Posted by Amanda Marcotte November 1, 2007 in Video
Some of Naomi Wolf’s writing on feminism in the past, oh, decade plus has annoyed me. So I’m glad she’s moving into an area where she can be more effective. This talk is good.
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When Klein prefaced her speech by saying that what she was about to talk about was disturbing and scary I didn’t make much of it.
After hearing her speech, it seriously freaked me the fuck out. She can say that fascism is coming to America, and state that without a hint of hyperbole.
I’m only 15 or 20 minutes in, so far (only up to step 2 on the blueprint), but I too am seriously freaked right the fuck out.
I too was seriously surprised that Wolf, whom I’d written off completely (well, I do give her credit for revealing to the general public what the academy has always known about Harold Bloom), was being so cogent.
Still, her new book is so (accurately) depressing and frightening that by the time I got to the end where she says, Now go out and fight! I was pretty much paralyzed with despair.
I’m glad for another wake up call that’s put in such a coherent and reasoned fashion. I think that the final message of her talk is not to be paralyzed but to get up and fight for our liberties and our democracy.
A very effective and chilling presentation, though I wonder if some of the examples she gives aren’t rather thin soup when it comes to proof of creeping fascism — in other words, some of her “evidence” (not items on “the list”, but examples of them in the current administration) can be readily dismissed as specious, thereby making is seem as though she’s just “hysterical” and we can ignore her overall message, which is really damn serious. For example, she notes towards the end that some withheld White House emails in the fired US attorney scandal reveal that they had initially planned to fire _all_ the USA’s, but eventually decided on selecting a few in key swing states who hadn’t toed the GOP line closely enough. She acts as though this would have been some “night of long knives” conspiracy, purging the Justice Dept. of the last line of judicial defense on the way to dictatorship. In reality, though, it would have been the more transparent, democratic route. New administrations routinely switch out all or most of the USAs at the beginning of a new term; what Bush did instead was to have Gonzales and Rove go through and cherry pick the “loyal Bushies” and weed out those who hadn’t been useful enough to Republicans in the 2006 election cycle. That was corrupt. Simply replacing everybody, while dramatic, would have at least had the appearance of fairness and openness. That’s just one example. One point I did think was interesting: she started, but then never fully finished, a thought on the significance of the 2nd amendment. I wonder if in the coming years, we won’t see the debate there shift, from authoritarian rightists being the 2nd’s biggest boosters, to it becoming more of a progressive issue. I’d put good money down on the first major politician in the (not so distant?) future to suggest registering and/or confiscating firearms from certain citizens being on the right, not the left.
Yeah Naomi for coming out with what some of us have studied our entire adult lives. The blueprint for despots is a fascinating thing because of its simplicity actually. I became obsessed with studying Hitler and the others, but mostly Hitler, because I lived in Germany for quite a while in the 1990s and couldn’t understand why such great intelligent people could have dealt with that reign of terror. It was the picture of Hitler still on a sweet little old ladie’s wall that finally pushed me over to the obsession of finding out what made Hitler tick and how he did what he did. That is when the blueprint surfaced in my studies as well.
I have always wondered why a country with the love of freedom and liberty and democracy as its core belief system would not have a civics class on how despots come to power and destroy the democracy from within taught in high schools through out our land. I had to study Hitler as a hobby because I was never really taught about him in school, (and I studied at a honors college in Political Science), and I would say that most people find it repulsive to see books about Hitler on your shelves!! That is when I realized that America is the easiest place in the world for fascism to creep in, because we have “othered” these nations as places where evil just “happened” and never felt it was necessary as a society to understand what these leaders did to get the power that they ultimately had. We aren’t even talking about other unknown nations to most Americans, we are simply talking about Germany and Italy for christ’s sake. It sickens me what has happened here the last 6 years, and it makes me feel like I live amongst the worst kind of ignorance when my German friends and Itlaian friends are laughing at us right now. “Stupid Americans–how do you judge US now”-they say!!!
