The patriarchy is dead ... but the kyriarchy lives on

| Nichi Hodgson | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

 

From reclaiming the F word to objecting to objectification – there's a new feminist army determined to finally flatten the patriarchy. But here's the really radical news: patriarchy is dead. It's dead simplistic, dead inaccurate, and no longer a useful way of framing gender inequality in the UK. Forget about castrating patriarchy – it's time to corral kyriarchy, the system identified by Harvard theologian Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, which explains how ethnicity, class, economics and education, as well as gender, intersect to oppress us all, men as well as women.

So, kyriarchy: the substitution of one elitist, etymological hair-splitting term for another, I hear my newly estranged sisters cry – just what feminism needs. But this is a neologism with a difference. Where patriarchy – literally, rule of the father – explains only how traditional male authority dictates to, and subjugates women, kyriarchy (from the Greek: kyrios – lord/master; archion – dominion/rule) relates how each of us, whatever our gender, is a bundle of privileges we can all too readily abuse by invoking the "master power", whether that's as a black female barrister, a mixed-race trans male teacher, or a white immigrant male labourer. At the same time, the term's connotations of elite authority perfectly tap into the legacy of oppression that western feminists, from Mary Wollstonecraft to Germaine Greer, have dedicatedly derided.

Scoff at my linguistic parsing, but terminology matters. Just as contemporary feminism is so keen to detox the term "feminist", so "patriarchy" carries a whole truckload of outdated assumptions about male-perpetuated oppression that blinker us all. Take porn for example. Patriarchy just isn't useful when we want to talk about how its proliferation is negatively impacting on men and women alike. Kyriarchy, by contrast, accounts for the increasing numbers of men who are suffering from sexual performance anxiety or emotional disconnection with women, which can be related to x-rated overconsumption, and how female performers, who can make good money out of being the object of both male and female desire and envy, can argue they are somewhat empowered by doing so. This isn't to claim porn stars as emancipated feminist role models; it's just to recognise that sexual allure and money, rightly or wrongly, accord power that oppresses too.

Kyriarchy links the latest feminist wave to decades of activism, while better framing today's more subtle oppressions. It helps us to recognise the interconnection of education, class and eating disorders such as anorexia, and of domestic violence and poverty, rather than encouraging us to indiscriminately blame men. It contextualises the contempt of working-class male unionists towards Margaret Thatcher. It helps to explain how women themselves can in some cases morph into the supremacist bully, when paranoid mothers pass on anxieties about food and bodies to their daughters, ground down themselves by years of trying to live up to constructed notions of beauty.

Perhaps most importantly, kyriarchy exposes a sin within the women's movement itself: that of feminist-perpetuated oppression. (I can already hear feminists hissing at me as I type. But don't worry – I'll hiss at myself in the mirror later for perpetuating the stereotype of internecine cat-fighting.) When feminist commentators and charities working to "liberate" sex workers relate their tales for them, rather than letting them speak first-hand, that's kyriarchy. It's also kyriarchy when minority male feminists are forced to veto voting rights in equality action groups because they are male.

Kyriarchy has the potential to settle the age-old argument about "privileged" feminism once and for all. Perhaps that's why it's so frightening to those that balk at the term, and will dismiss this as yet another example of woman-eating-woman. It may feel counterintuitive, but recognising your own privilege doesn't make the struggle for gender equality any less credible: it makes it more so, by allowing feminists to see that advantages – such as being born to a semi-prosperous family or being well-educated – don't necessarily protect against, say, rape.

Whatever British feminism has achieved, it has never managed to fully convince men to get their march on. At least kyriarchy, with its emphasis on individual liberation and social equality, gives guys a chance to whinge about how they're oppressed too. And not just by the feminists.

 

Welcome to the world of the "war on terror"

A bonfire of Obama's vanities | Mehdi Hasan | Comment is free | The Guardian

 

In the US, a crackpot pastor who claims "Islam is of the devil" threatens to burn copies of the Qur'an and puts his plans "on hold" only after appeals from the president, the secretary general of the UN, and Angelina Jolie. In Afghanistan, five US soldiers are charged with murdering civilians at random and collecting their fingers as souvenirs, while security guards open fire on protests against the pastor's plans.

In Britain the normally hawkish International Institute for Strategic Studies says the threat from al-Qaida and the Taliban has been exaggerated, and warns that the war in Afghanistan risks becoming a "long, drawn-out disaster". Meanwhile, Tony Blair cancels two appearances in London to publicise his memoirs after anti-war protesters pelt him with eggs and shoes in Dublin.

