Tucked away down a side street in east London, the Women’s Library is one of the best educational museums in the capital. The problem is nobody seems to know it exists. For example, during the hour I spent visiting the library’s latest exhibition on a dreary Saturday afternoon recently, I shared the exhibition space with just one other visitor.
Although substantial gains had been made by women in the preceding decades (the vote, legalised abortion, the introduction of the pill), there was still much to fight for.
Women continued to be “routinely discriminated against in education, the workplace and at home. There was no such thing as equal pay. If you got married, you could lose your job. If your husband beat or raped you, that was your problem,” one display notes.
In addition, while the popular image of the 1960s is one of revolution, free love and anti-establishment politics, the majority of dissident groups were male dominated, often belittling the important contribution women made.
It was in this general atmosphere that 600 women met at Ruskin College in Oxford for the first National Women’s Liberation Movement conference in February 1970. With men running the crèche, the delegates debated the issues facing women and the challenges ahead. “It was an amazing buzz,” remembers Sue Crockford. “I think it was one of those rare times in your own history when you know you’re there at an occasion that’s historically important.”
Playing on a loop in one corner of the exhibition, Crockford’s impressionistic 1971 documentary of the event, A Women’s Place, provides a glimpse of the chaotic and passionate discussions that took place, lingering on the men taking care of the children, albeit with a cigarette in their hands.
Out of the conference came four key demands - equal pay, equal education and job opportunities, free contraception and abortion on demand and free 24-hour nurseries. This influential gathering energised the movement, leading to a headline-grabbing protest at the 1970 Miss World Competition and the first National Women’s Liberation Movement march in March 1971.
At the former, “demonstrators shouted, blew whistles, and threw flour bombs, tomatoes and stink bombs.” Heckled by the protesters, comedian and host Bob Hope replied: “Pretty girls don’t have these problems.”
Studying the photos, press clippings, magazines and oral testimony on display, many visitors will be surprised by the sheer radicalism and energy evident in the movement at this time.
Of the Playboy protest, the Women’s Liberation Newsletter had the following to report. “Sally was arrested for assault (stubbing her cigarette out on a police pig) … Maia was arrested for abusive language (telling a pig to fuck-off).” The past really is a foreign country.
From Ann Oakley’s Housewife and Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch to the monthly magazine Spare Rib, which sold 30,000 copies at its peak, the exhibition argues the literature of the 1970s “brought about a new way of thinking” for many women. Special mention should also go to the selection of staggeringly good posters on display, many of which made me laugh out loud with their radical politics and sharp humour.
Turning to the present day, the question must be asked. Have the demands of the Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1970s been achieved?
With a new Fawcett Society report highlighting the persistent pay gap between men and women, pregnancy discrimination still rife in the workplace, abortion still illegal in Northern Ireland and childcare prohibitively expensive throughout Britain, the answer has to be a resounding No.
So what can concerned women (and men) do? The last section of the exhibition, titled “Where are we now?” gives hope, highlighting the important work women’s groups continue to carry out.
AUSTRALIAN documentary-maker Rob Punton went to Afghanistan to shoot a film about life in a war zone, but wound up in a Kabul jail for 37 nights, accused of rape and spying.
Instead, he witnessed inhumane conditions, torture, and had his life threatened inside the squalid prison.
On August 22, 12 members of Afghanistan’s CID police stormed a suburban house with guns drawn, arresting Punton and three women.
“I can honestly say I thought I was going to die when the police stormed the house. There was a huge explosion, and initially I thought it was a bomb,” Punton said. “At first, I thought they were screaming ‘Taliban!’, so I ran to get my bulletproof vest.
“Then I recognised they were plain-clothes officers from the Afghan CID - the local version of the CIA.
“An army officer came in pointing an AK-47 at me, and I thought that was it: I was going to be put to death.”In jail, Punton survived on one cup of rice a day and shed 17kg.
Accused of rape, having a relationship with a Muslim woman and spying, he was eventually released without charge after paying CID police $40,000. After Punton’s release, the Australian Embassy helped hide him under an assumed name before he flew out of Afghanistan to Dubai, then back to Australia in October.
