Re: "Women in Croatia"

[Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol@xxxxxxx>]

At 12:35 PM 8/30/99 +0000, Katha P. wrote:
>You might be interested to know that the "five witches" eventually won
>their libel suit against their media attackers.  Vesna Kesic is a friend
>of mine -- she won a modest amount by US standards, but enough to move
>to New York, where she is getting a master's degree at the New School.
> Kareta, the conservative women's org mentioned in Yoshie's post, is the
>organization that  --yes -- Catharine MacKinnon allied herself with when
>she got involved in Bosnian rape politics.  Kareta argued that only
>Serbs committed rape and sexual atrocities against women -- as of course
>they would say, being Croatian nationalists.  MacKinnon accepted this
>distortion of reality -- which was particularly strange given
>macKinnon's own oft-expressed beliefs about the prevalence of rape, and
>its pervasiveness in even the most peaceful of times. Apparently
>Croatian and Muslim soldiers and paramilitaries rape their wives and
>girlfriends and strangers on the street at home, but not women of other
>ethnicities in wartime!
>  After Slavenka Draculic published an article about bosnian war rape
>victims in the Nation, we got a letter from kareta calling her a
>"pornographer" because she wrote political journalism for a Yugoslav
>magazine that published sexy photos of women. These are MacKinnon's
>allies. Truly sickening.
>


Katha - this is yet another example of the spin industry i was talking
about in the thread on racism -- too good to pass it without commenting how
it works.  As usually - an empirical fact (rape) is bloated into a claim by
attaching an ideological baggage to it (mckinnon's voodoo logic that spells
can have the same material effects as deeds).  When you question that
ideology, the warlocks who profess it hit you with accusations that you
"deny the facts."  This whole strategy rests of conflating facts with
ideological claims and using the former as mere signifiers of the other
(see Roland Barthes _Mythology_ where he analyzes the structure of myths) -
a task perfected by religious warlock for centuries.

wojtek