• #Claire_Potter : Harvey Weinstein et la question des complices
    https://tradfem.wordpress.com/2017/12/04/claire-potter-harvey-weinstein-et-la-question-des-complices

    Moi, j’aimerais savoir ce qu’aurait dit Andrea Dworkin à propos de Harvey Weinstein.

    Cela fait un demi-siècle que #Dworkin – participante controversée à la première génération de féministes radicales à réfléchir aux violences sexuelles – et ses consœurs de la deuxième vague du féminisme ont amorcé la conversation contemporaine à propos de ces violences, et j’ai parfois l’impression que cette conversation piétine. Voyez par exemple le fait que les agressions sexuelles répétées de #Weinstein contre les femmes étaient un secret de polichinelle dans le monde du cinéma, du journalisme et de la politique depuis au moins 30 ans. C’est dire que des centaines de personnes ont conspiré pour dissimuler son comportement de prédateur.

    Oui, conspiré. C’est cette conspiration, ainsi que la façon dont elle a pris fin, qui m’amène à me demander ce que Dworkin elle-même aurait pu écrire dans ce contexte. Féministe souvent rejetée et vilipendée par les féministes libérales, Dworkin comprenait que les collègues et les camarades de travail, les amis et les membres de la famille des prédateurs jouent un rôle clé pour permettre et dissimuler la #violence_sexuelle. Mais elle croyait aussi que le son de la voix des femmes était un puissant antidote contre ce qu’elle reconnaissait comme une forme d’oppression omniprésente.

    Dworkin aurait sans doute trouvé dans l’affaire Weinstein une certaine confirmation de son analyse.

    C’est notamment vrai parce que la conspiration entourant Weinstein s’est effondrée lorsque les femmes se sont mises à parler.

    Traduction : #Tradfem
    Version originale : https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2017/10/20/harvey-weinstein-and-the-problem-of-collaborators

    Claire Potter est professeur d’histoire et rédactrice en chef de la revue Public Seminar à la New School.
    #meetoo

    • Il y a ceux qui dissimulent et ceux qui alimentent :

      Harvey Weinstein accusé de «trafic sexuel» à Cannes

      Bob Weinstein et la Weinstein Company sont accusés de négligence et d’avoir « connu le comportement de Harvey Weinstein et facilité » ce qui est décrit comme « une habitude pour Harvey Weinstein de voyager [...] pour solliciter de jeunes actrices avec la promesses de rôles » et les forcer à des relations sexuelles.

      Harvey Weinstein, qui a par ailleurs été forcé à démissionner lundi du syndicat des réalisateurs d’Hollywood après avoir été renvoyé de l’Académie des arts et sciences du cinéma et avoir démissionné du syndicat des producteurs, maintient que toutes ces relations étaient consenties.

      Autour de février 2014, Harvey Weinstein a « approché Kadian à l’hôtel Majestic de Cannes », l’invitant à monter dans sa chambre pour qu’elle lui montre une vidéo de ses performances, selon la plainte déposée lundi.

      Le producteur, après avoir convié la jeune femme jusqu’à sa chambre, aurait appelé un autre responsable de sa société qui aurait demandé à Kadian Noble d’être « gentille et de faire tout ce qu’il demande ». Il s’est ensuite approché d’elle et a empoigné sa poitrine. La plainte affirme que Kadian Noble a résisté avant de se sentir « forcée de se laisser faire ».

      Il l’aurait ensuite entraînée de force dans la salle de bains, puis retenue tout en caressant sa poitrine et ses fesses avant de la forcer à le masturber, détaille la plainte.

      Kadian Noble aurait à la suite de cet incident souffert « de blessures sévères, détresse émotionnelle », angoisse et « incapacité à avoir goût à la vie et à mener une existence normale ».

  • Don’t be fooled by the comforting rhetoric coming from Saudi Arabia’s crown prince
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2017/11/08/dont-be-fooled-by-the-comforting-rhetoric-coming-from-saudi-arabias-

    The younger generation of Al Saud rulers — represented by the recently appointed crown prince — have created the illusion of a “new” Saudi Arabia, one defined by youth, moderation and liberalization. But far from embodying a break with “traditional” Saudi rule, the new generation has simply doubled down on the tried and tested approaches to modern Saudi statecraft.

    Like its predecessors, the current regime uses great repressive force to maintain its rule. It relies on the very same programs of reform and modernization to shore up international support while exacerbating sectarian tensions and violently crushing all forms of political opposition, including the very forces of moderation it purports to support.

