You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.”
Ursula K. Le Guin — The Dispossessed, 1974
I'm speaking on a panel about the influence and inspiration of Ursual K. Le Guin at @BradfordLitFest on Saturday #BLF2018
When women speak truly they speak subversively — they can’t help it: if you’re underneath, if you’re kept down, you break out, you subvert. We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains - Le Guin
We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings - Ursula K. Le Guin
Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society...to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom...- Le Guin
People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.— Ursula K. Le Guin, from A Wave in the Mind
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This is how propaganda for the patriarchy works: it paints women who have been sexually assaulted as the criminals and men who have assaulted as the victims as a strategy to divert sympathy from the former to the latter. For example:
Popaganda for the patriarchy insists that we look at the men who sexually assault as “our brothers, sons, husbands,” rather than seeing the women they assault as “their sisters, daughters, wives” so as to divert sympathy from the latter to the former
I have barely slept.I have been unable to stop thinking about #JamalKhashoggi. I knew him from when we both were columnists for #Saudi-owned Asharq al-Awsat b4 I was banned.We met just once, I think. But reports yest of his killing came same day as #Kavanaugh & my worlds collided
Trump has emboldened so many dictators,esp Crown Prince Mohamed Bin Salman.With so much attention been sucked up by US,the killing of Jamal,who wasn’t an esp outspoken critic,is sure to embolden regimes further & signal to dissidents & opponents that their harm will go unnoticed
To think that you could go to your country’s consulate to get paperwork for an upcoming wedding and be killed and dismembered because of your writing is horrific. It’s evil. And to know that the regime responsible for that has a best friend in the most powerful country in earth!
Whatever happens today:
- Trump did not invent white supremacy or patriarchy.
- White supremacy and patriarchy will not end if Kavanaugh is not confirmed.
- Defy, disobey and disrupt white supremacy and patriarchy at every turn
- Make them fear you #MakePatriarchyFearYou
My message is to white Americans who will spend today saying:
- “This isn’t the America I know” - it is and has been for a very long time and you should be asking why you just now paid attention. Where have you been?
To white American women who’ll spend today saying:
-“Roe v Wade! No more rapists in power!”
Rapists have been in power for centuries.Ask indigenous & Black women.Anti-choice legislation in several states already made abortion nearly impossible for many women of colour,poor women
For too long rape and sexual violence during war was considered a byproduct of conflict. It is more and more finally being seen as weapon of war, not byproduct.
In 2016, my friend & journalist @AhNidzara took me to Vilna Vlas, a hotel & spa in Višegrad which was used as a rape concentration camp in 1992 during Bosnian war. Women & girls were raped individually & en masses in empty swimming pool. It is still being used as a hotel and spa.
In 2017, I went with France-based anti-racist activists from @EGAMofficial to Rwanda to take part in the commemoration of the genocide against the Tutsis. Rape was used as a weapon of war systematically against women who were also mitigated, and many killed.
These “Women for Trump”:
- Who indoctrinated them?
- Who taught them to submit to men?
- Why are they so brainwashed?
- Should I save them?
For decades, I’ve been asked by white people:
- What is wrong with Muslim women?
- Why do they put up with all that patriarchy and misogyny?
And here I am asking the same about these “Women for Trump” who are the 53% of white American women voters who voted for him.
Once again: white women never missing a chance to be footsoldiers of patriarchy:
Believe Blasey Ford: 46%
Believe Kavanaugh: 43%
- Quinnipiac University poll
h/t @Jteisele
Believe Blasey Ford:
Black people polled: 83%
Hispanic people polled: 66%
White people polled: 40%
The rot of white patriarchy:
White men
Believe Blasey Ford: 33%
Believe Kavanaugh: 57%