“The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade is aware of the case and our consular officials in Kabul provided the detained Australian man with consular assistance,” a spokeswoman said.
Until his release, Punton’s parents had left a non-government organisation official in Afghanistan in charge of release negotiations in agreement with Australian consular officials.
Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai announced his second-term cabinet last Saturday, retaining roughly half of his incumbent ministers, including US favorites, while appointing figures tied to Afghan warlords: here.
Two-thirds of Afghan war veterans are suffering from hearing damage: here.
Britain: Military families and former soldiers will travel from across the country on Monday to demand that Gordon Brown brings the troops home from Afghanistan: here.
President Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize speech has been hailed virtually unanimously across the entire spectrum of the American political establishment, including the Nation magazine: here.
With President Barack Obama approaching his first anniversary in office, his escalation of the Afghanistan war is writing a new chapter in the history of Washington’s shredding of democratic forms of rule in order to further militarist aggression abroad: here.
The Messenger and Brothers attempt to deal with the psychological realities of soldiers returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The filmmakers’ efforts are limited by a refusal to tackle the character of the wars themselves: here.
Britain: Families who have either lost loved ones or have relatives serving in Afghanistan will deliver a petition to Downing Street next week calling for all British troops to be withdraw: here.
Jimmy van der Lak [from Suriname] had no trouble finding work when he arrived in Amsterdam in 1925. He was a celebrated tap dancer and bar tender. He briefly made a name for himself as a boxer using the name Jimmy Lacky.
In addition, he worked as an extra in feature films and as a model at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten.
In 1930 Nola Hatterman painted a portrait of Jimmy in an outdoor café. Hatterman uses several motives symbolizing Jimmys occupations at the time. The clenched fist represents the boxer Lacky. The performances in the newspaper represent the artist Lucky and the glass of beer, the bartender Lucky.
Artists like Nola Hatterman (1899-1984) also had political and social reasons for painting black people. In the 1920s and 1930s many artists were communists, who viewed black people as the main victims of capitalism.
The artist Nola Henderika Petronella Hatterman was born in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, on 12 August 1899. She died in Paramaribo 8 May 1984.
This afternoon, there was a lecture about her in Amsterdam, by the author of her biography, Ellen de Vries. The lecture was part of the goodbye for Surinamese-Dutch psychologist Nel Jessurun, leaving fulltime work at the Transcultural Therapists’ Collective in Amsterdam.
Nola Hatterman had already been much interested in drawing as a small girl. However, she did not go to art school, but to acting school. She considered then that as an actress she might do more for women’s rights than as a painter. She acted in various plays, including by Herman Heijermans; and in 1920s Dutch films. She met her first husband, an actor, during her work.
Later, she found out that she prefered visual arts to acting; and prefered communist carpenter plus aspiring visual artist Arie Jansma as love interest to actor Maurits de Vries.
During the 1930s she met Leftist Surinamese exiles in the Netherlands Otto Huiswoud and Anton de Kom. De Kom wrote Wij, slaven van Suriname; a history of slavery and resistance to it in Suriname. Nola Hatterman promised De Kom that she would make paintings inspired by his book. She would honor that promise during the last years of her life, while living in the interior of Suriname.
After the second world war, Nola met the new generation of Surinamese coming to the Netherlands: including people like Jules Sedney, later Prime Minister of Suriname; and Eddy Bruma, later pro independence MP. She supported Bruma’s aim of independence for Suriname from Dutch colonialism. She wrote poetry in Surinamese. In 1953, she emigrated to Paramaribo, the capital of Suriname.
She became the pioneer of art education in Suriname. Not everybody always agreed with her preference for realist against abstract art.
She went to Brokopondo in the interior. She painted subjects, especially from eighteenth century Surinamese history, like maroons (runaway slaves) attacking plantations to free the slaves there; and a woman running away from slavery; and Boekoe fortress, a rebel stronghold in the jungle which was very hard to find for the pro slavery Dutch army.
