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meta-squash · 4 years ago

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Brick Club 1.5.13 “Solution of Some Questions of The Municipal Police”

Oh man. This one got long.

The spectacle continues. Fantine and Javert do not walk to the precinct alone; they’re followed by all the jeering spectators that were watching the fight. They are still yelling, laughing, genuinely finding amusement in Fantine’s humiliation. Fantine has returned to the mechanical lack of self she had before the fight. In the course of this chapter we’ll see her continuously oscillate between outbursts of presence and self-assertive distress, and moments of frightened distance and emotional shut-down.

“Curiosity is gluttony. To see is to devour.” Hugo keeps reiterating this. One of the worst things, aside from being an actual antagonist, aside from being an actual actor in the ruin of a person, is to be a bystander, a rubbernecker. There are no innocent bystanders, and by standing there, watching, finding glee and entertainment in the suffering of others, you are part of the problem. Curiosity is good, when it’s curiosity in pursuit of a solution or an answer in order to help someone. Curiosity is bad when the interest is purely voyeuristic. (I want to know why Hugo decided to use “to see” (voir) rather than “to watch” (regarder) in this sentence.)

Hugo’s discussion of the relationship between sex workers and cops is so sharp. The police have complete control over what happens to sex workers, who they choose to let go and who they bring in, how they are punished and for how long. I imagine, in cases that don’t include Javert, there’s a lot of “I won’t detain you if you sleep with me etc” type behavior from other cops. (Perhaps this is why Javert is so scary; he can’t be bribed or convinced and doesn’t use his status as leverage like that.) The police can “confiscate at will those two sad things they call their industry and their liberty.” This line just gets to me. The only thing people as poor as Fantine feel they have left is their way of making a living, and their freedom to be alive. Everything is else is on loan or in debt. And the cops can take those last two things at any moment. Not only that, but their industry and their liberty are both intrinsically connected to their bodies. Their industry isn’t something they can leave at the end of the day; they are always existing within the body that is also the main component of their livelihood.

I don’t know enough about legal proceedings of the era, but Javert is judge and jury here, condemning Fantine all by himself to six months in prison. On the other hand, Valjean (and Champmathieu) must go to court at Arras in order to be sentenced. Is this Hugo doing his Artistic Liberties handwavy thing, or could this have actually been done? It seems odd that some people could be sentenced by a random policeman and others have to go to court in front of a jury.

“It was one of those moments in which he exercised without restraint, but with all the scruples of a strict conscience, his formidable discretionary power.” Javert is extremely aware of his role in all of this. What’s fascinating to me about Javert is that he isn’t going around convicting people willy nilly, randomly making up crimes and things to fit a quota the way cops do in present day. With Fantine (and later, with Valjean, and even with the Thenardiers) he sits and he considers and he thinks about what he’s witnessed until he’s sure he’s seen a crime. The problem is, his morals and opinions are so rigid and unchanging that he could probably find crime almost anywhere, because he’s completely inflexible about what things are good or bad. Also, this arrest of Fantine is apparently a “great” (grande, as in big) thing, which I find interesting. Prostitution is essentially legal, so perhaps for him it’s a big thing because he finally has a reason to arrest someone whose legal profession he morally disagrees with? Or perhaps Fantine isn’t registered while most others are? Or maybe it’s big because it’s not just an arrest of a sex worker, but of a sex worker who has committed violence against a well-to-do gentleman? I don’t know.

“He was conducting a trial.” Nearly every time Hugo uses this phrase, when an individual character is conducting a trial of someone or something else, the resulting judgement is incorrect or too extreme. This happened with Valjean’s trial against religion, Javert is doing it here and will do it again at the end of the novel, Marius sort of does it to Valjean after the wedding. Each time a person’s worth is judged by a single person, the judgement falls short.

Fantine is terrified of prison, but part of her fear isn’t prison itself, but the wages. She’s more worried about the welfare of Cosette than herself. This makes sense to me. To her, prison itself probably doesn’t feel like it would be too much more miserable than her current state. The only increase in her misery would be her worry for Cosette and her inability to pay for her daughter’s care.

“Without getting to her feet, she dragged herself along the floor, dirtied by the muddy feet of all these men, clasping her hands, on her knees.” What an intense image. This is the condition of poor women: forced to beg for mercy from men who have power over them, while crawling through all the problems caused by those men’s uncaring and manipulative actions, dirtied by the utter lack of assistance from anyone with the actual power to help, and scoffed at when they clasp their hands and kiss the coattails of their oppressors.

