FEMINIST ANTI-IMPERIALIST MANIFESTO: WOMEN ARE NOT WAR PROPAGANDA

The world is changing. The unipolarity exercised by the capitalist West since the fall of the Berlin Wall, through political subjugation, economic plunder and imperialist war, is collapsing. Several countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America are beginning to rise up against the domination of the USA, the European Union and other powers of the collective West. In front of these transformations, Western feminism faces a historic challenge.

With the disappearance of a left and social movements subject to the most basic rationality, feminists have faced, in total solitude and suffering censorship, the postmodern transgenderist delirium according to which being male or female is not a biological reality, but an innate identity whose expression is materialised on the operating tables of gender clinics. This loneliness has meant an ideological retreat of feminism that makes it vulnerable to the propaganda of imperialist war, and completely unprepared for the enormous transformations the world is undergoing.

Thus, without understanding these transformations, Western feminism runs the risk of becoming itself part of the propaganda machine of imperialist war, a weapon against all those countries that undermine Western domination.

In recent times, a large number of hoaxes have been spread in the media that have proven to be false, or information that has been opportunistically disseminated, with the sole aim of generating animosity against countries such as China, Russia, Iran or Syria. This objective responds to the need to direct public opinion and create an environment conducive to Western societies accepting or supporting, by action or omission, the imperialist wars waged by our governments.

Whether real or invented, the lack of rights and the situation of women and girls in the countries of the global south are spuriously used to create an image of the world where the Western garden emerges as the champion of civilisation, human rights and democracy. And the rest of the world, the majority of humanity, as a jungle of violence, atrocities, religious fundamentalism and attacks on women's rights. A jungle that must be civilised, with bombs if necessary, because this savagery is its nature.

Thus, old colonial discourses about "civilised whites" are reprised in the new contest between the West and the other regions of the world, the same regions that for more than five centuries we have colonised, plundered and plunged into poverty, financing coups and terrorist groups to ensure that this jungle never rears its head. It is only by impoverishing the world that the West has become immeasurably richer. As the world's richest powers, we have been able to afford the standard of living necessary to fight for social, women's or gay rights. And in a colossal exercise of cynicism, we now accuse the rest of the world of being savages, making these improvements part of the Western supremacist discourse and legitimising imperialism.

Women and our rights cannot become a weapon of imperialist war. Feminism cannot collaborate with this cynical exercise of justifying the domination of Western countries that keeps the rest of the planet in subjugation, which has finally said enough and is uniting against the global North. If moral superiority, abstracted from all the socio-historical conditioning factors that have brought us here, is the only thing that Western feminists have to offer the world, we will lose all legitimacy to join the struggle of our fellow feminists in the rest of the world.

Israel's savage attack on Palestine in early October, one among many others with or without pretexts immediately preceding it, has exposed feminism's disorientation on all these issues. While demonstrations of internationalist solidarity with Palestine and against the genocide that Israel has been carrying out for seven decades have followed one after the other everywhere, Western feminism has been conspicuously silent, with honourable exceptions. When this has not been the case, false information against the legally recognised armed resistance of the Palestinian people has been given veracity. It has been argued that wars are "men's things", something contradictory to the idea that there are no intrinsically men's or women's things, in order to stand in equidistance in the face of an obvious and televised genocide. In even worse cases, the fact that Palestine was in the news because it was being exterminated has been used to point out that it is a very macho society.

As the conflict has escalated and maintaining this silence has become increasingly untenable, new nuanced positions have emerged which, while pointing to a greater or lesser extent to Israel's brutal aggression against Palestine, return to a position of equidistance, arguing that violence by either side should be condemned, or that the pain of Palestinian and Israeli women is the same. Women are thus used as a veiled way of equating the attacked with the aggressor in a conflict between a massacred people and their executioner, an imperialist military power of the collective West. All these well-meaning positions which condemn all violence equally, regardless of the historical context and which have appeared precisely when a people revolts against its aggressor, ultimately serve Israel, a state which professes the unequivocally fascist ideology of Zionism, and Western imperialism.

As feminists, we know the importance of peace in the world for women. As anti-imperialists, we know that it is our Western countries that are the first to foment wars and genocides to maintain their already battered unipolar hegemony. Like a wounded animal, the West will try to die by killing, and we must point this out unequivocally, and without speeches of cynical moral superiority or self-interested equidistance towards the rest of humanity, which needs to put an end to Western domination in order to develop on its own terms and according to each socio-historical context. This also applies to the struggle of women.

This is why we call for building an anti-imperialist feminism that does not allow itself to be manipulated by imperialist war propaganda and does not become a collaborator of imperialist war propaganda in any of its many forms. We owe it to all the women and peoples of the world from whose misfortune we have lived so far.