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A recurring theme during the Human Condition Series
Conference on Terror, during which I presented a paper a week ago,
concerned the marginalization of terrorized groups in society.
A group may be so marginalized
that its members become non-entities, thereby facilitating the
commission of all sorts of horrific and dehumanizing acts of terror
against them by those who belong to society’s non-marginalized
sectors.
In her after-dinner keynote
address entitled, “The ‘War on Terror’ and the Crisis of
American Masculinity,” Dr. Sunera Thobani depicted, in
stomach-turning graphic detail, acts of terror committed during the
war against Iraq.
Thobani, a former president of
the National Action Committee on the Status of Women, Canada’s
largest feminist organization, has made the politics of anti-racism
central to the women’s movement. In the course of her advocacy,
she has been viciously subjected to vilification by some right-wing
Canadian politicians and harassment or threats by Canada’s
law-enforcement organizations.
In her introduction, she narrated
how a young American soldier stationed in Iraq boasted, without a
hint of remorse and in horridly offensive racist and sexist
language, about his rape of an Arab 15-year-old, whom he then pimped
to many of his soldier buddies. Due to the shame and humiliation,
the Arab hanged herself.
Finding the girl still breathing,
the soldier left her to die and rationalized his inaction by
reassuring himself that suicide was an alternative better than
death-by-stoning, which would surely be the fate she would meet for
allowing the rape.
Throughout her address, Thobani
continually referred to the soldier’s degrading speech and
behavior as quintessentially masculine. She did the same in her
stimulating, masterful and insightful analysis of the speech and
behavior patterns of top American movie actors, notably Tom Cruise,
Michael Douglas and Jack Nicholson, in their movies.
During the open forum, I
questioned the wisdom of referring to the horrid speech as
masculine. I argued that both men and women today have rightly
condemned such behavior, and that therefore it constituted behavior
which men could unlearn, disavow and transcend.
Because other questions had to be
entertained, this issue did not reach any resolution. That
opportunity presented itself the next day during the presentation of
Robin Claire McCullough entitled: “Sunera Thobani, Biopolitics,
and Discursive Operation.”
McCullough bewailed the
“popular and academic response” to Thobani’s advocacy and
queried: “What is it about [Thobani’s] particular form of
discourse that it mobilized such ferocious attacks?”
During the open forum and before
a much smaller audience, I expressed my admiration for
Thobani’s courage, suggesting that some men could respond to her
advocacy not by ferocious attack but by gentle criticism.
I then intimated that Thobani and
I probably shared the same analysis of the gender situation and the
same goal, which was to end divisiveness, oppression and hate
between the sexes. Our difference lay in the method of cure.
Given the predominantly male
chauvinist society we have, I shared Thobani’s views that
offensive masculine discourse marginalized women into non-entities,
that masculine mentality was so ingrained in men’s consciousness
as to operate subliminally, and that most men, including myself,
still exhibit this offensive sexist behavior.
I then pointed out the difference
between us. I proposed that speech which has transcended racist bias
rather than speech which has remained oppressive and degrading,
should be the speech referred to as masculine. Otherwise, men would
not be encouraged to transcend that ethically moribund consciousness
which degrades and dehumanizes women.
The fault in Thobani’s
approach, therefore, was that, in accentuating the negative and the
destructive, it proposed no way out. She acknowledged the powerful
subliminal destructive effects on the human psyche of negative,
oppressive speech and yet chose not to avail of speech to a
positive, transforming end. Referring to sensitive and enlightened
non-sexist speech about women as speech that men are capable of and
should adopt would have that positive, transforming effect.
This was precisely the point I
made in my own presentation entitled, “Terror’s Challenge to the
Rule of Law: the Philippine Experience,” albeit with respect to
the different problem of government oppression. I proposed in my
paper a cure based on positive, spiritual values:
“As a philosopher who learns
from and adapts the intuitive wisdom of the East and the rigorous
logic of the West, my underlying values and principles are
essentially spiritual and my proposal for reform depends upon the
inculcation of positive spiritual virtues in the social and
political reformer.
“I classify spiritual virtues
into two: the inward self-realizing ones of solitude, contemplation,
purification, surrender and peace; and the outward social and
political ones of wisdom, humility, integrity, justice and
compassion. By imbibing the inward self-realizing virtues, a
reformer exhibits towards others the proper social and political
virtues by which meaningful and enduring change can be effected.”
Only by such a positive spiritual
approach can the cycle of hate, divisiveness and terror between the
sexes, or indeed between any oppressor and oppressed, be ended.
eqfernando@hotmail.com
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