Fantine’s monologue to Javert makes me so sad because she goes back and forth between “I did nothing wrong” and “maybe I was wrong to react the way I did,” when her reaction was so completely right. She asks, “Do they have the right to throw snow down our backs when we are going along quietly without harming anybody?” and I feel as though, in Javert’s eyes, they kind of do, because he disapproves of her profession in the first place. Fantine also brings up her illness here and in her other monologues, never as an excuse or even as an attempt to elicit pity, simply as an explanation. She also says “I wasn’t immodest with him, I didn’t speak with him. That was when he put the snow on me.” She literally tells Javert that she wasn’t trying to engage with Bamatabois in any way, that she was completely ignoring him even as he tried to incite her. The last chapter doesn’t mention how long he was mocking her for, only that her pacing brought her back to his spot “every five minutes,” which means he must have been out there harassing her for quite some time before he shoved snow down her back and she snapped. And yet, here she talks herself in a circle, suddenly turning around and saying “Perhaps I was wrong to get mad.” It’s just so sad that she’s completely in the right and yet she doubts even that.

And Javert doesn’t hear a word of her explanation or her pleas. She realizes this, and instead tries to use Cosette. But this isn’t her using Cosette to save herself, this is using Cosette to save Cosette. She realizes that if she goes to prison she won’t be able to pay for Cosette. She tries to use her “poor starved child,” tries to ask for pity for Cosette. If Javert won’t pity her, a sex worker, maybe he’ll pity her as the mother of a little girl. But considering Javert’s childhood, he probably sees Cosette as equally as bad as her mother, because she’s the child of a prostitute, born out of wedlock, living in poverty with some random innkeepers two hundred miles away.

“I’m not a bad woman at heart. It’s not laziness and greed that have brought me to this; I’ve drunk brandy but it was from misery.” God, this line. I don’t even know who would think something like greed or laziness (but especially greed) could bring someone into this line of work. Maybe if she was, like, a well-known professional sex worker in a Paris brothel she could make good money, but as a random woman walking the streets in a garrisoned town? She clearly makes practically nothing. And poverty like this isn’t lazy at all. Every second not spent sleeping is spent trying to make money, worrying about being able to pay rent or debts or to find food or some way to keep warm or whatever. I hate that even today people still think poverty comes from laziness.

“Great grief is a divine and terrible thing that transfigures the wretched. At that instant Fantine had again become beautiful.” I don’t really know what to do with this line. It feels like a weird fetishization of poverty and suffering?

“She would have softened a heart of granite; but you cannot soften a heart of wood.” Why can’t you soften a heart of wood? Because wood only rots when it gets soft. I do find it interesting that Hugo calls Javert’s heart wooden, but uses statue imagery for him for the rest of the chapter.

Javert declaring that "The Eternal Father in person couldn’t help you now” is a heavy line. The law is above even god here. If god appeared right now and told him to free Fantine, Javert is saying he wouldn’t do it. A page later we see him reluctantly stand down to Valjean, which negates this statement, but it’s interesting that at this instant, he says wouldn’t even be moved to mercy by god. And it’s true, he’s not moved to mercy, ever. At no point is it ever his decision to let Fantine go. He does not bow to pleas for mercy, but he will bow to authority, even if he questioned it a moment before.

Valjean enters without being noticed and watches the exchange. I feel like this is a weird reversal of Hugo’s “to see is to devour” from earlier in the chapter. Valjean is watching, but not out of voyeuristic curiosity. He intends to actually act, to do something about what has happened and help someone who needs help.

Throughout the last few chapters, Fantine has grown rougher with each loss. Her speech and personality has changed, she drinks, she is louder, less polite, and more childish. She’s lost her “modesty” and with that any pretense. There’s no more masking. She’s not trying to fit in, because that’s not happening anymore.

Somehow I’ve glossed over this line each time I’ve read the book, but when Fantine spits in Madeleine’s face, Hugo seems to imply that it reminds Javert of his suspicions re: Madeleine’s true identity. Javert sees this action and makes the connection between convict-Valjean and Fantine, and instead of seeing the sacrilege of a prostitute spitting on a mayor, for a moment he sees an interaction between two outlaws of society: a convict and a prostitute.

I’ve noticed that Fantine talks to herself in reaction to being freed in the same way that Valjean talked to himself when Myriel was first kind to him/when the bishop told the gendarmes to set him free, and the same way Eponine talks to herself. There’s a marked difference between moments when characters “talk to themselves” but it’s obvious that it’s a narrative mechanic of them thinking in their heads, and when they actually talk to themselves while other people are present. For Fantine and Valjean, it’s in moments when they are in great emotional shock/distress that they speak aloud to themselves while other people are present. (I’m not sure what to make of that in terms of Eponine, who always seems to be speaking mostly to herself.)

Fantine starts out this monologue talking to herself, but then she turns it into talking to Javert. It’s interesting that her utter rejection of Valjean means that she’s actually turning to Javert to speak, despite being absolutely terrified of him only moments ago.

Fantine announces that she’s not afraid of Valjean. Of course she’s not; in her eyes he’s done everything to her that he can. He has caused all her suffering and doesn’t have the power to cause anything more. She’s still afraid of Javert because he still has the power to hurt and ruin her. He can fine her or send her to prison, and condemn her for as long as he likes. She doesn’t know anything about Valjean, except that she assumes he doesn’t care. What she knows about Javert is that he does care, only that care is on the side of punishment, not one of mercy. It’s interesting then that she continues to try and appeal to his better nature (one which he does not possess) or to his pity (which he also does not possess). She also continues to try and convince herself that it is Javert who has decided to let her go, not Madeleine. It’s almost as though she thinks that if she can convince herself that he’s the one letting her go, she can also convince him to actually do it.

