On Bigotry

Another post that started out as a thread on “X marks the plot” but grew too long.

Those who know me are aware that I've been an active anti-racist all my life, which includes opposing all forms of antisemitism. How can I not? My left-wing politics and knowledge of history aside, I have Jewish family, and I count many Jewish people among my dearest friends and comrades.

 

I know that among people who profess support for Palestinians are some who are antisemitic, just as among those who profess support for Israel are antisemites who currently hate and fear Arabs and Muslim people more. 

 

I don't accept the highly ideological or idiotic premise that criticism of the policies and actions of a far-right Israeli government is actual or de facto antisemitism. 

 

Those who stick the labels of "racist" or "antisemite" on any argument or behaviour of which they disapprove, risk emptying the concepts of political and critical meaning, and as such they serve to weaken opposition to racism and antisemitism.

 

Israel is the de facto 51st state of the US. It couldn't exist without US federal backing; its interests align with those of the USA, albeit that the current ultra-right-wing Israeli government has slipped the leash and savaged more non-combatants than its imperial master might have wanted it to. 

 

It’s one thing justifying owning an attack dog by claiming it’s for defensive reasons because of the dangerous neighbourhood; it’s another thing entirely when the dogs get off the leash and rip a load of kids to pieces.

 

The old European imperial powers advanced their interests via settler colonialism. They declared a land to be “empty” of people or populated by people who lacked the ability to utilise its natural resources, and/or to govern themselves in what the imperialists deemed to be a "civilised" way.

 

Zionists couldn’t claim terra nullius in Palestine given the known history of the role of multiple empires in the region since people first settled it … Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Canaanite, Phoenician, Hebrew, Carthaginian, Minoan, Greek, Persian, Illyrian, Thracian, Etruscan, Iberian, Roman, Byzantine, Bulgarian, Arab, Berber, Ottoman, British … so they relied on what is a variation of the lies told by the white South African apartheid regime. 

 

They claim that when Jews began to arrive in Palestine in large numbers from Eastern Europe in the late C19th, only around 250,000 Arabs lived there, most of whom had arrived in recent decades, and all, according to the Zionists (many of whom were mired in European supremacism), were an inferior people.

 

Also, they claim, that although Muslim invasions of the region in the 7th century AD had resulted in Arabic being the main language and Islam the main religion, it was never exclusively an Arab region.

No-one has ever claimed it was but more than twelve hundred years of settlement and cultural-religious influences cannot be denied or deemed inferior without creating a justified backlash.

 

Many Arab nationalists saw the Levant as a logical part of a Greater Syria with a capital in the ancient city of Damascus. Greater Syria was a potential Arab powerhouse that was anathema to the old and new imperial powers which wanted the Middle East to be a collection of small states they could dominate and play off against each other to protect the trade routes and the oil.

The Balfour Declaration which promised a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and the League of Nation’s Mandate that followed it, placated powerful Zionists in the UK and the US. \

It has been interpreted by Zionists as having granted a de facto legal right to sovereignty that was formalised by the 1947 UN partition resolution which established the state of Israel.

After the horrors of the Nazi slaughter of Jews became widely known, the UN resolution served as a political balm to assuage the guilt of the countries that had allowed the horror to happen and had refused entry to refugees.

The ultra-Zionists’ rewriting of a complex history rests firmly on the idea of the Arab inhabitants of Palestine as both a lesser people and as aliens, recent “invaders” of a land to which the Jewish people have both a divine right and an indigenous claim because their God promised it to Abraham, and there has been uninterrupted Jewish settlement from the time of Joshua. (Including the hyperbolic claim of being the “world’s first constitutional monarchy” around 1000 BC.)

It also sowed the seeds of the anti-Arab racism that is now a malignant cancer in the Israeli social body.

To ensure enough Israelis continue to elect right-wing governments and support their extremist measures, the population is heavily indoctrinated, with the IDF and compulsory military service playing a significant role in that. 

The most potent element of that indoctrination, apart from the fuelling of anti-Arab racism, is stoking fear and rage over the Nazi holocaust. That those right-wing governments directly and indirectly force young Israelis to participate in genocidal acts against mostly young Palestinians, is beyond tragic.

 

 

 

The Politics of Peeing

I took issue with a post on X that the reason there are women’s loos, prisons etc is because men pose such a physical threat to them, women demanded and got separate provision. My post was misconstrued, so I will try to explain myself. 

Leaving aside the reductionism and pessimism of the view of men as innately inclined to physical and sexual predation of women, the reality of the emergence of sex segregated public provision is more complex than female activists having forced it.

