Sunday, June 26, 2016
So Much...
So much has been happening, like one blow after another. I have been reading all your words, thinking of the old Village and my old bar, the Sea Colony, and all the years in between and now--do not think you are invisible, only we can make ourselves disappear with silences, with our own fears. Take to the streets, with banners--Lesbians Against Fascism, Lesbians Against Trump, Lesbians for Gun Control like we did when Reagan spread his ugliness--these are anxious times and we grow anxious about our own histories, until we take to the streets, the meeting rooms, the cultural events at LHA, look into the faces of our dear ones like Carlson and Michelle and so many more and join with others shouting our visions of just life into the cities, on whose streets we found our public selves, our desires singing in the hot night air--from the 50s and before until now and beyond.
Saturday, June 25, 2016
Remembered Women's Words: Thank You, Geraldine Robertson for Your Dedication
‘The peoples, as well as the Governments, have sown the wind of misunderstanding and of hate and are reaping the whirlwind,
and we must bring in the soft breezes of sweet reasonableness, of charity, of clarity to the considerations of social and industrial problems.’
and we must bring in the soft breezes of sweet reasonableness, of charity, of clarity to the considerations of social and industrial problems.’
Letter from Vida Goldstein published in the Woman Voter, Melbourne, 18 December 1919.
It was referring to the First World War, particularly to the signing the Versailles Treaty at the Paris Peace Conference, 28 June 1919.
It was referring to the First World War, particularly to the signing the Versailles Treaty at the Paris Peace Conference, 28 June 1919.
Also from Vida and published in Woman Voter 11 May 1917:
The WPA (Women’s Political Association) and the Women’s Peace Army will be remembered in Australian History
as the one band of workers who never wavered for an instant in the Australian fight for internationalism,
which the WPA began on 7 August 1914.
as the one band of workers who never wavered for an instant in the Australian fight for internationalism,
which the WPA began on 7 August 1914.
Geraldine Robertson
Tel: 03 9486 1808 Mobile: 0412 8653 10
womensweb1@gmail.com
Women's Web - Stories, Actions
www.womensweb.com.au
Women Working Together suffrage and onwards
www.womenworkingtogether.com.
Prejudice and Reason
www.prejudiceandreason.com.au
Tel: 03 9486 1808 Mobile: 0412 8653 10
womensweb1@gmail.com
Women's Web - Stories, Actions
www.womensweb.com.au
Women Working Together suffrage and onwards
www.womenworkingtogether.com.
Prejudice and Reason
www.prejudiceandreason.com.au
Wednesday, June 8, 2016
Where hope springs. Lepa reports in May:
"Dear Lesbians,
"Dear Lesbians,
here's again your East European reporter!
yesterday was a beautiful day in TIRANA!
dont forget they have the best president at the moment in the entire Balkan region, one Socialist and painter~!
anyway, this is 5th bycicle ride against homophobia in Tirana!
photo1: in the first row is XHENI KARAJ, she i THE LEADER OF THE LESBIAN AND GAY MOVEMENT IN ALBANIA, in the red shirt!!! She is the main reason why there are so many people behind her, a charming queer feminist leader!! and then Kris Pinderi, a great gay activist in blue shirt.
When I was in Tirana, he wanted his mother to meet me and brought me and his partner to a dinner, it was moving... i listened about life in socialist absolutist Albania, his mother ... waiting in the row for bread as early as 5 o cock in the morning... untill 1990 they had only the basic items for life. just so that you can imagine where did these young beautiful people come from. And then the third in the front row, the butch with a cap and blue moto on the very right, KEO, she is a passionate motorcycle rider... and i am one of her amazone mothers by choice!!!! on the third photo with white jacket is Delina Fico, legendary feminist activist & professional, who is making history of freedom for Albanian women!!
When I was in Tirana, he wanted his mother to meet me and brought me and his partner to a dinner, it was moving... i listened about life in socialist absolutist Albania, his mother ... waiting in the row for bread as early as 5 o cock in the morning... untill 1990 they had only the basic items for life. just so that you can imagine where did these young beautiful people come from. And then the third in the front row, the butch with a cap and blue moto on the very right, KEO, she is a passionate motorcycle rider... and i am one of her amazone mothers by choice!!!! on the third photo with white jacket is Delina Fico, legendary feminist activist & professional, who is making history of freedom for Albanian women!!
i love them all... you can imagine this is a big gathering for Albania, we are all so happy... BRAVO!!!
