By Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale.
Three years ago we posted an article about gang abuse of young women in Oxford. This article is of national relevance now, because the fascist and hard racist right is making hay with campaigns against Asian and Muslim abusers. Two weeks ago 15,000 people marched in central London calling for freedom for Tommy Robinson. There were 500 anti-racist counter-marchers. Things are getting serious. Continue reading
Rachel Denhollander at the trial of Larry Nasser
Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale write: In the wake of Metoo, collective movements are now exposing cover-ups from the top. The target is no longer just one individual, a Strauss-Kahn, a Bill Clinton or a Clarence Thomas. These movements are shouting: it’s a whole system. The class inequalities that protect abuse are being exposed. This is a cause for joy, and hope.
The Larry Nasser case provides a brutal example. At Nasser’s trial last month more than 160 survivors of abuse testified about what he had done to them. Nasser was a doctor for the athletics department at Michigan State University, and for the United States national Olympic team in gymnastics. The stories the survivors told were moving, and horrific. Nasser abused thousands of girls, some as young as six, by fingering them vaginally and anally for his own pleasure, over a period of more than twenty years.
Nasser was only able to do what he did because dozens of people covered up for him. This fits with what we have seen in the many cases the Metoo movement has begun to expose. Only a minority of men abuse. Most men do not do those things. But the men who do it, do it over and over again, so almost every woman suffers. Continue reading
Saydnaya prison, Damascus, Syria
Nancy Lindisfarne writes: For forty-six years the Assad regime has ruled Syria with murderous brutality. A measure of this brutality was the quelling of a popular uprising against the regime in the city of Hama in 1982. Assad (the father) bombed and killed some 20,000 Syrian citizens. Or perhaps 40,000 – the violence was so comprehensive and effective that it has never been possible to establish exactly how many perished. The massacre in Hama and the violence of the Assads’ secret prisons served to terrify the population and kept people quiescent. Until 2011. Continue reading
By Rouba Mhaissen
My alarm woke me up
It’s 2017
Good morning Fortress Europe
Today is another day
I’ll get randomly checked
At an airport nearby. Continue reading
Syrian refugees in Jordan, 2016
Lewis Turner writes about Syrian refugees in Jordan, He argues that ‘a person is not vulnerable because they are a man or a woman, but because of what being a man or a woman means in particular situations. A refugee response that automatically assumes that women and children are the most vulnerable will do a disservice to the community it seeks to serve.‘ Continue reading
Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale write: Trump’s win this morning has left many of us in despair. To prepare ourselves for what is to come, here are some things we need to understand about class struggle, racism and climate change.
First, this vote is a victory for the far right and for racism on a global scale. Second, it is also partly a class revolt against the consequences of neoliberalism. Trump’s appeal to class anger through racism is a tragedy and an obscenity. Continue reading
Nancy Lindisfarne writes – We live in a world mad drunk on technology and political stupidity. Bob Hughes’ new book, The Bleeding Edge: Why Technology turns Toxic in an Unequal World (Oxford: New Internationalist. 2016) says more about this poisonous combination – its causes, consequences, and possible cures – than anything I have previously read. This is an ambitious and important book. The questions Hughes addresses about the relation between equality and creativity – and the converse, why inequality is so stifling of innovation and so destructive of the environment– are extremely pressing.
And they are questions that haunt us. Thinking hard about technology is frightening. Our world is so full of things that most of us don’t understand, perhaps it is better not to look. Continue reading
American planes bombing Ramadi in October, 2015
Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale
An assault on the Iraqi city of Mosul by the United States, Iran, the Iraqi government, Kurdish forces and Shiah militias looks imminent. We can expect massive bloodshed and the destruction of most of the city.
Mosul is now held by ISIS. Different estimates suggest that between 600,000 and 1,500,000 people are still in the city. In the last year Iraqi and Iranian forces backed by the US bombs have retaken the cities of Ramadi and Fallujah from ISIS. In both cases, the whole city was flattened by American bombs, and almost all the people became refugees. Those two cities remain destroyed, and almost empty.
Because ISIS holds Mosul, every reactionary power in the world will welcome the bombing. On present form, almost the whole of the European and North American left will do nothing to protest the bombing, and many leftists will support the assault.
The position of most of the left makes us sick at heart. Do Muslim deaths not matter? Continue reading
Dame Lowell Goddard
Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale
Update on 30 September 2016. Yesterday the lead lawyer for the official British inquiry into historic child abuse was sacked, after protesting internally about changes to the workings of the inquiry. So we are recirculating a post we wrote last month. In hindsight, our post is too trusting of Dame Goddard, who now appears to have been trying to narrow the scope of the inquiry. But the general context we provide is still useful. Continue reading
Rida Hus-Hus 1939-2016
Nancy Lindisfarne writes:
The Syrian painter and printmaker, Rida Hus-Hus, died in Mannheim, Germany on the 30 July 2016 at the age of 77. His courage, uncomplicated generosity and celebration of all that was beautiful is to be remembered and cherished. His life drawings and portraits reflected his affection and interest in other people. Through still-life drawing and flower pictures he celebrated the joy of quotidian detail, while his vibrant pastels captured the sweeping landscapes outside of Damasus, and literally painted Syria in a most beautiful light. Yet Rida was also intensely political in the dangerous environment of the Assad dictatorship, and to keep himself sane, and preserve the independence of his art, he lived an extremely modest and cleverly managed life. Continue reading
This was posted just before the UK referendum on leaving the European Union.
