Rad Geek People's Daily

From Feminist Daily News (2008-08-08): Rape, Sex Abuse of Afghan Girls Continues:

Afghan girls continue to be sexually exploited, reported the Afghan Interior Ministry Thursday. The Ministry told Reuters that the number of sexual assaults on children has significantly increased. The Afghanistan Human Rights Organization (AHRO) has reported that in January a 10 year-old girl was raped in Jowzjan province and that groups of men raped a 12 year-old girl in June in Sar-I-Pol province and a 3 year-old girl in July in Jowzjan province. Cases like these abound.

A 12 year-old girl who was raped at gunpoint by five men has publicly spoken about the gang rape. A video of the girl and her family was posted online by the Revolutionary Association of Women in Afghanistan. The girl pleads for help from Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Since the video became public, the family has met with Karzai, who has reportedly fired the police chief where the attack occurred, according to CNN.

Relatedly, an Islamic cleric was detained for allegedly presiding over a marriage of a 7 year-old girl to a 17 or 18 year-old man. Legally, girls under 16 and boys under 18 can not marry in Afghanistan. However, according to the United Nations Trust Fund to End Violence Against Women 57% of Afghan girls are married before age 16, frequently to settle their family's debts or other disputes.

— Feminist Daily News Wire (2008-08-08): Rape, Sex Abuse of Afghan Girls Continues

It’s important to remember that, whatever problems Afghan men may or may not have as a cultural group, the rampant violence against women and girls in Afghanistan has nothing essentially to do with some peculiar vice of Afghans, or with some peculiar vice of Muslims. The violence and the devaluing of girls’ lives and freedoms has to do with some things that are shared by all known cultures — violent patriarchy, male sexual entitlement — and a lot also to do with a set of political and economic circumstances — the political elevation and unchecked power of regional warlords with the arms and backing of the U.S. military, the ongoing civil war between U.S.-backed and Taliban-backed fundamentalist factions, the grinding poverty produced by years of war and sustained by a military occupation and an insane, U.S.-sponsored attack on Afghanistan’s most lucrative cash crop, and so on — which sustain an environment of poverty, terror, and insecurity, which the most vulnerable people — especially women and girls — bear the brunt of. War is the health of the patriarchy, and the conditions created and sustained by war and occupation and the zealous effort to impose the U.S. government’s imperial policies (such as the terror-famine drug eradication policy) on Afghanistan, are all part and parcel of the problem. As I said in an earlier post, on the issue of marrying off young girls:

One good way to make any existing form of oppression even worse is to throw the people involved in it into desperate poverty: the first victims of poverty are always the most vulnerable people within the poor community, and in places where the human dignity and well-being of women and girls is worth less than nothing to the men who hold cultural and political power, one of the things that poor families are going to “sell” is likely to be the lives of their young girls.

— GT 2007-01-13: The tall poppies, part 2: The tall poppies, part 2: food, drugs, and female sexual slavery in Afghanistan

And the point goes not just for the specific policy of opium eradication (as disastrous and idiotic as that particular policy is), but for the whole program of U.S. Empire in Afghanistan.

Please support the life-saving work of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, which is working to provide refuges and schools for women, to oppose warlordism and misogynist fundamentalism, and to end the U.S. government’s ongoing occupation and war against the people of Afghanistan.

See also:

• GT 2007-01-13: The tall poppies, part 2: food, drugs, and female sexual slavery in Afghanistan

Question: in a city racked by poverty and a long history of antagonism between cops and the local populace, how can you instill trust and inspire public confidence in your police department?

Answer: by firing police who attempt to communicate with the public. Let’s thank Flint police chief David Dicks for this useful tip.

Remember, nothing says transparency like opacity, and nothing says public servants like a tightly-organized, intensely secretive cabal of heavily-armed professional muscle, who absolutely refuse to discuss their business in the open.

Everyone wish L. a happy birthday!

Then, since it’s Sunday, let me know what you all wrote about this week–leave a link and a short description for your post in the comments.

Oh, Utne. What won’t you romanticize?

Fellow workers, I know that times are tough. Lots of people are losing their jobs. Lots of people are losing their homes.

But I’m sure that, as you hit the skids, or as you try to figure out how to feed yourself and your family without any income, you’ll be very glad to know that your economic pain is contributing to a national character correction, which might eventually lead to your city’s government adding a few more bike lanes, to penny-pinching high-enders shopping for their overpriced organic arugula at Safeway instead of at Whole Foods, and to some other high-enders, who had enough money in the bank to spend the past several years on a fossil-fueled consumerist binge that they need to be jolted out of, to possibly stop buying quite as much stuff as they used to buy. I am sure that you will feel grateful for your chance to play your part in this great national exercise in character-building and simple living. Right after you finish eating saltines for dinner.

By the way, in case you were wondering, other great ways of making a national character correction include a total-war command economy and blowing the hell out of a few million fellow workers in far away countries.

Do I need to mention what a special kind of professional-class Progressive self-absorption, callousness, and obliviousness it takes to write something like In Praise of Economic Pain — and then to pass it off as Leftist commentary, no less? Do I need to mention how very clear it is that the intended audience of an article like this are people who, as a class, are generally fairly secure in their own living situation and income, and so in no really great danger of ever feeling much of the economic pain that they are so quick to praise?

Well, if do, then I guess I just did.

Fellow workers, are these your allies? Do they speak for you? Have their methods worked for you? Is this the change you can believe in?

If not, then what we need to do is to get together — all of us who are small enough to fail — and cut through the seasonal noise and start talking about ways that we can unite amongst ourselves in order to take control of the conditions of our lives and our labor. We need to talk fighting unions and the victories that they can win. We need to talk mutual aid and how we can help each other, person to person, in our own neighborhoods and through our own efforts, through both bad times and good. We need to talk direct action, about organizing and taking control of the conditions of our lives in ways that don’t take ballot boxes or political parties or coalition partners who are too busy Believing in Change to bother themselves about whether we eat or starve, about the ways that we can do these things ourselves, with our own hands.

It’s a shame about his later work, but The Gulag Archipelago, at least, is a work of passion, insight, and genius. And a work that has a lot to say to us here in the Free World today–perhaps more than we would like to admit.

Why, then, should you run away? And how can you resist right then? After all, you'll only make your situation worse; you'll make it more difficult for them to sort out the mistake. And it isn't just that you don't put up any resistance; you even walk down the stairs on tiptoe, as you are ordered to do, so your neighbors won't hear.

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood that they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you'd be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur — what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked? The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!

If... If... We didn't love freedom enough.

(Via The Picket Line 2008-08-06.)