Kristen Petroshius: Finding inspiration in Arizona

Kristen Petrosius (center) at a civil resistance action in Arizona

Last week I had the honor of being one of the hundred arrested for doing civil disobedience in Phoenix, Arizona. By blocking the road in front of Arpaio’s jail and office and flooding his jail with over eighty people on July 29, we kept his forces too busy to be able to do the raids on Brown communities that Arpaio had been bragging about for months. Physically, with our bodies, we prevented Arpaio’s assault on our communities for one day.

People had told me before my visit that Arizona is a police state. Nothing could have prepared me for the gross oppression I witnessed and heard in people’s stories during my brief three-day visit. We know that all over the country it’s criminal to “drive while Black/Brown”. Usually the police at least have to make up an excuse for harassing you. In Arizona, though, the police just say, “you look suspicious” meaning “you are brown.” I did not find one Brown person in Arizona who didn’t have a story of being on their way to work or to get their kids when they were stopped, arrested, and forced to endure a day in Arpaio’s hell-hole of a jail – deprived of sleep and food, treated like dirt by the guards, and mentally broken by the psychological warfare of the entire system’s design – only to be released with no charges. People’s freedom is literally being taken away every day in Arizona, especially if you’re an immigrant and you’re Brown, but even if you’re Native, Asian, Black, Arab, or a poor white person.

I feel a fierce rage in my belly when I think of Arizona and then I think: Do I feel the same rage with 287g, the so-called “secure communities” law that allows local police to act as ICE agents; the ways the ICE are constantly deporting our neighbors, friends, and families; the hardship immigrants have in finding work, accessing healthcare and other social services, and traveling? Do I feel the same rage from the ways Black people, Indigenous people, and other communities of color are inflicted with poverty, violence, and prisons? Am I willing to put my body on the line for these “every day” struggles? Is it the time to use civil disobedience as a more common tactic in our movements? Why or why not?

I think to a generation before me and the decisions we were making then. Recently I read of another white person from Wisconsin, James Zwerg, who decided to participate in the Freedom Rides through Alabama in 1961. One Freedom Ride had already taken place and they faced brutally violent mobs and a bus that was set on fire. Being clear in their message that your violence cannot keep us from building our movement, the Freedom Riders decided to take a second shot at a ride knowing they may be killed. The night before he left for the Freedom Rides, James Zwerg wrote a letter to his parents apologizing that he had to give his life for the cause, but hoped one day they could understand. James was viciously attacked the next day and, though nearly killed, survived. In making a choice to stand for justice that day, James was taking a risk that was literally about life and death. Countless others, especially Black people and Brown people, gave their lives for the cause. Let us remember them.

What are the risks we take (or don’t take) in these days and times? When my mom found out about my arrest, she immediately worried I would lose my job and my whole life would come to an end. How much we have internalized fear, how much we believe that making the system shake just a little bit would have such harsh repercussions that life as we know it would end. My partner, who is Black, said afterward how much she wanted to go with me and take arrest, but she feared they would beat her or do other especially horrible things to her in jail as a Black lesbian. Another friend said her grandfather taught her that whatever you do, as a Black person, don’t let the police arrest you and get you on track to be another pawn in their prison industrial complex. These fears and the white supremacy within the system are real. Yet at the same time, we know that sometimes it’s necessary to take direct action even with the fear and the risks.

How do we reconcile all this within ourselves? How do we hold the fact that people of color will always be hit harder than whites from taking direct action and that we all will have to deal with some consequences, and also know that the work must be done by somebody? If not us, who? If not now, when? After all, for many of us we’re risking a short stint in jail, a blemish on our criminal records, and we continue on in life. I think to our ancestors in the struggle who gave their lives for us: Give us the strength to make the necessary decisions of our times. As a friend of mine, Max Rameau, says: We owe it to history and to our ancestors to forward the cause.

Many of the women I was arrested with endured great pains to do direct action. Most were mothers; one woman was pregnant. One mujer valiente, Asuscena, is the super momma of 6 children – one still a small baby. As we sat in our cell she could feel the pain of her baby not being able to breastfeed and kept hoping someone would hold him for her. Yet she still acted. A strong older Black woman, Audrey, took arrest and endured a day of solitary (which is psychological trauma) because of her disability. She said she knew she had to take a stand for immigrant rights because otherwise she’d be like white people who say they want to do something but aren’t willing to take action when it comes down to it. She said it was especially important for her as a woman of color to be present with her body and that, even knowing the trauma that would be especially targeted at her, she would do it all over again in a heartbeat. Audrey took action.

