Women in Black Uk

I want to ask you a puzzle:
What do Bush, Blair, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, Ariel Sharon have in common? Yes, they are all ruthless. They all bluster, refuse to back down, refuse to listen to any views other than those which echo their own.
They are all butchers. All prepared to kill in the cause of maintaining power and their particular version of the world. And here we come to a little known fact - they are all boys.

Have I said enough? Not quite, because we all know that putting a woman or two in there doesn't make any difference. This is not so much about men as about the idea that most men share of what being a man is about.

Yes, this is a war about oil. It is about maintaining strategic control of the Middle East. It is a step on the way to militarising not only the world but space under US domination.

But what all these are about is about buying power. The war is also about living in a world run by masculine values, values of competition, control, domination, aggression. Whether they like it or not, and there are plenty of men who don't, men's identity is attached to masculinity. I heard a young man on the train this week explaining to his girl friend that she wouldn't want to go and see a film with him cos its 'blokes' stuff' - not sex, apparently, but adventure, heroes falling off cliffs and out of airplanes, war.
War is definitely blokes stuff.

As is violence. We are seeing at the moment, writ huge, the message that too many women experience day in, day out in their own homes.' If you don't do exactly as I say, exactly as I want, I can't answer for the consequences'. Women being knocked about by a man who says he loves them can't feel so different from the Iraqi's being told by Blair that they are being bombed for their own good.

War has a big advantage, you see. Not that it solves problems cos it doesn't. But the ever present threat of war keeps masculine values at a premium and makes sure that we need heroes, hard men around, not the soft options so despised by Blair.

It is not that women are by nature nicer, more passive, less likely to get angry than men or less fierce when they need to be. But feminine values are rich resources developed by women to negotiate the world. They are the lessons that we learn in making peace amongst brawling children, in supporting others in growing up sturdy and confident, in finding our own places of power when we are excluded from the world of domination. They are not soft options: they take courage and patience and fierceness - and resources that they have never been given.

What are these options?

Talking and listening,. Mo Mowlam got people nearer to peace than anyone could have thought possible. Not because she was nice, or polite, but because she was prepared to talk and to listen to anyone, she had no image to protect, she refused to be backed into corners of right and wrong. And she was sacked by Blair, whose idea of a peace mission is apparently to go to India as he did last year last year, on the brink of war with Pakistan, and broker a £1.5 billion deal in Hawk fighter jets.

Justice. Not vengeance.
Women know well that until things are sorted out fairly there will always be trouble. Each of us here knows that it is injustice that fuels our rage like nothing else can, however we express that rage. You will have your own particular fuel: for me this week, reading of the millions being spent on exploring for water on Mars while life for many on earth hangs on the thread of a dirty well several hours walk away. Water on earth is definitely women's stuff - they have to carry it, clean it and nurse their gut- poisoned children.

Security. We know people can only talk and listen when they feel safe. When they are not worried about where the next meal or where the next bomb is coming from. Why it is such a mockery to have screwed the life blood out of Iraqi people through sanctions and then complain that they haven't got it together to overthrow Saddam.

Co-operation, not competition. Women, as the big time losers, know that 'winning' doesn't make a problem go away. So women are at the forefront of alliances, at making links across impossible looking borders. Women in Black's origins in Palestine, in building bridges between Palestinian and Israeli women.

And most of all we know to keep your eye on the biggest bully in the playground. And that is the US government, in personal and political cahoots with the oil, arms, aerospace, drugs and chemicals industries. They are the greatest threat to world order.

Women don't want this war. 70% women in Britain against war in current polls. We know that peace is not a state we arrive at, but something we struggle for, balancing different interests, experiences, visions. There will be plenty of other wars to follow, all equally pointless and destructive, until we can build societies which have rejected the values of militarism, of competition, of bigger is better, as long as its mine, of using threats and violence to get what we want. Until we change our ideas about what it is to be a real man.

We can do that, men and women together, and we can start here and now. We can start in our close relationships, in the way we work together, in the way we run our campaigns and our communities. We have to rebuild our world from the bottom up.

We can engage in creative, determined, passionate opposition which is non-violent. An opportunity is the Foil the Base protest at Menwith Hill on the 22nd of March, tickets available. Plans to occupy Fairford air base, see me if interested. Non-violent direct action training for women, information from River.

And we can listen. I'd like to close with the voice of Arundhati Roy a woman from the Indian sub continent, speaking in Brazil at a huge gathering of the future, the World Social Forum. She said:

'The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling - their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.
Remember this: we be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them.
Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing'.