Drums of War

You really can’t be a feminist and be pro-war, or be the kind of feminist that justifies wars. You just can’t.

Um, what?

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Of course, once the war ended, the US did its damnedest to send women back to the kitchen…

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The cooption of feminist iconography in the service of militarism does not make militarism feminist.

OTOH, sure: there is plenty of room for critique of white liberal feminism. The history of it is tightly bound up with racism and classism; the initial gains of the suffragette movement were motivated by a desire to suppress rising working class power.

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Incidentally, the antifascist response to the history of WWII is not “hooray for war!”.

It’s “this is why you need to stop fascists before they start a war”.

War is the last resort of antifascism.

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Reads more like war is the pre-emptive action of anti-facisism. Almost as if antifacistm is pro-war :anguished:

So, fascism is anti-war?

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Antifascists are willing to use force to prevent fascism. They have a good record of holding that force to the minimum required.

The antifascists were not the aggressors in the 20th century. Franco shot first.

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The women who built ships and planes and munitions for the massive war machine during the Second World War and inspired one of the most recognizable icons of feminism were not feminists. Got it.

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If the fight for preserving democracy and equality truly requires bombs and bullets, I don’t see how pacifism in that instance is compatible with feminism, either.

Zooming out even further, I don’t understand how discussing beliefs in set-theoretic terms clarifies anything.

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It’s a debate with some depth to it, to be sure. That’s what I posted it.

It’s important to differentiate pro-war militarism from the right to self-defence, though. As you’ve probably noticed, I’m not opposed to the idea of the oppressed defending themselves by any means necessary.

Anti-militarist and anti-imperialist, yes. Complete pacifist, no.

Note that the initial poster did make an exception for self-defence. And she didn’t demand pacifism, she denounced being pro-war. There’s a distinction between wars of choice and self-defence.

Care to expand on what you mean by “set-theoretic terms”? Do you object to a class-based analysis of politics, or is it something else?

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I wish I had WiFi because composing my thoughts on a mobile is a cognitive bottleneck for me and this discussion needs a proper keyboard.

Personally, I don’t subscribe to the notion that one’s belief system needs to be internally consistent. Which is just as well, because the dire circumstances of war (based on what I’ve read) , will pit your ideals against one another or at the very least demand prioritization of one over another.

I had something else to say but again, my fingers can’t keep up with my brain so I’ll have to wait for it to come back.

Edit: Right. So the other thing I was going to say is that -isms tend to be densely packed (and not always carefully inspected) systems of beliefs themselves. Talking about these -isms as if they were sets of beliefs where exclusion=incompatibility seems (to me) a unnecessary quantitization that ignores the messy roots of those -isms as well as our human tendency to embrace conflicting beliefs.

Again, that tendency isn’t a bad thing. Imagine someone who had Kantean beliefs about lying and applied that in their daily life without exception. Their social life would be hell.

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you seem to be having trouble parsing

“The cooption of feminist iconography in the service of militarism does not make militarism feminist.”

let me try to clarify:
feminists may or may not be militarists
militarists may or may not be feminists
but
militarism does not equal feminism.

your rewording is, i suspect, deliberately obtuse.

edited to correct an unfortunately confusing statement caused by a distraction irl.

Uh, what?

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'Oh that was easy,’ says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing."

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So in the UK too they also over use the laugh track machine?

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see edit to original comment above. i was distracted as i was completing my comment and the result was, at a minimum, confusing.