idiocy in the Globe and Mail
Someone just pointed out an article to me…an opinion article in the Globe and Mail, one of the national newspapers here in canada (specifically, March 7th, 2006, “How the feminists betrayed feminism”, by Margaret Wente). The gist of the article goes like this “Those damn feminists keep blaming imperialism for third world problems, but what we should really do is help all those poor backward brown people by bringing them more Wal-mart and more capitalism “. Seriously, i’m not making this shit up.
You can check out a copy of the article if you have a Vancouver Public Library card by going to the VPL Electronic Resources page and signing in with your card number, and then scrolling down to “PressDisplay”. The PressDisplay site will give you access to many world-wide newspapers. From there, you click on Canada, and then The Globe And Mail. March 7th, 2006, page A13. anyway, on to more detail about this hilariously stupid article.
First, she states some opinions from various feminists she’s heard, which say that women are oppressed by corporate globalization, racism, colonialism, cut-backs in health care, and by the male business establishment. When i read these quotes, i was thinking “ya, sounds right to me”. so-called “globalization” increases poverty, as can be seen in the countries that follow “free-trade” principles. Poverty affects women more than men (the percentage of poor people who are women is higher than the population percentage of women). Racism is tied to poverty, which you can see by looking at how sweatshops and low-wage jobs are filled with people of colour (and much of the time women of colour). Cut-backs in health-care come with privatization and IMF regulations associated with “globalization”….And of course, you’d be blind if you didn’t notice that most of the people controlling large corporations are white men. it’s hard to deny the existance of a “male business establishment”, however you want to define that phrase.
So, imagine my amusement when the next paragraph starts with “The trouble with these experts is that almost every claim they make is wrong. What impoverishment? What rise in racism?” Jeez…if you can’t take the time to go look these things up, then that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. I’m sure the York University feminist geography class that she complains about can probably help her find that information ;)
After all of this complaining about how she’s annoyed by talk of colonialism and racism, the author then launches into a diatribe about how western feminists are betraying women in the third world (!!). so here’s a strain of feminist thought that attempts to call into question the white establishment and tries to find ways to support feminist struggles in the colonized world without preaching from the privileged North, and this two-bit opinion writer is chastizing them for not doing exactly what they try to do? Absurd, you say? But wait! you’ll love her solution to the problem.
In other words, the feminist establishment has it exactly backward. Western values and institutions aren’t the problem. They’re the answer. We should be doing our best to spread them. Capitalism and globalization have done more to empower oppressed women of the world than all the NGOs on Earth. Peasants pulled up from destitution as India gets richer are less inclined to starve (and abort) their female children. Chinese girls who escape the serfdom of rural life to make goods for Wal-Mart are far freer and better off than their mothers ever were. And who are the most oppressed women in the West? They are, in large part, the immigrants who belong to certain subgroups that have rejected liberal Western values.
Wow, i don’t even know where to start with this. This seems so obviously absurd to me that it’s astonishing. working in a sweat shop for Wal-Mart so that white people can get cheap shit makes you free? Sounds like a german slogan i once heard. There’s a huge body of literature out there waiting for anyone who wants to read about these issues, but the author obviously chooses not to even read the titles of any of them. It doesn’t seem like she even realizes that she’s essentially saying “imperialism’s not the problem….they just need more imperialism!”. She’s attacking the feminists who are saying that non-white people don’t need white people pushing bullshit down their throats, and then she goes on to say that the solution is for white people to go push bullshit down their throats.
Anyway, maybe i’ll throw out some reading suggestions for anyone who’s curious. First, an article i just read yesterday, by Harsha Walia (a fellow resident of Vancouver), called “Colonialism, Capitalism and the Making of the Apartheid System of Migration in Canada”. Second, take a look around for a book called “The Nawal El Saadawi reader”, which is a collection of essays from an egyptian feminist/writer/doctor who has quite a lot of interesting things to say about the topics raised by Ms. Wente in her opinion piece. Here’s a quick quote from the section called “Gendering South-North politics”:
What is Development? Countries in our region and in the South generally are subjected to what is called ‘development’. Development is not something we choose. It is dictated to us through local governments dominated by the international institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). The result of development carried out in line with the policies of these institutions continues to be increasing poverty, and an increasing flow of money and riches from South to North. From 1984 to 1990 the application of structural adjustment policies (SAPs) in the South led to the transfer of $178 billion from the South to the commercial banks in the North.
‘Development’ is just another word for neocolonialism. We need to be very careful when we use the word ‘development’. The word ‘aid’ is just as deceiving: we know that money and riches flow from the South to the North, not in the opposite direction. A very small portion of what was taken from us comes back to us under the name ‘aid’. This creates the false idea that we receive aid from the North.
In this way, we are robbed not only of our material resources, but also of our human dignity. Human dignity is based on being independent and self-reliant, on producing what we eat rather than living on aid coming from the exterior. ‘Aid’ is a myth that should be demystified. Many countries in the South have started to raise the slogan ‘Fair trade not aid’. What the South needs in order to fight against poverty is a new international economic order based on justice, and on fair trade laws between countries, not ‘aid’ or charity. Charity and injustice are two faces of the same coin. If we have real equality between people and between countries, there will be nothing called ‘charity’ or ‘aid’.
ok, i think i’m momentarily done complaining about this. I just came up with those two reading suggestions off the top of my head (and the Nawel El Saadawi book was just the first one in front of me on the bookshelf), but i’m sure there are many more good ones out there. Feel free to drop some suggestions in the comments section. oh wait, i just found a great quote from Sunera Thobani:
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.
Boom. ’nuff said.
Ride hard, ride free
March 7th, 2006 at 22:13 pm
Actually there’s a third option. Give every woman of color a $100 laptop!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%24100_laptop
March 10th, 2006 at 19:14 pm
There’s so much idiocy in the whole world it’s hard to know where to start to end some of it. One thing I can never understand is how there can be some countries rich enough to have lotteries where one individual (or several) can become millionaires overnight, while other countries have people starving. Yes, I know the rich countries have starving people too, but not so many.
There are times I feel embarrassed & ashamed to be a human being. But then, I am glad I was not born an animal. It just seems so hard for many of them in this human-centric world.
But that’s my 2 cents worth.
March 20th, 2006 at 23:24 pm
If you’re bothered by starvation, do something about it. There are hundreds of organizations looking for money and man-power. If you can raise the funds or provide the time, do it. Don’t lament that others aren’t, because they’re already lamenting that themselves.
March 23rd, 2006 at 11:32 am
dan, part of my point in this rant was that starvation isn’t just a thing that happens by itself, and it can’t be solved just by donating to a charity to feed the starving kids in africa or something. The problems described are caused by these processes that funnel money from the places commonly referred to as the “third world” to the wealthy countries of Europe and North America. IMF regulations, “development”, and many other things are methods of extracting wealth from the south for the benefit of the north.
The causes of poverty in the world are the structures that make the north wealthy at the expense of others. We can fight poverty in the south by fighting the rich people and corporations here in canada that are creating and benefitting from the situation.
I strongly recommend reading “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man” by John Perkins. He was a chief economist for a large company called Chas T. Main, which was similar to Halliburton, and in the book he explains the methods they used to purposely cheat people in the south to get their countries in deep debt, and then used that debt to enforce unjust “structural adjustments” that continued to make the company rich.