Monthly Archives: April 2014

Declaration on Granting Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples

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Three points

1) The United Nations starts out by reaffirming the dignity and worth of the human person, the yearning for freedom in dependent peoples, the equal rights of men and women, and the need for better standards of life.

2) According to the UN, an end must be put to colonialism and all practices associated with it. Exploitation in colonies is a violation of human rights.

3) People and nations have the right to self-determination. A nation may be independent regardless of its social, economic, or cultural conditions.

Two questions:

What prompted this declaration?

Does this document take away from the original purpose of colonialism- to outsource labor, expand territory, and increase the diversity of consumer choices?

One point:

I thought the tone of this declaration was particularly interesting. The UN adopts an air of righteousness, when many of the countries in the UN had been employing methods of colonialism for centuries. It seems as if the countries that make up the UN suddenly realized that what they had been doing for generations was wrong. Furthermore, it’s interesting that the UN acknowledged the equal rights of men and women, when they certainly did not exist. Also, freedom is mentioned several times throughout the course of the document without any definition or guidelines as to how freedom may be defined. However, the document was written in 1960, and preceded many instrumental social and cultural movements that occurred towards the latter half of the 60s.

Nehru on Marxism, Capitalism, and Non-alignment

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3 Points

Nehru believed that the violence present in communist nations was inherent and deep-rooted, while the violence of Communist nations was leading Russia to peace, cooperation, and freedom of its people.

He emphasizes Russia’s fortitude and resilience, while the rest of the world was regressing and deteriorating. “With all her blunders, Soviet Russia had triumphed over enormous difficulties and taken great strides toward this new order while the rest of the world was in the grip of the depression and going back in some ways […]”

Nehru expresses the need for India to attribute to the task of achieving economic development. He urges the production of strategic planning, implementation, and enthusiasm and cooperation of India’s people.

 2 Questions

What was Nehru’s reasoning for believing that his approach would help to preserve peace in India, as well as internationally.

What does Nehru mean when he says ‘nonalignment’?

1 Interesting Point

I found it interesting that this was basically the first text we’ve read where there was no intention of interference with another country. Nehru makes it clear that India will successfully move forward with the approach of nonaggression and noninterference.

NOW Statement of Purpose

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Three Points:

1) NOW observed that the status of women in American society had actually been declining in recent years. They supported this with facts and identified that 75% of working women were relegated to routine jobs that required little skill and earned on average 60% of what men earned.
2) NOW demanded a concerted effort on the part of the government and civil rights organizations to integrate women into the “mainstream of American society.” Women must be provided equal opportunities as men to fulfill their potential.
3) To realize any major advances and provoke change, women needed to unify and mobilize. For fear of discouraging any group of women, NOW did not affiliate itself with any political party. Women had often refrained from voicing their indignation with their position in society for worry of being labelled a feminist, but this attitude must change for any real progress to be made.

Questions:

1) What initiatives did NOW take to enhance the status of women? What impact did they have on the women’s rights movement in America?
2) Did NOW collaborate or receive support from any civil rights organizations?

Observation:

NOW’s Statement of Purpose outlined very specific goals and used facts to prove the inequality of women. I found some of there statistics very startling as I had not realized the extent of male domination in the U.S. only some-odd years ago. I also found it interesting that NOW used the increasing life span of women as support for women going out and achieving outside the household.

NOW Statement of Purpose

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Three major points:

– This organization, made up of both men and women, want to create a society that holds women in the same regards as men. They want to bring women into “mainstream America” and allow them to have the same privileges and responsibilities that men enjoy. This will all be done in order to ensure that women are able to have truly equal partnership with men.

– This group’s logic is being uncovered as technology “has reduced most of the productive chores that women once performed.” Therefore, women are not needed as much in the home and can expand their responsibilities to the workplace. They are now able to use their intelligence and ingenuity to help out the workforce instead of it being “wasted” in daily household chores.

– This group wants women to take a stand for themselves on a much more basic level. They want them to reject the long-standing idea that women are inferior to men while demanding representation in political, business and other influential circles.

Questions:

Why haven’t women brought these point up before? They could’ve fought for more rights in the earlier half of the century – they didn’t have to wait some forty odd years to make a stand for themselves on this front.

What is the most important step for women in this document? Is it their “necessary” involvement in politics? More prevalence in the business community? Their want to be educated just as much as men are?

