A column by Clay Risen [IMC] begins with some interesting suggestions to the effect that the debate over the security fence marking off a no-free-speech zone for the upcoming IMF/World Bank protests in DC is probably something of a red herring: debate over the fence and security vs. the rights of demonstrators will eclipse the discussion of the actual meeting, individuals, and issues that they are demonstrating against. All this is very true. On the other hand, Risen quickly descends into feel-good liberal blather as he suggests that black-masked anarchists who will take direct action against the fence or other private property will cast a pall on the entire effort that peaceful, thoughtful people labored for. Predictably, he invokes the well-worn liberal platitudes about Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. to justify his sweeping dismissal of militant tactics and assumes that anyone who pursues them is simply an unthinking brute.

Well, look. A critique of Black Bloc-style militant tactics is in order. I know way too many would-be revolutionary white boys who have the time and the luxury to go to DC and throw things at police, but not everyone has the time, money, or legal protections and privileges that let them indulge in antagonism of police. But strategic use of direct action, including forceful direct action, can be a valid and important tactic. Police have proven in Genoa, DC, Philadelphia, etc. that they don’t give a shit whether you are violent or non-violent: they will beat the shit out of you and arrest you either way, and if they can’t figure out a reason they will make one up. Here, for example, the Black Bloc’s tactic of using force to un-arrest people from the police is a hell of a lot better than the passive acceptence of police state tactics urged by the liberals. Similarly, smashing barriers that keep demonstrators away from areas of wide public spectacle and media attention can accomplish the major goal of getting presence in the media (and directly in front of thousands of people) in a way that merely holding press conferences and peaceful marches will not do. Here a good example was the Black Bloc’s smashing of barriers between demonstrators and the motorcade route during the inauguration protests in DC.

We have, have, have to drop this one-dimensional mania for non-violent demonstrations and civil disobedience, along with its insipid, uncritical canonization of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. Strategic use of violence — violence in self-defense, violence against barriers which have no right to exist in the first place and which it serves a goal to destroy — is a hell of a lot more effective than marching around in a pathetic little circle with clever slogans on signs that the DC police have ensured no-one will see. Both violent and non-violent action are needed. India’s liberation was not accomplished by Gandhi’s march to the sea, but by both Gandhi and militants such as Communist workers. Black liberation in the United States, insofar as it has occurred, was not the invention of Martin Luther King Jr.; it was both Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, the Black Panther Party, etc.

There are still only a few Leftists who continue to believe that the revolution in Iran and the Ayatollah’s regime was something that deserves support from the Euro-American Left (I suspect that their psychological profiles are similar to those of the last few ardent Stalinists who hung on through the 1950s and 1960s and refused to acknowledge the horrors perpetrated by the Soviet tyranny). Nevertheless, they — as well as anyone who thought that Iran was well on its way to becoming a liberal democracy under a reformist regime — should consider the following: feminist filmmaker Tahmineh Milani has been arrested at the order of the reactionary Revolutionary Court on charges that her film The Hidden Half insults Islamic values and slanders the 1979 revolution [Independent Media Center]. The arrest is part of a broader campaign restricting dissent which has closed several dissident newspapers and imprisoned several activists, but Milani’s arrest marks the first time that artists have been targeted.

For further reading:

• GT 5/17/2001 reports on the decision by the Guardian Council of Iran that women cannot run for president under the revolutionary constitution

Just two days after the women of Sirt’s month-long strike strike from sex with their husbands hit the international AP newswire, and attained global celebrity, the striking women declared victory [CNN] in their efforts to improve the village’s abysmal water system. As the strike pressed on, the men of the village finally frantically lobbied the government for help in fixing the system, and the Directorate of Rural Affairs has agreed to provide the men of Sirt with five miles of piping so that water can be brought directly to the village from a nearby source. The men of Sirt will work to lay the pipe themselves. Although some women have decided to end the boycott immediately with the announcement, others will continue to refuse sex until the pipe-building project is completed.

A group of women in the rural village Turkey of Sirt have garnered international media attention through enacting a real-life Lysistrata: they are striking from sex with their husbands to demand improvements to the city’s antiquated water system [Salon]. Since the boys were not the ones who have to hike miles out to the fountain, don’t have to wait in endless lines to collect water from the trickling fountain, don’t have to haul it home, and don’t have to be responsible for most of the household washing, the boys had not been doing much of anything to get the system fixed. Since the strike began, they have suddenly decided it might be a good idea to petition the municipal government for it to be fixed and have even offered to work on it themselves if the government will get them the parts.

Eye-roller for the day: Our women are right to protest, but we’re the ones who are suffering, grumbled Ibrahim Sari to the Milliyet newspaper. Poor boys!

Yet another reason to hate DynCorp’s guts: the United States-based multinational mercenary contractor has now been working to cover up its officers role in international sex trafficking. DynCorp holds a contract to provide UN police forces for Bosnia-Hercegovina. When DynCorp hired Kathryn Bolkovac to combat sexual abuse and sex trafficking of women from Eastern Europe to NATO and UN outposts in Bosnia, legalized brothels in Western Europe, etc., she began finding evidence that DynCorp officers were involved in this sexual slave trade. When she brought this evidence to the attention of DynCorp and the UN, DynCorp fired her. And, surprise surprise, it turns out that there was a prior suit filed by an air mechanic who says he was fired after he uncovered evidence of DynCorp’s officers being involved in trafficking in women and gun-running.

The thing about mercenary corporations like DynCorp is that they are pretty much totally unaccountable to anybody, since they are not directly affiliated with any national government. This is why the Feds love sending them in to situations like Colombia, because even though the troops are American and paid for by US tax money and almost always discharged US armed forces troops, when horrendous human rights violations come up or they are killed in firefights the government can still say that no American servicepeople are getting involved in Colombia’s Civil War. This is the same outsourcing strategy that companies like Nike use to artificially distance themselves from the brutal practices of the sweatshop bosses they contract with.

And this is holding true in the sex trafficking case as well: despite clear participation of US and British troops in the sexual enslavement and slave trade in women’s bodies, DynCorp is moving to cover up, and nobody from DynCorp has ever been prosecuted for these crimes. Even though the suit is exposing DynCorp, you can be sure that the governments of the US and UK, or the UN administration in Bosnia, will catch no serious flak for it. But this kind of government involvement is now the rule rather than the exception: organized traffickers and pimps in the Russian mafia and other criminal organizations have either bought off the government or become the government in many of the primary sources for trafficking such as the Ukraine, Russia, and Southeast Asia. Official complicity with traffickers is nothing new; this UN case is merely exposing it at new levels.