Fantine’s monologues keep coming back to wages. She specifically criticizes the way that the prison contractors do wrong to poor people by paying them so little for so much labor. Her discussion of her own expenses is also still applicable to modern day. She still owes money to the Thenardiers, but she’s up to date on her rent. This is still the experience of the poor: you deal with more immediate expenses first, and debts come second, even as they continue to rack up.

Both Fantine and Javert are thrown off balance by Madeleine’s declaration. Fantine spends her entire monologue before attempting to leave trying convince herself that it is Javert that has let her go. It is only when she hears Madeleine confirm that he was the one who declared it that she is thrown off-kilter, having to reconcile her opinion of Madeleine with his (perceived) actions. Javert is thrown by someone in an authority position acting the way that Madeleine is; this is the first time we see him actually question authority and refuse to act on an order.

“...that order, law, morality, government, society itself, were personified in him, Javert?” This is the only time, I think, where Hugo implies that a character is consciously becoming a Symbol. The fact that Hugo even suggests the potential for Javert to see himself as the embodiment of law, morality, society, etc is unique, because no other character sees themselves as the embodiment of such big concepts. The closest might be Valjean seeing himself as a Bad Person Forever, but even that is a much smaller concept, in that Valjean is looking at his past self, not at himself as the entire concept of Criminals Everywhere. But Hugo only gives two choices when it comes to Javert: either he is questioning authority for the first time in his life, or he is consciously becoming a Symbol. It turns out to be the former, but both of these things are really extremely significant.To become a conscious symbol, or even to have the potential of becoming a conscious symbol, is a unique level of conceptual engagement for a character, almost like starting to break the fourth wall. And questioning authority is a First for Javert here, significant because it starts the ball rolling and he continues to question Madeleine’s authority from here on out, even if it’s only to himself and not to his face.

“The insult does not belong to him, but to justice.” Okay so Hapgood translates this line a little differently, but WOW I love this FMA version a lot. Just the idea that something as small as an insult doesn’t even get to belong to the person it was directed at, but instead can be entirely claimed by the law. Now, I know that this line is supposed to mean that Fantine’s insult to Madeleine was by default also an insult to justice due to Madeleine’s authority position, but I always read it as the law taking this insult for its own use. Like, “This societal outcast insulted someone, so now we can arrest her, because any sort of social indiscretion from someone like that belongs to the law” or “this insult, because it was made in the presence of police by someone in custody, now belongs to the law rather than her or her target.” (It also reminds me of modern day cops, who arrest or threaten to arrest people simply for hurting their little baby feelings despite doing nothing illegal.)

Fantine goes through a parallel struggle to Valjean here. The man she hated so much (Madeleine) was her savior, just as the religion Valjean doubted and hated had been his. I mean, literally they have the same “two paths, one of light and one of darkness” symbolism, the same angel/demon symbolism, the same conflict about whether or not they must change their whole soul and beliefs, the same absolute terror, and then the final feeling of hope and gratitude. She kneels in front of Valjean the same way Valjean knelt in front of Myriel’s door.

This is also the first time we see Valjean’s benevolence in speech, action, and monetary terms. He rescued Fauchelevent, but we don’t seem him speak to Fauchelevent after that despite the purchase of his horse and cart and getting him a new job. We never see him speak to anyone else that he helps, especially since his usual mode is Reverse Robbery (thank you Mellow for that term btw) rather than in-person benevolence. But we do get him not only rescuing Fantine from prison, but speaking to her, offering her monetary help, offering her pretty much any assistance towards happiness. I wonder if the difference between Valjean’s interaction here with Fantine, and his interaction with Fauchelevent or any other person he gives money to or helps, is that this is the first instance that he feels guilty or personally responsible. Every other act of charity, including Fauchelevent is just that, selfless charity just because. But this, Fantine, is Valjean righting a wrong that has been done. Even though it was without his knowledge, he still seems to feel responsible.

Once again, we have a moment of hope for Fantine that is immediately dashed. Fantine is free, she’s going to get her daughter back, she can leave her miserable life for something better, her debts will be paid, she can be happy. Only she faints, and she spends the rest of her time in hospital until her death.

#les miserables #les miserables meta #brickclub #lm 1.5.13 #les mis #les mis meta

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nonameinanytongue · 7 years ago

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The Flower & the Serpent: The Violent Women of Game of Thrones

“Here's the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. Oh, oh, oh!”

-Lady Macbeth, Macbeth, Act V, Scene I

DC’s Wonder Woman opened this summer to critical acclaim. Pop culture outlets made much of its empowered protagonist and progressive themes, lauding everything from its feminist fight scenes to Wonder Woman’s thigh jiggle. In approaching the first superhero flick of the modern big-budget tentpole era both helmed by and starring a woman with such intense and specific scrutiny, much is overlooked and more repurposed to suit a flexible, almost reactive set of ideals held by fans and critics alike. If a woman does something in art that shows her to be powerful, it is interpreted as inherently feminist no matter its context in the work of art or the world beyond.