That is why I loved the part of the clip where Naomi speaks of fascism as looking just like a civilised society from within to most people. How DO we judge the Germans or Italians when they too did not see it? My other hair raising story was about a german woman who thought the concentration camps were where they sent bad germans to become “good citizens” and actually wrote a letter to the SS demanding they come pick up her husband to encourage him to be a “better citizen”. Well that story ended badly, but you get the drift of how in the dark and filled with propaganda life in Nazi Germany was like. I have said it for years and now I say it OUT lOUD— FASCISM WILL HAPPEN HERE!!!
Yep. Scary stuff. It was a good lecture though.
However I don’t feel like she offered any real solutions. Saying we have to “rise up” is a little too abstract for me. I want to know what I can actually do. But maybe that’s just the problem, the abstract solution is the only one available because no-one seems to know what to do anymore. After all the anti-war marches and political junk I have tried to get involved in, I still feel more and more powerless and unable to affect real change. I feel like the last 6 years I have been watching my country slip away from me while I am unable to do anything to stop it…just bitch and moan with friends and on blogs.
OT, but…OMFG.
>I got freaked just reading a review of her book in Salon.
How is it we’ve come to this? 40 years after fighting a world war against fascism, we fall prey to it’s influence in our own country?
40 years after? I guess you are counting–and rightly so–from the beginning of the Reagan Admin. Perhaps because that’s when Wolf does? I dunno, I’m not in a position here to actually listen to her lecture, certainly not if it runs 20 minutes and counting! But I don’t need her to tell me we’re on the cusp of indubitable fascism.
Then again, if I wanted to start a fascism clock, I’d start it way back in the Woodrow Wilson admin. That’s when we adopted a national political police–the FBI. At that, our national security apparatus went back even farther, with the various military branches each having their own Intelligence arms, which even before the FBI had already begun coordinating their “findings” with local police forces in projects to identify, contain, even eliminate “subversives.” Before the Bolsheviks took over in Russia, there were after all the dread “anarchists,” not to mention the Second International–represented, for instance, by Eugene Deb’s Socialist party, which was making respectable gains in national elections when Wilson cracked down on it under the pretext of WWI.
But a national police establishment, by itself, does not fascism make.
In answer to “how have we come to this,” my answer is–this is what capitalism evolves into. Its ideals are best served by the plausible appearence of lasseiz-faire, but at some point, the general public can no longer be relied upon to vote in and accept representatives devoted single-mindedly to the rights of the propertied. At that point, political economy and liberal politics reach a cross-roads where society goes one way or the other; the propertied classes will never permit it to go down the gentle path of creeping, due-process socialism, not without a struggle, and never without either being decisively defeated (never has happened yet in a mature, central capitalist nation) or with strings attached to democracy to make sure it can’t go too far.
The Reagan admin was a third iteration of pulling those strings, or fourth–counting first the Red Scare of the 1920s (going back really to WWI), then the McCarthy era, then the panicky backlash against hippiedom in the Nixon years. Already, coming of age in the Reagan years, contemplating the rhetoric of the 1986 mid-term elections and the 1988 election, I was calling this country’s dominant, conventional wisdom “crypto-fascist.”
It’s just gotten less cryptic is all.
As for those who have studied German and Italian history to their profit if also sorrow–yep. I grew up going to Catholic schools in the ’70s. I think that the whole popular culture got a new wave of Nazi consciousness then, perhaps from getting a generation’s perspective on the 1940s, perhaps because British and other classified stuff was coming to light then, perhaps because in Europe generations were rising to power that were being critically scrutinized for their complicity with the Nazis as youngsters. And perhaps, in this country, because we saw nasty parallels between the Nixon years and the rise of the Nazis. All I know is, I got my exposure in the lens of Catholic school “religion” classes. Performances of Diary of Anne Frank, WWII memoirs as “inspirational books,” perhaps I shaped my attention toward WWII because of my Grandfather’s service and my Dad’s glorification of our “good war.” But the notion that we should take heed of the lessons of the war and the rise of the 3rd Reich was in the air for me at any rate. For that matter, I read a greatly simplified and expurgated version of Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich back in 3rd grade.
Whatever; I was raised to take all that stuff pretty seriously. Imagine my shock, when trained to muse on what was “wrong” with the Germans, when I realized that a whole lot of “white” America gets its traditions and values not so much from Britain, but from the many waves of German immigration we’ve accomodated! If there are cultural quirks that predisposed Germans to this, well, they’d largely apply here too.
