Kitty Marion: an actress who became a suffragette who planted bombs
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
This piece is interesting to me. I spent my childhood very uninterested in history because in school we basically memorized the names of politicians and the dates of starts of wars. There was nothing interesting presented to me.
Then I began to learn that wars impacted things like fashion and women's rights and freedoms and had substantial economic impact. I was hooked.
Many people don't realize it, but the long dresses and many underskirts that preceded the war stopped being the fashion precisely because we had this war. Women were asked to donate their many underskirts and excess material from long dresses to the war effort. They were also asked to donate their corsets, which were often made of metal, so munitions and the like could be made from them.
This is how we went dramatically from Victorian fashion -- with long dresses, long sleeves, many underskirts and crippling corsets -- to the Flapper Era of loose fitting mini dresses. This was hugely liberating in and of itself and improved the health of women. Women suffered terrible gastrointestinal issues from corsets and some of them had lower ribs removed in order to fit a smaller corset. It was horrible.
This is akin to if an Islamic country suddenly stopped requiring the veil in public. Women in conservative Islamic countries typically suffer vitamin D deficiencies because they can't go out in public without being covered head to toe. It has significant negative health consequences.
I was a military wife for a lot of years. The military is weirdly empowering of women in old fashioned roles. I was a homemaker, yet I routinely had a power of attorney and was expected to make decisions and handle family business in my husband's absence. War is often something that does good things for the status of women.
It saddens me to learn that women were engaging in terrorist activities to try to gain some freedom and this only ended because the entire world went to war. I would like to think we can find our way forward on such topics more peaceably, though I am currently so frustrated with certain things that I am having one of those moments where I kind of understand why some women would just lose their shit and start making bombs. Staying the course on a peaceable path sometimes seems mind-bogglingly hard.
Used to be Iran didn't require it [0].
One of the captions on that page ("to protect the achievements of women’s right in the [preceding] 70 years of Iranian history") made me curious, so I did a quick search and found something interesting [1]. Apparently, the liberation they were defending in 1979 was actually forced upon them generations earlier.
[0] https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/women-protesting-hijab-1979...
I have read some pieces about Iran, including the memoirs Reading Lolita in Tehran and Persepolis. From what I gather, when women leave an Islamic country and are free to wear western clothes in public, this is a big deal and the whole feel of the sun on my skin is a thing they comment on to each other as some significant detail.
I can actually feel some sympathy for women objecting to the removal of the veil being forced upon them, but I'm not sure I can say anything constructive about that which has any hope of being appreciated by a mostly western audience.
So in cases like this were the militant struggle involved fighting for what we now consider a fundamental right rather than purely barbaric violence, people want to make a distinction from terrorism.
For example the IRA bombs in London where often targeted at economic targets ie look we can cost you so deal with us - ok they also had a go at the PM and almost succeeded a couple of times.
With ISIS its almost a return to the original roots though there is also an element of sectarian almost genocidal which is why targeting medics and children is ok for them.
We have this notion that everything can be solved with a cup of tea and a polite, perhaps friendly conversation.
It is this precise notion that makes war and terror likely - because we think ourselves better than those who came before, and that we are immune to those forces that dragged them into terrorism and political violence.
I don't really care what the answer was, as personally I think either position is workable. I was just curious what rayiner thought.
Was the violence “acceptable?” To me it’s not a useful question. Violence is one of the ways people interact with each other; any large scale social movement will involve some violence. Was the outcome of self determination worthwhile despite some deaths? Undoubtedly.
Violence is one of the ways that people interact with others, but so is greed, envy, racism and hatred. One of the great things about being humans is we can choose to discard or tempter behaviors that are destructive.
Are you for racism and bigotry because that's a part of nature? I know you aren't. Why is violence different? If we've made international laws which we've decided as a species that certain actions are unacceptable, why is violence so sacred?
You cannot have movements involving millions of people fighting for justice and not have some of those people turn to violence. Demanding that such movements be completely non-violent means de facto endorsing the status quo.
> Are you for racism and bigotry because that's a part of nature? I know you aren't. Why is violence different?