Welcome to the world of the "war on terror", on the ninth anniversary of 9/11. It is a world more divided, fearful and conflict-ridden than a decade ago. "We need to win not just the military action, but to win people's minds," Tony Blair told CNN in November 2001, at the height of the Anglo-American bombing of Afghanistan. But the struggle for Muslim hearts and minds was allowed to morph into a seeming war on Muslims. The "war on terror" has resulted only in more war and more terror.

It all seemed so different in 2001. The mayor of Tehran called his counterpart in New York to offer his condolences, as Iranians held candle-lit vigils in solidarity with grieving Americans. Palestinians lined up to donate blood to the survivors of the attacks. Islamic scholars and clerics across the Middle East denounced the murderous barbarism of al-Qaida. Polls showed that vast numbers of hearts, minds and souls in the Muslim world were with the west.

But along came Guantánamo Bay, the catastrophic and illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003, photos of prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib in 2004, and allegations of torture and murder at the US air base in Bagram, Afghanistan, in 2005. By 2006 Muslims across the globe were horrified and radicalised by the Israeli bombardment of Lebanon, conducted with the blessing of Blair and his partner in crime, George Bush.

The "hearts and minds" brigade had to beat a humiliating retreat. Hopes were raised again in 2008, with the election of Barack Obama, with a Muslim middle name and an African heritage. In his first six months in office, Obama declared that "the US is not and will never be at war with Islam"; in a speech in Cairo he symbolically "reset" relations with Muslim communities.

But Guantánamo is still open for business, and the president's demand that the Israelis "freeze" illegal settlements has fallen on deaf ears. The war on terror has been ramped up in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and the Horn of Africa. The deaths of US soldiers in Afghanistan and Pakistani civilians in US air strikes have increased on Obama's watch.

On Thursday the US president said Pastor Jones's plans to burn the Qur'an would be a "recruiting bonanza" for al-Qaida. Yet he fails to recognise how the west's war in Afghanistan provides a similar boost to extremists – on both sides. The "enemy" in Afghanistan, concluded the IISS report released on Tuesday, is "incentivised by the presence of foreign forces". And inside the US the likes of Jones and rightwing Republican bigots, frothing at the mouth over the "Ground Zero mosque" take their cue from aggressive leaders like Blair, Bush and Obama – who send more and more troops to fight and die abroad, in faraway Muslim countries, while denying any link between Islamic militancy and western foreign policies.

Whether the swivel-eyed priest goes ahead with his plan to immolate Islam's holiest book is, ultimately, irrelevant. The battle for hearts and minds was lost long ago.

* This article originally referred to "Nato troops" opening fire on protesters. It was corrected at 8.30am on 11 September 2010.

 

9/11 anniversary: Charged with hate

| Editorial | Comment is free | The Guardian

 

When Andy Warhol predicted in 1968 that in the future everyone would be world-famous for 15 minutes, he could not have meant Pastor Terry Jones. The idea that t he world's media has been hanging on every word uttered by a low-rent bigot with a gun – who has been mulling over whether to burn 200 copies of the Qur'an today – is grotesque. Hillary Clinton, David Petraeus, Robert Gates, the presidents of Afghanistan and Pakistan and lastly Barack Obama himself have all been sucked into the media maelstrom created by the pastor with a dodgy past and 30 congregrants. And the circus is not over yet. Jones plans to fly to New York to discuss the proposed location of the Islamic centre near Ground Zero with the New York imam Feisel Abdul Rauf.

Whether or not this meeting takes place – and last night the pastor was still threatening to burn the Qur'ans if it did not – the damage has already been done. A protester was shot dead after a crowd of 10,000 converged on a German-run Nato base in north-eastern Afghanistan. Thousands of Indonesian Muslims demonstrated outside the US embassy in Jarkarta. President Obama has said and done the right things, neither reacting too soon – and thus inflating the importance of the pastor – nor too late. But the vulnerability of America's image in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the possibility that it would be recast by the lunatic fringe of Christian fundamentalists at home, is all too real. The pastor may be the most extreme version of it to date, but he is symptomatic of a larger trend, particularly in Florida. In May a mosque in Jacksonville was attacked with a pipe bomb, and a mosque south of Miami was attacked twice last year, once with gunfire. The pastor may have been condemned by Sarah Palin, but anti-Islamic rhetoric has begun to creep into the words of some Republican political candidates in the state.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is planning to distribute 200,000 copies of the Qur'an under an initiative called Learn, Don't Burn. Its spokesman, Ibrahim Hooper, said that the group's research shows that when people learn about what it is they are supposed to be hating, intolerance lessens. This is the right reaction, even if it feels at the moment like trying to hold back an incoming tide. There are around 7 million Muslims in the US, but no one knows for sure as they are as ethnically and culturally diverse as America is itself. This community is already fully integrated. Reactions such as seeing the headscarf as a symbol of "sharia by stealth" will, if allowed to continue unchecked, reverse this process.