Perhaps in a world where women, homosexuals, and transsexuals lobby vigorously for the right to serve in active combat zones a conflation of ability to do violence and the possession of feminist power is understandable. Surely there are many women who, for reasons understandable or awful, crave invincible bodies and the power and grace to crush the people who hurt them. Many more are happy to acclaim any media in which a woman emerges victorious as another mile marker driven into the roadside on the highway of equality. Especially beloved are movies, shows, comics, and novels in which such victories are portrayed as straightforwardly virtuous and good.

Think of Sansa Stark condemning her rapist and tormentor, Ramsay Bolton, to a grisly death at the jaws of his own hounds. How many fans and critics expressed unbridled joy at that, as though Sansa had won some kind of symbolic victory for all women? Her sister Arya’s rampage, which has taken her across the Narrow Sea and back again and claimed the lives of dozens, has likewise been applauded as a meaningful triumph in the way we tell women’s stories. For the record, I think both of these plots are intensely compelling and reveal volumes both about the characters themselves and the world they inhabit. Game of Thrones is a show nearly singular in its refusal to make violence joyous or cathartic, no matter the whoops and cheers of many of its fans.

Still, no matter how many times the show delivers searing anti-war images or explores the corrosive influence of violence on those who commit it, viewers remain hungry for the spectacle of women overpowering their enemies and turning back on them the weapons of their own oppression. In a culture where Redpill misogynists hold elected office and our president is a serial rapist, a desire to see women take power with a dash of fire and blood feels all too understandable, but celebrating the destruction of their personalities and lives is a reductive way to understand their stories.

In order to understand what Game of Thrones has to say about violent women, it’s necessary to set aside the thrill that seeing them materially ascendant brings and focus on the images, words, and larger context of the show’s particular examples. Where films like Wonder Woman thrive by repurposing a complex and horrifying conflict (World War I in the first film, the Cold War in the upcoming second) into a heroic battle between good and evil, Game of Thrones, rooted in a genre where conflict is often artificially cleansed of moral ambiguity through devices like entire species of evil-doers, makes no attempt to sand the edges off of its depictions of war or violence.

Nearly every woman on the show, with the possible exceptions of Gilly and Myrcella, are directly involved in war, torture, and many other forms of brutality. From Catelyn and Lysa’s ugly mess of a trial for Tyrion, an act they surely must have known would cost many smallfolk their lives once Tywin Lannister caught wind of it, to Ygritte fighting to save her people by sticking the innocent farmers in the shadow of the Wall full of arrows, the actions of women with power both physical and political are shown to bear fruit just as ugly as any their husbands, sons, and brothers can cultivate. There’s an uncomfortable truth lurking there, an admission that some modes of action and ways of being may not intersect meaningfully with many of modern feminism’s tenets.

In this essay I will dissect scenes and story to illustrate the show’s deeply antipathetic stance on violence and the ways in which it is misunderstood both by those who enjoy the show and by those who detest it or object to it.

I. ARYA

If a man is getting his eyes stabbed out by a child he intended to beat and rape, does the child’s gender matter when determining what the scene is meant to convey? Is it somehow triumphant for a girl to do that to another living person, no matter how repugnant he might be? Isn’t it possible that what the scene communicates is not that Arya’s slow transformation into a butcher with scant regard for human life is something we ought to cheer for but that the fact she couldn’t survive in Westeros or Essos as anything else, much less as a little girl, is deeply sad?

Arya’s crimes nearly always echo those of her tormentors. Think of the first person she kills, a stable boy, not so different in age or appearance from her erstwhile playmate, Mycah, who was slaughtered by the Hound a bare few months before. Or else consider Polliver, the Lannister soldier who murdered her friend Lommy and whose own mocking words she spits back at him as she plunges her sword up through his jaw. More recently, her wholesale slaughter of House Frey recalls with a visual exactitude which can be nothing but intentional the massacre of her own family and their allies at the Red Wedding. In this last instance she literally dons their murderer’s skin in order to exact her revenge, pressing Walder Frey’s face against her own in an act that feels uncomfortably more like embodiment than disguise.

Arya’s long journey through peril and terror has hardened her, but there’s little reason to rejoice in her hard-won powers of stealth and bloodletting. Who, after all, does she resemble with her obsession over old scores and her penchant for cruelly ironic punishments if not the subject of this essay’s next section.

II. CERSEI

Cersei Lannister, is distinguished from a hundred other interchangeable evil queens by the attention devoted to her own suffering. Sold by her father to a man who beat and raped her, denied the glory heaped on her twin by sole dint of her gender, humiliated and terrorized by the despicable son whose monstrosity she nurtured, and finally stripped, shaven, and marched barefoot through jeering crowds after being tortured for weeks or months in the dungeons of the church she armed and enabled, Cersei’s brutality serves only to deepen her misery and isolation.

