We receive and publish this contribution from the comrades of the 23 September Committee, already available on their page (see here):
WITH RESISTANCE TO COLONIALISM AND WARS
FOR A NEW FEMINISM
On Saturday 11 May we will meet in Venice with the protagonists of the international movement denouncing the aggression against the population in Gaza and the West Bank and supporting the resistance that has been opposing the Zionist project of ethnic cleansing in that land for 75 years. Military attacks, expulsions, land theft, house demolitions, harassment, walls, repression, prison even for children, collusion with corrupt leaders have not been enough to break the resistance of men and women. A resistance that has consolidated in the diaspora over the years, which has been transmitted from generation to generation, and which promises to continue “until liberation”.
In the colonial wars of yesterday and today and in the many forms of robbery on which the capitalist system was founded, women were at the center of operations to conquer territories and subjugate peoples. A subjugation that was presented as a clash between the West, the bearer of civilization, and the barbarian peoples to be “educated, moralized, converted” and… subdued.
Still today and without shame, wars and military aggressions are falsely motivated by the need to free the women of the attacked countries, victims subjected to a patriarchal power. A liberation that should take place with the sound of bombs and the destruction of every most basic survival structure of the women themselves, especially the poorest. Rape, prostitution for the benefit of the occupiers, the dismantling of the social and cultural bases of communities multiply the effect of murders and material destruction.
In its 200 years of history, Western feminism has often found itself faced with its inability to listen to and deal with the conditions and needs of the vast majority of women in the world, an inability aggravated by the claim to teach them the path to take towards emancipation as they benefited from their work, in the countryside, in the factories and from care work in their homes.
The women’s movement in the West, essential within the liberation movement of all the oppressed and exploited, will only have a future if it is able to enter into harmony with the broader movement of resistance and struggle of women in the south and east of world, against the patriarchalism and oppression of which Western governments are complicit. If they know how to fight with determination against the growing exploitation to which they themselves are subjected as workers, the environmental destruction, the impoverishment, the attack on self-determination and the gender discrimination that the capitalist system brings with it and that governments put in place act, starting from the Meloni government. We must mobilize against war propaganda that wants to enlist us and our children against false enemies.
The rampant wars and the toxic ideologies that justify them tend to break down the will to fight of unprivileged women, on the basis of a supposed achieved emancipation which in reality hides the strengthening of their role in the family and social hierarchy affirmed with growing violence. We will talk about all this and the challenges that the feminist movement must face at the meeting on May 11th.
The meeting is in person, but can also be followed online; We will gladly send the link to anyone who requests it.