    The timing of these announcements speaks to the regime’s desperate need for a victory to cover up its many domestic and regional failures, to increase confidence in the regime’s commitment to reform and to provide fodder for its all-out war against domestic opposition and regional rivals. This is not to say that change in Saudi Arabia is not possible, nor to discount the efforts of thousands of Saudis who have risked so much to improve their living situations. But in the hands of relentless dictators in such an authoritarian context, “change” is elusive at best.

    • Ouf, c’est juste une opinion libre, pas un édito du WaPo !

      Even as Western governments and media outlets sing his praises, the young crown prince is viewed domestically as an incompetent and corrupt ruler who hides behind liberalism, tolerance and anti-corruption rhetoric. This view is shared by ruling members of the monarchy, economic elites and the population at large, who see Mohammad as someone who has disturbed the status quo for the sake of massive personal enrichment and political aggrandizement.

  • When the shooter is white
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2017/10/06/when-the-shooter-is-white/?tid=sm_tw

    When perpetrators of violence are people of color, journalists, politicians and many citizens treat their violence as natural, expected. But when shooters are white men who kill white victims, politicians like Trump, and indeed many other facets of white America, reach for the notion of an unstable, angry, isolated person driven to mass murder.

    That description is a relatively new one: the image of a disturbed, gun-obsessed, white male loner who presents a threat to mainstream society emerged alongside the rise of mass shootings over the past two decades. To pick but one example, in the aftermath of Newtown, headlines repeatedly described killer Adam Lanza as a deranged “loner” who “felt no pain.”

    We emphasize the mental health of white mass shooters because these men look like “us,” meaning that there is nothing predictive about the ways they look that might foretell their actions, save their awkwardness and isolation when “they” interact with “us.” In other words, they could be anyone — part of what gives these events their terrifying valence.

    As has been widely pointed out, however, American politicians and media outlets, along with any number of citizens, reflexively look to blame larger cultures, politics or ideologies when the perpetrator of a massacre is nonwhite. Put bluntly, the only reason we aren’t referring to mass killers like Paddock as terrorists, even though spectacular events like the Las Vegas shooting meet the textbook definition of terrorism, is because of their race. Underlying that argument is an assumption that race likewise foretells the violence of nonwhite shooters.

    Blaming crazed nonwhite “cultures” when guns are involved is a tradition with deep roots in American history. Indeed, the dynamic took shape decades before the current double standard of white “shooters” and Muslim “cultures” emerged, as the very notion of guns for everyday domestic protection entered American consciousness.

  • The Killing of History
    https://consortiumnews.com/2017/09/21/the-killing-of-history

    I watched the first episode in New York. It leaves you in no doubt of its intentions right from the start. The narrator says the war “was begun in good faith by decent people out of fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence and Cold War misunderstandings.”

    The dishonesty of this statement is not surprising. The cynical fabrication of “false flags” that led to the invasion of Vietnam is a matter of record – the Gulf of Tonkin “incident” in 1964, which Burns promotes as true, was just one. The lies litter a multitude of official documents, notably the Pentagon Papers, which the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg released in 1971.

    There was no good faith. The faith was rotten and cancerous. For me – as it must be for many Americans – it is difficult to watch the film’s jumble of “red peril” maps, unexplained interviewees, ineptly cut archive and maudlin American battlefield sequences. In the series’ press release in Britain — the BBC will show it — there is no mention of Vietnamese dead, only Americans.

    “We are all searching for some meaning in this terrible tragedy,” Novick is quoted as saying. How very post-modern.

    All this will be familiar to those who have observed how the American media and popular culture behemoth has revised and served up the great crime of the second half of the Twentieth Century: from “The Green Berets” and “The Deer Hunter” to “Rambo” and, in so doing, has legitimized subsequent wars of aggression. The revisionism never stops and the blood never dries. The invader is pitied and purged of guilt, while “searching for some meaning in this terrible tragedy.” Cue Bob Dylan: “Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?”

    What ‘Decency’ and ‘Good Faith’?

  • The millennial left’s war against liberalism - The Washington Post
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2017/07/20/the-millennial-lefts-war-against-liberalism

    The left is back — and millennials are leading the way. “Socialism” was the most searched word on the Merriam-Webster website in 2015, and a 2016 poll showed that 43 percent of Iowa Democrats described themselves as “socialists.” Despite the setback of President Trump’s electoral victory, the left continues to grow. Publications like the magazine Jacobin, launched by millennial Bhaskar Sunkara, now reach more than 1 million website visitors each month.

    But the millennial left is not a return to the New Left of the 1960s — the student radicals, hippies and Yippies who raised hell in their efforts to end the Vietnam War and change American culture to make it less racist and sexist and more authentic. Rather it invokes the ideas of the Old Left of the 1930s — the militant labor unions, socialists and even communists who, in the context of the worst economic depression in American history, sought a genuine alternative to capitalism.

    #gauche #Etats-Unis