The aforementioned tyranny of the High Sparrow she put in power, the murder of her monstrous son by her political rivals after she groomed him to be the beast he was, her conflicted and good-hearted younger son’s suicide after his mother’s revenge on the High Sparrow and the Tyrells broke his spirit; Cersei’s litany of victories reads a lot like a list of agonizing losses when you look at it sidelong. Certainly her grasping, vindictive reign has brought her no joy. It’s true that audiences are expected to see Cersei as a horrible human being, which she is, but the time the show spends on giving viewers a chance to empathize with this badly damaged person trying to throttle happiness and security out of a recalcitrant world argues for a more complex interpretation of her character. Watching her need to dominate rip her family and sanity apart, ushering all three of her children into early graves, transforms her from a straightforward villain to a troubled and tragic figure.

III. DAENERYS

Sold into slavery after a life on the run with her unstable and abusive brother and raped on her wedding night by a foreign warlord, Daenerys’s relationship to violence after her ascent to power is complex and heavily ideological. Her crusade to end slavery, motivated as much or more by strength of character and an innate sense of justice than it is by personal suffering and an impulse toward vengeance, has engendered sweeping changes throughout Essos, but at times it has taken on shades of the ostentatiously symbolic punishments for which her family name is famous. The crucifixion of the Masters is a particularly gratuitous example as Daenerys allows her desire to change the world and her need to feel good about the justice she doles out combine to produce a dreadful and inhumane outcome.

This act of performative brutality finds its echo in the rogue execution of a Son of the Harpy, imprisoned and awaiting trial, by Daenerys’s fervent supporter Mossador. Dany may claim that she is not above the law when Mossador confronts her, but when butchery without trial suited her she was quick to embrace it. Her case is uniquely complicated by her enemy: the slavers. Nothing excuses violence like a civilization of rapists and flesh-peddlers beating and maiming their human chattel onscreen, and there is powerful catharsis in seeing their corrupt works shredded and their hateful and exploitative lives snuffed out, but in making them suffer and in choosing the easy way out through orgiastic episodes of violence, Dany betrays her own unwillingness to do the hard work of reform. In many ways, her long stay in Meereen functions as the tragic story of her decision to embrace the grandiose violence her ancestors partook of so freely. We may feel good watching her triumph over evil, but we’re reminded frequently of the horrors and miseries of her reign.

IV. BRIENNE

Brienne’s pursuit of knighthood and adherence to its practices and code is no warrior-girl fantasy about a scabby-kneed tomboy learning to swordfight. Trapped in a body unsuited to courtly life, mocked by suitors and competitors alike, and yearning for the right to live by the sword as men do, Brienne finds challenging refuge in a way of life intimately associated with violent acts. From her butchery of the guards in Renly’s tent to her honor-bound execution of her one-time king’s brother in a snowy forest, Brienne’s path has frequently led her into mortal conflict.

At the climax of Wonder Woman, Diana kills a super-powered caricature of historical figure General Erich Ludendorff, a character who seems to exist solely to uncomplicate the moral landscape of World War I. A few minutes later she kills the man behind the man, her divine uncle Ares, and breaks his grasp on the people of war-torn Europe. The presentation of the act of killing as a triumph for human morality strips away much of what violent media can offer. Contrast Brienne’s desperate fight with three Stark soldiers as she attempts to spirit Jaime Lannister to safety on Catelyn’s orders. Screaming with every blow and leaving her opponents hacked to pieces, Brienne succeeds in her mission at an obvious human cost. Men, despicable men but men nonetheless, are dead. She and Catelyn are now in open rebellion against Robb’s authority.

To kill is to sever a life and give birth to a living, growing tree of consequences. To explore it instead as a tidy way to resolve problems and make the world a better place is to misrepresent its essential nature. You can’t improve the world through butchery. You can’t heal by harming. What violence in media is meant to teach us is a capacity for empathy, a reflexive understanding that all people are as fully and completely human as ourselves. Loathsome or virtuous, kind or cruel, no human suffering should be a comfortable or affirming thing to witness. (The Republican Party’s elected officials and pundit corps certainly makes a strong case for an exception to this rule).

One might charitably assume that lionization of violent women and their specific acts of violence stems from a place of vulnerability, a desire to balance the scales and erase the danger and aggression with which almost all women must live on a daily basis. I would argue that while this may hold true in part, a deeper truth is that many people have not been taught to feel pain for others in a way that allows for true emotional vulnerability or complex feelings about morally ugly and confusing actions. It’s easier to cheer when the guy we hate gets his than it is feel sorrow for the former innocent who dished out justice, or empathy for the deceased whose life must surely have held its own miseries and secret hurts.