As I feel that nervousness, that self-doubt, that voice that says, “Oh, someone else will do it,” I remember these courageous Freedom Fighters and the 27 hours we spent behind bars and become grounded once again. If Audrey can do it, if Asuscena can do it, I can do it. I am incredibly grateful we’re not yet at a crossroads of choosing to risk our lives for our movement, at least not yet. As I think of all the people we left behind in jail – the Black man with hair awry who has clearly been psychologically tortured, the white woman beat up by the sheriff’s forces leaving a hallway full of blood, the migrants being bashed by ICE and set up for deportation, and all the women trying to sleep away their endless despair of being controlled by other inhumane beings – I ask within myself: What am I willing to do, what am I willing to give so that all this needless suffering and oppression stop? These are the questions of our times.

Kristen Petroshius is a member of WNPJ member group Groundwork anti-racist collective in Madison.

Steve Burns: Time magazine's concern for Afghan women

You won't see the picture on the left, of a victim of a U.S. airstrike in Afghanistan, on the cover of Time magazine. It's not that Time is reluctant to show horrific images on its cover -- just last week their cover photo was of a young Afghan woman named Aisha, horribly mutilated by her husband under the direction of a Taliban commander -- rather, it's that the cover of Time is reserved for horrific photos of the victims of our official enemies, the Taliban, and never for horrific photos of our own victims.

But highlighting Time's obvious double-standard isn't really an adequate response to the challenge of Time's cover photo and its provocative headline, "What happens if the U.S. leaves Afghanistan" (please note that that's not a question, but an assertion: This is what happens if the U.S. leaves Afghanistan.) You can call Time's pairing of photo and headline propaganda, and it is, but it's effective propaganda because it touches on a serious and sincere concern that many Americans have about withdrawal: "Yes, what will happen if the U.S. leaves Afghanistan?" If most Americans, unlike Time, still place a question mark at the end of that sentence, then those of us who advocate for withdrawal have an obligation to at least attempt to respond to their question.

By far the most thoughtful response I've seen to Time's cover and the accompanying report is by Derrick Crowe of the Rethink Afghanistan project, here. I encourage you to go and read the whole thing. What I've written below is partly (and unashamedly) stolen from Derrick's writing, with some of my own thoughts added in.

We must start, as Derrick does, by noting that Aisha's attackers acted last year - at a time when a hundred thousand U.S. troops and more than a hundred thousand U.S.-paid military contractors occupied her country. U.S. helicopters controlled the skies, U.S. drones targeted people at will, American soldiers kicked down doors in a thousand homes, and none of this prevented Aisha's husband from taking a knife to her face. Time's cover could just as well be entitled "What happens if the U.S. stays in Afghanistan," because eight years of our occupation did nothing to stop the horrible crime that cover photo depicts. Does anyone seriously think another eight years, or another eighteen years, of occupation will prevent more attacks of the sort that mutilated Aisha?

In fact, Time's framing of the question is based on a simple, and wrong, understanding of the situation in Afghanistan. In this cartoon-simple view, there are "bad" Afghans, the Taliban and Al Qaeda, who horribly oppress and mutilate women, and there are "good" Afghans, presumably the Afghan government that we are spending tens of billions of dollars a month to support, who oppose the oppression of women. In fact, at the highest levels of the U.S.-supported Karzai government, the same brutal warlords responsible for the oppression and killing and disfigurement of women in the days before the Taliban came to power (No, the Taliban did not invent the oppression of women in Afghanistan) now hold power, and are now reinstating the same misogynist laws that were on the books in the days of the Taliban. When the Afghan parliament passed a law sanctioning marital rape and child marriage, it was signed into law by President Karzai, the man we have sacrificed thousands of American and Afghan lives to keep in office. To quote from a message typed by a panicked American soldier at Outpost Keating, an isolated American base camp under heavy insurgent attack, "The enemy is inside the wire." For the women of Afghanistan, there is simply no dividing line - no "wire" - between their oppressors in an insurgency we oppose and their oppressors within a government we support.

