Winona LaDuke captures this image, quoting Tobin, in her book Recovering the Sacred, where she reminds the reader that for over 300 years, the Iroquois survived “a scorched earth policy, the forced relocation of their people, and the creation of a monoculture” of agriculture and “a monoculture of the mind” from colonial and imperial enforcement (Laduke).
In Ziauddin Sardar’s novel Desperately Seeking Paradise, there is a scene in Islamabad where a moderate Muslim character is discussing with the narrator, "What I want is a decent living, proper education for my children, a proper roof over my head,” but what fundamentalists want will only give “public floggings, beheadings, compulsory beards, and lock my poor long-suffering wife and daughter behind purdah” (Sardar).
The theme that keeps coming back to the foremost of conflicts and survival is the constant brutal enforcement of humans inflicting their beliefs and their might onto others. Human Dignity is at the core of both LaDuke and Sardar’s work.
When the media uses the term Arab Spring to define this year’s events in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, and the events that followed in Syria, Israel, and more, the use of the seasonal parameters is aiming that the current unrest has a clear beginning and a clear end. This Calm Before The Storm is far from over and the clarity of the historic meaning behind 2011 uprising is far from clear in determined framework.
Reuters News confirmed this week that since 2010 - 46 million people were in poverty in the United States. When over ten years ago the international community had come together to design Millennium Development Goals, the masterminds behind the goals claimed that the aim was to secure social and economic standards for the poorest countries. Those goals were never within reach, and now it appears the richest countries are nose-diving to impoverished levels faster than expected.
The second richest country fell off the economic map this year with a horrible earthquake and tsunami that along with shattering the nuclear power grid brought Japan to nearly unforeseeable trauma. The London Riots reflected just how imbalanced the gap between have and have-nots in England stand apart.
In the world of the capital bourgeois property and freedom are many times confused and fused together. Freedom to buy whatever one wants. In the Anarchist ideal, property is a form of theft. In the world where women have been objectified across cultures, a woman owning her own body in an objective sense can be just as painful.
…Pause…
Enmeshing multiple voices that are shouting in my mind in my Attention Deficit Society, I am trying to bring together too many ideas and voices. But I am going somewhere and I am getting the order of thoughts to reflect the underline theme.
As Grace Lee Boggs emphasizes, before we can have a social revolution we have to have a personal revolution. Yet Individual emancipation is not enough. But while we continue to push society to reach the levels to gain such a revolution, we can spend our time overcoming our own selves.
Julia Kristeva continually focuses on the masquerade of society, but under all the means of dividing ourselves from each other, we see a hybrid culmination for human dignity trying to break away from limited parameters and determined codes of objectification: whether it be male or female, black or white, Native American, Muslim or Christian. Everyone’s a potential carrier for pleasure and pain. Just as ‘women’ can never be defined, ‘men’ can never be defined in limited parameters. Refusal to be determined is Julia Kristeva’s emphasis; her theme that resides in my mind most is “I Revolt, Therefore We Are Still To Come:” the only way to overcome predetermination is to remain against the grain.
The Ukrainian Feminist group, FEMEN, has been making a significant outcry this year. In the past month, FEMEN protested against the trial of the former female Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, which more or less gave the appearance of a political show trial by the current administration to boost political weight, and more recently, the FEMEN group burst into a Ukrainian fashion press conference of the upcoming Miss Ukraine contest. FEMEN’s mission was to highlight the competitions ties to the sex-industry in Ukraine, and the growing rise of prostitution in Ukraine since the country became aligned in capitalist ideology.
Ironically, at the press conference was Paris Hilton, a symbol herself of women as sex-object in the 21st Century. In Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs, the author reflects on how far women still have to go to gain a subjective self beyond the parameters of a chauvinist society. One cannot help reflecting on the young women who in the past few years in the United States that have turned to the porn industry as a means to escape economic hardship. With further insight, one can see that the women do not enjoy the degrading positions or try their best to appear to enjoy the position, but all in all it reflects little in women’s liberation, just the choice to objectify their own bodies for a price.
Simone de Beauvoir in an interview late in her life, when the 70’s liberation movement was in full bloom, stated: “Individual emancipation is not enough… women’s equality cannot be won unless there is a total overthrow of the current system” (1972 with Alice Schwarzer).
In India, one of the key responses to why certain women join the Naxal-Maoist movement is that they are fed up with patriarchy, and want to end the repressive nature of the current system that exploits and dehumanizes men and women.
The continual women’s rights struggle is a human rights struggle. The continual civil rights struggle is a human rights struggle. The exploitation of Native Americans, Muslims, Jews, and Religious minorities is all part of the struggle for human rights and human dignity. The exploitation of homosexuals, transgenders, and all those not mentioned is part of the struggle for humanity.
Catherine Clement discusses the foreseen and unforeseen spectacle, “In every society it is inevitable that a percentage of individuals find themselves placed outside the system or between two or several irreducible systems,” … the current crisis remains enslaved, it “signals and repeats. … A means must be elaborated to unhinge entire panels of ideology; a rigorous activity is needed which for the sake of rigor must think out and measure its relation to social activities as a whole” (Catherine Clement, Enclave Esclave, 1975).
In the 1960’s, the leader of the Italian Turin student and union alliance, Vittorio Rieser, came to a similar conclusion as Clement, and found that “without mass-conflict there is no hope of forming smaller active groups since the number of activists decreases and because there is a lack of concrete political consciousness which is necessary … for practical inertia” (Rieser).
The inertia to move the global society past the current pathology of capital objectification of individuals comes during a time of unrest. The current year has reflected through small and large actions throughout the integrated world system that people are ready to stand up for their humanity. The utter importance of “Not Mistaking the Target” can be vital in deciding actions.
Targeting people, places, and false directives that are not the key instigators of deeper frustration is a dangerous remedy. When the Libyan rebels target black Libyans, they are misunderstanding their rise against dictatorship. When the London Rioters target small businesses on the streets and loot stores for material gain, they are failing to rally together for a cause against greater sources of their exploitation.
Whether it is exploitation of women, of working labor, of unemployed, of racial, or religious persecution, “In the new Millennium, it is time for the settler to end the process of naming that which he has no right to own, and for us collectively to reclaim our humanity” (Winona LaDuke).
There is another world possible, and if you limit your skepticism to accepting the current parameters as the only way, then you have to have your own internal personal revolution first. It should not be diverted down the wrong path through reactionary violence, but less utopian and still realistic in its emancipation of oppression. If the laws are already written in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights under the United Nations, then it just needs to be implemented and upheld by all those nations that signed and ratified it. Yet if it were only that easy. As Kristeva totes, "I revolt, therefore we are still to come!"
Biodiversity and human diversity return despite the monoculture of colonialism and capitalism (LaDuke). Everyone's a potential carrier of pleasure and pain, let's hope that inclusive pleasure wins out in the end.
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