Audiences would be well-served by taking a moment to step back from their reactions to violence in media and attempting to interpret what message the art is trying to convey. Is the violence slickly produced and bloodless, a parade of cool moments and heroic victories? Or is it focused on the humanity of victims and perpetrators and the cost of their actions? What is the camera telling us? The colors? The editing? Are we meant to agree with King Theoden’s speech about the glories of war in Return of the King when the very next cut brings us into the hellish, pointless confusion of the taking of Osgiliath? Are we meant to be happy when Sansa smiles at Ramsay’s death when the very last thing he told her was that she would carry him, his essence, with her forever?

The most transcendent joy art brings is the opportunity to reach out of your own beliefs and feelings and into someone else’s dreaming mind, to parse the language of symbols and ideas with which they have addressed the world and make in the negative space between your consciousness and theirs a new understanding. Learn to relish the complex and sometimes hideous nature of humanity over the easy thrills and cheap moral lessons of crowd-pleasers made by billionaires. Understand that art that makes you uncomfortable could be helping you grow.

A woman’s actions are not laudable just because she’s a woman, or just because she’s been wronged. In our rush to associate the violent triumph of women over the men who’ve hurt them with personal strength, healing, justice, and praiseworthiness we ignore what shows like Game of Thrones are saying in favor of what we want to hear. Violence should never be easy, and violence that assures us, or that we think assures us we’re good and rooting for the right people should always be suspect.

In labeling anything that pleases us, that satisfies our own hunger for justice and supremacy “feminist,” we forget that feminism is first and foremost an attempt to remake the world. The structure of things as they are is brutish and oppressive, and to cry tears of joy as women, even fictional women, fall prey to the allure of those same structures is to fundamentally misunderstand the point of a life-or-death struggle in which at this moment in history we are perilously engaged. As assaults on our tattered reproductive rights continue, as women struggling with addiction, illness, and homelessness are thrown into prison en masse, as our political leaders openly contemplate sentencing the most vulnerable among us to death in order to pay off the corporate elite and the Left (justifiably, in my opinion) contemplates and utilizes resistance through force on a scale unheard of in this millennium in our country’s history, learning to see violence for what it is has become more imperative than ever before.

#game of thrones #brienne of tarth #cersei lannister #arya stark #Sansa Stark #polliver #the hound #mycah #the freys #walder frey #catelyn stark

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newseveryhourly · 5 years ago