Learning how much our national security as well as technical institutions drew directly from captured Germans was pretty unsettling too. Not that I think we needed Germans (as a lot of modern Americans, especially authoritarian patriot types, seem to think today)–nope, we had this authoritarian and technical bent pretty well in hand ourselves, but the Germans fit right in, didn’t they. Just ask Werhner von Braun. Learning how Hitler was able to adapt the Nuremeburg laws pretty much clause by clause from California’s own eugenics codes was a rude awakening too. It was also instructive to pick up some foreign policy textbooks from the WWII era, and read how their fashionable approach to the question of why “white” people ruled the world (the climate theory of Northern superiority–people in tropical climates naturally couldn’t function at the level of folks from “bracing” temperate climates, doncha know) were pretty much equivalent in effect to Nazi Aryan theory–to the point that I had to figure that from the State Dept’s point of view we weren’t so much fighting for an alternative way of life as just fighting over who would be top dog in an essentially similar world order–well, I’d already seen that notion expounded by Orwell in 1984 so it wasn’t such a shock.
Democracy, in the sense of a society founded on stable, sustainable democratic practices, remains a great but untried idea, at least on the scale of a nation capable of holding its own in global-level power struggles.
Liberty Enlightening the World–it’s what I have for patriotism. And it has yet to be implemented.
Is Naomi Wolf a sex-positive feminist? If she is, then that is way cool.
What is not cool is that we are on the fast track towards fascism. The only way to delay that is to reject the Republicans in 2008, 2010, 2012 and 2014.
Actually, no. The Republicans are not the only corrupt politicians. And Democrats have proven they’re not particularly interested in restoring our civil rights or ending the war.
We need a revolution.
We have to do more than just vote, we have to make a big, loud, stinking deal about how totally wrong this war is, how totally wrong torture is, how totally wrong it is to wiretap innocent people, how totally wrong it is to deny accused persons of due process… It’s time to take our country back.
Sit Down For The Constitution >>
You are correct, Elaine. We need to start a revolution, one that our parents would have never dreamed of.
People should remember that fascism as a political philosophy is only abhorent to us NOW, after the fact, because of the horrendous brutality of the Nazi death camps. It was respected politics in the upper stratas of Western societies, including Canada and the USA, until the war made any fascist sympathies suspect from a nationalist POV (the Allies being at war with Axis powers, loyalties of fascist American, Canadian and British citizens were suspect).
The modern day revisionist histories say that the Western powers fought WWII as an antifascist war. This may be the case for many individual citizens who fought in the war, but I believe from the POV of these *countries* it was mostly a nationalist war and not a war of democracies against fascism.
My test case in this thesis is the shameful way the West acted during the Spanish Civil War, by tacitly giving its approval to the military coup by Franco when they remained neutrals knowing Germany and Italy were providing aid to the Franquist uprising. Also, the shameful way in which these countries spit on their own citizens who had the moral courage and fortitude to go themselves to Spain and join the Republican militias when they returned after the war was lost.
The West was more interested in making sure socialism and communism never gained one inch than in fighting the specter of fascism. It was true then, and it was true during the entire Cold War era. It is my opinion that if Hitler and the Nazis had decided they were content with ruling only Germany instead of embarking on countless wars of aggression against their neighbors, the West would have just let them carry on and would have focused on Russia instead, and fascism as an ideology might have gained traction in other countries.
I’ve got to run in a bit, so I haven’t yet watched the talk and I don’t know if Wolf mentions these authors at all, but folks here might be interested in books by Roger Griffin (The Nature of Fascism) and Robert Paxton (The Anatomy of Fascism). Their analyses are slightly different, but both very informative and they do a good job of tying together a lot of different threads that constitute fascism.
One thing you get from reading them - and I think it’s pretty persuasive - is that fascism takes forms that are peculiar to the nations in which it’s situated. Americans may not recognize when fascism is taking hold in the United States because they look for it in its historically mature forms and they are especially accustomed to Nazi Germany as the paradigmatic example of fascism. So because they don’t see what happened in Germany in the 1920s and 30s as the same as what is (or may be) happening in the United States, they conclude that fascism “can’t happen here.”