As we report today, growing numbers of Muslims who have lived in America for most of their adult lives, whose children do all the things American kids do, are enduring a backlash of hostility and suspicion on the ninth anniversary of al-Qaida's assault on New York and the Pentagon. Islam is thus portrayed not as a faith but an invading system of government and justice. Mosques are not religious centres but the outposts of "radical Islam". While this mood is driven by politics in an election year, Republicans do not have to drill that deep. After nine years of incubation, anti-Muslim sentiment has burst on to the scene. Ignorance triumphs, and as the Tea Party activists are discovering, if you lie often enough and loud enough, it works. Nearly one in five Americans suspect that their president is secretly a Muslim.

Europe has got very little to teach America on this score, and about the last person it should be exporting to New York to speak at a rally today to oppose the Manhattan mosque plan is Geert Wilders, the virulently anti-Islamic Dutch political leader. The one thing European leaders should be telling America is not to go down the path that Holland, Switzerland, France and Austria have trod on this issue, each in different ways alienating the very communities on which their intelligence services depend to defend them against al-Qaida's plots. The pastor is doing Osama bin Laden's work for him.

 

Different model of socialism

Cuba: from communist to co-operative? | Stephen Wilkinson | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

 

Fidel Castro's wry comment to US journalist Geoffrey Goldberg that Cuba's economic system isn't working has become an aside that has echoed round the world as columnists and commentators have seized upon it as the confession of a man preparing to meet his maker.

 

However, as it is wont to do with Cuba, the world's media (especially that which is vehemently opposed to socialism) is perhaps reading a little too much into the comment. Fidel is a keen media watcher himself and seeing the attention his remark has received will surely be clarifying his views in the days to come, but you can be sure it will not be to say that capitalism is the answer. (Indeed, elsewhere in the Goldberg interview he told his interlocutor that he was still very much a dialectical materialist.)

 

So what exactly did the old man say? To be specific: "The Cuban model doesn't even work for us anymore," was his answer to being asked if he believed it was something still worth exporting. That is hardly an admission of total failure. He clearly thinks it worked once, and since he does not elaborate on the reasons why he thinks it doesn't work now, it is premature to assume that he is chucking in the towel.

 

Nor can the statement be interpreted as him saying that socialism per se has failed – merely that Cuba's current model of it no longer fits the times. He has consistently held the view that there are as many models of socialism as there are countries that try it out. As a Marxist he believes that the particular circumstances of each society and the peculiarities of their histories affect the character of whatever politics they might have – be they communist or capitalist.

 

What the statement really means is that he agrees with his brother that the way the Cuban system is currently configured has to change, but watch the space carefully – this does not automatically imply that free-market capitalism is the answer – far from it.

 

Since being handed power by his brother in 2006, Raúl Castro has taken measures to reform the economy, including using some market mechanisms and allowing more citizens to work for themselves. In order to shrink the state (and the deficit – Cuba is in the same boat as the rest of us), something like a million government workers are set to lose their jobs in the coming months.

 

The government has recently handed out more than 2.5m acres of land to individuals and co-operatives, in order that they produce more food, and has accordingly loosened controls that prohibit Cubans from selling fruit and vegetables. In an effort to build a modern tourism infrastructure it has eased property laws to give lease periods of up to 99 years for foreign investors.

 

However, at the same time the government has announced that workers will be encouraged to take over the ownership of the companies in which they work. In a move that the government has actually called a deepening of socialism, the Cubans are about to launch what could potentially become the biggest co-operative project the world has ever seen.

 

The government is saying that the old centrally planned Soviet-style of socialism has finally hit the buffers – a new form of socialism is required, in which the state ceases to be the administrator of economic activity but the regulator. That's a different model of socialism – it may not work either – but it is not capitalism.

 

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I was looking for "Asian values" files and found this old pic. Anwar Ibrahim is one of  the prominent proponents of Asian Values besides Mahatir and ex Singapore's PM Lee Kwan Yeuw. I was wondering whether he still has the same view about Asian values which once had been an international debates after his ex best friend Mahatir Muhammad brought the issue globally defending them from the western values.

Anyway,,this Asian values thingy brings me over some old memories when I was in Australia. I remembered, my lecturer Prof. Anthony Langlois also discussed this in a class I joined couple years ago. Even, I made an essay about it. Thanks to Langlois who introduced me to the wide spectrum of human rights, universalism, cultural relativism, and cosmopolitanism. um.I feel kind of wanting to reread his book.....