Guerilla Girl Ponders the Situation
Report submitted by Harriet Ellenberger, 8 November 2004
Wily Fox's Time-tested Advice When confronted by overwhelming forces bent on your submission and/or extermination, do not fight them head-on. Rather, go around them. Send in your scouts; gather intelligence. Probe their defenses, exploit their weaknesses, withdraw only to return again and again. In other words, nibble the edges of the cookie until the cookie crumbles.
Definition of Terms and Preliminary Situation-Assessment
Wily Fox's Time-tested Advice When confronted by overwhelming forces bent on your submission and/or extermination, do not fight them head-on. Rather, go around them. Send in your scouts; gather intelligence. Probe their defenses, exploit their weaknesses, withdraw only to return again and again. In other words, nibble the edges of the cookie until the cookie crumbles.
Definition of Terms and Preliminary Situation-Assessment
- The term viriocracy shall signify the machineries and ideology of male hegemony, following the usage of Michèle Causse, who rightly notes that patriarchy (father-rule) is way too tame a word to describe what's been going on for the last 5000 years.
- The term Americanist fascism shall refer both to the U.S. Republican party as a movement and to the U.S. government and military, which it now controls.
- Americanist fascism may be analyzed as a late and culminating manifestation of viriocracy, with some features specific to the U.S.A. and to the early 21st century.
- This scout regards Americanist fascism as our primary species-emergency, currently the chief enemy of human survival.
- Well, the first one is easy: they're nuts. What makes them dangerous also makes them vulnerable. Reality always comes as a surprise, since they don't make a practice of staying in touch with it.
- The national economy they "manage" is headed into the toilet. And they can't begin to fix it without violating their own ideology and alienating their corporate backers.
- They have no plan to cope with climate change nor catastrophic weather, regarding the former as a plot by Commie scientists and the latter as one more opportunity for insurance companies to hike their rates. Mother Nature, unimpressed, continues to brew up her increasingly impressive displays of displeasure.
- Iraq. Requires huge infusions of blood and money to maintain this famously depraved occupation. Eventual ouster guaranteed.
- Peak oil. Their strategy for controlling the world's decreasing oil supplies is coming apart at the seams. The plan was to attack and occupy prime pipeline locations ( Afghanistan ) as well as oil-producing countries themselves (see previous entry on Iraq ). The attacking and occupying military, however, runs on oil. So far, the U.S. has used up more oil invading and occupying Iraq than it has gained from stealing her oil wells. During the day of Bush's "re-election" and the day after, Iraqi resistance fighters shut off oil production once again, blowing up sections of three pipelines.
- Finally, and most importantly, Americanist fascism -- a movement and a government intent on overt and brutal world domination -- inevitably generates worldwide resistance, resistance within every sector of every society.
Afterword, 28 November 2004
For me, the saddest and most ironic thing about my country of origin being taken over by a recycled version of fascism is this: the hard-right developed in the U.S. in imitation of and reaction to the civil rights and anti-war and, above all, the feminist movements. It's the backlash to everything I poured my heart into. And it's more monstrously lethal than what we were fighting in the 60s and 70s. Also, of course, the destruction of the planet by humans is remarkably more advanced and visible than it was thirty or forty years ago. Watching the television news, I have the odd sensation of time running backwards and time running out.
Thirty years ago I held to a flickering hope that we (but who was this "we"?) could turn around the funeral procession of the human species which was male dominance – just in time, at the cliff's edge. Now that hope may have guttered out, but I'm left with something more solid. Free females do not submit to tyranny. Period. To do so would be a breach of honour, a surrender of principle, a soul-extinction. Not permissible, not even thinkable.
I decide to resist mindless killers with my own mind, for as much time as I have left, and with the only weapons I know how to use, plain old words. I urge every free-thinking, free-spirited female to find her own forms of resistance and to exercise them, daily. We may be up against what can seem at times hopeless odds, but no one can make us less than we are.
Long live the resistance.
Thirty years ago I held to a flickering hope that we (but who was this "we"?) could turn around the funeral procession of the human species which was male dominance – just in time, at the cliff's edge. Now that hope may have guttered out, but I'm left with something more solid. Free females do not submit to tyranny. Period. To do so would be a breach of honour, a surrender of principle, a soul-extinction. Not permissible, not even thinkable.
I decide to resist mindless killers with my own mind, for as much time as I have left, and with the only weapons I know how to use, plain old words. I urge every free-thinking, free-spirited female to find her own forms of resistance and to exercise them, daily. We may be up against what can seem at times hopeless odds, but no one can make us less than we are.
Long live the resistance.
Notes on sources
For a full elaboration of her theoretical work, see Michèle Causse, Contre le sexage ( Paris : Éditions Balland, 2000).
My survey of “weaknesses of Americanist fascism” is based on conversations with my partner, a retired Canadian military-intelligence officer, and on far too much Internet reading over the past three years. A few of the sites I check frequently: “Centre for Research on Globalization” www.globalresearch.ca and “From the Wilderness Publications” www.fromthewilderness.com
My survey of “weaknesses of Americanist fascism” is based on conversations with my partner, a retired Canadian military-intelligence officer, and on far too much Internet reading over the past three years. A few of the sites I check frequently: “Centre for Research on Globalization” www.globalresearch.ca and “From the Wilderness Publications” www.fromthewilderness.com
Working notes
"Guerrilla Girl" might have been entitled "Post-Cassandra." When I look back at my writing attempts since the early '70s, they're Cassandra-ish, full of warnings and portents in the sky, "patriarchy is the funeral procession of the human species," etc. But that was yesterday. When the expiry date for warnings has passed, what choice does a girl have? Mutter darkly "we told you so" before retiring into meditative silence? Evidently, I prefer to go on the warpath, with the only weapons I know how to use: plain old words.
One picky little note on why I use the term "Americanist fascism" instead of "American fascism":
a) People in the USA do not get to claim the adjective "American" to describe anything about themselves, including their worst excesses. "American" describes beings and events in North America, Central America and South America.
b) Americanism is a de facto, if intellectually disreputable, ideology, rampant among the U.S. populace of elementary-school age and above, which may be roughly summarized as "Rah, rah, rah, sis-boom-bah, we's the only humans, the rest of you is dogs." Americanism as ideology gets played out real-time in places like Abu Ghraib and Fallujah.
One picky little note on why I use the term "Americanist fascism" instead of "American fascism":
a) People in the USA do not get to claim the adjective "American" to describe anything about themselves, including their worst excesses. "American" describes beings and events in North America, Central America and South America.
b) Americanism is a de facto, if intellectually disreputable, ideology, rampant among the U.S. populace of elementary-school age and above, which may be roughly summarized as "Rah, rah, rah, sis-boom-bah, we's the only humans, the rest of you is dogs." Americanism as ideology gets played out real-time in places like Abu Ghraib and Fallujah.
About the author
Harriet Ellenberger was a founding member of the Charlotte (North Carolina, USA) Women's Center (1971), co-founded the lesbian feminist journal Sinister Wisdom with Catherine Nicholson in 1976, and was a founding member of L'Essentielle, a bilingual feminist bookstore in Montreal (1987) , and published a small feminist journal on the web called She Is Still Burning (2000-3) .
For an updated list of works published in TRIVIA, please see this author's contributor page.
For an updated list of works published in TRIVIA, please see this author's contributor page.