Category: The Struggle for Peace

WDI Statement on Wars 

All entries on Feminist Legal Clinic’s News Digest Blog are extracts from news articles and other publications, with the source available at the link at the bottom. The content is not generated by Feminist Legal Clinic and does not necessarily reflect our views.

The twin purposes of Women’s Declaration International are to
promote the Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights and to
promote the global movement to liberate all women everywhere
from patriarchy.

We acknowledge that wars everywhere subject women to male
violence that includes acts of rape, torture, and murder. During
wartime especially, male armies tend to target women not only
as residents of the enemy nation, but also specifically as
women.

We also acknowledge that feminists feel strongly about such
violence, but may be deeply divided as to which side is more
responsible. Discussions quickly become heated and personal,
and carry the imminent potential to be divisive of our
organization.

WDI aims to bring all women together in forums where we can
speak and act as feminists to promote the Declaration and build
a Women’s Liberation Movement. In the interests of unity on
our narrow aims, we have decided to limit conversations on our
platforms, including our webinar chats and breakout rooms, to
these two core topics. There are many forums available to
debate who is at fault in any given armed conflict; but WDI
provides a unique and valuable space for all women, regardless
of nationality, ethnicity, or other politics, to work together to
advance our singular mission. We will not let our organization
be divided, diverted, hijacked, or torn apart by conflicts
ultimately created by men; and we ask for the cooperation of all
signatories in this endeavor.

Source: WDI Statement on Wars – WDI_Statement_on_Wars.pdf

Time to challenge identitarian bullies of the extreme left | Drew Hutton | The Australian

Across the world anti-democratic parties of the right are gaining increasing support. The response to this on the left has been mixed. Calls for unity ignore the fact there are two main streams of left-wing thought in Australia and they are incompatible.

There is the pluralist, democratic left, whose adherents believe in democratic institutions, freedom of speech, a regulated market and the rule of law. They are a mixture of mostly radical liberals and social democrats, and they believe that while our society is a liberal democracy, there is much that needs reforming, and so they favour nonviolent, radical reform achieved after rational debate.

The new kids on the block are the identitarian left. They promote a mixture of transgender/queer and critical race theories and, while having different emphases, they tend to work together and are often described as woke. While there are probably many more Australians on the pluralist, democratic left, they tend to run scared of the identitarians, who have no compunction in cancelling their opponents.

This is done in the name of social justice or human rights but there are many differences between how each of these left-wing streams interpret these concepts.

I am a lifelong inhabitant of the political left. After nearly two decades of work inside the peace and civil liberties movements, I formed the Queensland Greens in 1990. After nearly 60 years of activism, my life membership of the party was suspended because I would not delete women’s posts that were gender-critical on my Facebook page. This suspension turned into an expulsion in May 2025.

Identity is the key term in the identitarian left. Each one is tribal and they tend to co-operate with each other. The transgender grouping believes biological sex is unimportant in identity and people are what they think they are.

This is not necessarily an anti-social belief except that the movement has been able to convince enough governments around the world to pass legislation making it illegal for women to have women’s-only spaces such as toilets, change rooms, prisons, refuges, women’s sport and lesbian events. It also promotes the gender-affirming model of treating troubled young people to deal with their problems with puberty blockers, hormones and life-changing surgery.

Queer theory builds on postmodernism; it valorises the blurring and disruption of boundaries. After the LGB movement won the end of structural discrimination, the T and the Q were added, and queer theory found a home in legacy LGB organisations.

Both leftist streams might campaign on the same issue – that the Israelis are committing genocide in Gaza – but from completely different viewpoints. The identitarians, for example, support the Palestinians and demand the destruction of Israel as a white settler colonial society, while the universalist left would be more likely to demand a ceasefire, Palestinian statehood and a two-state solution.

The most obvious difference between the progressive and identitarian left lies in their attitude to political strategy. A central component of identitarian strategy is cancelling.

Anyone who argues for the definition of woman as a biological female is immediately set upon and, if that person is in a vulnerable position with their work or membership of an organisation, the complaints system will be weaponised and, if possible, they will be sacked or expelled. For example, JK Rowling has received hundreds of death threats from trans activists merely for stating women are biological females and men can’t be women.

The identitarians are the very opposite of the nonviolence and free speech advocacy of the pluralist, democratic left. But the latter has, until now, largely left it to women’s rights advocates and the odd progressive to stand up to these bullies. Where are all the leftist public intellectuals in this debate?