I don't think a larger movement that is otherwise just is discredited just because some subset is driven by racism or bigotry, or engages in violence. E.g. I strongly support British peoples' exercise of their right of self determination through Brexit, even if a lot of people were motivated by xenophobia. Likewise Irish self determination, even though it involved a lot of violence and religious sectarianism. There is a huge difference between discouraging racism/bigotry/violence at an individual level, and discrediting the efforts of groups of people merely because some portion of them cannot overcome those human tendencies.
To use an example: Do you think that the Irish should've lived under the thumb of the British until such a time that it could've achieved independence in a way that did not involve violence or Catholic/Protestant animosity?
Of course not, but it also doesn't mean that we suggest that violence is a positive thing or necessary for progress.
Resorting to violence in many cases minimizes your argument. You turn aggressors into victims and give them a reason to fight back. You deny those abusers the same thing you want (peace and safety), which distorts the argument. And demagogues will distort it.
This is ignoring the completely innocent victims that are often harmed in incidents like this. How can humanists support the maiming and death of innocents?
To use an example: Do you think that the Irish should've lived under the thumb of the British until such a time that it could've achieved independence in a way that did not involve violence or Catholic/Protestant animosity?
I don't know. I do know that progress, though slow, was being made without violence. The Irish were given Home Rule by the British HoC in the 1910s. Surely this kind of progress would have continued. In contrast, violence was avoided at other times (the UVF arming to reject Home Rule).
If in any of these incidents you say that violence was a given, necessary, or justified, you are very possibly making it so, and not only that, but starting conflict which may never end. Surely people are capable of progress without our most animal of instincts? Many people have believed that.
Violence is cowardly and brute. If you want to be a martyr, be a martyr as you've made that choice for yourself, but don't be a murderer.
“The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral; begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. So it goes. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/paperbacktheology/2016/01/ten-g...
It was not being made without violence. The British didn't give Irish Home Rule out of the goodness of their hearts - what an absurdly paternalistic argument, and one which ignores all the violence involved in upholding a particular political order.
As a parallel in this thread, people are wringing their hands about the violent potential of BLM but none of those people seem put out by the extensive use of violence by police on a daily basis, because that seems like such a part of social infrastructure that many have become blind to it..
I'm against violence across the board, for the record. The problem with violence against the police is it doesn't improve your position, it only confirms negative biases people have of the movement. It's counter-productive.
Violence is undesirable but you're arguing against people engaging in any kind of self-defense.
"The headlong stream is termed violent
But the river bed hemming it in is
Termed violent by no one."
-- Brecht
Humans are obsessed with violence and conflict. Though sports, movies, video games, debate, and fighting have somewhat sublimated this obsession.
When the majority have created an unjust system, and leave no option for reforms by minorities within that system, the only alternative is civil unrest, and that civil unrest has brought reform in the us multiple times in history.
Honestly, though — considering what they’re protesting, I think BLM has been remarkably NON-violent.
>considering what they’re protesting, I think BLM has been remarkably NON-violent
Last year only 20 unarmed black people were shot and killed by police vs 30 whites. So far this year the numbers are 8 and 11. Counting all police shootings last year, whites are 457 of them, blacks 223. About twice the number of whites have been shot by police. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shoo...
So yes blacks are killed at a higher rate per population. But what about by actual violence? When looking at violence, blacks and whites commit about the same number of homicides despite population differences. Homicide is the most fair stat we have. If we use lesser crimes [like drug possession or other violence], we will see blacks overrepresented due to higher policing and a biased justice system. In fact, as minority areas of cities have a low solve rate, going by homicides may understate the racial difference in crime in favour of blacks.
It sort of looks like, if you want to get racial about it, whites are the ones killed too much by police. And if you look at the numbers for Hispanics, it is even worse. (But that might be an artifact of how race/ethnicity/Hispanic is reported.[1])
Yet that does not stop perception. There was an ad on TV a while back with a black mother having "The Talk"[2] with her teenage daughter about getting stopped by cops and not wanting her killed. Well, let's see: in 2017 one unarmed female black person was shot by police, and that was when a SWAT team raided her and her bf's place. Such ads that portray this as an issue are simple fear mongering. 2018, so far that number is 0. An ad about how to hide in case of lightning storms would be more realistic. Or simply more training about driving. Or avoiding pools. Or practically anything else in the world.