The Boekoe painting today is owned by politician Desi Bouterse, army commander during the military regime of the 1980s. Bouterse claims that Nola Hatterman sold it to him. Ellen de Vries is skeptical about this, as Ms Hatterman wanted her work to be in museums, accessible to the public, and not in private ownership.
In 1984, Nola Hatterman went to Paramaribo to see the first showing there of a film about her life. She would never see the film. She was killed in an accident before the show.
Descendants of African slaves have called on US Virgin Islands MPs to require corporations doing business in the territory to research their histories and disclose whether they had profited from the trans-Atlantic slave trade: here.
Hollywood on Trial (1976) directed by Daniel Halpern, Jr., written by Arnie Riesman, cinematography by Barry Abrams, narration by John Huston
The Hollywood witchhunt and blacklisting of left-wing actors, writers and directors in the post-World War II period has been the subject of many books, but has received little serious attention in Hollywood itself. …
More recently, in 2007, the worthwhile but limited documentary Trumbo appeared, based on letters from screenwriter Dalton Trumbo who was one of the Hollywood Ten, the writers and directors who were cited for contempt of Congress and blacklisted in 1947 for refusing to testify, on First Amendment grounds, before the witchhunting House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).
The only effort to deal in some detail and in documentary form with the history of the HUAC hearings in this period is the 1976 film Hollywood on Trial.
There is much valuable material in this movie. The footage in some cases speaks for itself, showing the Congressional witchhunters at work.
The film exposes the myth commonly subscribed to that the witchhunt was the product of a few flawed individual minds, specifically those of the redbaiting Senator from Wisconsin, Joe McCarthy, and the California Congressman who went on to become president of the United States some two decades later, Richard Nixon.
Senator Joseph McCarthy
While McCarthy and Nixon were notorious for playing the anti-communist card throughout their despicable political careers, they were only two among other prominent players in these events, and neither played a leading role in the Hollywood events. The witchhunt represented the policy of the American ruling class, not simply one or more of its political representatives. …
The documentary’s most valuable service is in dispelling the superficial and mistaken conception that the anti-communist hearings arose suddenly in conjunction with the post-World War II Cold War, and just as suddenly disappeared without leaving a trace.
In fact, although HUAC became a permanent body in 1945, its origins go back to the 1930s and even further, to a Congressional committee that began investigating Bolshevism after the 1917 Russian Revolution. …
HUAC was neither the beginning nor the end of anti-communism. In recent decades many in Hollywood have smugly assured themselves that the days of the blacklist were an unfortunate aberration. The aftermath of the events of September 11, 2001 demonstrated the stupidity of such a claim, as new efforts were made to ensure that movies toed a patriotic, pro-war line.
Lesbian Who Fled Army Opens Legal Ground in Canada
By Wency Leung
WeNews correspondent
Monday, December 7, 2009
After fleeing abuse at Fort Campbell, a lesbian now living in Canada is hoping for asylum on the unusual grounds of anti-homosexual persecution within the U.S. military. Her case could affect other claims by asylum seekers from democracies.
VANCOUVER, British Columbia –For months, Pvt. Bethany Smith silently endured taunts and physical abuse from her fellow soldiers at Fort Campbell, Ky., for being a lesbian.
But when she received an anonymous note one day with a threat against her life, Smith decided she had to get out of the Army.
“It said that they were going to break into the supply room and get the keys to my room and beat me to death in my bed,” Smith said, adding that the letter came only a couple months after she learned the Army was deploying her to Afghanistan. “It was at that point that I knew I was more afraid of the people who were supposed to be on my side than people we were supposed to be fighting overseas.”
More than 12,000 service members have lost their jobs because of the U.S. military’s so-called “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. A disproportionate number of those discharges are women, according to 2008 statistics gathered by the Washington-based Servicemembers Legal Defense Network from the government under the Freedom of Information Act.
With the help of an acquaintance, Smith abandoned Fort Campbell and drove for two straight days to Canada, where she hoped to seek asylum.
She crossed the border on Sept. 11, 2007.
More than two years later, Smith, now 21, is fighting to stay in Ottawa, where she works for a call center.
