To Stay Quiet Is As Political An

...a Political Struggle That Does Not Have Women At The Heart Of It, Above It, Below It, And Within It Is No Struggle At All.

In 2001, We Were Told That The War In Afghanistan Was A Feminist Mission. The Marines Were Liberating Afghan Women From The Taliban. Can You Really Bomb Feminism Into A Country? And Now, After 25 Years Of Brutal War - 10 Years Against The Soviet Occupation, 15 Years Of Us Occupation - The Taliban Is Riding Back To Kabul And Will Soon Be Back To Doing Business With The United States.

The Time Has Come For Everybody -capitalists, Communists, Socialists- To Ask Themselves What 'civilization' Really Means. If Not, Whether A Country Calls Itself Capitalist Or Communists, In The Pursuit Of 'progress' , It Will Visit Genocide Either On Its Own People Or On Another People Whose Country Must Be Plundered For Resources To Feed The Progress Industry.

As Indian Citizens, We Subsist On A Regular Diet Of Caste Massacres And Nuclear Tests, Mosque Breakings And Fashion Shows, Church Burnings And Expanding Cell Phone Networks, Bonded Labor And The Digital Revolution, Female Infanticide And The Nasdaq Crash, Husbands Who Continue To Burn Their Wives For Dowry And Our Delectable Stockpile Of Miss Worlds. What's Hard To Reconcile Oneself To, Both Personally And Politically, Is The Schizophrenic Nature Of It.

As A Writer, I've Often Said That, Among The Other Things That We Need To Reclaim, Other Than The Obscene Wealth Of Billionaires, Is Language. Language Has Been Deployed To Mean The Exact Opposite Of What It Really Means When They Talk About Democracy Or Freedom.