But it can happen, though its appearance will be different. If I recall correctly, Paxton seems to think that fascism in the United States would have a much stronger religious component to it than it did in Germany.
Am I the only one bothered by her pronunciation of “Goebbels”? I have to resist the temptation to immediately take people less seriously for reasons like that.
Is my post stuck in moderation, or did ‘Net bandits beat up and kidnappes my bytes while they were en route to Pandagon?
“The Reagan admin was a third iteration of pulling those strings, or fourth–counting first the Red Scare of the 1920s (going back really to WWI), then the McCarthy era, then the panicky backlash against hippiedom in the Nixon years. Already, coming of age in the Reagan years, contemplating the rhetoric of the 1986 mid-term elections and the 1988 election, I was calling this country’s dominant, conventional wisdom “crypto-fascist.””
Mark, don’t forget the surprisingly large group of influential Americans (Henry Ford being one of the most public) who found ideological soul-mates in the German Nazis and thought we should enter the war ASAP - on the side of the Germans. They were so afraid of the Russians & Communism, and so admiring of the social control of the Nazi police state that they completely failed to notice the overpowering odor of pure, unadulterated evil that surrounded and tainted everything the Nazis did.
The easy assimilation of Nazi criminals (to be fair, many were, but many were not) into the scientific community after the war when our alliance of convenience with the Soviets quickly resumed its pre-war status, showed just how little concern the Nazi philosophy had among the political elite, as compared to our fear of The Reds.
All in all, not a proud era for America. The fact that many of the children and grandchildren of those who successfully fought the Nazis have gone on to absorb many aspects of Nazi philosophy (in “American” form), without realizing what a betrayal they represent to the idea of America, is a disgrace…
Actually, my math was just off. I meant 60+ years. Friday mornings before the coffee kicks in is a bitch.
Also, I think you may be on to something, Mark with ,”this is what capitalism evolves into.”
For some time I’ve been trying to figure out what Capitalism’s end-game is. You can only expand your profit making potential so far before you reach the end of a closed system (that system being either national, in the 2oth century and global in the 21st). But still, Capitalist philosophy dictates that you must increase profits because failure to do so means you are loosing money. The only way to increase profit in a closed system is to start punching holes in the system and manufacturing demand.
Wars, especially ones based around fear of the Other, are handy for this as they are open ended, feed profits directly for several large businesses (Defense and Reconstruction Industries). The easiest and most efficient way to do this is to marry the goals of the government with the goals of corporate interest. Viola, fascism.
Or as we like to say in the US, the first CEO President. For life.
And we’re already there, of course. That’s precisely why only a bona fide revolution can substantively change things. The Dems have a better track record when it comes to social values (abortion, gay rights) but they’re just as beholden to corporatism as the Republicans.What form such a revolution might take is just as disquieting to contemplate as a planet completely subjugated to global corporatism.
I give Wolff a B- on this. The threat is real, the creeping fascism is on the move, yes, but some of her examples and her solution (impeachment) are clunkers.
The tasering of the U.Fla kid was not an example of oppressive police suppressing speech. After VaTech last spring, law enforcement is highly sensitive to students who start to act a little crazy. They didn’t care what he was saying, they cared he was being disruptive and a little crazy, and they wanted (or needed, depending on your perspective) to control him. Tasering is better than breaking bones or a skull. Th kid went on the Today show this week and said he was wrong in losing control, but that the issue he wanted to bring up, electoral disenfranchisement, deserved further exposure. He’s right, and so is Wolff on this (so why DID Kerry punk out on the issue?).
Similarly the arrest and dragging of the out-of-control woman in the Phoenix Airport was not a harbinger of fascist police. The police misconduct there was not in arresting her, it was in leaving her alone when she was in such a perilous mental state.
Presidential ability to federalize the National Guard is not necessarily a bad thing. Kennedy did it in service of civil rights when the local state refused to protect black citizens/students. Infiltration by government agents is not necessarily a bad thing, considering that infiltrations into KKK groups, wing-nut militia groups and mafia groups seem legitimate to me.
