pattrice jones
Originally published in the Summer 2005 issue of Impact Press.
Review of The Voltairine de Cleyre Reader edited by A.J. Brigati (AK Press)
Quick — name two 19th century female anarchists. If you got stuck after Emma Goldman, then it’s time for you to meet Voltairine de Cleyre. Born into poverty in Michigan in 1866, converted to anarchism by the 1887 execution of the Haymarket martyrs, and active as a popular speaker and writer from the 1890s until her premature death in 1912, Voltairine de Cleyre was called by Emma Goldman “the most gifted and brilliant anarchist woman America ever produced.”
Like Goldman, de Cleyre condemned the objectification and exploitation of women with the same urgency with which she challenged the legitimacy of governments. Speaking with more force and honesty than many self-proclaimed feminists manage to muster today, de Cleyre dared to denounce marriage laws that permit husbands to rape their wives as “sex slavery.”
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by pattrice jones
Originally published in Fall 2005 issue of Impact Press.
Review of War Made Easy by Norman Solomon
“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”
So goes the old saying. But when it comes to war, we’ve been fooled over and over again, with the same tricks serving the same purposes every time.
When does credulity become complicity? That’s the question that arises for me after reading Norman Solomon’s War Made Easy.
People in the United States like to think of themselves as peaceful and friendly lovers of liberty. Despite that innocent and pacific national self-image, the USA always seems seems to be fighting somebody, often by means of torture and treachery. In my lifetime, the United States has invaded Afghanistan, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Iraq, and Panama; bombed civilians in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Iraq, Kosovo, Lebanon, and Vietnam; and sponsored reactionary paramilitary violence in Afghanistan, Angola, Cuba, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Nicaragua and heaven-only-knows where else.
How is it that peace-loving people are so frequently inspired to march to war?
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by pattrice jones
This interview and book review was originally published in the December, 1999 edition of LesbiaNation.
In her recently released book Exile & Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation (South End Press), lesbian feminist and disability rights activist Eli Clare explores the political and emotional terrain of disability, class and sexual orientation by means of personal narratives. In sometimes surprising ways, Clare brings together issues that on the surface seem separate but which she sees as parts of a devastating unified field: environmental destruction and the sexual exploitation of children, homophobic violence and the economic exploitation of workers, cultural bigotry and the exploitation of natural resources.
Some of us, Clare maintains, are more scarred by these things than others, but none of us are unscathed. As she points out, our bodies can be and are “stolen, fed lies and poison, torn away from us…. Stereotypes and lies lodge in our bodies as surely as bullets.” But Clare is not content to simply catalog the damage; she insists that “the stolen body can be reclaimed.”
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