As reported to me by my dear friend Gabriel, Hamas are torturing Fatah and Fatah are torturing Hamas. Fatah say that it was a mistake for Israel not to totally destroy Hamas, and Hamas accuse Fatah of supporting Israel in its attempt to destroy Hamas. It’s beginning to look like we will have to stop speaking of two entities, Israel and Palestine, and start speaking of three – Israel, Hamas-controlled Gaza, and the Fatah-controlled West Bank.
Renee at Womanist Musings reports the despiriting story of an abusive father who, having decided that his teenage daughter was ‘overweight’, and having failed to control her by putting locks on the fridge or simply beating her, chained her to her bed for two days before being arrested.
I totally concur with Renee’s discussion: this is just the very extreme end of a culture of fat-hatred. The most disgusting thing is that the father apparently “stated he didn’t think he had committed a crime and that he was acting in his daughter’s best interest“. This is only possible because of all the other parents, peers, and partners who, similarly thinking they’re acting in people’s (largely women’s) ‘best interests’, ridicule or criticise signs of ‘fat’ or it’s (symbolic, not real) counterpart, ‘piggish’ gluttony (the fact that in our relationship with pigs it is we who eat and they who are eaten doesn’t seem to stop us identifying them with the activity).
I’d just add that we should avoid listing only imprisonment, psychological abuse, and beatings here – the forcible restriction of food is itself a form of abuse. Preventing someone from eating when they are hungry is an attack on their body, and, especially for people whose metabolism demands lots of food, it damages that body, both in the short run and in the long run.
There’s an interesting discussion here and (part 2) here by Tony Cliff, whose current intellectual progeny are the UK’s beloved Socialist Workers’ Party. For those with a low Marxist-tolerance-threshold I will summarise:
1) Marx thought that capitalism set up the preconditions for socialism by, among other things, replacing small-scale individual enterprises with large-scale, industrial enterprises (such as latter-day TNCs) thus performing on its own the task of ‘collectivising’ the economy. This seems to be broadly true.
2) Marx ALSO thought, however, that (A) the exact same process would go on in agriculture, with larger and larger farms progressively squeezing out small ones. As a result, he also thought that (B) the class divisions in the countryside would grow sharper and sharper, as a mass of owner-workers separated into a mass of workers and a small group of owners. Finally, he thought that (C) socialist revolution would only be successful in highly advanced, industrialised countries, like the UK, where a developed industrial sector would be able to pump resources into the agricultural sector (machinery, fertilisers, GM crops, etc. all of which can be better used by large farms than by small ones) so as to speed up its collectivisation.