Her efforts to obtain refugee status were boosted in November when a Canadian federal court judge decided her case should be reconsidered by the country’s refugee board, which had earlier rejected her claim.
Smith said she was thrilled with the court’s decision.
“I basically jumped around the room, all happy,” she said.
USA: According to an analysis of statewide data taken from 1998-2001, women in Oregon who made less than $50,000 a year were more than three times likely to report they were discriminated against by health providers because of their insurance status during pregnancy and delivery: here.
Vincere, the latest feature by veteran Italian director Marco Bellocchio, is about Ida Dalser, the first wife of fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. The audacious work is currently on the international film festival circuit, after premiering at Cannes in May this year. The movie has received some well-deserved praise and last month won the best direction, cinematography, editing, art direction and acting prizes at the Chicago film festival. Unlike most of Bellocchio’s more recent work, Vincere has secured several international distribution deals and eventually will be released in US and Australian cinemas.
gives valuable insights into Dalser’s tragic life, the deep class polarisation of Italy in the lead-up to and throughout World War I, and some sense of the brutal, all-encompassing state repression during the first decade and a half of Mussolini’s fascist rule.
The movie opens in 1907 with the first encounter between Dalser (Giovanna Mezzogiorno) and Mussolini (Filippo Timo), at that point a Socialist Party member and journalist, and a militant atheist. One of Mussolini’s earliest pamphlets was entitled God does not exist and the movie’s shows him defiantly challenging a group of Christian scholars. Dalser, originally from Sopramonte in Trento, then under Austrian rule, runs a successful French-style beauty salon. She is impressed with the young firebrand and falls in love.
Mussolini as editor of the social democratic paper Avanti drives up its circulation, but with the outbreak of WWI the Socialist Party splits into two factions—those calling for Italian intervention in the bloody imperialist conflict, and those rejecting any involvement.
Mussolini becomes a ferocious proponent of Italian intervention, seeing the war as an opportunity for Italy to wrest control of Trento and Trieste from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Denounced as a traitor and expelled from the party, he establishes his own paper—Il Popolo d’Italia—to agitate for the war. Dalser sells most of her possessions to help finance Mussolini’s political activities and the couple are married and have a son. Mussolini, however, maintains a certain distance and refuses to completely commit himself to Dalser. He joins the army and is wounded in a training accident.
Dalser later discovers that he has married another woman—Rachele Guidi (Michela Cescon)—and there is an angry altercation between the two women at a church hospital where Mussolini is recuperating from his injuries. The future fascist dictator is beginning to be noticed by sections of Italy’s ruling elite, including King Vittorio Emanuele III, and has no intention of letting Dalser or anybody else stand in the way of his political ambition. Dalser publicly insists that she is Mussolini’s wife but is made persona non grata and then placed under virtual house arrest at her sister’s home. Government agents raid the house, destroying all evidence of her relationship with Mussolini and she is incarcerated in a mental asylum.
Dalser stubbornly refuses to be intimidated and writes to the Pope, the king, in fact, anyone in authority she hopes will listen and demands that she be officially acknowledged as Mussolini’s first wife. She vacillates between denouncing Mussolini as a traitor and deluding herself that he still loves her and is simply testing her loyalty. Dalser escapes the institution only to be recaptured and is packed off to San Clemente asylum in Venice where she is held until she dies in 1937.
Benitino, her son, is also hounded by government officials. The young boy is sent to boarding school, told that his mother is dead and later “adopted” by a local fascist police chief. Benitino insists that Mussolini is his father. Under constant surveillance for the rest of his life, he too is committed to an asylum where he dies in 1942, aged 27.
Vincere is a compelling work by Bellocchio, an interesting and significant director with a 45-year career in Italian cinema. Born in 1938, he studied at Italy’s prestigious Centro Sperimental di Cinematografia and then the Slade School of Fine Art in London, where he wrote a thesis on Michelangelo Antonioni and Robert Bresson before directing his first feature—Fists in the Pocket (I pugni in tasca) in 1965.