(the bikes are rented for free by a friend who does it every year, now fifth time!)
here's also a klip:
http://historia-ime.com/2016/
http://historia-ime.com/2016/
Robert Kagan's Drawing of the Picture
Like so many of you, I am trying to find a way to understand the Trump ugliness of spirit that seems so popular to so many now in my old country. I read, l listen, I think, and hear the echoes of other times when a government used economic fears and the desire for national purities to come to power.
Robert Kagan is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a contributing columnist for The Post. The Republican Party’s attempt to treat Donald Trump as a normal political candidate would be laughable were it not so perilous to the republic. If only he would mouth the party’s “conservative” principles, all would be well. But of course the entire Trump phenomenon has nothing to do with policy or ideology. It has nothing to do with the Republican Party, either, except in its historic role as incubator of this singular threat to our democracy. Trump has transcended the party that produced him. His growing army of supporters no longer cares about the party. Because it did not immediately and fully embrace Trump, because a dwindling number of its political and intellectual leaders still resist him, the party is regarded with suspicion and even hostility by his followers. Their allegiance is to him and him alone. And the source of allegiance? We’re supposed to believe that Trump’s support stems from economic stagnation or dislocation. Maybe some of it does. But what Trump offers his followers are not economic remedies — his proposals change daily. What he offers is an attitude, an aura of crude strength and machismo, a boasting disrespect for the niceties of the democratic culture that he claims, and his followers believe, has produced national weakness and incompetence. His incoherent and contradictory utterances have one thing in common: They provoke and play on feelings of resentment and disdain, intermingled with bits of fear, hatred and anger. His public discourse consists of attacking or ridiculing a wide range of “others” — Muslims, Hispanics, women, Chinese, Mexicans, Europeans, Arabs, immigrants, refugees — whom he depicts either as threats or as objects of derision. His program, such as it is, consists chiefly of promises to get tough with foreigners and people of nonwhite complexion. He will deport them, bar them, get them to knuckle under, make them pay up or make them shut up. That this toughguy, getmadandgeteven approach has gained him an increasingly large and enthusiastic following has probably surprised Trump as much as it has everyone else. Trump himself is simply and quite literally an egomaniac. But the phenomenon he has created and now leads has become something larger than him, and something far more dangerous. Republican politicians marvel at how he has “tapped into” a hitherto unknown swath of the voting public. But what he has tapped into is what the founders most feared when they established the democratic republic: the popular passions unleashed, the “mobocracy.” Conservatives have been warning for decades about government suffocating liberty. But here is the other threat to liberty that Alexis de Tocqueville and the ancient philosophers warned about: that the people in a democracy, excited, angry and unconstrained, might run roughshod over even the institutions created to preserve their freedoms. As Alexander Hamilton watched the French Revolution unfold, he feared in America what he saw play out in France — that the unleashing of popular passions would lead not to greater democracy but to the arrival of a tyrant, riding to power on the shoulders of the people. This phenomenon has arisen in other democratic and quasidemocratic countries over the past century, and it has generally been called “fascism.” Fascist movements, too, had no coherent ideology, no clear set of prescriptions for what ailed society. “National socialism” was a bundle of contradictions, united chiefly by what, and who, it opposed; fascism in Italy was antiliberal, antidemocratic, antiMarxist, anticapitalist and anticlerical. Successful fascism was not about policies but about the strongman, the leader (Il Duce, Der Fuhrer), in whom could be entrusted the fate of the nation. Whatever the problem, he could fix it. Whatever the threat, internal or external, he could vanquish it, and it was unnecessary for him to explain how. Today, there is Putinism, which also has nothing to do with belief or policy but is about the tough man who singlehandedly defends his people against all threats, foreign and domestic. To understand how such movements take over a democracy, one only has to watch the Republican Party today. These movements play on all the fears, vanities, ambitions and insecurities that make up the human psyche. In democracies, at least for politicians, the only thing that matters is what the voters say they want — vox populi vox dei. A mass political movement is thus a powerful and, to those who would oppose it, frightening weapon. When controlled and directed by a single leader, it can be aimed at whomever the leader chooses. If someone criticizes or opposes the leader, it doesn’t matter how popular or admired