Observation:

At this point there was no defined civil rights organization for women. During this period there were many civil rights groups popping up for minorities and smaller delegations, but there hadn’t been one specifically for women. Shocking.

Revolutionary Text

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The Catechism of the Revolutionary and the Demands of the Narodnaia Volia both demonstrates the extreme side of the revolutionaries in Russia in the late nineteenth century. The Catechism of the Revolutionary is the ideal guidelines which a revolutionary should live by, outlining their goals, behaviors, and even feelings to define a true ‘revolutionary’. The Demands of the Narodnaia Volia is the product of these guidelines, and shows the extent to which followers of the Catechism of the Revolutionary were willing to go to achieve their goals and how they felt they were justified in doing so.

I got a distinct feeling while reading these documents of a cult-like feeling developing. The Catechism of the Revolutionary required not just a dedication of time or beliefs to a cause, but of the revolutionary’s entire life. Most of what is done, even if it only effects one person such as that person connections to their ‘second and third rank’ revolutionaries. This kind of hive-mind behavior coupled with the extremes that Bakunin and Nechaev called for created an almost religious tone. I was also shocked at portrayal of violence that these documents seem to idealize. Not only is it mentioned and encouraged or justified often throughout the texts, but it also seems to address the revolutionary as a tool for violence rather than as a thinking person. Paragraph 13 states “The revolutionary joins the state, society, and so-called civilized world and lives in it only for the purpose of its more total and speedier destruction”, and goes on to discuss how compassion is a weakness. The document attempts to take believers in revolution and make them into blind-instruments by telling them that this is the only way to truly support a cause that they believe in.

Reading these texts left we with questions as to how both the documents themselves and this mindset overall were view by the population of Russia. How did the Catechism of the Revolutionary in particular make it into Russia past the censors? If it was written while the authors were in exile how much of the document was influence by outside ideologies that they encountered, and how much was directly from them (and probably the cause of their being exiled)? Additionally, how many followers were willing to follow such dire measures for the sake of revolution?

Leaving Moderates Out in the Cold

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Reading The Catechism of the Revolutionary and Demands of the Narodnaia Volia reminded me of Pussy Riot. Both groups want roughly the same thing (considering the time periods in which they are from). In a documentary I watched about Pussy Riot and the trial proceeding their ‘performance’ at Christ the Savior Cathedral, a prosecutor approached the women and told them their actions essentially alienated liberals and prevented moderates from joining a more liberal camp. The Catechism and Demands essentially do just that. Any moderate person of the time reading the documents would most likely be put off by such a radical, far left.

The Catechism of the Revolutionary makes extraordinary demands of revolutionaries, essentially detailing out a revolutionary’s entire life. Revolutionaries may not have friends or family, and cannot do anything unless it benefits the organization. The document makes revolutionaries out to be terrorist operatives, essentially devoid of humanity and feeling (unless it forwards the goals of the organization). On the other hand, Demands of the Narodnaia Volia confirms any suspicions that these revolutionaries might be operatives.

Part D of the Demands of the Narodnaia Volia lays out the various operations of the terrorist organization. Item number two specifically discusses “destructive and terrorist activity”, essentially condoning any actions or deaths, if they are in the best interests of the organization’s goals. The entire document makes the Narodnaia Volia out to be a cold, extremely focused organization.

These documents were both intriguing to me. Have either of these been applied to and used for modern terrorist organizations? How many people could truly call themselves ‘revolutionaries’ and how seriously were the rules in the Catechism taken?

The Catechism of the Revolutionary

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The Catechism of the Revolutionary is disturbing to say the least, but it clearly defines the lengths that the revolutionary fanatic authors were willing to go to see Russia destroyed. From the very beginning, Bakunin and Nechaev define a true revolutionary as someone that exists solely for the purpose of carrying out a revolution, and for a revolutionary, all else in life is a distant second.

The pure annihilation preached by Bakunin and Nechaev is extreme, but they state in no uncertain terms just what a revolutionary is and what they live for. Their idea of revolution could be said to be pure, as it defines the revolution as a central aspect of life. In fact, their commitment to the revolution and their belief in its purpose is borderline religious. They write that to be a true revolutionary, one must sever all ties, visible or not, to the government and civil order itself, and they may only exist in the civilized world “for the purpose of its more total and speedier destruction” (p. 352).