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The extent to which the Israeli government has designated opposition to its policies as not just illegitimate but also illegal is now plain to see‘Throughout the hallways of US officialdom and among the mainstream pundits, many have reacted to the barring of Omar and Tlaib with outrage and shock.’ Photograph: Erin Scott/ReutersAnyone paying attention to the politics of Israel-Palestine could sense this was coming. It was was only a matter of time before a prominent American politician was blocked from entering Israel on political grounds, and now that moment has arrived. After being goaded by Donald Trump, the Israeli government announced on Thursday that they would deny the US representatives Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib entry to the country.This move didn’t come out of nowhere. The Israeli government passed a law in 2017 barring supporters of the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions (BDS) movement from entering the country. After Omar and Tlaib, who have expressed support for the BDS movement at various points, entered office, the question loomed about whether Israel would refuse to let them in.That this was even a question reflects the extent to which the Israeli government has designated opposition to its policies as not just illegitimate but also illegal. And though it did seem that Benjamin Netanyahu initially wanted to avoid creating a diplomatic spectacle – the Israeli ambassador to the US, Ron Dermer, said in July that Omar and Tlaib would be permitted entry – a combination of pressure from the US president and domestic political considerations appear to have led him to decide otherwise.For Trump, who tweeted that allowing Omar and Tlaib in would be “a show of great weakness” by Israel and that the two Democratic congresswomen “hate Israel & all Jewish people”, this is part of his 2020 re-election strategy.Trump and the Republicans have made it explicit that they intend to continue demonizing Omar and Tlaib with the goal of tarnishing the Democratic party’s image and peeling away Jewish voters. In this instance, that strategy, always unlikely to succeed, appears to have backfired. Not only have Democratic politicians across the board condemned the Israeli government’s decision, but so has the powerful pro-Israel lobby American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac), as well as some Republicans, including Marco Rubio. It seems Netanyahu may not have anticipated the breadth of the backlash, and it is still possible that he might reverse the decision.However, for Netanyahu, also facing a difficult re-election campaign and multiple corruption investigations, denying entry to Omar and Tlaib is an opportunity to refocus attention away from his own scandals and shortcomings and to strike his favorite pose as “protector of Israel” against its external enemies. Several members of Netanyahu’s current cabinet are under criminal investigations as well, and it is perhaps not a coincidence that the decision to bar Omar and Tlaib came on the same day as the announcement of possible graft charges against the interior minister, Aryeh Deri, who signed off on the denial of entry decision. In Israel, as elsewhere, ethnocracy and kleptocracy go hand-in-hand.Throughout the hallways of US officialdom and among the mainstream pundits, many have reacted to the barring of Omar and Tlaib with outrage and shock. But there is nothing exceptional about the Israeli government’s decision, which should be an object lesson about contemporary Israel for those who either haven’t been paying attention or have preferred to avert their eyes from the reality on the ground.Israel criminalized not only support for the BDS movement but also boycotts of settlements years ago. Netanyahu and his successive administrations have turned human rights NGOs into villains. “Leftist” has become an epithet, used interchangeably or alongside “traitor”; Arabs, Muslims and, especially, Palestinians are considered first and foremost enemies and treated as such.The designation of two progressive, Muslim American congresswomen – one of whom is black, the other Palestinian – who support BDS as threats is entirely consistent with the Israeli government’s delegitimization of dissent and its routine use of the rhetoric of security to justify punitive measures and violence against populations it deems undeserving of basic rights: Palestinians, African asylum seekers, and even Ethiopian Israeli citizens. By attempting to enter Israel-Palestine on their own, without the imprimatur of the pro-Israel establishment, Omar and Tlaib demanded to be treated as equal to their rightwing peers. The Israeli government refused to do so.But there is more to Omar and Tlaib’s denial of entry than that. Tlaib is Palestinian; her parents were born in Palestine, and her grandmother still lives there. That Israel could bar her unilaterally from visiting her family’s home – despite her status as a member of Congress – reflects the gross injustice of Israel’s border regime and should dispel any residual illusions that what exists in Israel-Palestine is anything other than a one-state regime with a hierarchy of rights and privileged based on ethno-religious identity. And, sadly, Tlaib’s situation here is not exceptional either. Israel routinely denies Palestinians living in the diaspora the chance even to visit their families and ancestral homes while Jews from anywhere in the world can become Israeli citizens with full rights. If the pro-Israel right had hoped that the decision to bar Omar and Tlaib would shield Israel from threats to its legitimacy, the practical effect could very well be the opposite.It is clear, from their widespread condemnation of the decision, that the pro-Israel establishment would have much preferred if Omar and Tlaib’s visit to Israel had passed without incident – that they would have liked to have avoided Israel appearing so obviously in the wrong. But the tactically savvy pro-Israel groups, those that fret about keeping support for Israel a bipartisan issue, no longer possess the same power they once did. Today, the Trump administration’s Mideast policy is determined by an alliance of the religious, pro-settler Jewish right and Christian evangelicals.Such an alliance has little need for bipartisanship, which for the Jewish right entails compromises – like lip service to two-state solution – that they are unwilling to make. Instead, for this newly empowered Jewish right, the entire land of Israel is God’s exclusive gift to the Jewish people, the conflict is a zero-sum struggle that only one side can win, and any criticism of Israel is illegitimate and antisemitic. The US ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, is a representative of this ideological tendency and has played a major role in shaping the Trump administration’s position. In a statement regarding the decision to bar Omar and Tlaib, Friedman called BDS “no less than economic warfare” designed to “ultimately destroy the Jewish state”.The great irony of all this, of course, is that the Israeli government and the pro-Israel right have given the flagging BDS movement the gift of free publicity and renewed relevance. Supporters of BDS argue that Israel must face consequences for its systematic denial of Palestinians’ basic rights and that external pressure is required to democratize the current undemocratic one-state reality in Israel-Palestine. It was already hard to argue otherwise; now, it will be a little bit harder. * Joshua Leifer is an associate editor at Dissent. Previously, he worked at +972 magazine and was based in Jerusalem

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Tell Us, General, What’s Plan B?