I don’t buy the connection between conduct of the war in Iraq to conduct here, necessarily, although the idea that the federal government has hired Blackwater for domestic security purposes is pretty scary.
What is needed is a heightened value in the electorate for its individual freedoms, particularly free speech and search and seizure issues (including here surveillance). Legislative oversight has failed in these areas, in fact, legislatures have been co-conspirators in the erosion of our rights. Some judges have stepped in, but we need to demand of our legislators/candidates that our rights and freedoms be protected. And that includes respect by the left of the exercises of freedoms it doesn’t really like, such as right to bear arms and speech it doesn’t like (Imus, Limbaugh, Couilter).
Like Jonas above points out on 2nd Amendment, I have often felt the right to bear arms may one day be a friend to the left. An armed citizenry can be a good deterrent to state fascism.
As part of a fight to preserve our freedoms, we should defend the rights of people we don’t like or who act in ways we don’t like. Stop drumming people out of public life because they do or say something you find offensive. Also, more powerful people like Wolff need to take opportunities to fight where the more anonymous of us could not. I was bothered she tossed out the book before going through airport security. She could have raised a stink and gotten press if she had been harassed for it. Kerry had the standing to expose voter fraud, even if it wouldn’t have overturned the election.
To call for impeachment is an utter futility. That’s not going to happen. Most of what Bush has done has been approved by Congress. Let’s try for something more achievable, like repealing the “Patriot Act”.
I look at this and see an explanation for why conservatives oppose abortion. We can’t keep increasing demand and growing markets if the population isn’t increasing. The whole idea that the earth’s resources are finite or that earth has a carrying capacity is foreign to these people, because they believe that a part of citizenship is to grow markets for corporations.
Good examples of these arguments come out of the European and Japanese press, where journalists are forever complaining about how childfrees aren’t contributing populations of children to grow up and fund the pensions of the older generation. It’s disgusting to portray these people as socially worthless and characterize currently-productive taxpayers as “leeches.”
When governments put corporate profits ahead of the well-being of the citizens they supposedly represent, that’s not just facist, it’s disgraceful.
Actually, the pronunciation of “Goebbels” was bothering me too, as did her characterization of breast milk as a “gross liquid”.
But other than those minor nits, I thought it was a very thought-provoking lecture and it makes me want to read the book.
In some ways, I think she is brilliant to pick examples of creeping fascism that reasonable people can argue with– it demonstrates how the “creep” takes place with so little resistance from the public. If you can rationalize oppressive state actions as being somewhat legitimate then you won’t put your foot down to stop it. I also think it demonstrates the difficulty of identifying a closing of the society when you are in the thick of it.
Did anyone else’s video stop in the last 9 minutes? I reloaded it and it kept stopping at the same point.
Two people have objected to Wolf’s pronunciation of Goebbels. I agree she says it with an American accent, but her pronunciation of the “ö” (spelled as “oe” in English) is actually close enough to correct. And it’s way better than those folks who say “go-bels”, no?
I think the work Wolf presents here is the best she has done in years.
Former lurker here.
I extracted the MP3 audio from the video if you prefer to listen to it. 20 MB in size and much, much smaller than the YouTube video. If you’re having trouble loading the video, this might just work. For those who want to cut to the chase, The Guardian published Wolf’s 10-item list earlier this year.
I found another list by Dr. Lawrence Britt that’s more detailed than Wolf’s, but the essence is the same. Whenever you let someone get a foot in the door of one’s civil liberties, it’s only a matter of time before they continue to push the door open.
Whenever I read about someone dismissing these concerns as “fear-mongering,” I only need to think about all those academics silenced for expressing views against the administration. A professor at my local university teaches a seminar on violence and the sacred. The reading list consisted of fundamentalist Islamic polemics and analysis of what motivates such people to carry it out. Soon enough, his students were being interrogated by the CIA on the nature of the class. There’s just something seriously fucked up when an objective classroom discussion triggers alarm bells on the federal level.
It’s a mad, mad world out there.
Former lurker here.