Source: Subscribe to The Australian | Newspaper home delivery, website, iPad, iPhone & Android apps

Eighty Years of Lies: Why the US Really Nuked Japan  | MPN

Eighty years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, declassified records and military testimony reveal the atomic bombings were unnecessary.

American generals and war planners agreed that Japan was on the point of collapse, and had, for weeks, been attempting to negotiate a surrender. The decision, then, to incinerate hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians was one taken to project American power across the world, and to stymie the rise of the Soviet Union.

“It always appeared to us that, atomic bomb or no atomic bomb, the Japanese were already on the verge of collapse,” General Henry Arnold, Commanding General of the U.S. Army Air Forces in 1945, wrote in his 1949 memoirs.

Arnold was far from alone in this assessment. Indeed, Fleet Admiral William Leahy, the Navy’s highest-ranking officer during World War II, bitterly condemned the United States for its decision and compared his own country to the most savage regimes in world history.

By 1945, Japan had been militarily and economically exhausted. Losing key allies Italy in 1943 and Germany by May 1945, and facing the immediate prospect of an all-out Soviet invasion of Japan, the country’s leaders were frantically pursuing peace negotiations. Their only real condition appeared to be that they wished to keep as a figurehead the emperor—a position that, by some accounts, dates back more than 2,600 years.

“I am convinced,” former President Herbert Hoover wrote to his successor, Harry S. Truman, “if you, as President, will make a shortwave broadcast to the people of Japan—tell them they can have their emperor if they surrender, that it will not mean unconditional surrender except for the militarists—you’ll get a peace in Japan—you’ll have both wars over.”

Many of Truman’s closest advisors told him the same thing. “I am absolutely convinced that had we said they could keep the emperor, together with the threat of an atomic bomb, they would have accepted, and we would never have had to drop the bomb,” said John McCloy, Truman’s Assistant Secretary of War.

Nevertheless, Truman initially took an absolutist position, refusing to hear any Japanese negotiating caveats. This stance, according to General Douglas MacArthur, Commander of Allied Forces in the Pacific, actually lengthened the war. “The war might have ended weeks earlier,” he said, “If the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor.” Truman, however, dropped two bombs, then reversed his position on the emperor, in order to stop Japanese society from falling apart.

At that point in the war, however, the United States was emerging as the sole global superpower and enjoyed an unprecedented position of influence. The dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan underscored this; it was a power play, intended to strike fear into the hearts of world leaders, especially in the Soviet Union and China.

To this day, Japan remains deeply tied to the U.S., economically, politically, and militarily. There are around 60,000 U.S. troops in Japan, spread across 120 military bases.

Many in Truman’s administration wished to use the atom bomb against the Soviet Union as well. President Truman, however, worried that the destruction of Moscow would lead the Red Army to invade and destroy Western Europe as a response. As such, he decided to wait until the U.S. had enough warheads to completely destroy the U.S.S.R. and its military in one fell swoop.

War planners estimated this figure to be around 400. To that end, Truman ordered the immediate ramping up of production. Such a strike, we now know, would have caused a nuclear winter that would have permanently ended all organized life on Earth.

The decision to destroy Russia was met with stiff opposition among the American scientific community. It is now widely believed that Manhattan Project scientists, including Robert J. Oppenheimer himself, passed nuclear secrets to Moscow in an effort to speed up their nuclear project and develop a deterrent to halt this doomsday scenario. This part of history, however, was left out of the 2023 biopic movie.

The Pentagon, too, is recruiting Elon Musk to help it build what it calls an American Iron Dome. While this move is couched in defensive language, such a system – if successful – would grant the U.S. the ability to launch nuclear attacks anywhere in the world without having to worry about the consequences of a similar response.

Source: Eighty Years of Lies: Why the US Really Nuked Japan

Help Us Fight the Psyopcracy – Consortium News

William Casey, C.I.A. director under Ronald Reagan, said: “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.”

Thus the American people are continuously subject to a number of psychological operations otherwise known as “the news.”

U.S. intelligence officials feed journalists disinformation to create a false narrative that is intended to mislead the public and cover-up what is actually taking place.

The constant reinforcement of these lies becomes entrenched in the public mind and after time comes to be accepted as unquestionable truth.

Through such operations, the American people were led to believe for years that the United States was winning in Vietnam, when it was actually losing, as the Pentagon Papers proved.