Tell Us, General, What's Plan B? 14ymedio, Miriam Celaya, Havana, 20 April 2017 — The Venezuela of "XXI Century Socialism" is wavering and threatening to collapse. It's only a matter of time, soon, perhaps, as to when it will tumble. And since the economic and political crisis of the country has slipped from the government's grasp, President Nicolás Maduro, in another irrefutable demonstration of his proverbial sagacity, under the advice of his mentors of Havana, has opted for the most coherent path with the nature of the regime: increase repression and "arm the people." Such a strategy cannot end well, especially when thousands of street protesters are not only motivated by the defense of democracy, but also by the reluctance to accept the imposition of forced present and future poverty for a nation that should be one of the richest on the planet. Decent Venezuelans will not accept the imposition of the Castro-style dictatorship that is trying to slip in their country. Thus, "Maduro-phobia" has become viral, people have taken to the streets and will make sure that they will stand in protest until their demands are met, which involve the return of the country to the constitutional thread, to legality, to the rule of law, that is to say, without Maduro. As the Venezuelan crisis increases in its polarization, Nicolás Maduro, allegedly elected by the popular vote, continues to accelerate his presidential metamorphosis into a person of the purest traditional Latin American style, capable of launching the army and hundreds of thousands of armed criminals against their (un)governed compatriots who have decided to exercise their right to peaceful demonstration. So if it is true that the terrible decisions of the Venezuelan government are guided by and directed from the Havana's Palace of the Revolution, the intentions of the Cuban leadership are, at least, very suspicious. Such recommendations from the Cuba's high command would drag the Chávez-Maduro regime directly down an abyss, and Venezuela toward the greatest chaos. That is to say, if the Castro clan really ordered Maduro to radicalize a dictatorship and to cling to power against the will of the majority of Venezuelans, by applying repression and force to achieve it, even though this would mean the end of the "socialist" regime in Venezuela -with the consequent total loss of petroleum subsidies for the olive green cupula, as well as the income capital sources from health professionals services- would be a challenge to logic. Such a strange move, in addition to Raúl Castro's significant absence at the recent ALBA political meeting held in Havana as a show of support for the Venezuelan government, the official reluctance to directly accuse the US government of the popular expressions of rejection against the regime of Nicolás Maduro inside and outside Venezuela, the suspicious silence or minimization of the facts on the part of the Cuban official press about what happens in Venezuela, and the unusually circumscribed condemnation pronouncements "to the regional rightist coup" – which, in any case, have stemmed from the Cuban government's political and mass organizations and other non-governmental organizations, and not directly from it –we can only speculate about the possible existence of secret second intentions on Cuba's part. It would be childish to assume that the Cuban government does not know the magnitude of the crisis of its South American ally, given that – as it has been transcended by testimonies from authorized sources in various media over the years – both the army and the repressive and intelligence Venezuelan bodies are widely infiltrated by Castro's agents, so it may be assumed that the regime's political strategists have some idea of a solution, at least in what concerns Cuba. One example is the case of Cuba's aid workers, which are in Venezuela in the tens of thousands. We cannot ignore the serious danger faced by Cuban professionals in the health sector and in other services, who work in Venezuela as "collaborators" in ALBA programs, in the very probable case of a violent chaos in that country. How, then, would one explain the folly of advising, or at least supporting, the violent actions of the Venezuelan regime? Why don't the official media offer more accurate information, specifically about the safety of our countrymen in Venezuela? What is the contingency plan to safeguard the lives of these Cuban civilians in case the Venezuelan humanitarian crisis is aggravated by the violence incited from power? Cuba's past history is disastrous. It is not wise to forget that the same person who occupies the power throne in Cuba today is the same subject that commanded the Armed Forces when thousands of Cubans were sent to fight (and to die) in Angola, Ethiopia, Nicaragua, Bolivia and other remote points of the world's geography. Fidel Castro, who was never in a real war, was the one who had – at least de jure, not de facto – the actions of the Cuban army when, in 1983, civilian workers were ordered to participate in the construction of an airport on the Island of Grenada who fought back the US Marines during the invasion of that small Caribbean country. When one speaks of the profits of the Castro regime, one usually thinks in terms of money. However, the harvests of innocent martyrs have always brought the Cuban regime valuable political returns and allowed for a temporary respite. Now, when the glory years of the "revolution" have passed, when just a few naive ones believe in the discourse of the olive green big shots, and the predominant feelings of Cubans are disappointment, apathy and uncertainty, and when the very "socialist model "is only a sad compendium of failures and promises of infinite poverty, it would not be surprising that the Castrocracy is considering the possibility of nourishing its moral capital at the expense of the sacrifice of the helpless professionals who lend their services in Venezuela. It would be particularly easy for the government to take advantage of several dozen Cuban doctors and technicians – the numbers are not important for the government leadership, as long as the people provide the corpses – that turn out victims of the violence of "the stateless ones who sold out to the empire" in Venezuela, to try to ignite some spark of the quasi withered Cuban nationalist and patriotic feeling and to gain some time, which has been the main goal of the power summit in Cuba in recent years. It would not be unreasonable to consider this possibility, especially in a population that mostly suffers from a lack of information, which makes it susceptible to all sensory manipulation. It's true that times have changed, and that, to some extent the penetration of a few information spaces -spread by the precarious access to technology – makes the consecration of the deception on a massive scale difficult. It no longer seems possible to mobilize the Cubans as in the days of the gigantic marches for "the boy Elian," to cite the most conspicuous example, but neither should we underestimate the regime's histrionic capacity and social control. Suffice it to recall the tearful and blaring spectacle displayed during Fidel Castro's funeral novena. In any case, and since the strategy of harvesting victims has often been applied successfully, perhaps the caciques are considering the possibility of taking advantage of the wreck of the Castro-Chavez ship. That's how warped they are. It shouldn't come as a surprise that the narco-elite from Miraflores and their cohorts have made a pact with the Cuban honchos to escape to Havana in case they find it impossible to keep the scepter. For now, it is a fact that the Cuban-Venezuelan soap opera is experiencing a truly dramatic escalation these days and nobody knows what the outcome will be. But in the midst of so much uncertainty, one thing seems irrefutable: what is currently being played out in Venezuela is not only the future of that nation, beyond the adversities of Nicolás Maduro and his cronies, buy the course of the next steps of the Cuban regime, which continues to be the absolute owner of the Island's destinies. So, tell us, General Castro, what is Plan B? Translated by Norma Whiting Source: Tell Us, General, What's Plan B? – Translating Cuba - http://ift.tt/2oVEGPL via Blogger http://ift.tt/2p9JvFZ

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