Women, and their children with them, have always been lesser beings in human societies.
This is wrong.
Women are not the least of us; women are the best of us. A woman has carried in her body for most of a year, before we ever drew breath, every human being who ever lived. Most of our literature has dealt with the deeds, heroic and otherwise, of men, because it has been written mostly by men. But no noble sacrifice in battle, no crossing of formidable mountain ranges or uncharted oceans, matches the quiet (yet sometimes noisy!) heroism of what women do and have always done to give us life, and to keep us alive.
I’ve come to this: if the world is destroyed, men – in their unceasing quest for power and/or wealth (which is increasingly becoming the Greatest Power) - will destroy it.
If the world is saved, women – like Azar Nafisi and Shirin Ebadi and Neda Agha Soltan in Iran, like Graça Machel and many others in Africa, like Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma, Malalai Joya in Afghanistan, Arundhati Roy in India, like the Saudi poet Hissa Hilal, like ordinary women all over the world who simply struggle to keep their children alive in the face of men’s abandonment and depredations - will save it.
In her wonderful Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, the Iranian professor of English literature Azar Nafisi writes of the regime of Ayatollah Khomeini as conducting a “war against women....(56)” She also notes
that during the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88, Iran used child soldiers to clear minefields ahead of tanks by walking over them. P.W. Singer, in Children at War, quotes Khomeini as saying that the children’s sacrifice in that war was “helping Iran to achieve a situation which we cannot describe in any other way except to say that it is a divine country(57).” Singer also notes that the young boys walking over mines wore keys around their necks “to signify their pending entrance into heaven.” A military history website lists the ages of those Iranian volunteers who cleared minefields by walking over them as “from only nine to more than fifty(58).”
Divine country.
56Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books. Random House, 2008, p.111
57 Singer,Children at War.Op. cit., p. 22.
Just now I am remembering lines from the “Rifleman’s Prayer” we learned in boot camp:
To God and Country, Home and Corps
Let me be faithful evermore.
Amen(59)
It will anger some that I draw a parallel between U.S. soldiers and their Nazi enemies wearing GOTT MIT UNS
belt buckles. Or a similar parallel between us Marines being marched to chapel in boot camp to sing “Onward Christian Soldiers” led by a chaplain with officer’s insignia
on one point of his shirt collar and a cross on the other, and Islamist extremists who call our soldiers “infidels” and “crusaders.”
. But that’s my point. “Divine country” says it all:
Your country will send you to war. We will give you a reason. The reason may or may not be true, or it may be a mixture of some truths and some outright lies. But the truth or falsity of those reasons is not your concern. Your job is to do what you’re told, without question, attack the people we tell you to attack, and risk or give up your life as you do this. Your country thanks you for your sacrifice. If you do not come home alive, we will thank your mother. We will give her a folded flag and a prayer to replace you.
59 From the Marines’ “Rifleman’s Prayer.” See above, p. 79
