WORLD WORLDWIDE FRANCE News Journal Update - (en) France, CNT-AIT, femmes [BROCHURE]: Veil: neither religious obligation, nor state ban ---- NEITHER GOD NOR MASTER (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 A Jewish mother (let's remember here that to be one, you don't have to be Jewish

or even be a mother - it's a universal archetype) gives her son two ties, one is
red , the other is blue. To please him, he wears one the next day, let's say the
red one. Seeing him, annoyed, the mother burst into tears: "I was sure that the
other would not please you". Inevitably, if he had worn the blue, he would be
entitled to exactly the same scene. Faced with this "double constraint", he is
left with only two choices: to wear both ties together, that is to say, to go
crazy, or to wear none, that is to say, to break with his mother. The link with
Muslim women?

They are also subject to a double constraint: religion requires them to wear the
veil while the state forbids them (at school). To free themselves from one of
these powers, they are forced to submit to the other and vice versa. They are
then left, just like the Jewish son, with two possibilities. Either they submit
to both authorities, so they try to wear and take off their veil at the same
time, which is contradictory and therefore impossible. Either they simultaneously
refuse the obligation and the prohibition to wear it, which is absurd but
constitutes the only logical answer to the absurd world in which they live. This
second choice is as contradictory as the first but, here, the contradiction is
surmountable: refusing the two injunctions amounts to breaking with all the
powers at the same time, in short, to intoning once again this good old "neither
god, nor master". ".

Finally, it is not only Muslim women who find themselves in the same situation as
the son who received the two ties, it is the case for all people who, in all good
faith, wish to take a position in this debate. Indeed, if they speak out against
the headscarf, they risk being suspected of racist ulterior motives. If they take
the opposite position, they will be given objective complicity with the
Islamists. This is the classic situation that leads to self-censorship for fear
that the truth can be used by the adversary. Experience shows how much this type
of approach leads to the opposite of the desired result. During the Cold War, the
"left intellectuals", called upon to choose between the two blocs (i.e. between
state capitalism and market capitalism) mostly opted for the Soviet bloc and
suppress his crimes so that their disclosure does not strengthen the Western camp
and so as not to "discourage Billancourt". A decade later, the truth -despite
their efforts- was known to all and the discredit reflected not only on the
Eastern bloc but also on the very idea of Revolution which has since been
associated with that of totalitarianism. Only some dared to refuse the whole of
the alternative imposed on them and criticized, from a revolutionary point of
view, the USSR, contributing to the fact that the new Billancourts could still
conceive some hope.

In the same way, in the current debate, it is necessary to tell the truth -
whatever the advantage that this or that adversary may derive from it in the
short term. In the long term, as everyone knows, "only the truth is revolutionary".

NOR GOD...
It turns out that the Islamic veil is both a sign of religious affiliation and
gender discrimination. In him are opposed the rights of women and the "rights" of
religion. To defend one is to deny the other. As libertarian communists, we
unhesitatingly defend the rights of the individual against those of his culture.
Here, it will essentially be a question of Islam, since the current debate
concerns its practices, but what will be said about it applies broadly without
difficulty to the three monotheisms (Jew, Christian, Muslim, in order of
appearance ). They have in common a deep contempt for women and a hatred of
sexuality. More precisely, they start from a double postulate: desire would be
exclusively masculine and, moreover, it is -with some exceptions- culpable. They
conclude that in order to repress this desire, it is necessary to repress its
object: women. And for that, hide them. Thus the sharia imposes that women, by a
kind of apartheid, be confined in the intimacy of the home and, when they leave
it, duly accompanied by a guardian, that they are veiled.

Resentment against women is not only expressed in this way. It consists in also
denying their pleasure and their desire. This negation, which is sometimes
expressed physically by excision, symbolically means that women can only be the
object, never the subject of desire. Their inequality is thus founded.
Conversely, lending women any desire should have led, symmetrically, to veiling
men.  And, even without going that far, guaranteeing a minimum equality of the
sexes, should have led to rather locking up men with such fiery, uncontrollable
needs...

It should be noted that violence against women is coupled with another violence,
of less intensity, but with just as perverse effects, which is exerted on men.
Indeed, by veiling the woman, we designate her, in a paradoxical way, as
exclusively and completely an object of desire. Forbidden object, therefore even
more desirable. The veil prohibits/arouses the envy of men; forbidden because it
arouses, arouses because it prohibits.

Religion, like the other powers thus perfects, like a firefighter-pyromaniac, the
social control over individuals.

Reading the above, and seeing the debate over the veil, rendered extremely
confusing, some will suspect a specific animosity against Islam, or even racism.
The lines that follow hope to demonstrate not only that refusing the veil is in
no way racist, but that tolerating it is.

To be racist means to reproach someone not for what he does (example: having a
given religious practice) but for what he is (being born Arab, black or white).
However, being an Arab is not the same as being a Muslim. Religion, despite all
the pressures that come with it, is a matter of choice. One can be Arab and
Christian, Jewish or atheist. There are thinkers and poets in Arab history, born
into Muslim families, who chose to be heretical and even blasphemous like Hallaj
(858 - 922) who said: "I am Allah".[1]

Moreover, if we generalized this confusion between Arab and Muslim, we would be
forced to also confuse Western and Christian, which is, not surprisingly, the
position of the National Front. According to the logic of this same party, being
for abortion is an anti-Catholic and therefore anti-French position.