I extracted the MP3 audio from the video if you prefer to listen to it. 20 MB in size and much, much smaller than the YouTube video. If you’re having trouble loading the video, this might just work. For those who want to cut to the chase, The Guardian published Wolf’s 10-item list earlier this year.
I found another list by Dr. Lawrence Britt that’s more detailed than Wolf’s, but the essence is the same. Whenever you let someone get a foot in the door of one’s civil liberties, it’s only a matter of time before they continue to push the door open.
Whenever I read about someone dismissing these concerns as “fear-mongering,” I only need to think about all those academics silenced for expressing views against the administration. A professor at my local university teaches a seminar on violence and the sacred. The reading list consisted of fundamentalist Islamic polemics and analysis of what motivates such people to carry it out. Soon enough, his students were being interrogated by the CIA on the nature of the class. There’s just something seriously fucked up when an objective classroom discussion triggers alarm bells on the federal level.
It’s a mad, mad world out there.
Former lurker here.
I extracted the MP3 audio from the video if you prefer to listen to it. 20 MB in size and much, much smaller than the YouTube video. If you’re having trouble loading the video, this might just work. For those who want to cut to the chase, The Guardian published Wolf’s 10-item list earlier this year.
I found another list by Dr. Lawrence Britt that’s more detailed than Wolf’s, but the essence is the same. Whenever you let someone get a foot in the door of one’s civil liberties, it’s only a matter of time before they continue to push the door open.
Whenever I read about someone dismissing these concerns as “fear-mongering,” I only need to think about all those academics silenced for expressing views against the administration. A professor at my local university teaches a seminar on violence and the sacred. The reading list consisted of fundamentalist Islamic polemics and analysis of what motivates such people to carry it out. Soon enough, his students were being interrogated by the CIA on the nature of the class. There’s just something seriously fucked up when an objective classroom discussion triggers alarm bells on the federal level.
It’s a mad, mad world out there. (Hope I don’t double-post!)
Josh said:
“(well, I do give her credit for revealing to the general public what the academy has always known about Harold Bloom)”
I wasn’t sure why that struck a slightly sour note with me, so I looked it up.
Wolf’s accusations are in a 2004 New York Magazine cover story here: http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/features/n_9932/
Criticisms of her 20 year old harassment allegation are here: http://www.observer.com/node/48872
http://www.slate.com/id/2096152/
From that reading, Wolf’s article was an unfair slam at both Bloom and Yale. FWIW
Josh said:
“(well, I do give her credit for revealing to the general public what the academy has always known about Harold Bloom)”
I wasn’t sure why that struck a slightly sour note with me, so I looked it up.
Wolf’s accusations are in a 2004 New York Magazine cover story here: http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/features/n_9932/
Criticisms of her 20 year old harassment allegation are here: http://www.observer.com/node/48872
http://www.slate.com/id/2096152/
From that reading, Wolf’s article was an unfair slam at both Bloom and Yale. FWIW
24: I don’t think I’ve ever met a German who put a rhotic ‘r’ on the end of the ‘oe’, which is what her pronunciation sounds like to me.
Criticisms of her 20 year old harassment allegation are here: http://www.observer.com/node/48872
Wow. That article is really, really straining to discredit those allegations; it’s obvious from the first few paragraphs. And all it comes up with is those old standbys “she was drunk”, her memories are not 100% consistent (if you’re a lawyer determined to read things uncharitably)”, “she was asking for it.” It’s a cookie-cutter replication of the smear job perpetrated on anyone who speaks up in cases of sexual assault and harrassment. Gnarled relationship my ass! I’m sort of really disappointed that anyone who actually reads a feminist blog could have fallen for it. Wasn’t the “rationalize” a few paragraphs in a giveaway that the piece was biased? Or the “tremulous”? Or the ridiculous demand that a piece written in memoir form– hardly uncommon in newspapers– should have been rewritten by a “disinterested reporter” (because women shouldn’t be allowed to tell the truth about their own lives)? I mean, even the headline should have given you a clue.
For god’s sake, what kind of article devotes a whole paragraph to quibbling with a writer subsituting “moved towards me” for “came at me”? It should be obvious: an article that couldn’t find anything else to discredit a harrassment victim with. Not just a smear job but a shoddy, transparent smear job. Still, I guess you can fool some of the people all of the time…
The video appears to be gone.
