Not radically different
The new issue of Free Inquiry is online, and my column is one of the items not subscribers-only this time. It’s about the odd fact that we consider Islamic State an enemy while we consider Saudi Arabia a valuable ally. (By “we” of course I mean Anglophone countries at government level.)
Saudi Arabia is officially an ally of many liberal democracies, yet it spurned the UDHR in company with newly apartheid South Africa and authoritarian communist states. This should seem stranger to us than it does. The hostility toward human rights of apartheid South Africa eventually made it a pariah state, and its pariah status in turn forced an end to apartheid. The stark absence of human rights in the Soviet Bloc eventually helped cause it to crumble. Why has nothing similar happened to Saudi Arabia? Why has global outrage not made something similar happen to Saudi Arabia? Why were conditions in South Africa and East Germany treated as human-rights issues while those in Saudi Arabia were not? Why now is the Islamic State a dreaded enemy while Saudi Arabia is still an ally? I would really like to know.
The two are not radically different, after all. Islamic State beheads people, and so does Saudi Arabia. Islamic State enslaves women, and so does Saudi Arabia. Islamic State kills people for “apostasy” and “blasphemy,” and so does Saudi Arabia. Islamic State considers Sharia law absolute and binding, and so does Saudi Arabia. Islamic State hates the Jews, and so does Saudi Arabia. Islamic State considers itself a legitimate state, and so does Saudi Arabia.
More.
Saudi Arabia is run by billionaires.
I believe you channelled the late Andrea Dworkin, this piece below was written in 1978 and little has changed other than the names. If you look at the history of apartheid, there was no international protest initially because many countries had and perpetuated racial discrimination themselves, this was merely an extension on what many were doing. Similarly, how can you protest the suppression and torture of political and other dissidents when you’ve got a presidential candidate promising to bring back worse? Does it make a difference if you label the torture “interrogation”? Again, with women’s rights, how do you assert their rights to control their lives and fertility when so many countries similarly outright ban or restrict or are working on restricting contraception and abortion services. How do you complain when women, this is shades and degrees here, are still so poorly represented in politics and public life, well below the proportion in the population they should represent?
And then of course the second factor is a self-serving lack of will. With Apartheid, South Africa was an ally in the Cold War, had gold, had some important ports. Mostly it paid off, a trade-off in peoples lives and human rights abuses, to ignore all of that as an “in house” issue and cultivate a selective blind spot. It was only in the context of the UN, where it wasn’t a particular nation’s interests on the line that concern could be expressed and there were measures to at least monitor the situation. In that context, India could express concern about the treatment of Indian people in South Africa, there could be murmurings of discontent. Some pressure could be put on, and support to those resisting the regime.
It took a massacre, Sharpesville to get international attention. Prior to this pass laws were used to increase repression, and were extended to include women. They were used to detain and harrass dissendents, but it was only internal protest with brutal backlash that got real attention. I don’t think this would happen in Saudi Arabia, while apartheid was ruthless, it ruthlessly sorted and categorised people and lumped together. They couldn’t stop people collecting together, thinking their own thoughts and talking strategy. You get the opposite, ruthless desegregation, everyone forced into compliance with even the slightest transgression punished, only a brave few within try and protest with few means to organise collectively and resist.
More importantly, this is a system set up to benefit men, it might be brutal, but it’s a lot easier when you are on top from the moment you draw breath to the moment you die and in that context there is little will to hand over power. Women, unable to go outside without a minder are segregated from men, and more importantly from other women, they are rendered voiceless and powerless. Tying the maids to the family another method of this, they cannot move on, cannot talk together about their powerlessness. Those internationally that express concern are limited to addressing individual human rights abuses, not the larger picture of a population subjugated. You need much more than that to truly make change, you need something to happen to cause a revolution, true protest and push back.
Worse still, they’ve managed to co-opt the the bigotry of the Trumps of this world, Christian right claims there is a ‘war’ on them and their desire to limit freedoms of conscience and impose a theocracy of their own, the oppression narrative of the left and the fear of being exclusionary and of reactionary politics. Used to be able to easily criticise religion and the harms, and to reply to complaints along the line of “how dare you”, now any activists and critics not only within the country but outside of it can be charged with islamophobia, and once that label gets on, that sticks. You only need the taint to be recoiled from after that. Of course there are parallels with Islamic State, but it’s much easier to make a target of a more amorphous group, with less powerful and internally disrupted states supporting them, they have no strategic importance. And probably more importantly, they are attacking the interests of powerful men and powerful states. That makes it a worthwhile target while turning a blind eye to human rights abuses elsewhere.
It occurs to me that the second wave was the last wave of feminism that actually addressed intersectionality, what Kimberle Crenshaw aptly described as the overlapping of oppressions affecting women of various ethnicities, held back by racism, sexism and classism. They opposed racism, and violence, and other harms done to women, looking at the overarching themes and structures which held people down. Now intersectionality is, well, set up to essentially include everyone and no one, because you can’t run a movement off many individuals claiming discrimination of some type and have it work to do something for a group of people. You can’t just choose your choice when all choices are constrained, nor try and claim to be empowered within a disempowering system that systematically limits a person in what they can do and be.
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“…Disbelief leads me to wonder why the plight of male dissidents in Russia overtakes Mr Carter’s not very empathetic imagination when women in this country are in mental institutions or lobotomized or simply beaten to death or nearly to death by men who do not like the way they have done the laundry or prepared dinner. And on days when this sanctimonious president makes certain that poor women will not have access to life-saving abortion, and tells us without embarrassment that “life is unfair,” my disbelief verges on raw anguish. I ask myself why the pervasive sexual tyranny in this country–the tyranny of men over women, with its symptomatic expression in economic deprivation and legal discrimination–is not, at least, on the list of human rights violations that Mr Carter keeps on the tip of his forked tongue.
But mostly, inability to believe surfaces on days when Mr Carter and his cronies–and yes, I must admit, especially Andrew Young–discuss our good friend, Saudi Arabia. That is, their good friend, Saudi Arabia. I hear on newscasts that Mr Carter was enchanted by Saudi Arabia, that he had a wonderful time. I remember that Mrs Carter used the back door. I remember that the use of contraceptives in Saudi Arabia is a capital crime. I remember that in Saudi Arabia, women are a despised and imprisoned caste, denied all civil rights, sold into marriage, imprisoned as sexual and domestic servants in harems. I remember that in Saudi Arabia women are forced to breed babies, who had better be boys, until they die.
Disbelief increases in intensity as I think about South Africa, where suddenly the United States is on the side of the angels. Like most of my generation of the proud and notorious sixties, a considerable part of my life has been spent organizing against apartheid, there and here. The connections have always been palpable. The ruthless economic and sexual interests of the exploiters have always been clear. The contemptuous racism of the two vile systems has hurt my heart and given me good reason to think “democracy” a psychotic lie. Slowly activists have forced our government, stubborn in its support of pure evil, to acknowledge in its foreign policy that racist systems of social organization are abhorrent and intolerable. The shallowness of this new commitment is evident in the almost comical slogan that supposedly articulates the aspirations of the despised: One Man, One Vote. Amerikan foreign policy has finally caught up, just barely, with the human rights imperatives of the early nineteenth century, rendered reactionary if not obsolete by the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848….” http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/WarZoneChaptIIIA.html