Late Breaking News! Archduke Ferdinand Found Alive! Wars of Twentieth Century all a Big Mistake!

Meanwhile along the Rye Harbour Road…a little closer in time and space…the cycle path continues to be notable by its absence despite watch-my-lips promises that it would be up and rolling by the end of March 2006. Jim Hollands, the editor of Rye’s Own tells me that the latest delay is due to objections from a lobby group for the disabled. They argue that the new path should be for the use of their mobility scooters…while cyclists should use the road.

Harvard University Press has just published Are Women Human by Catharine MacKinnon. It ends with a rhetorical essay on Women’s September 11th where she makes the point that the same number of women are murdered by men in the US each year (2800) as were killed in the Twin Towers (3000).

There is a big difference between cause and correlation. And comparing apples and oranges seldom makes much sense. One person is killed every minute somewhere in the world by armed violence. But MacKinnon goes on to imply some relevance in the comparison by arguing that violence against women ‘qualifies as a casus belli and a form of terrorism every bit as much as the events of September 11th’. Apparently ‘it’s only because it’s men doing it against women that it isn’t seen as war.’ Hmm!

The North American brand of Fundamental Feminism espoused by MacKinnon and her disciples stresses fixed gendered polarity and women’s need for protection from men’s domination of them. In MacKinnon’s view women’s status as a group relative to men has never been much changed from what it is now…a disempowering view for women as it trivialises a century of practical struggle and a vast array of major advances towards Social Equality.

If Machiavelli had been writing in the mid-20th century instead of the mid-16th his prince would have been instructed to invent Fundamental Feminism to drive a wedge into the movement for Global Justice spear-headed by Socialism and Communism in the aftermath of the collapse of the old order following the diplomatic debacle of the Kaiser War and the incompetence, greed and sheer nastiness of the Great Depression.

This strategy of divide and rule is as old as the Seven Hills of Rome. Even today large areas of the Feminist Movement have a case to answer against the accusation that they are dupes of the One World Police State Project which has as one of its minor tactical manoeuvres the blunting of the leading edge of the movement for global justice by making men and not poverty or the abuse of power…any power…the real enemy of female activists.

As a group English Socialist Feminists has been influenced (to their detriment) by American Fundamental Feminism but have not been taken in. Wiser heads have usually prevailed. Nonetheless the ideas of these militant rights-based foreign feminists have infiltrated the legislative apparatus in Strasburg, Whitehall, Westminster and Millbank. Their intolerance as well as their goals stands in sharp contrast to the tolerance and the dreams of the duties-based attitude of both the Old Gendered Aristocracies and the New English Socialist Feminists.

Men are not women’s enemy…although Patriarchal Fascism certainly is. Noble men and women everywhere need to make common cause not only against poverty and violence but also against fascism and fundamentalism…especially when it hides behind the sort of pseudo-science and false socio-biological truths wielded by American Feminist Fundamentalists to obscure the illogicality and irrelevance of many of their positions.

In America for instance while white middle-class women form campaigns against pornography the real victims of the Republican Party’s Right Wing’s conservative agendas…working class, black and ethnic minority women…are campaigning for welfare and healthcare. Specialisation is one thing…and Adam Smith had a very positive view of it…but the problem here is that much of the middle-class Fundamental Feminist campaigning…through the courts and law schools…actually strengthens the power and appeal of an anti-feminist Moral Right that is threatening to enclose women anew in repressive patriarchal structures…replete with notions of female helplessness wrapped up in the sugary pill of female virtues. This is not the sort of gendered society most of us wish to see. But no doubt Machiavelli is smiling benignly in the wings.

Sonia Holmes won the only place up for grabs on Rye Town Council this year with 266 votes. Christopher Strangeways came in second (155) with Jessica Neame bringing up the rear (137). A sixth of this ancient town’s vote-force of 3000 turned out to place their marks upon the ballot paper. No ballot papers were issued…it was enough to announce your name and confirm that your address was the one the Returning Officer told you it was.

Elspeth Wrenn reckoned she could have voted several times so I asked her to put a cross for Strangeways on my behalf. She refused not on the grounds that it was illegal but because it was wrong. I’m not s sure it isn’t the other way about. Since I live in a post-office box I have no address and having no address means I get no vote.