Farms Not Arms
“Our farmers are in trouble right now and so are our soldiers,” said Nadia McCaffrey, whose son Patrick was killed in Iraq in 2004 – one of at least 3,750 U.S. military deaths there since the March 2003 invasion.
She founded a group called Veterans Village to help soldiers returning with post traumatic stress disorder and other problems. The group plans to set up a self-sustaining organic farm in North Carolina for veterans.
“The farm is going to be a safe place for them to be,” said McCaffrey. “Many of them thought they were going to go back to life and put the war behind them but it didn’t quite work this way.”
Saturday’s event will mark the launch of a politically neutral group called the Farmer-Veteran Coalition to provide farm jobs, training and land for veterans, organizers said.
SI:
[Moderator notes: this is not original work unless the commenter was a member of the CEM in the 70’s (scroll down for text of this pamphlet). Freedom of information is a wondrous thing, but intellectual honesty requires that sources should be cited when known. Also, entire documents should not be pasted in if there’s a URL where the entire text can be found. I am excerpting this post and providing the URL.]
Address to Women’s Liberation
Woman’s everyday life embodies a critique of human history, including a critique of the traditional revolutionary organization and its so-called New Left alternatives. However, women are obscuring this critique by trying to define themselves in terms of traditional revolutionary theory, which has in general merely tacked an obscured discussion of the role of women onto its periphery. Women have failed to utilize their lived critique of hierarchical society, limiting themselves to the same alienating modes of revolt (Stalinist, for example) to which men have been confined.
The separation which women feel from history offers them an opportunity for critical revolt. This opportunity is obscured by the expressed need to relate women’s liberation to the traditional revolutionary struggles. […]
Women’s liberation fails to realize that it is rebelling against an image of men which is as superficial as the image of women they have rejected for themselves, and that it is the very nature of the male role to be self-perpetuating because of its characteristic dominance. By limiting the critique of psychological stereotypes to women, the realm of the possible is drastically narrowed: a critique of male and female roles should lead to a general critique of Role, and from there to a critique of all ideal absolutes. In the past, the critique has only constructed another idealized essence — the New Woman — to be revealed in the “post-revolutionary era.” Both the New Man and the New Woman are mystifications; embracing these ideal types merely postpones the necessity of throwing into radical question all that the revolutionary project must encompass.
[see url above for full text and historical context]
[it is not clear what relevance this American paraSituationist pamphlet has to the Farms not Arms thread. any further offtopic cut/paste posts may be treated as spam]
11 September 2007, 7:36 pm