Jonathan Neale: Please vote against borders on Thursday.
I was born in New York just after the Second World War, and now I live in Britain. I was six years old when my family first went to India. We lived in Ludhiana, a small industrial city in Punjab. Six years before India and Pakistan had been partitioned. Hindus and Sikhs had killed Muslims, and Muslims had killed Hindus and Sikhs, until three quarters of a million were dead. One evening my father’s best friend, Mister Dillon, played caroms with me and told me that his family had sheltered a Muslim under their house to save his life. I understood he was telling me that there were good people in the world.
When I grew up, I understood that no one else in Punjab had ever told me a story like that, and that was part of what Mister Dillon was telling me too. But so many of our older neighbours told me that I must see Lahore, in Pakistan, once before I died. They could never go back. Continue reading
Students at Rhodes University in South Africa went on strike today (20 April) against rape culture on campus. The police opened fire with rubber bullets and teargas, and arrested several students. The situation is electric, it is national news, and there are rumours the action will spread to other campuses. Continue reading
Afghan Resistance, 1842
Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale
This article is about three intersecting wars in the Middle East, in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.[1] The bombings in Paris occurred just as we were finishing the piece, and give our arguments here further tragic relevance.
This piece is 25,000 words long, and readers may find it easier to read by downloading the version here: Oil Empires 16Nov2015 FIN5.
It will help the reader to know from the outset where we stand. We want the mass resistance to the Assad regime in Syria to win, and the Russian armed forces and their allies to leave. We want the Americans and their allies to leave Afghanistan, now, completely. We want Assad and the American, British, French and Russian military to stop bombing the Syrian resistance and the Islamic State.[2] Continue reading
Nancy Lindisfarne writes: The lunar month which began in mid-June this year is the Islamic month of Ramadan, the month of fasting and charity. This is a story to mark Ramadan, and one day in the life of Basima. At forty five, she is still unmarried, on the shelf, and as the youngest daughter of a large Syrian family, she has become the sole carer of her elderly, difficult mother.
This short story is set in Damascus in the 1990s, where I did a year’s anthropological fieldwork among well-to-do Damascenes. For me, unlearning academic writing and writing fiction was a lengthy and salutary experience. The impetus came from my anger and exhaustion at countering simplistic, popular stereotypes of Arab or Muslim women and men as fundamentalists, terrorists, or both. My hope then was that the stories might be a way to reach an audience beyond the academy. Continue reading
Jonathan Neale
This post will be of interest to only some of our readers. But we hope it will be very useful for them.
It is not easy to be both an academic and an activist. The values, the audiences and the constraints are different. Sitting down to write, you can feel yourself pulled in two different ways. The result is often muddled thinking and murky prose. There is too much ranting for an academic audience, and too much gobbledygook for the movement. In many cases, there is no prose at all, only silence, and pages crumpled in the wastebasket or erased on the screen.
The first half of this post offers some advice that can make writing easier, faster and more useful. The second half explains why universities make activists feel stupid, how they do it, and how you can cope. Continue reading
Nancy Lindisfarne writes: In understanding the Taliban we need to face up honestly to two quite different things. First, the Taliban are on the side of the poor . Most of their supporters come from the poor. The leaders of the Taliban are themselves from among the poor. (In this they are unlike most other Islamist groups.) And when they take power in an area the life circumstances of the poor improve significantly. These are the reasons why many ordinary people support the Taliban.
But there is another truth: the Taliban are also conservative in their sexual politics, and their policies oppress women. This is one of the things most ordinary Afghans and Pakistani Pashtuns don’t like about the Taliban.
Both these things are true. We need to face up to this contradictory reality. So we need to explain the situation in some detail. This post is an academic – but readable – paper explaining the class background of the Taliban. In another post, we shall turn to their right wing gender politics. Continue reading
The five Chinese feminists we wrote about in an earlier blog have been released. They are not completely off the hook, and could be charged at any time over the next year. But this is still a welcome victory, and in part a result of global solidarity
American bomber being prepared for flight
Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale write: Many people now argue that feminists should support the American and Iranian alliance against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Or they argue that we should support the American and Pakistani armed forces against the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Many other feminists, and many on the left, are confused and unsure. But they also talk as if it was a straight choice between IS and the US, or between the Taliban and the US. ‘Both sides are morally repugnant,’ these people say, ‘but if I have to choose…’
This way of thinking ignores the fact that you are not just choosing between two sides, you are choosing between two ways of waging war. How you kill people is important, and has emotional and political consequences. It matters that American bombing from the air is more cruel, more unequal, kills more women, and kills more children than fighting that on the ground with guns. Continue reading
Chinese feminists protesting against domestic violence in blood spattered bridal gowns
Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale write: Five Chinese feminists have been arrested for planning to protest against sexual harassment. They face five to ten years in jail. This post explains the background to the case, and suggests ways that other activists around the world can show solidarity.
Jonathan Neale writes: Islamophobia is now the last respectable form of racism in the West. This new fear has eerie echoes of another time and place. I was a small child in the United States during the time of McCarthyism. Much later, I trained as a labour historian, and when I first wrote on McCarthyism several things caught my attention:
Anne Bonny Pirate 