Cannon Fodder Knows No Gender In 21st Century Wars

Clay Bennett in Chattanooga Times Free Press

Big post-inaugural announcement by the war machine firmly in control of the purse strings in Congress, the signing pen in the White House, and the leashed judicial "check" function: women will be officially sent into combat. USA Today helped by reporting that the president is all for the idea.

"Today, by moving to open more military positions -- including ground combat units -- to women, our armed forces have taken another historic step toward harnessing the talents and skills of all our citizens," Obama said in a statement Thursday.

Not surprising, since turning mothers into cannon fodder is what passes for equality in the milItarized 21st century reality funded by you and me.

Recruiting ads aimed at women play on their sense of duty toward their families i.e. Be a good daughter and earn money by enlisting. This is in keeping with studies showing that women lie to protect other people, and embezzle to help other people. Also in keeping with twin facts: austerity wears a woman's face, and the poverty draft in the U.S. is in full swing.

Supporters of the plan are willfully ignorant of the fact that the biggest danger faced by women in every branch of the military rape and other violent assault by their "fellow" soldiers. This is well-documented in the film The Invisible War which is up for an Academy Award and is a must-see for anyone paying attention to rape culture.

The president is not paying attention to this culture in the slightest as he uses the bully pulpit to spew b.s. about female cannon fodder:

"Today, every American can be proud that our military will grow even stronger with our mothers, wives, sisters and daughters playing a greater role in protecting this country we love."

Right, I'm sure that his daughters will be first in line to sign up when they graduate high school.

Mother Jones reported yesterday that the U.S. "defense" secretary (always a male) sat straight faced while the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (always a male) claimed sending women into combat was a policy actually designed to reduce the incidence of rape.

Having studied the issue of rampant sexual misconduct in the ranks, Gen. Martin Dempsey... noted that he has concluded that the phenomenon exists partly because women have been subordinated to men in military culture: "It's because we've had separate classes of military personnel." 

No more second class citizens, no more rape --- see how easy that was?

I have become somewhat obsessed with the play "Mother Courage" by Bertholt Brecht. It's an historical play set in a grim Europe theater of perpetual war. The title character makes a living off provisioning the army while trying to save each of her three children from it; in the end, the recruiters get one son, the war profiteers get another, and PTSD due to witnessing atrocities gets her daughter. Only the mother survives, sort of.

Turning the daughter into cannon fodder would only makes sense in a culture so sickened by violence that it calls for arming teachers and sending them to school ready to gun down intruders.

In the 21st Century, we are all Mother Courage -- living by the sword, and dying by the sword.

But women are rising up against the glorification of violence. The 21st century will see women striking, dancing, and overturning the structures that allow violent patriarchy to dominate the airwaves and colonize young minds.

Feminist values are on the side of life, not of dealing death.

Authentic feminist courage was on display yesterday in the blood soaked halls of the U.S. Senate as 19 year old college student and CODEPINK intern Lachelle Roddy called out to warmonger John Kerry:

 “We’re killing thousands of people in the Middle East who are not a threat to us. When is it going to be enough? When are enough people going to be killed? I’m tired of my friends in the Middle East not knowing if they’re going to live to see the next day!”

Here's what greeted her as she emerged from jail (yup, she was arrested for speaking out of turn -- because we are such a free country):

My sentiments, exactly.

Patriarchy Spiraling Down, In Its Death Throes

The bad effects of having so little representation of feminist values in the cabals that make decisions that all of us must live with are increasingly evident.

The rape of the Earth, as in this Hellish operation in North Dakota, or as depicted in this map of fracking accidents, are just two examples of an enormous global problem.

source: EarthJustice.org "Because the earth needs a good lawyer."

The superheating of the planet is evidence of patriarchy in action, as in this example where Australian children and their grandmother cling together in a body of water to escape temperatures so high they required a new color on the weather maps.

photo source: AP Photo/Holmes Family

Guarded over by their grandfather who is taking the photos, it is fitting that they have the appearance of white Europeans who took over land stewardship in the fragile ecological system of Australia that had endured since African descendants arrived on foot over 30,000 years ago.

White European culture is all about patriarchal control. That's why it must fund vicious misogyny in the Middle East, to make itself look benign by comparison (and create the chaos that enables resource grabbing, of course).

Top down management has resulted in governments that are the best corporate lobbyists can buy, corporations that destroy the very ground they live upon in order to generate short term profits.

Another of its results: rape culture.

I blogged earlier this week about the Oscar-nominated film The Invisible War, which is about decades of rape culture in all branches of the U.S. military. It's a pattern of abuse.

Arundhati Roy speaks eloquently of the class and gender politics in India that result in New Delhi being known as the rape capital of the world even prior to the gruesome rape and murder of a female medical student kidnapped along with her escort by a van posing as a bus.

Now comes the hacktivist collective Anonymous with a full release of the Steubenville rape video which constitutes part of the online evidence of gang rape of a drugged 16 year old girl by members of a high school football team. Others, most notably blogger Alexandria Goddard, have offered the rest of the evidence including a photo of the girl being carried as if she were a slain deer. Carried from party to party to be raped repeatedly.

And then the bragging began. You can read DemocracyNow! reporting on it, or view the full 12 minute video of braggart here.

Many who have viewed the video warned that is is revolting, best viewed in small doses. I found it disturbing but less than shocking. For one thing, there are protests off camera from more than one young man objecting to the de-humanizing statements being made, urging the braggart to develop his empathy.

