From: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu (Rich Winkel)
Subject: THE GUNMAN'S MYSTIQUE
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Originator: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Organization: PACH
Date: Thu, 10 Sep 1992 08:23:06 GMT

The ACTivist, Volume 8 #9, September 1992.

The ACTivist, Ontario's peace monthly, is published by ACT for
Disarmament, 736 Bathurst St., Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5S 2R4,
phone 416-531-6154, fax 416-531-5850, e-mail web:act. Hard copy
subscriptions are $10 for a year ($25 for institutions and funded
agencies).

Reprint freely, but please credit us (and send us a copy!)

/** gen.newsletter: 138.11 **/
** Written  8:58 pm  Aug 31, 1992 by web:act in cdp:gen.newsletter **
THE GUNMAN'S MYSTIQUE

The Demon Lover: On the Sexuality of Terrorism
By Robin Morgan
W.W. Norton & Co.
pp. 400

Reviewed by John Bacher

While Gene Sharp has written eloquently on the practicality of 
nonviolence, and leaders such as Gandhi and Martin Luther King have
 developed its spiritual roots, it has taken the innovative and 
courageous American feminist Robin Morgan to develop of philosophy 
of peace based on an understanding of the pathology of rationales for 
armed struggle. Morgan is not content with merely demonstrating the
 workability and morality of the nonviolent creed. She takes us on a
 previously uncharted journey to explore the logic behind the madness 
of violence without the usual apologies.

Morgan demonstrates that, whatever the contrasts between 
various advocates of violence, be they of the 'right' or 'left', of 
different creeds or nationalities, in the end the victors are arms 
merchants, and the victims are civilians -- women and children. She 
adapts the phrase of Frederick Engels, that violence is "the accelerator 
of economic development" to the reality thaat all armed struggles are 
"to the businessman ... also a market."

The book illustrates how armed struggles become commercial 
rackets, obscuring their original political objectives, with examples 
covering the range from the activities of the United States government 
to the IRA (which funds its bombings from taxi cab operations whose 
profitability was greatly increased after they began bombing the 
Belfast bus system).

Stunning as these revelations are, they are surpassed by Morgan's 
careful exposition of how they are ultimately linked to male 
oppression of women. The book begins with a scenario: "Look closely 
at her. She crosses a street ... suddenly there are footsteps behind her
 ... A man's footsteps. She knows this immediately ... He could be a 
man merely walking at his normal pace. But she fears him. She fears 
him because he is a man. She has reason to fear ... This moment she 
shares with every human being who is female. This is the 
democratization of fear." She goes on the examine the myth of the 
terrorist, the Demon Lover, the "subliminal idol of an androcentric 
cultural heritage ... smoldering on a long sexual and emotional fuse 
... We are told that women lust to have him. We are told that men 
lust to be him ... This is the democratization of violence."

While avoiding the idealization of women as 'naturally peaceful', 
Morgan insists that it is they, "perhaps ... because we exist outside 
that body politic, except as victims or as tokens", who are able to 
challenge and end the institutionalization of violence that is equally 
a part of state-waged warfare and of small-scale terrorism, to take 
the glamour away from the eroticized myth of the gunman.

One of the most compelling aspects of The Demon Lover is Morgan's 
own experience as an 'urban terrorist', a member of the Weather 
Underground. She remembers "the risk of being swept into obliteration, 
the aphrodisiac in demanding power", remembers as well the 
development of her own feminist understanding and how it led 
her away from the group. She recounts a crucial turning point, when 
she was asked to place a bomb in a women's washroom and refused 
"... It's secretaries who'll get hurt or killed ... They don't have any 
power..." She finally won the argument only by falling back on more
 politically correct logic -- that the cleaning women were most likely 
to be hurt, and that they would be "very likely black or Hispanic."

Morgan records, as well, the cynical ways in which male terrorists
 manipulate women, even those who 'of their own will' carry out 
terrorist acts -- like Patty Hearst, converted by repeated rapes and 
beatings. The infamous terrorist Carlos was financed by a network 
of women, who were subsequently jailed or killed while he escaped 
without a scratch. The expendability of women in terrorist causes 
was most frightfully revealed by the Japanese United Red Army's 
killing of 14 of their former comrades, mostly women, for such sins 
as "bourgeois deformities" and the wearing of earrings.

Morgan's grim description of the crimes and follies of armed struggle 
is balanced by a moving description of the power of women in 
nonviolent movements for social change, like the Chipko movement, 
a peasant struggle against deforestation: "The women clung to the 
trees, and the troops were too ashamed to fire. So the government 
and loggers sent in elephants to trample the women who were 
draping themselves around the trees. The huge animals moved forward 
on command. The women left the trees and approached the elephants,
 singing a ritual song ... But these were not temple elephants, they 
were army elephants. Still the women approached, singing, and then 
they swarmed over the animals, stroking them, embracing the 
massive trunks and feet. Was this a tactic or a prayer? ... But the 
elephants stopped. The elephants knelt. The elephants would not budge. 
The troops and the loggers withdrew, acknowledging defeat before a 
group of women who were hugging trees. Bina Kala, coordinator of 
eighteen local women's forums in the district, explains, 'When 
awakened, Hindu goddesses are known to be more powerful and 
awesome than their male counterarts. Women here now have 
become conscious of their shakti (energy). They will exercise it 
whenever necessary.'"



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