Since then, many examples have followed of completely false stories being planted into people’s minds to start and keep a war going, the fake WMD narrative in Iraq perhaps the most infamous.

Today the wars people are being fooled about are in Ukraine and Gaza.

Sometimes a psyop doesn’t involve inserting false information, so much as leaving out what’s true.

Robert Parry, the founder of this website, in March 2017 wrote the article, “How US Flooded the World with Psyops,” in which he reported for the first time:

“Newly declassified documents from the Reagan presidential library help explain how the U.S. government developed its sophisticated psychological operations capabilities that – over the past three decades – have created an alternative reality both for people in targeted countries and for American citizens, a structure that expanded U.S. influence abroad and quieted dissent at home.

 

So many people are subject to psyops that telling the truth becomes a formidable task. You become the one that is out of step. You are the one that seems to be mad.

[Ed: The trans movement is clearly a psyop.]

Source: Help Us Fight the Psyopcracy – Consortium News

Friday essay: are wars and violence inevitable, or is there another way to live? | The Conversation

Most of us want to live in peace and safety. Yet violence is in epic proportions, particularly towards women and children.

Every day, a new atrocity blares from the radio or across huge screens in gyms, railway stations and homes, causing widespread fear, feelings of powerlessness, and despair.

Is this violence just human nature, and inevitable?

Politicians repeatedly urge us to “change the culture” of violence. But what exactly does this mean? How can it be achieved? And don’t governments send mixed messages when they spend far more on nuclear submarines, weapons and fighter planes than on violence prevention?

In 2016, actor Matt Damon visited Australia to shoot a violent, gun-filled Jason Bourne film, featuring an Anglo hero out to rid the world of a psychopathic Venezuelan. While here, he said he wished the US could have gun laws like Australia’s, seemingly unaware his films almost certainly reinforce and spread US gun culture.

Histories and museums can glorify war and patriarchy, or commemorate effective nonviolent movements such as the suffragists.

Australia has more war memorials than any other nation. They’re often in the middle of towns (like the War Memorial in Sydney’s CBD), making them a central part of our lives. “Remembrance Driveway”, the highway between Sydney, Australia’s economic powerhouse, and Canberra, the nation’s capital, has 24 rest stops dedicated to Victoria Cross war heroes. All were men.

Our new and former parliament houses are in line with the avenue to the Australian War Memorial. There’s no shortage of funding for upgrades to the War Memorial, including more than $830,000 from arms manufacturers in three years, meaning its histories are unlikely to be objective or anti-war.

The militarisation of Australian history means other stories go untold. One under-recognised figure is Wiradjuri resistance leader Windradyne, who in 1824 led a delegation to Parramatta to call for peace. He addressed the governor, calling for an end to the killing, wearing a hat with “peace” written in English on it.

There’s no major road or museum in Australia recognising the effectiveness of suffragists and nonviolent movements, often led by women, for land rights, social justice, the environment and peace.

Ninety per cent of movies contain violence. Even children’s stories, such as Peter Rabbit, The Cat in the Hat, Peter Pan and the Tintin adventures, are often made violent or more violent when adapted for the screen, even though their original authors, such as Dr Seuss and Hergé were increasingly pro-peace.

Violent films often glorify weapons and make people more fearful – and likely to accept the narrative that armed violence is necessary and more effective than nonviolent action, despite strong evidence to the contrary. This narrative is actively pushed by the military-industrial complex, (the individuals and institutions involved in the production of weapons and military technologies), and by the media and entertainment outlets it influences and supports.

Militaries want films like Top Gun because they make the armed forces seem glamorous, exciting, social and sexy. So they often give filmmakers cheap or free access to billions of dollars worth of taxpayer-funded jet fighters, aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines. In return, the movies serve as sophisticated, enticing forms of recruitment propaganda.

The military-entertainment complex supports such movies because they encourage a favourable view of militarism, “defence” spending and the purchase of their products. As psychiatrist Emanuel Tanay observes, “what we call entertainment is really propaganda for violence”. He continues: “If you manufacture guns, you don’t need to advertise, because it is done by our entertainment industry.”

Arms dealers also do this through the media companies they own or influence. General Electric, which has ties to Mobil, owned the NBC TV network until 2013. Disney Entertainment, which owns the American Broadcasting Company, collaborated with Boeing to create flying X-Wings to soar over their Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge theme park in California’s Disneyland Resort. Inevitably, the editorial leanings of military-linked media are pro-war, biased and critical of peace activism, if they cover it at all.