Try it out: Go ask around and see what your friends and others think the true rate is of unarmed people being killed. Ask them what difference in numbers they think exist for black vs white, and ask them about the flip side of civilian violence. My guess is you'll first get some incredibly high statement about how this is just happening non-stop, then when you reveal the numbers you'll get some other excuse about how it is not about the numbers anyways but some other general racial problem.
1: I'm using https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2014/crime-in-the-u.s.-... for a quick view of homicide stats. The numbers could be off by 2x and it would not change the point much.
2: Found it: https://youtu.be/3s20ePvTaME?t=21 "This is not you about getting a ticket, this is about you coming home" to which the girl says "I'm going to be OK....right?" Obviously a dramatization but if you're somehow implying to your teenage girl that cops are going to pull you over and you'll not "come home", you're the problem.
In a situation like that, where one group feels the shooting of unarmed people is justified the absolute numbers are not the whole picture.
> During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.
He's lauding the role of the violent revolutionary without further reflection (because he'd already made his choice long ago) whether actions that generated waves of murder and generations of tyrants as a result were actually desirable.
I'd argue that results of his violence are a great argument against much of what he sad because he obviously didn't know how to control it or didn't care. As an example, he didn't want Stalin to come to power, but he was powerless to stop the bloodshed he'd put into motion and people suffered horrendously because of it. Sounds like a short-sighted and evil person.
A series of debilitating strokes reduced Lenin to the status of an invalid, and Trotsky naively took Stalin's good faith for granted and avoided attacking him publicly despite Lenin's request for him to denounce Stalin's political opportunism. Omitting major causal factors doesn't say much for the quality of your argument.
The foolishness of violence is assuming you can put it back in the bottle. That's part of the argument.
> I was appointed on a commission to investigate the conditions of the blind. For the first time I, who had thought blindness a misfortune beyond human control, found that too much of it was traceable to wrong industrial conditions, often caused by the selfishness and greed of employers. And the social evil contributed its share. I found that poverty drove women to a life of shame that ended in blindness.
If we're only telling her story as an allegory and divorce her from her personal viewpoints, we might as well tell fables.
Deafblindness isn't particularly unknown outside her case, and she wasn't the first person to be successfully taught to communicate despite it. But her ability to become a nationally prominent political activist despite her handicap made her unique.
Well, she learned how to communicate and even speak. That seems pretty big. Clearly schoolchildren all over America, when they learn about this, are amazed by HK and her teachers. No one hears that story and says "Well, so what?" if they don't hear the part about how she became a socialist later in life.
> But her ability to become a nationally prominent political activist despite her handicap made her unique.
She was already nationally prominent before she became a political activist. It's not like she became a social activist, and then people said "Hey, we should look into her past and see what her upbringing was like", and then the Hellen Keller story emerged.
And whats so controversial about being a socialist. The Europeans would be laughing at how "controversial" it is, seeing as the Socialist Party is the largest party in France and used to produce several French presidents.
We remember Helen Keller because by all rights she should have been basically an institutionalized animal and not had a career of any kind whatsoever. What exactly she did is of less significance than that she did anything at all with her life.
This scene from "The Miracle Worker," a movie about her relationship to the teacher who taught her sign language and basic manners against very long odds, never fails to bring me to tears:
De Klerk similarly had a great moderating influence. The alternative to the nonviolence of him and Mandela would have been a racial civil war in which tens of thousands died.
Rick Stengel on Mandela, via FAIR:
> One of most interesting things he ever said to me was this idea of nonviolence. Remember, we compare him to Gandhi, we compare him to Martin Luther King. He said: “I was not like them. For them, nonviolence was a principle. For me, it was a tactic. And when the tactic wasn’t working, I reversed it and started” –that’s a very important difference.
After his release in '90, he visited Castro and heaped praise on him for that among other things. There's no indication that he regretted that support for Cuba's direct military involvement in open warfare later, as far as I know.
Here's an excerpt (with links to the full speech) of Mandela's speech on the subject at a commemoration of the start of the Cuban revolution in 1991:
https://www.democracynow.org/2013/12/11/nelson_mandela_on_ho...
(I have plenty of issues with Castro, but it's worth understanding why he was seen as we seen by African leaders, and how we was seen by people like Mandela also elucidates those leaders own views)
Renouncing violence against a nuclear-bomb-equiped adversary is beyond foolish, strategically speaking. At the micro end, the same regime was not beyond shooting dead (unarmed) protesting high-schoolers less than a decade before the offer. Renouncing violence wasn't a viable option, but perhaps they hoped 2 decades imprisonment with labor had softened Mandela.