Fists in the Pocket is a dark and confronting story about a dysfunctional Italian middle class family and rightly regarded as one of the classics of post-WWII Italian cinema. It was denounced by sections of the Christian Democratic Party who wanted it banned, claiming it to be a slur against the Italian family. …
Vincere highlights Bellocchio’s artistic strengths, and some of his weaknesses. The movie is characterised by its visceral imagery and strong performances, particularly from Giovanna Mezzogiorno, and a palpable anger over the destruction of the lives of Dalser and her son. Mussolini’s regime often used psychiatric institutions to incarcerate and silence its opponents. …
Vincere provides a sense of the extreme class tensions during WWI with demonstrations and street-fighting between pro- and anti-war workers. One clash erupts in a cinema during newsreel screenings of Italian involvement in the war.
The asylum scenes are both tragic and beautiful, including an extraordinary moment when Dalser climbs up the bars of the asylum in the depth of winter and flings out her letters declaring that she is Mussolini’s wife and protesting her treatment. Another scene provides a damning exposure of the attitude of those sections of the Italian middle class who had accommodated themselves to Mussolini’s dictatorship. One psychiatrist tells Dalser to adapt herself to the existing political reality. This government will not last forever, he complacently declares, so you must become a great actress and pretend to be a “good fascist woman”. She rejects his cowardly advice.
Vincere, of course, is not flawless. Mussolini’s political evolution—from a militant anti-clerical socialist to a pro-war demagogue and a fascist dictator—is never fully explored. Bellocchio provides little sense of the political forces that shaped Il Duce and why. The movie heavily focuses on psychological factors—Mussolini’s ambition, ego, ruthlessness and other personal characteristics but his reaction to the revolutionary movement of the Italian working class following WWI is absent. This leaves the door open for all sorts of confused and wrong-headed interpretations.
One film writer praising Vincere, for example, has suggested that Dalser was an “instinctive anti-fascist” and that Italians, “like Dalser, all too eagerly succumbed to his [Mussolini’s] toxic allure”. This is false.
Mussolini took power not because ordinary Italians “eagerly succumbed to his toxic allure” but because the extraordinary post-WWI revolutionary movement of the Italian working class was blocked by the Socialist Party leadership. The young and inexperienced Italian Communist Party, founded in January 1921, proved incapable of mobilising workers against this betrayal and leading them in the struggle for a workers government and a socialist overturn.
Mussolini and his fascist Black Shirts, with financial and political support from the king, the military and Italian industrialists, stepped into the political vacuum and set to work murdering and intimidating the most class-conscious and militant workers. Britain was just one of the many imperialist powers that praised this bloody operation, with figures like Winston Churchill publicly hailing Mussolini as a hero and cheering from the sidelines. …
Notwithstanding Bellocchio’s tendency to shy away from these questions and to focus on personal psychological factors, his latest movie has integrity and is an important artistic contribution. Hopefully it will encourage other filmmakers to explore other aspects of this period in more detail. As the hysterical response to Vincere by extreme-right commentators and demagogues, such as the neo-fascist parliamentarian Alessandra Mussolini, Il Duce’s granddaughter, indicates, the unearthing of Italy’s real political history remains a crucial political and artistic question for the Italian filmmakers and the working class as a whole.
Michael Moore’s new film Capitalism: A Love Story is playing in many countries now, including the Netherlands.
The film starts off by comparing the USA, as they had become by 2008, the last year of George W. Bush’s presidency, to the Roman empire. Seemingly strong, but still heading for decline.
The film discusses the 2008, last year of the Bush presidency, bailout by taxpayers’ money of banks and other big businesses. A Democratic member of the House of Representatives being interviewed tells how Congress voted for the Iraq war based on government lies. The Bush bailout proposals, he says, were again based on lies, and he did not want to vote for them. Still, after an initial rejection, they passed, with enough Democrats for Bush voting for them.
This is a video from the USA about “dead peasant” insurance.
The film mentions that there are no pro capitalist statements in either the United States constitution (contrary to the draft European Union constitution, and its successor, the Lisbon treaty, by the way) or the Christian New Testament. Both often mentioned by today’s US propagandists of capitalism.
The music is accompanied by quotations by eighteenth century founding fathers of the American revolution like Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, critical of capitalism.