Media can also be influenced by think-tanks sponsored by arms companies and “defence” departments. For example, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, which has numerous arms-related sponsors, was behind the Red Alert series of front-page articles in Australia’s Nine newspapers, which argued for more military spending to resist a supposedly imminent war with China.

The military-industrial complex, with its “revolving door” relationship with governments, is gaining influence in universities and schools. The University of Melbourne trumpeted the arrival of a new laboratory in partnership with Lockheed Martin, the world’s biggest and wealthiest arms corporation, with a history of bribery and corruption.

Wars and violence are neither inevitable, nor an inherent part of human nature. The power to reduce violence is in our hands, words and TV remotes.

Source: Friday essay: are wars and violence inevitable, or is there another way to live?

Vijay Prashad: When Guns Are in Museums – Consortium News

In the aftermath of the war, Virginia Woolf wrote in her novel Mrs. Dalloway of a former soldier who, overcome by fear, uttered, “The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames.”

Those words resonate today, as NATO’s provocations in Ukraine put the possibility of nuclear winter on the table and the U.S. and Israel commit genocide against the Palestinian people as the world watches in horror.

We are tired of carnage and death. We want a permanent end to war.

The McCloy-Zorin Accords on the Agreed Principles for General and Complete Disarmament made two important points: first, that there should be “general and complete disarmament” and, second, that war should no longer be “an instrument for settling international problems.”

None of this is on the agenda today, as the Global North, with the U.S. at its helm, breathes fire like an angry dragon, unwilling to negotiate with its adversary in good faith.

Peace can be understood in two different ways: as passive peace or as active peace. Passive peace is the peace that exists when there is a relative lack of ongoing warfare, yet countries around the world continue to build up their military arsenals. Military spending now overwhelms the budgets of many countries: even when guns are not fired, they are still being purchased. That is peace of a passive kind.

Active peace is a peace in which the precious wealth of society goes toward ending the dilemmas faced by humanity. An active peace is not just an end to gunfire and military expenditures, but a dramatic increase in social spending to end problems such as poverty, hunger, illiteracy, and despair.

Wealth, which is produced by society, must not deepen the pockets of the rich and fuel the engines of war but fill the bellies of the many.

We want ceasefires, certainly, but we want more than that. We want a world of active peace and development.

We want a world where our grandchildren have to go to a museum to see what a gun looked like.

Source: Vijay Prashad: When Guns Are in Museums – Consortium News

A year of violence and women excluded from what comes next | Women’s Agenda

Today marks one year since Hamas inflicted its horrific attack on Southern Israel on October 7.

Today also marks one year and three days since 1500 Israeli and Palestinian women came together on the shores of the Dead Sea, demanding an end to the “cycle of bloodshot” and for peacemaking to be elevated.

The gathering that occurred between the Israeli group Women Wage Peace, and the Palestinian group Women of the Sun, is especially tragic when you consider what was to come just days later. A brutal attack by Hamas that killed more than 1000 people in Israel, sparking a relentless Israeli retaliation in Gaza and an ever-escalating conflict that continues today.

. . .

A terror rampage organised and perpetrated by men. A relentless retaliation by a male-dominated government, with almost no women involved in any aspect of the attempts at negotiations that have followed.

Source: A year of violence and women excluded from what comes next

‘Inspire Inclusion’ and you’ll get duped again on International Women’s Day

The UN Women theme for 2024 is actually Count Her In: Invest in Women. Accelerate Progress.

This correct theme is getting more traction than in previous years. But if you Google ‘International Women’s Day,’ the first result will push you to a domain encouraging you to ‘Inspire Inclusion.’ Ask ChatGPT, and you’ll also be told the theme is to “Inspire Inclusion’.

If you leverage the ‘Inspire Inclusion’ theme for your marketing or event efforts, you are complying with a UK-based firm that runs the internationalwomensday.com domain but offers no transparency on who is behind it and how they chose their themes, charities and partners.

The corporate-theme hijacking of IWD first bothered me in March 2022 when UN Women’s official theme, which centred around climate change, was drowned out by calls to “break the bias” instead. Especially frustrating given Australia was experiencing significant flooding and weather events during that period. At the time, I described themes like ‘break the bias’ as weapons of mass distraction.

