27 October 2015

For the Love of Germaine Greer and Fidel and Gadaffi and Assata and All the Rebellious Rogues


Someone I have no reason to disrespect politically just responded to a post I made of feminist Germaine Greer writing "I just learned of her today in the context of her apparent transphobia."

The person who wrote that appears young, but I do not know how young. Whatever his age, he is intelligent. The point is Greer is nearing 80, and is not young, and has indisputably served much of her life as an anti-assimilation, anti-racist, anti-patriarchal, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-industrial feudalism class warrior. Agree with her or not, her record is wide and deep.

So this reflex by rising generations of activists, which seems to have gained steam over the last 20 years only, where we approach our radicals like Mormon missionaries on safari, is disturbing.

Stop it.

What do Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Margaret Sanger, Assata Shakur, Muammar Gadaffi, Robert Mugabe, Mohamed Morsi have in common? I don't know, but they are to some controversial figures, and to others they are heroes.

They have all been important enough to get me unfriended, blocked, cussed at. To be absolutely fair, I have unfriended, blocked, cussed at a few people who've crossed the line of civilized debate with me and resorted to personal attacks in place of argument.

I am a man of ideas. Not of people. Ideas outlive people: they are handed down. People die. I do not quote, share, cite any of these peoples' works to make gods out of them but to nurture the soil of revolution and revolutionary thought. My belief in their contribution to this thought is unequivocal.

To the extent they might be deemed imperfect is arrogance to me. I don't care if they are drunkards, philanderers, starved their children, as Marx is said to have done.

What does this have to do with Germaine Greer, the author of The Female Eunuch and many other writings?

Revolutionary thought is done no service by abbreviating two generations of work of someone like Greer to her articulated position on transsexuals, any more than we miss study of a revolutionary movement by reducing Fidel to a "dictator" and those UMAP camps [where gays and dissenters were sent in the early years of the Cuban revolution].

If this is all Fidel is for you, then you will miss his cogent, deep, sometimes colorful analyses of capitalism in general and the Western empire in particular. You will also miss his position on those camps and his own evolution, but I maintain these are irrelevant to his contributions.

Before Hillary and Benghazi, Gadaffi lost me about 10 friends in one day on Facebook, all of whom had their "Christopher Hitchens moment" and supported the overthrow of the Libyan revolutionary. They openly despised me for coming to his defense. They were tone deaf to my counter-argument that while the US was ambivalent about South African apartheid yet arming the white regime, Gadaffi was giving money and weapons to crush that racist regime. This has made Libya a heroic figure in the global South in anticolonial, Pan-African struggle. I urged a broader perspective; they did not want one.

Just a few days ago, I unfriended a young white man, who had only recently requested my friendship. This debacle was over Pres. Mugabe. Before he told me I was full of hate and provoked my pushing the eject button, he had reduced Mugabe to a homophobe who was orchestrating pogroms against lesbian and gay Zimbabweans.

Now, to the first, there is evidence; Mugabe has said some disturbing things; to the pogroms, the record is very thin. Human Rights Watch is interestingly disturbed now about "equal rights" now that white farmers are being kicked off lands. They are silent about pogroms, except for the harassment and arrest of a leader of an unlicensed gay rights NGO. This is regrettable but hardly a pogrom.

What I wanted to impress upon this man and his worldly ways was that for some people on the continent and in the diaspora, Mugabe is a freedom fighter who successfully kicked the British settler government out of what was this colonial Southern Rhodesia. While the British queen and her ministers were fiddling "God Save the Queen" and making all sorts of excuses about the white occupiers of African lands, Mugabe - an aspiring school teacher - was waging a rebellion, a rebellion he is still waging at 90 years old.

I guess I have crossed the rubicon into "older." I understand less and less these young radicals, who are almost entirely millennials, who demand ideological purity to what is currently in style.They don't read anything longer than a Tweet. They have a lingo but no syllabus.

This essay isn't about demanding they share my view of things, but for godsake be a little reticent and more global. Anyone who would reduce Greer to a transphobe  is not doing any reading. This is not to say one way or another what Greer's position is: it is to say it's probably not relevant to the weight of her contribution.

In George Bernard Shaw's writing and stage play, "St. Joan," the maid of Orleans is described as an early feminist and rational stylist when it came to clothes. She was an anti-warrior warrior and military strategist. But the patriarchs of the time could bear none of this, let alone see it. Threatened by these things, they burned her. The last words Shaw puts in Joan's mouth, which end the play, resonate: "
O God that madest this beautiful earth, when will it be ready to accept thy saints? How long, O Lord, how long?"

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