The following just scratches the surface of a multi-layered and complex issue.

The rise of public sanitation 

In Britain and the empire, before the Victorian era, public health measures such as public loos, were largely non-existent.

Prior to the installation of water closets in the home, the wealthy would use a close-stool, the contents of which would be emptied by a servant, usually female.

If there was no ready access to a close-stool, ladies would pee in a special pot carried by a maidservant. Gentlemen, if in male company only, peed in a container in a corner of the room or out a window.

If they weren’t near a chamber pot or privy, poor women and men pretty much peed and pooed wherever they could, and their privies would be shared by the occupants of several dwellings.

The Victorian era saw an increase in wider public sanitation measures in cities to stop the spread of diseases like cholera. Epidemics are not only bad for business, they can also kill the rich.

The provision of public loos was heavily influenced by both concerns about public health, and concerns over the “immorality” of people exposing themselves in public. The latter was far more focussed on women than men.

Closed crotch knickers

Prior to the development of closed crotch knickers in the late regency era, it was easier for all women to pee in public, and with the influence of the French Revolution, wealthy women’s dress, outside of formal court dress, was much less restricting. 

Working women were always forced by finances and the physical demands of their lives to dress more simply.

Men didn’t wear knickers either but pulled their long shirt tail between their legs. NB. Men’s shirts still had a tail long after underpants became a thing.

Interestingly, closed crotch knickers for women were initially regarded as immoral. The rise of bourgeois Victorian morality saw them become de rigeur, and the absence of knickers or wearing of open crotch knickers were seen as immoral.

The impact of closed crotch knickers on the politics of peeing and pooing was that they necessitated increasingly voluminous skirts and petticoats to be lifted and the knickers to be lowered. Prior to the invention of elastic, knickers were held up by tapes around the waist which had to be untied and retied.Women of all classes no longer had the ability to spread their legs or squat and have a discreet pee.

Female sequestration

The wives and daughters of wealthy/powerful men were sequestered in the home for the most part, and were the main focus of patriarchal modesty and chastity standards aimed at the guarantee of paternity and the transmission of title and/or property.

However, the domestic sphere for wealthy women was a world away from the lives of the masses.

What a lot of middle class, white feminists forget or choose to ignore, is that many working class women were not sequestered in the home in the same way.

There was a “trickle down” of upper class and bourgeois morality, but it was often over-ridden by the need to exploit the labour of working class women. (1)

The first people to be drafted into factories were pauper women and children. Women worked on the land, and in workshops, in mills and mines, and in the houses of those whose exploitation of the working class enabled them to employ an army of servants to empty their piss pots and middens, and wash the cloths used to wipe arses. 

Even middle class people employed a maid of all work.

There was a vast army of women who carried the dual burdens of their own domestic chores plus low paid/low status employment, and were held to bourgeois standards of decorum while being forced to live in ways that made maintaining them impossible. 

The late Victorian/Edwardian era saw the entry of large numbers of middle class women into the public sphere, and with that the need for both public loos, and the provision of them in commercial and educational buildings etc.

Many men resented the intrusion of women into male areas of employment and blocked or did not support such provision – the so-called "urinary leash." (2)

Due to prevailing modesty standards, it was unthinkable for a “respectable” woman to lift her skirts and drop her knickers in the vicinity of a man, or even to do so within hearing distance, so it was inevitable that all public loos were strictly sex segregated. The clothes women had to wear also made the process of using a loo both time consuming and difficult.

Most women were influenced to some degree by the modesty standards that were a cornerstone of patriarchal religion, and those standards were in play in movements agitating for an increase in provision of women’s loos.

Women did not need to demand sex segregation, it was a given.

The penal reform work of the remarkable Elizabeth Fry is a case in point. She was a member of a wealthy Quaker banking family and very devout. As such, although her penal reform mission became wider than sex segregation, her concerns included the “low and deplorable state of morals” of both female and male prisoners in the prisons of the regency era when the infamous Bloody Code was still in force. 

The movement she ignited, to segregate prisons by sex, was as motivated by questions of sexual morality as it was by a concern for the safety of the mainly poor women who were incarcerated in the brutal prisons of the day. 

It was the wider acceptance of those concerns which resulted in sex segregation being readily agreed and quickly implemented, while other, equally important, penal reforms were not. 

Projecting a 21^st century liberal or radical feminist analysis of sex segregated provision back two centuries onto the likes of Elizabeth Fry risks taking presentism into the realms of caricature.