As I also wrote in 2022 and remains true today, when you Google ‘International Women’s Day’ you come across this official-looking, we-own-this-IWD-thing website that claims to determine each year’s theme and resources to support messaging and ideas around the day.

The website, in 2024, continues to share very little information on who is behind it, how it is funded and how and why it determines the theme. There is no ‘About Us’, only an ‘About IWD’. There are no names listed or clear contact information given, other than a form you can fill out regarding sponsorship opportunities, which are now positioned as a place to submit a ‘partnership proposal’.

While a generic email address is given, the physical address is listed as Aurora Ventures (Europe) Limited, based in London. Aurora Ventures lists its work as including delivery of the International Women’s Day (IWD) platform and working “with stakeholders to produce an annual IWD campaign theme.”

As of late 2023, those who own the IWD domain name also featured several “Prime Employers” associated with International Women’s Day that the website writers said “maintain a deep and continuous focus on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) all year round”. Some notable exemplars included Siemens Healthineers, Diageo, Honeywell, John Deer and Northrop Grumman in association with IWD 2023.

The website has since been updated, presumably to focus more on employers that don’t make things like intercontinental ballistic missiles because “weapons and women’s empowerment” doesn’t roll off the tongue so well in 2024.

Source: ‘Inspire Inclusion’ and you’ll get duped again on International Women’s Day

OpenAI’s refreshed board needs women fast

As Sam Altman returns to the CEO post at OpenAI following one of the most high-profile oustings in tech history, the shakeup also sees an all-male board replacing the previous board.

The only two board members to go this week were the two women, including Australian Helen Toner, who specialises in AI safety.

There are suggestions the previous board was split between “accelerants” of AI — those who want to see it developed and deployed quickly — and “decelerationists”, which include those who believe AI should be more slowly developed and with stronger safety mechanisms in place.

The “decelerationists” in this scenario are now gone from the board. Altman is back at the helm, with the board currently falling strongly into the accellerant camp.

Helen Toner had been on the OpenAI board for two years until this Wednesday. Still in her thirties, she is a University of Melbourne graduate who has made a career studying AI and is the director of strategy at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology. When initially appointed to the board, Altman described her as bringing an “understanding of the global AI landscape with an emphasis on safety, which is critical for our efforts and mission.” Earlier this week, The New York Times reported that a paper Toner co-authored with CSET and published in October had been a point of discussion between Altman and Toner, with the paper criticising OpenAI for releasing ChatGPT at the end of 2022 for sparking a predicted tech race of sorts, and leading competitors to “accelerate or circumvent internal safety and ethics review processes.”

Getting women on the board of OpenAI to support its future will be essential, along with getting more diversity generally involved. And it must happen fast, given how quickly AI is evolving, especially thanks to OpenAI.

The underrepresentation of women in AI remains a key concern internationally, given rapid advances in AI over the past two years and how quickly the tech is and will continue to disrupt industries and those who work within them. Plenty of examples also show the consequences of bias being embedded in AI, which may have been reduced if there had been more — or at least some — diversity in the teams developing the tech.

Currently, just 12 per cent of AI researchers globally are women, according to stats from the United Nations, while just 20 per cent of employees in technical roles in machine learning companies are female. One area where women do dominate in AI is the ethics space.

On Thursday, news emerged from Reuters of a letter from OpenAI staff researchers to their previous board warning about an AI discovery they believed could threaten humanity. The letter was provided days before Altman was fired.

Source: OpenAI’s refreshed board needs women fast

How women in Israel and Palestine are pushing for peace — together

The joint Women Wage Peace-Women of the Sun initiative unites Israeli and Palestinian women calling for peace. The international community should elevate their voices.

Following the Hamas attack, Women Wage Peace posted an image of a bloodied dove on their social media feed.

A week later, the movement issued a full statement on the rapid escalation of violence in Gaza:

“Every mother, Jewish and Arab, gives birth to her children to see them grow and flourish and not to bury them. That’s why, even today, amid the pain and the feeling that the belief in peace has collapsed, we extend a hand in peace to the mothers of Gaza and the West Bank.”

This was undoubtedly a difficult statement to write through their grief and anguish.

But this statement of cross-community solidarity — steadfastly insisting on peace in the face of war — is emblematic of the power and resolve of feminist anti-war collective action.

If our national commitment to women, peace and security and our feminist foreign policy means anything at all, we must stand together for human rights and justice and endeavour to elevate the many voices of solidarity and peace.

Source: How women in Israel and Palestine are pushing for peace — together