The Catechism of the Revolutionary classifies people into different classes based on their dedication to the cause, their standing in the Russian government, and even their sex. They determine a person to be a comrade only if they can devote themselves to the revolution and a human only if they can offer something to the revolution. Their class system is nearly as complete as the Table of Ranks created by Peter the Great, and it clearly defines the purposes and fate of many different people groups.

Nechaev and Bakunin are absolutely clear when they define their vision, but one of the most important statements that they make is said in Paragraph 24. They state that they didn’t lay out this design for a group that would seize power from the government, they only created the system to tear down the government that already existed. After the social order and the government are gone, they leave it up to the people to build a new system after they’ve done their job.

National Organization for Women : Statement of Purpose(1966)

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Three main points

1. Women have possessed many disadvantages in the society such as a low income, sex discrimination, low statues in workplace for a long time. They also could not take part in political decision makings since their political rights had not been guaranteed for a long time.

2. Although women have suffered from a lot of disadvantages in the society, these disadvantages should be removed for realizing a society that both men and women can live under equal rights.

3. It is significant to make a society that women can freely choice their own lifestyle. Since most of women had to  take care of children after a marriage, they had to quit their jobs regardless of  their will. Therefore, it is necessary to conduct a measure to realize a greater participation of women in public affairs.

Two questions

1. In page three, there is an old idea that men have to take care of their family members, while women mainly engage in a household to back up husband. What was a factor that produced this idea?

2. In page three, the establishment of child-care center was suggested to help women who would like to continue their works after they gave birth to children. After this suggestion, Were there any movements or measures to help women continue work ? If so, how much did women come to continue their works comparing to before?

Observation

Although I mentioned in the question part, there is an old idea that men have to take care of their family members, while women mainly engage in a household to back up husband. This idea had also been common in Japan for a long time. Now, many Japanese women have their workplaces and work with men workers. However, few women engaged in a work except for a household thirty to forty years ago. Therefore, I understood that some countries had shared the same idea about the role of each gender.

 

 

 

 

National Organization for Women

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Statement of Purpose (1966)

  1. NOW’s mission was to rally support of all American citizens and to take action in bringing women into full participation of American Society. By exercising all the privileges and responsibilities stated in the US constitution, women must be in a truly equal partnership with men.
  2. NOW rejected all previous assumptions that a man is in charge of supporting himself, his wife, and family, and that a woman’s role is to support her husband from the home. NOW believed that marriage should be equal among both partners and the responsibilities dealing with the home and family support should be shared between husband and wife.
  3. NOW declared itself independent of any political party for the purpose of rallying political power of men and woman sharing its goals. NOW strove to make sure that no candidates who did not believe in full equality between the sexes would be elected or appointed to office.

Questions:

  1. Do woman have equal rights in the United States today?
  2. Why is it that woman often make less money for a similar job where a man makes more money?

Observation:

I find it unbelievable how long and how difficult a fight it was for woman to finally attain civil rights in America. In my generation, equality for women would never be a question. It amazes that in 2014 women do not have equal rights in many other countries around the world.

National Organization for Women- Statement of Purpose

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Three Points:

–       Says that the social restraint of keeping women in the home has been surpassed by the increased life span. Since women can live longer, the majority of their life is not spent raising children and thus they have the capacity to strive for more personal accomplishments other than domestically. In addition, technology has reduced the work in the home as there are less” chores” for women to do. This allows for women to expand from previous societal restraints because there is more time and opportunity for them to excel outside of domesticity.

–       NOW wants more federal backing for the Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 so that women are not discriminated against in the work place. They state that this has occurred numerous times, and despite legislation, has yet to be addressed to the full extent that it needs to be.

–       They show many statistics in higher education and higher power jobs that show the disparity between men and women- women making up 51% of the population but rarely having jobs that pay well and that give them societal power (for example, at this time only 4% of all lawyers were women). This causes them to call for more educational opportunity for women and more jobs that would allow them to claim as equal members of society to men.

Two Questions:

– How did the feminist movement in America affect similar movements globally, and how did those other movements play into American feminist identities?

– Was the reaction of men towards feminist issues more accepting and supportive than in the past, or was there still resistance?

One Observation:

– I think it is important to see how the feminist movements work alongside the Civil Rights Movement for racial inequality. Both being subjugated to unfair social standings and inequality from the white male led governing body, on many fronts they were able to support each other and stand in solidarity for equal treatment. Specifically in the Statement of Purpose from the National Organization for Women, they discuss the double victimization of black women in society, and how they are being undervalued by two different aspects of inequality in America.