that person has been. He might be a famous war hero, but if the leader derides and ridicules his heroism, the followers laugh and jeer. He might be the highestranking elected guardian of the party’s most cherished principles. But if he hesitates to support the leader, he faces political death. Opinions newsletter Sign up In such an environment, every political figure confronts a stark choice: Get right with the leader and his mass following or get run over. The human race in such circumstances breaks down into predictable categories — and democratic politicians are the most predictable. There are those whose ambition leads them to jump on the bandwagon. They praise the leader’s incoherent speeches as the beginning of wisdom, hoping he will reward them with a plum post in the new order. There are those who merely hope to survive. Their consciences won’t let them curry favor so shamelessly, so they mumble their pledges of support, like the victims in Stalin’s show trials, perhaps not realizing that the leader and his followers will get them in the end anyway. A great number will simply kid themselves, refusing to admit that something very different from the usual politics is afoot. Let the storm pass, they insist, and then we can pick up the pieces, rebuild and get back to normal. Meanwhile, don’t alienate the leader’s mass following. After all, they are voters and will need to brought back into the fold. As for Trump himself, let’s shape him, advise him, steer him in the right direction and, not incidentally, save our political skins. What these people do not or will not see is that, once in power, Trump will owe them and their party nothing. He will have ridden to power despite the party, catapulted into the White House by a mass following devoted only to him. By then that following will have grown dramatically. Today, less than 5 percent of eligible voters have voted for Trump. But if he wins the election, his legions will comprise a majority of the nation. Imagine the power he would wield then. In addition to all that comes from being the leader of a mass following, he would also have the immense powers of the American presidency at his command: the Justice Department, the FBI, the intelligence services, the military. Who would dare to oppose him then? Certainly not a Republican Party that laid down before him even when he was comparatively weak. And is a man like Trump, with infinitely greater power in his hands, likely to become more humble, more judicious, more generous, less vengeful than he is today, than he has been his whole life? Does vast power uncorrupt? This is how fascism comes to America, not with jackboots and salutes (although there have been salutes, and a whiff of violence) but with a television huckster, a phony billionaire, a textbook egomaniac--
Another way--our Women in black Vigil in Melbourne, 2016
This is How Fascism Comes to America
By Robert Kagan May 18 at 7:09 PMRobert Kagan is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a contributing columnist for The Post. The Republican Party’s attempt to treat Donald Trump as a normal political candidate would be laughable were it not so perilous to the republic. If only he would mouth the party’s “conservative” principles, all would be well. But of course the entire Trump phenomenon has nothing to do with policy or ideology. It has nothing to do with the Republican Party, either, except in its historic role as incubator of this singular threat to our democracy. Trump has transcended the party that produced him. His growing army of supporters no longer cares about the party. Because it did not immediately and fully embrace Trump, because a dwindling number of its political and intellectual leaders still resist him, the party is regarded with suspicion and even hostility by his followers. Their allegiance is to him and him alone. And the source of allegiance? We’re supposed to believe that Trump’s support stems from economic stagnation or dislocation. Maybe some of it does. But what Trump offers his followers are not economic remedies — his proposals change daily. What he offers is an attitude, an aura of crude strength and machismo, a boasting disrespect for the niceties of the democratic culture that he claims, and his followers believe, has produced national weakness and incompetence. His incoherent and contradictory utterances have one thing in common: They provoke and play on feelings of resentment and disdain, intermingled with bits of fear, hatred and anger. His public discourse consists of attacking or ridiculing a wide range of “others” — Muslims, Hispanics, women, Chinese, Mexicans, Europeans, Arabs, immigrants, refugees — whom he depicts either as threats or as objects of derision. His program, such as it is, consists chiefly of promises to get tough with foreigners and people of nonwhite complexion. He will deport them, bar them, get them to knuckle under, make them pay up or make them shut up. That this toughguy, getmadandgeteven approach has gained him an increasingly large and enthusiastic following has probably surprised Trump as much as it has everyone else. Trump himself is simply and quite literally an egomaniac. But the phenomenon he has created and now leads has become something larger than him, and something far more