NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #20/NN_1992_20.iso/spool/misc/activism/progress/6430

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From: [e-mail] (Rich Winkel)
Subject: THE GUNMAN'S MYSTIQUE
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The ACTivist, Volume 8 #9, September 1992.

The ACTivist, Ontario's peace monthly, is published by ACT for
Disarmament, 736 Bathurst St., Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5S 2R4,
phone [phone], fax [phone], e-mail web:act. Hard copy
subscriptions are $10 for a year ($25 for institutions and funded
agencies).

Reprint freely, but please credit us (and send us a copy!)

/** gen.newsletter: 138.11 **/
** Written  8:58 pm  Aug 31, 1992 by web:act in cdp:gen.newsletter **
THE GUNMAN'S MYSTIQUE

The Demon Lover: On the Sexuality of Terrorism
By Robin Morgan
W.W. Norton & Co.
pp. 400

Reviewed by John Bacher

While Gene Sharp has written eloquently on the practicality of
nonviolence, and leaders such as Gandhi and Martin Luther King have
 developed its spiritual roots, it has taken the innovative and
courageous American feminist Robin Morgan to develop of philosophy
of peace based on an understanding of the pathology of rationales for
armed struggle. Morgan is not content with merely demonstrating the
 workability and morality of the nonviolent creed. She takes us on a
 previously uncharted journey to explore the logic behind the madness
of violence without the usual apologies.

Morgan demonstrates that, whatever the contrasts between
various advocates of violence, be they of the 'right' or 'left', of
different creeds or nationalities, in the end the victors are arms
merchants, and the victims are civilians -- women and children. She
adapts the phrase of Frederick Engels, that violence is "the accelerator
of economic development" to the reality thaat all armed struggles are
"to the businessman ... also a market."

The book illustrates how armed struggles become commercial
rackets, obscuring their original political objectives, with examples
covering the range from the activities of the United States government
to the IRA (which funds its bombings from taxi cab operations whose
profitability was greatly increased after they began bombing the
Belfast bus system).

Stunning as these revelations are, they are surpassed by Morgan's
careful exposition of how they are ultimately linked to male
oppression of women. The book begins with a scenario: "Look closely
at her. She crosses a street ... suddenly there are footsteps behind her
 ... A man's footsteps. She knows this immediately ... He could be a
man merely walking at his normal pace. But she fears him. She fears
him because he is a man. She has reason to fear ... This moment she
shares with every human being who is female. This is the
democratization of fear." She goes on the examine the myth of the
terrorist, the Demon Lover, the "subliminal idol of an androcentric
cultural heritage ... smoldering on a long sexual and emotional fuse
... We are told that women lust to have him. We are told that men
lust to be him ... This is the democratization of violence."

While avoiding the idealization of women as 'naturally peaceful',
Morgan insists that it is they, "perhaps ... because we exist outside
that body politic, except as victims or as tokens", who are able to
challenge and end the institutionalization of violence that is equally
a part of state-waged warfare and of small-scale terrorism, to take
the glamour away from the eroticized myth of the gunman.

One of the most compelling aspects of The Demon Lover is Morgan's
own experience as an 'urban terrorist', a member of the Weather
Underground. She remembers "the risk of being swept into obliteration,
the aphrodisiac in demanding power", remembers as well the
development of her own feminist understanding and how it led
her away from the group. She recounts a crucial turning point, when
she was asked to place a bomb in a women's washroom and refused
"... It's secretaries who'll get hurt or killed ... They don't have any
power..." She finally won the argument only by falling back on more
 politically correct logic -- that the cleaning women were most likely
to be hurt, and that they would be "very likely black or Hispanic."

Morgan records, as well, the cynical ways in which male terrorists
 manipulate women, even those who 'of their own will' carry out
terrorist acts -- like Patty Hearst, converted by repeated rapes and
beatings. The infamous terrorist Carlos was financed by a network
of women, who were subsequently jailed or killed while he escaped
without a scratch. The expendability of women in terrorist causes
was most frightfully revealed by the Japanese United Red Army's
killing of 14 of their former comrades, mostly women, for such sins
as "bourgeois deformities" and the wearing of earrings.

Morgan's grim description of the crimes and follies of armed struggle
is balanced by a moving description of the power of women in
nonviolent movements for social change, like the Chipko movement,
a peasant struggle against deforestation: "The women clung to the
trees, and the troops were too ashamed to fire. So the government
and loggers sent in elephants to trample the women who were
draping themselves around the trees. The huge animals moved forward
on command. The women left the trees and approached the elephants,
 singing a ritual song ... But these were not temple elephants, they
were army elephants. Still the women approached, singing, and then
they swarmed over the animals, stroking them, embracing the
massive trunks and feet. Was this a tactic or a prayer? ... But the
elephants stopped. The elephants knelt. The elephants would not budge.
The troops and the loggers withdrew, acknowledging defeat before a
group of women who were hugging trees. Bina Kala, coordinator of
eighteen local women's forums in the district, explains, 'When
awakened, Hindu goddesses are known to be more powerful and
awesome than their male counterarts. Women here now have
become conscious of their shakti (energy). They will exercise it
whenever necessary.'"



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