The Social Compact

Sex segregation of public loos, changing rooms, etc was and remains a powerful social norm which can be backed up by the law if there is criminal action or intent.

So powerful was the normative acceptance of sex segregation, when sex discrimination laws were drafted in the 1970s, no one questioned the exceptions written into them to make provision of women-only spaces and services lawful. It continued to be seen widely as natural and desirable.

 

 Notes:

(1) In the US, the role of slavery, Jim Crow, and the post-slavery hyper-exploitation of African American women, was a gaping hole in much of early white American feminism. In the UK and associated countries, there was a similar gap of the situation of working class women and women of colour.

(2) I worked in the Fire Service in London in the 1990s and saw first-hand how resentful many men still were about women's intrusion into what they saw a male preserve.

Slavery

(First published in Christchurch Press)

2007 is the 200th anniversary of what has been described as one of the few "perfectly virtuous acts in the history of nations" – the abolition of the British slave trade.

There were virtuous people involved, among them the Quakers, who started the movement; Thomas Clarkson, written out of history by Wilberforce's sons, and Granville Sharp, who defended runaways.

But the reason abolitionism became so powerful in England was a coalescence of social and political movements, shifts in political consciousness and changes in production methods.

This social revolution made it politically, economically and militarily expedient for Britain to end slavery. It also changed the way Britain dealt with its colonies, especially New Zealand.

On a prosaic level, our consumption of sugar, potatoes, tobacco and coffee derives from the triangular trade in which ships took goods to Africa, bartered them for slaves, transported the slaves to the colonies, and returned with the products of slave labour. Our use of the word "manchester" to describe cotton and linen goods reflects that city's key role in the triangular trade.

The English dominated the trade from the late 16th century. Estimates of the number taken, mainly young and able-bodied, vary between 8 and 14 million, and up to 40 million more died in wars and raids.

From Elizabethan times slaves were taken to England where their legal status remained unclear. They often absconded and when recaptured would be sold to West Indian plantations. Granville Sharp and others fought for years defending runaways and pressing for a legal ruling on slavery in England.

The 1772 Mansfield judgement in the Somerset case said no-one could compel a slave to leave England, but it did not formally end slavery. Most English slaves effectively freed themselves by the 1790s and, with the freed slaves who had fought for the English in the American Revolutionary War, formed part of the abolition movement.

From the 1770s, Quaker pamphlets and posters exposed the way slaves were treated in the colonies. Mortality rates were very high; beatings, rapes, torture and murder were commonplace. In 1781, in an insurance scam, 135 sick slaves were thrown overboard from the slaver Zong. The case was dealt with in the English courts, not as one of mass murder, but as a property dispute.

Conditions on board slavers were little better for sailors; one in five died on the voyage. Many people saw a correlation between slavery and the injustice of press ganging and forced labour in the Royal Navy.

The Acts of Enclosure, the colonisation of Ireland and the Highland Clearances forced people off the land and enabled the creation of vast estates by rich men, many of whom made their fortunes in the triangular trade.

Feudal production methods and ties were being broken; dispossessed rural folk and unemployed artisans formed a new urban poor for whom life was both harsh and precarious. A new middle class emerged; people with the time and means to act upon their consciences and to question the vagaries and corruption of the parliamentary process.

At this time, only 5% of men could vote, but there was a strong culture of "intuitive democracy". It was legal to own and operate printing presses; there were many libraries and debating societies and an efficient road and postal system allowed a high level of uncensored communication. All these factors were successfully exploited by the Abolitionists.

Slavery created the capital that fuelled the industrial revolution that created a working class – and it was the first issue to galvanise nation-wide working class action. After Wilberforce's first abolition bill was defeated in 1788, anti-slavery petitions flooded into parliament from working class organisations. At the forefront of the demand for emancipation were women's associations which organised a boycott of sugar that was supported by 300,000 people.

The link between abolition and the radicalism of levelling and the rights of man horrified Wilberforce who believed the trade should be stopped, but that the property rights of slave owners had to be protected. He also believed that working people should be treated well but kept firmly in their place, hence his support of the 1795 Combinations Acts and the outlawing of radical and trade union activities.

The 1807 Act formally halted the slave trade but it wasn't until 1833 that slaves were freed throughout the empire. Whilst hefty compensation was paid to slave owners, slaves were forced to work for a further four years without pay. Freedom when it finally came was notional; ex-slaves had no political voice and were shackled by debt. Slavery had been replaced by another system just as brutal and exploitative.

One year after emancipation, the Reform Bill introduced one of the most detested institutions in British social history – the workhouse.