dangerous. Republican politicians marvel at how he has “tapped into” a hitherto unknown swath of the voting public. But what he has tapped into is what the founders most feared when they established the democratic republic: the popular passions unleashed, the “mobocracy.” Conservatives have been warning for decades about government suffocating liberty. But here is the other threat to liberty that Alexis de Tocqueville and the ancient philosophers warned about: that the people in a democracy, excited, angry and unconstrained, might run roughshod over even the institutions created to preserve their freedoms. As Alexander Hamilton watched the French Revolution unfold, he feared in America what he saw play out in France — that the unleashing of popular passions would lead not to greater democracy but to the arrival of a tyrant, riding to power on the shoulders of the people. This phenomenon has arisen in other democratic and quasidemocratic countries over the past century, and it has generally been called “fascism.” Fascist movements, too, had no coherent ideology, no clear set of prescriptions for what ailed society. “National socialism” was a bundle of contradictions, united chiefly by what, and who, it opposed; fascism in Italy was antiliberal, antidemocratic, antiMarxist, anticapitalist and anticlerical. Successful fascism was not about policies but about the strongman, the leader (Il Duce, Der Fuhrer), in whom could be entrusted the fate of the nation. Whatever the problem, he could fix it. Whatever the threat, internal or external, he could vanquish it, and it was unnecessary for him to explain how. Today, there is Putinism, which also has nothing to do with belief or policy but is about the tough man who singlehandedly defends his people against all threats, foreign and domestic. To understand how such movements take over a democracy, one only has to watch the Republican Party today. These movements play on all the fears, vanities, ambitions and insecurities that make up the human psyche. In democracies, at least for politicians, the only thing that matters is what the voters say they want — vox populi vox dei. A mass political movement is thus a powerful and, to those who would oppose it, frightening weapon. When controlled and directed by a single leader, it can be aimed at whomever the leader chooses. If someone criticizes or opposes the leader, it doesn’t matter how popular or admired that person has been. He might be a famous war hero, but if the leader derides and ridicules his heroism, the followers laugh and jeer. He might be the highestranking elected guardian of the party’s most cherished principles. But if he hesitates to support the leader, he faces political death. Opinions newsletter Sign up In such an environment, every political figure confronts a stark choice: Get right with the leader and his mass following or get run over. The human race in such circumstances breaks down into predictable categories — and democratic politicians are the most predictable. There are those whose ambition leads them to jump on the bandwagon. They praise the leader’s incoherent speeches as the beginning of wisdom, hoping he will reward them with a plum post in the new order. There are those who merely hope to survive. Their consciences won’t let them curry favor so shamelessly, so they mumble their pledges of support, like the victims in Stalin’s show trials, perhaps not realizing that the leader and his followers will get them in the end anyway. A great number will simply kid themselves, refusing to admit that something very different from the usual politics is afoot. Let the storm pass, they insist, and then we can pick up the pieces, rebuild and get back to normal. Meanwhile, don’t alienate the leader’s mass following. After all, they are voters and will need to brought back into the fold. As for Trump himself, let’s shape him, advise him, steer him in the right direction and, not incidentally, save our political skins. What these people do not or will not see is that, once in power, Trump will owe them and their party nothing. He will have ridden to power despite the party, catapulted into the White House by a mass following devoted only to him. By then that following will have grown dramatically. Today, less than 5 percent of eligible voters have voted for Trump. But if he wins the election, his legions will comprise a majority of the nation. Imagine the power he would wield then. In addition to all that comes from being the leader of a mass following, he would also have the immense powers of the American presidency at his command: the Justice Department, the FBI, the intelligence services, the military. Who would dare to oppose him then? Certainly not a Republican Party that laid down before him even when he was comparatively weak. And is a man like Trump, with infinitely greater power in his hands, likely to become more humble, more judicious, more generous, less vengeful than he is today, than he has been his whole life? Does vast power uncorrupt? This is how fascism comes to America, not with jackboots and salutes (although there have been salutes, and a whiff of violence) but with a television huckster, a phony billionaire, a textbook egomaniac--
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