This is an archive of the former website of the Maoist Internationalist Movement, which was run by the now defunct Maoist Internationalist Party - Amerika. The MIM now consists of many independent cells, many of which have their own indendendent organs both online and off. MIM(Prisons) serves these documents as a service to and reference for the anti-imperialist movement worldwide.
Maoist Internationalist Movement

Amerikan military wimmin rub it in

by MC45 & MC12

MIM has just learned that an Amerikan military officer stationed in Saudi Arabia has brought a sex-discrimination lawsuit against her employer. The officer's complaint is that the army requires that when wimmin military personnel in Saudi go off base, they wear a long robe, ride in the back seat of any car and be accompanied by a male escort.

The officer is complaining that these regulations discriminate against her as a woman, and subvert her authority as an officer. Her cause has been championed by columnist Ellen Goodman, who writes: "Martha McSally -- excuse me, Lt. Col. Martha McSally -- is the nation's highest-ranking female fighter pilot. She's a graduate of the Air Force Academy, a champion triathlete, a pilot who heads the search and rescue mission over Iraq. If you crash in Iraq she comes to get you. But when McSally goes off the base, she is required to wear an abaya, a long black robe covering her from head to foot. The woman who flies a plane is not allowed to drive a car. This leader of men cannot travel without male escort. The American combat fighter must sit in the back seat." Now please pardon us for raising the question, but since when is anyone supposed to give a rat's ass about the discomfort an occupying army suffers in trying to blend in to the population whose land it is occupying?

This particular form of subordination of wimmin is a matter of patriarchy for wimmin living in some Muslim societies -- a product of gender oppression deeply bound with religious mysticism. McSally's lawsuit is comparable to the gays-in-the-military fight to increase civil rights within the world's most oppressive and murderous institution. But this lawsuit goes further, trying to protect Amerikan wimmin from conditions experienced by the wimmin in the very countries they are occupying. In fact, McSally's presence in the country is part of what ensures that Saudi wimmin continue to live under these conditions. Gender is one of three main strands of oppression with which the world's people must struggle, along with class and nation. Maoists argue that imperialism -- the contradiction between the exploiting nations and the exploited - - is the principal enemy of the world's people.

Nations like Saudi Arabia must have self- determination, must be governed according to the will of their own people, and the fight against the oppression of wimmin and the exploitation of classes must be part of that national liberation struggle.

Note: Washington Post, 8 Dec 2001, p. A25.