Surreptitiously, therefore, hesitating to condemn the veil for fear of being
racist turns into a racist position. Indeed, this presupposes defining Arab
identity in religious terms, as if an "Arab race" existed and was genetically
determined to be Muslim. Moreover, this leads to tolerating for Arab women what
would be refused for Western women, just as if freedom and equality were
exclusively Western values and could not be conceived or claimed by other
civilizations. Once again, we join the so-called differentialist positions of the FN.

That said, distinguishing Arab and Muslim is not enough. Indeed, a society is
only a field of struggle between several groups, ideologies, currents, ... and
especially social classes. To consider it as a homogeneous block would be to
reduce it to the dominant group and its discourse and therefore to become its
accomplice. Talking about collective identity (whether Arab or Muslim) serves to
mask the domination of Arab women by Arab men, of Arab workers by Arab bosses and
finally of agnostic and atheistic Arabs by religious Arabs.

Is it really necessary to remember that this same logic applies to other
"identities" (French, Christian, Jewish, Occitan, etc.)? For us, the only valid
identity is that of the individual. Which means that our rejection of religion is
coupled with a rejection of the nation-state.

NOR MASTER
Many "left" consciences in agreement with the above will see no other way to
fight the veil than to endorse its ban by the state. This amounts to replacing a
reactionary master with a new "emancipatory" master. But, a partial release is
only a new bondage. It therefore remains for us to free ourselves from our
liberators, and first of all from the myth of an emancipatory power. This last
expression is indeed a contradiction in terms: power cannot seek to emancipate
its subjects under pain of disappearing. But it can happen that he seems to seek
this end; in reality, it then aims to legitimize and preserve itself against
other powers that compete with it. By appearing to fight the oppression exercised
by his rivals, he hides his intention to eliminate them in order to replace them.

In the case before us, it is not difficult to see how the devious state does not
sincerely seek to defend women or even secularism.

Two facts first, of unequal importance, occurred in the months preceding the plan
to ban the veil at school. First of all, a law recognizing the legal personality
of the embryo was about to be adopted, which could have led to a criminalization
of abortion. Power therefore prohibits the veil with one hand, and seeks to
abolish the right to abortion with the other. On the other hand, the "Chained
Duck" revealed, with supporting evidence, how Bernadette Chirac had written to a
prefect to authorize a nun to pose veiled in the photo of her identity card.

Another proof of the state lie: the Republic only "defends" Muslim women when
they are veiled, not when they are "simply" victims of racism, poverty and
exploitation, while these latest injustices explain the vogue of sail. Indeed,
some veiled women (those who are not forced to do so) choose the veil as a means
of protest. It is the paradoxical and desperate choice of servitude as a means of
liberation. It is also a choice largely conditioned by the State itself, which,
if it wanted to seriously combat the veil and therefore Islamism, should have
rather than intervene at the level of the symptom by legal prohibition, to combat
it the cause, that is to say exclusion in all its forms.

Only, the state only pretends to oppose fundamentalism. By staging this
opposition and publicizing Islamism, it paradoxically prescribes it to the
suburbs as a "good" means of revolt (that is to say the least dangerous for
itself), while maintaining it within certain limits. . Designating Islamism as a
new theology of liberation for the suburbs makes it possible to move them away
from the Social Revolution, which has the disadvantage for the rulers of aiming
at the totality of the system and of bringing together beyond "ethnic"
differences and religious. Islam can then, as Christianity did before it, serve
as a policing force in poor neighborhoods.

Moreover, by simulating the fight against religious theology, the state slyly
asserts its own theological character. Thus, the school is a "sanctuary" and
Human Rights are "sacred". The alienation remains unchanged. Like any other
"opium of the people", state rhetoric conceals, through its incantatory formulas,
the injustice of this world. Through the equality of rights in a sort of
constitutional beyond, it consoles for the inequality that reigns here below.

Moreover, by limiting the powers of religion, the state seeks to extend its own:
the Stasi report on the veil recommends the prohibition of not only religious but
also political signs. The authors of the report justified this provision by the
concern not to appear to offend Islam. In reality, it is a revealing slip of the
will of state power.

The ban on the veil, justified with arguable grounds (freedom of women),
constitutes a precedent facilitating the future extension of this measure to
other modes of expression of opinions undesirable by the State.

Finally, let us note that, if the Republic is currently posing as the guardian of
freedom in the face of religious obscurantism, this situation could one day be
reversed. Indeed, it has already happened in the past that religion proclaims
itself the main force of resistance in the face of state oppression: this was for
example the case of the supporters of Khomeini during the tyranny of the Shah of
Iran and also that of the church under communist party dictatorship in Poland and
Russia.

Mistrust in the face of any power claiming to be defender of our rights must
therefore be in order. A final precision: we, libertarian communists, we do not
undertake to free veiled women. Nor do we intend to dictate their conduct. If we
acted in this way, we would send them a paradoxical injunction: by freeing
themselves, they would obey us. In a way, they would therefore remain dominated.
Their only means of asserting their freedom, in the face of our suggestion, would
then be to remain submissive!

In reality, the liberation of Muslim women will be the work of Muslim women
themselves or it will not be. On the other hand, if as we hope, this work of
self-emancipation takes place, our solidarity is acquired without limits. Not out
of generosity, but because their emancipation, far from being limited to
themselves, would also extend to us, for whom it is very difficult to feel free
when others are enslaved. Everyone knows that individual freedom remains
imperfect if it suffers from even one exception. "The freedom of others, far from
limiting mine, extends it to infinity"...

#Mustapha

[1]c. Lower the sails, Chahdortt Djavann, Gallimard

http://cnt-ait.info/2019/06/09/voile-ni-obligation/
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