I've been around adolescent males much of my life, so his attitude is not too surprising. What struck me is that it could be used as a textbook study of bullying and what fuels it: the show-off who thinks he is hilarious, enabled by the sycophant (in this case the boy behind the camera) who laughs at everything whether funny or not, and eggs the bully on when he starts to wind down, and fuels the whole performance with his adulation.

From working in schools I know that current thinking on bullying is that, while bullies must experience consequences, don't make the mistake of thinking that will stop bullying. Sadistic behavior is its own reward, and is often addictive (a point made tellingly in The Invisible War). It is the bystanders who hold the key to disrupting the dynamic; the victim often does not have the resources to stop it -- unless he goes home and gets his older brother's shotgun, as happened in the latest school shooting, at Taft High School in California.

So here's the connection to patriarchal culture: the prevalence of hyper-masculine violence as entertainment and glorification of our way of life is the very air the current crop of jocks and soldiers have breathed from infancy. All human beings have both violent and compassionate impulses. Which ones does a culture support and develop? Winner take all, eat or be eaten, dog eat dog, alpha males intimidating their so-called inferiors -- women, children, and "weaker" males by definition -- are the signature style of the sick culture of the U.S. Empire and its outposts.

Commandeering the airwaves to drown out other voices is just one aspect of the problem, albeit a very powerful one.

Seeing the women who sell out to become mouthpieces of such a system is just sad. Check out The Invisible War segments of Susan Collins or Chellie Pingree or DOD spokeswomen to see what I mean.

Seeing the men who are the refuseniks -- Bradley Manning, the husbands and fathers in The Invisible War, or the hacktivist "X" who leaked the Steubenville brag video confirms what we all know -- there is much goodness in men as individuals. It is the sick system allowing sadistic alpha males to control our common resources that is the underlying and very real, very urgent problem.

It is time for patriarchy to step down before this planet is no longer habitable. It is time for all who hold feminist values to withdraw our cooperation from this system.

If you are in Maine or nearby, consider joining a Feminist Values GA-style discussion in Augusta on Saturday, January 26 at the Pine Tree State Arboretum. Small groups of diverse people will discuss how to free ourselves collectively from the death grip of patriarchy. This is 19th in a series of Changing Maine Gatherings. More details are here.

Revised 5:10pm EST - Could not resist including this bit of evidence from the ongoing disaster of NATO/US occupation in Afghanistan where soldiers have murdered, raped, desecrated and pissed on corpses -- among other crimes:

Karzai confident he can get U.S. troops immunity

#Invisible_War Invisible No More. Thanks, Academy!

Rape survivior Hannah Sewell with her father. Most of the women in the documentary came from families with a tradition of enlisting. Hannah was told by her command that they had lost all the evidence of an attack that damaged her back and took her virginity. She called Washington DC and found that all the evidence was right where it should be. But her attacker, like most of the rapists discussed in this film, was never held accountable.

I watched a film nominated for the Academy Award for best feature documentary last night on my Netflix instant play (I understand it's available on Hulu and still playing in some theaters, too): The Invisible War. A scathing indictment of the culture of rape that prevails in the U.S. military -- all branches -- and of the failure of command and oversight by those entrusted with the safety of what politicians love to call our brave men and women in uniform. Here's the trailer:


Several of the women who were brave enough to report their rape joined with other survivors in a lawsuit alleging that their command did nothing to pursue the criminal that attacked them. Au contraire, in several cases the command brought charges against the victim. For instance, if the attacker was married but raped a single woman, she would be charged with adultery. (I swear, I cannot make shit like this up.) The court found against the plaintiffs saying that the risk of rape is an employment condition of military service! Needless to say, the case has now been appealed.

Experts believe around 1 in 3 women are sexually assaulted while on active duty, far more than die in combat.  Their high rate of PTSD seems to stem as much from the assault on their trust from the way the case is handled as from the physical assault of the rape itself, which is often accompanied by beating and or drugging. By the way, many men are raped while on active duty, too. And as the film makes clear, the families of rape survivors suffer in their own ways. The heroes in this film are the spouses, parents and children who live with someone trying to live with PTSD.

The mother of a former student of mine told me this week that her daughter was thinking of enlisting, because the trade she went to school for was not in demand and the young woman had been laid off from her job. It's the type of trade that is useful in weapons manufacturing, but increasingly robots do that sort of work. No matter who does it, it is at the U.S. taxpayer's expense.

Ditto the all night drinking parties indulged in by officers from the Marine Barracks in Washington DC, the elite post which provides the soldiers who guard, among other things, the White House. Serial rapists continue to work and draw their government paycheck. Who knows how many of them are guarding Barack Obama's family right this minute?

One of the more disappointing performances in the film was by Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-ME). Yes, she met with a delegation of rape survivors and listened to their stories sympathetically. Then she delivered a treacly statement about how much she supports our brave men and women in uniform. What happened to the organic farmer and mom that Mainers sent to represent them in Washington? She got put on the House Armed Services Committee, she found a billionaire husband (who now owns most of the newspapers in Maine) and she started riding in the black limos that go to General Dynamics' Bath Iron Works for the launch of each new nuclear equipped Aegis destroyer, that's what.

I had been meaning to see The Invisible War for a while. Yesterday one of my kids who is friends with the editor, Derek Boonstra, brought my attention to the Academy nomination. Congratulations to all who worked on this film -- it is really excellent. The film's pacing is considerate of the audience as we grapple with the horrible truth of the epidemic of rape and its cover up at our expense.