In Afghanistan, a woman-hating form of fundamentalist Islam holds great power, and is reflected in many parts of society - in the insurgency, yes, but also in the government. Is military occupation an effective challenge to dangerous and even evil ideas? No. In fact, members of the Afghan women's-rights organization, Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan have repeatedly explained that the presence of a foreign occupying army in their country acts to strengthen the most misogynistic elements of their society, first by giving legitimacy to religious fundamentalists who use Islam as a basis for their fight against occupation, and second by creating a climate of constant war, in which violence is the only means by which disputes are settled and power asserted. Adding more Men With Guns to the country does nothing to change a situation where all decisions are now made by Men With Guns.

But if occupation isn't the answer, what is? Orzala Sharif of the Afghan Women's Network had this reply: "I don’t believe and I don’t expect any outside power to come and liberate me. If I cannot liberate myself, no one from outside can liberate me." The only effective challenge to the dangerous and evil ideas of woman-hating religious fundamentalists must be another idea, the idea of full equality for women, and that idea can only be put forward effectively by Afghan women themselves.

Yes, woman-hating fundamentalism has deep roots in Afghanistan, but the idea of equality for women also has deep roots. Before the U.S. sponsored an army of the most violent fundamentalist elements to force the Soviet army from Afghanistan, the country had made great progress toward full equality for women, and not just during the Soviet occupation, but before, in the time of Afghan king Zahir Shah. Courageous Afghan campaigners for women's rights, many of them quoted in this video from Rethink Afghanistan, stand ready to revive this tradition, but they cannot make progress in that struggle while their country is under occupation.

And this is why Time's cover photo is not only dishonest but actually dangerous to Afghan women. As public support for the Afghan war wanes among the U.S. and European public, we can expect the supporters of the occupation to rely more and more heavily on the argument that "We must stay in Afghanistan to protect women's rights." In our globalized world, such a message, even if only intended for American or European audiences, will inevitably make its way to Afghanistan. Once there, it serves to link the cause of women's rights to a hated foreign occupation, to de-legitimize those Afghans who fight for women's rights as collaborators (just as the occupation legitimizes the religious fundamentalists who fight against it) and cements women's rights in the minds of the Afghan public as a "Western" idea. Equal rights for women is not foreign to Afghanistan, but we can make it foreign, if we continue to use the plight of Afghan women in a desperate attempt to prop up public support for our failing occupation.

At the end of the day, the U.S. will leave Afghanistan. Our patience and our funds are not unlimited, and shameless button-pushing of the sort practiced by Time will only have so much effect, for so long. And when we leave, Afghan women will have to face their oppressors without the "help" of the U.S. Army. What situation will we leave them in? Can we see that using Afghan women to justify our war only leaves them to reap the whirlwind, when we do finally leave? When U.S. elites finally decide they've had enough of this war, perhaps when a newer and shinier war beckons, their claimed concern for Afghan women will be discarded as inconvenient - it is, in fact, already being discarded, as the U.S. plans "reconciliation" talks with elements of the insurgency. Derrick Crowe has many good observations about the reconciliation process, I'll only note here his two main points: 1) There is much that the international community and civil society can do to make sure that reconciliation isn't used to steamroller over the rights of Afghan women, and 2) Thus far, the U.S. government has shown little interest in letting women's rights get in the way of its political and military objectives.

For U.S. opinion-makers, the rights of women are always disposable when no longer useful. Last week, the Iraqi website Niqash reported on the practice of Fasliya, in which young women are forcibly married as a means of settling tribal conflicts. The story quotes a young woman named Zainab, forced to marry at age 11 following an armed confrontation between two tribes: "When the family commemorated the anniversary of their son’s death, my husband would beat me. Every single day, the whole family looked at me as if I was the one who killed their son.”

You won't see Zainab's photo on the cover of Time under the headline "What happens if we leave Iraq", even though the Iraqi Society for Human Rights estimates that more than 800 Iraqi women have suffered her fate just since the beginning of this year. In Iraq, the U.S. is headed for the exits, and has no need for concerns about human rights to gin up public support for staying. When word comes from on high that it's time to leave Afghanistan, won't Time's concern for Afghan women be just as disposable?

Steve Burns is Program Director of Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice.