centers are now mostly closed and hundreds of secular Iraqis who worked with the coalition in local councils have been murdered.)

With apologies to Michael Franti, you can bomb women and children to pieces, but you can't bomb them into peace.