Given South Africa's geography, why do you think the apartheid government had (prior to the offer) developed its nuclear program? Hint: there was no parallel program for long-distance nuclear-payload delivery.
But would the former have succeeded without the latter's help? Would MLK have succeeded without Malcolm X? Would Gandhi have succeeded without Subhas Chandra Bose? Would Nelson Mandela have succeeded without his willingness to use violence?
When looking at movements such as the American revolutionary war, the American civil war, and the Allies' resistance against Nazi occupation, the use of violence to achieve political goals, is both accepted and seen as necessary for the greater good. I've yet to meet anyone who deplored armed resistance in the above conflicts.
https://www.independent.co.uk/world/the-forgotten-violence-t...
http://www.latimes.com/world/worldnow/la-fg-wn-nelson-mandel...
If colonised countries had not been actively(and violently) trying to get rid of their colonisers, the British Empire could have persisted indefinitely.
Violence is much more effective than non-violence in trying to get rid of any oppressor. Consider this: any State can deal with 5-10% of its population not working/paying taxes and "non-violently" resisting(these days even property crime can get you counted as a violent protestor). States would be much more hard pressed to deal with even 1% of their population in active, armed revolt against them.
(even one that somehow rapidly ended slavery without slave owners waging war)
I think you could make just as strong an argument that the Nazi regime would not have lasted long if those harsh punitive measures were actually enforced. I mean, if you have a strongman leader, the best thing for him is an enemy who snarls real good, but who backs down immediately upon confrontation.
I think the truth of the matter is that after world war one, the allies didn't have the political will to properly enforce the sanctions or to expend the money and effort for a marshal plan type response. I think that's why we got what we did, harsh punitive measures that were ignored whenever Germany pushed on them. - but I think that's also the best case for an expanding fascistic government... It sure looked, to the non-jewish german people, that every time Hitler "stood up for them" hitler got what they wanted. It was like the allies set up a paper tiger for Hitler to look strong against.
I'm not saying that's what should have been done, just that the "the Nazis would have not risen if there weren't punitive measures" and "The Nazis would not have held on to power if those punitive measures were actually enforced" are counterfactuals; theories about what could have been. I argue that there is just as much evidence for my theory as yours.
Maybe? I mean, the war of independence is a little different... clearly, we were not a real threat to the British; we just needed to be seen to be resisting, without getting crushed, until the war with France heated up enough that the British couldn't spare the troops to keep us down. from that perspective? it was almost a minimal violence kind of war. The "Fabian strategy" - which only worked against an army as good at logistics as the British because they were also fighting a serious war with France at the time. Really, we needed to remain a threat, but except for proving that we could inflict such damage, one could argue that the actual violence wasn't super necessary.
The ACW, on the other hand, I... kinda don't think there was a peaceful resolution there. I mean, it wasn't like the southerners were arguing for a British style 'emancipation with compensation to the former owners' and the war was just haggling over the price. The Confederacy pretty much immediately rebelled after it was clear that we'd have an abolitionist-leaning president... long before any actual abolitionistic action was taken, long before it was clear that such action would be taken.
I kinda don't see how the ACW could have been avoided or made less violent. By advanced nation standards of the time, we were pretty far behind on the abolition schedule already, and while the slaughter of the ACW was shocking, so was slavery.
The economic model is strong in some ways; the value of all the slaves in the south, as I understand it, was greater than the value of all the farmland in the south.
There are weaknesses in the economic model, too, though. Nobody is saying that the southern enlisted man was hesitant to fight, and few of the enlisted (as opposed to officers) owned slaves.
For that matter, your average enlisted southerner would probably have been significantly better off, economically speaking, without slavery, just because if you are trying to sell your own labor, it's significantly more difficult to do so when you are competing with literal slaves.
So while you can use the economic model to explain the behavior of the southern elite, the economic model does not explain why the average southerner fought.
If say the American colonies where given all the rights UK citizens under the same legal system had then Somerset v Stewart becomes interesting as that case outlawed chattel slavery in the UK in 1772.