A conversation with Austin Chu, co-director of The Recess Ends. A film about the impact of the economic crisis in the US: here.
Milan, November 27 - Fresh proceedings against Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi for allegedly bribing British corporate lawyer David Mills will begin on December 4, a Milan court ruled Friday.
Berlusconi was removed from the trial by an immunity law passed by his government last year but the law was struck down by the Constitutional Court last month.
The trial was therefore reactivated but the judges have been required to step down because they found Mills guilty and a fresh set of judges must now take up the case.
Findings and evidence admitted during Berlusconi’s involvement in the first proceedings, up to October 2008, will be valid in the second one, the court ruled Friday.
In the case, Berlusconi is accused of paying Mills $600,000 to hush up evidence in two previous corruption trials.
Mills has been found guilty twice in the case and has one appeal left against his four-and-a-half year sentence. Berlusconi’s lawyer, Niccolo’ Ghedini, said Friday the premier will not be able to attend the trial’s opening session because of a cabinet meeting.
…
Another trial against Berlusconi, for alleged irregularities in the sale of film rights, has already restarted.
The premier did not attend the first session of that trial because of a world food summit in Rome.
Berlusconi’s People of Freedom Party confirmed Thursday it will present a new version of the immunity law, this time as a constitutional amendment which it believes will pass muster with the Constitutional Court.
The centre-right government is also framing a controversial law to cut the duration of trials, for crimes carrying less than a 10-year penalty, to a mandatory two years for each of the three stages.
Should that law be approved, both of Berlusconi’s trials would be annulled by the statute of limitations.
According to the (Conservative) Daily Mail in England, “Blair lied and lied again: Mandarins reveal that 10 days before Iraq invasion PM knew Saddam couldn’t use WMDs“: here.
This video says about itself:
This is a video highlighting the propaganda and lies told by the Bush administration in order to justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
The military timetable for war in Iraq did not allow UN weapons inspectors the time to conclude their work, a former British ambassador to the US has told a public inquiry.
Christopher Meyer told a hearing in London on Thursday that because contingency military plans had been decided before inspectors went in, “we found ourselves scrabbling for the smoking gun”.
Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser to US President Bush, was the first person UK ambassador to the US Christopher Meyer heard mention Iraq on September 11, 2001, he told The Iraq Inquiry yesterday: here.
RICE RAISED THE ISSUE OF SADDAM IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE TWIN TOWERS WERE ATTACKED: here.
The former British ambassador to the United Nations warned his superiors he might have to resign if the UN Security Council failed to pass a resolution on Iraq, the inquiry into the war heard today.
Sir Jeremy Greenstock said he believed a resolution was essential for the UK to become involved in “internationally legitimate” military action against Saddam Hussein’s regime.
The invasion of Iraq was of “questionable legitimacy,” Britain’s ambassador to the United Nations at the time of the war Sir Jeremy Greenstock has told the official inquiry: here.
The government’s chief legal advisor informed then British prime minister Tony Blair in 2002 that deposing Saddam Hussein would contravene international law, a newspaper reported on Sunday: here.
UK Iraq War Inquiry: Blair Was Told Iraq War Was Illegal, Decided On War In 2002: here.
While the American corporate media has given little attention to it, an official British inquiry into the war with Iraq has brought to light damning testimony about the Bush administration’s deliberate launching of an invasion to overthrow the regime of Saddam Hussein and subjugate Iraq to American domination: here.
The possibility of a war against Iraq was raised in a telephone conversation between George Bush and Tony Blair just days after the September 11 2001 terrorist attacks, a former Downing Street aide has revealed: here.
Revisiting the semantics, dissembling and downright lies in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq: here.
Yet another Whitehall official has confirmed that a plot to remove Saddam Hussein was already being hatched in the autumn of 2002, a year before the Iraq invasion: here.
Iraq Inquiry bombshell: Secret letter to reveal new Blair war lies: here.
The official British inquiry into the Iraq war has provided damning evidence of the Blair government’s collusion in the planning and waging of an illegal war of aggression by the US administration of President George W. Bush: here.