Ooop… Never mind. I can play it now. The first couple times I tried I got a “this video is no longer available” message.
Kali, did you read the Slate piece, too?
Regarding the Observer piece, Wolf strongly implied in in her article that Yale, particularly Dean Brodhead, stonewalled her on how Yale was handling harassment issues in 2003. But the Observer actually checked and found out and learned that Brodhead sent Wolf an email resonding to her concerns before the article was published:
***********
Brodhead said that in his 11 years as dean, the grievance committee had heard four cases, which varied in “nature,” “gravity” and “the nature of appointment of the instructor the complaint was lodged against.” He said that “since unsubstantiated complaints can be regarded as libel and since the complainants typically wish their privacy to be protected, we do not publicize complaints.” Students themselves, he said, are free to make the information public.
“I took it that another of your concerns was to learn how robust and accessible our grievance process is, and here I’m happy to supply details,” Mr. Brodhead wrote. He described how sexual harassment is discussed at “mandatory meetings during freshman orientation,” and that freshman counselors and residential college deans are “well briefed on the issue.” He said Yale occasionally distributed leaflets on dining-hall tables “to remind students of the issue and of the available recourse if they seek one,” while “peer counselors trained by the Health Service give presentations in the colleges, athletics departments, fraternities and sororities, and they staff confidential hot lines that students are free to call.”
Mr. Brodhead said that Yale’s Undergraduate Regulations contained materials on the grievance procedure, as did the university’s Web site.
***********
So who is fooling whom?
Real sexual harassment is a serious thing, in academia and the workplace. Wolf’s story is pretty lame on Bloom and misleading on Yale’s current handling of the issue. So when someone here tossed off a comment on how Wolf exposed the truth about Bloom, it appears a smear has survived quite well.
No, I didn’t read the Slate article after seeing how ridiculous that first link was. I figured if the Slate article made a good case you wouldn’t have bothered including the Observer link, which could only damage your position. I didn’t even read Wolf’s original article. I didn’t need to; the Observer article was such a weak smear job that it made me pretty sure her allegations were credible. Praising with faint damns, or something.
The Obsever article says that Naomi Wolf had been in contact with Yale for months about sexual harassment issues. Why did she only get that email ten days before her article was due to come out? Reading between the lines, it’s pretty obvious that she was in fact being stonewalled, and when they realised she was going to publish an article, they quickly emailed her some PR guff as damage control.
Regarding said PR guff, which you have quoted extensively, all I can say is that it’s one thing having a grievance policy in place, and quite another having a culture where students feel safe to use it. Most organisations have a grievance policy in place these days; the fact that Yale does doesn’t prove anything regarding Wolf’s allegations about Yale.
I’m not sure why you seem convinced that the allegations re Bloom were a smear. The attempts to refute that were unbelievably weak– they haven’t even got a quote from him denying it!
history_mom,
Wolf isn’t really characterizing breast milk as a “gross liquid” so much as she is acknowledging that many adults are squeamish at the thought of drinking human breast milk themselves, and that it is that particular squeamishness that is being exploited in the example she cites.
Ugirl: I wish I could take that explanation but given her delivery of the term, I’m not convinced that she isn’t one of those people grossed out by the idea of drinking breast milk. The point she made was perfectly clear without trying to create that kind of one-to-one comparison, but she felt the need to do it anyway.
Kali,
I had no agenda in the order of selection of the counterpoints to Wolf’s artilcle. I can’t even remember the google terms I used. I found somebody’s blog article which linked all three articles, which seemed to be from mainstream publications.
I find it a bit mind boggling that you would seem proud to admit ignorance. You are willing to conjecture on the “point” without reading it, based on your reading one “counterpoint” you find poorly written, so badly written you conclude the second counterpoint must also be specious. Whew. Breathtaking.
Looking further, apparently there were several dissections and defenses of Wolf’s original article. For anyone really interested, google “naomi wolf bloom”. Another treatment is here at ifeminist : http://www.ifeminists.net/introduction/editorials/2004/0324campbell.html