Violent action makes people engaged in non-violent action seem reasonable when before they may have seemed extremist. MLK became someone the middle could deal with because they saw that the alternative would have been a violent insurrection. Same with ghandi.
If you’re dealing with a democracy and a populace like the US or the UK, there happens to be a limit of how much brutality they’re willing to stomach in defense of the system. In a lot of cases it’s much more than we’d like to admit.
If you’re dealing with an authoritarian government or a theocracy, that limit is much higher or non-existent.
No, it doesn't.
It (correctly) notes that the bomb-planting didn't doom the movement. What it doesn't do is give credit to the bombings for advancing the movement (rayiner's short comment is mute on that aspect).
We should indeed seek to get justice without firing a shot. I take exception to the implication that we should condone violence because there's supposedly no such thing as a bloodless revolution.
And I don't think it is condoning violence to be unsurprised if some people involved in some movement resort to violence.
The argument isn't that other movements were violent so violence is fine, it is that falsely painting historical movements as pure creates the problem where the actions of an extreme few can be used to dismiss the work of the many.
Nevertheless, that's what the comment referred to. For you it's an obvious non-issue, but not objectively so, and they were referring to that issue.
If you find something else more interesting, make that point without twisting what someone else said. Otherwise that whole stuff about rejecting violence sounds kind of hollow.
Exactly. That was rayiner's point from the beginning, so I'm not sure what you were disagreeing with there.
From ‘Words of Wisdom’ by Tupac Shakur, who made a very good point.
For achieving major political change, the two most effective means really are violence and the threat of violence.
In a way modern movements tend to be like modern wars such as 'The War on Drugs' or 'The War on Terror.' These are neverending wars that can never be won, nor lost. And when violence begins to become associated with these movements, then it's infinitely more damning since that means there will also be no end to it and you'll invariably breed a counter-movement, which can lead to a long term divide in society which, again, has no end.
Boycotts and strikes can do so as well and are generally less backfire prone. Granted they require valuable resources in their control to do so. Meanwhile everyone has some capacity for violence and it becomes more tempting in response to violence received. In some cases it is the only option. Look at Haiti's bloody history. Their revolt was brutal but they had lived in a situation that was essentially a death camp - population of slaves was sustained by importation. Peace was never an option and there was no halfway. Once the revolt started it was either kill every oppressor or be purged and replaced by the next shipfull.
Gene Sharp the longstanding founder passed away earlier this year.
Much of the content is free.
Another great resource is Canvas(with a lot of free ebook content):
http://canvasopedia.org/publications/
The co-founder Srdja Popovic was an instructor of mine for the Harvard JFK School course he teaches.
He was a student leader in Serbia that helped to remove Milosevic from power with non-violent concepts such as "laughtivism".
The data on non violent movements for social change suggests that non-violent movements are twice as likely to be successful and more sustainable/resilient.
it makes intuitive sense as well. Someone who resorts to violence can be considered a public enemy and therefore engages in a zero sum game. Non violent protests usually consider that both sides need to talk and not fight.
SJWs have such a bad reputation because many of them clearly don't really want to end the current Lord of the Flies pecking order that dictates some people get crapped on and some people do the crapping. They often clearly just want to change who plays those respective roles, often with an obvious eye towards taking revenge against the current "privileged" demographic.
If you aren't advocating that no one should be crapped on, it's really hard to gain trust and it's really hard to convincingly claim the moral high ground.
I don't know about the impression anyone else had, but the impression I had came from Disney and Mary Poppins: suffragettes were frivolous society women of well-to-do means who just wanted to find a cause for the drama and attention while neglecting their children and family.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kvk1NZDFvZU
Riddell goes on to list the chaining, the force-feeding, and the window-smashing; I wasn't even aware of that. The whole suffragette movement for a long time looked to me like a bunch of women complaining for a long time until men, simply exasperated with the whining, decided to give in.
I had never even heard of "deeds, not words", nor about Emmeline Pankhurst, or Emily Davison. Nor was I aware that women had to put up with the exact same kind of mockery that they have to endure today:
http://historyoffeminism.com/anti-suffragette-postcards-post...
https://mashable.com/2016/09/03/anti-suffrage-propaganda/#d9...
http://mentalfloss.com/article/52207/12-cruel-anti-suffraget...