As the global Occupy Movement enters its next phase, U-Know proudly presents the personal reflections of an individual participant from Occupy Bath and Bristol - including an overview of the movement's origins, actions and future intentions.
"Listen, the next revolution is gonna be a revolution of ideas." - Bill Hicks
The Republican Party's war against American women’s healthcare and contraceptive rights is an all-out war against women. Birth control freed females at last from the age-old tyranny of enforced, non-stop childbearing. But the Republicans have made their aim clear: to catapult women's rights back by decades – and keep women enslaved as second-class citizens.
The Arab Spring signaled hope for millions across the Middle East. But with Tunisia, Morocco and Egypt having elected religious-dominated governments, women remain as marginalised as ever and – ominously – risk the loss of even more pre-revolution rights, as was the case in post-1979 Iran.
In an illuminating article for the New York Daily News entitled “The Arab Spring's Misogynist Winter”, Deborah Scroggins writes:
“A year after they marched alongside men to topple regimes in the Arab Spring, Arab women are facing a wall of misogyny.
In Tunisia, Salafist vigilantes have been attacking unveiled women and occupying universities that do not allow the face veil. In Egypt, only eight out of 508 newly elected parliamentarians are female, and the country’s Islamists are threatening to repeal laws making it easier for women to divorce and to gain custody of their children. The head of Libya’s transitional government has promised to bring back polygamy.”
The Conservatives roll out plans to force benefit claimants to work for what was previously their right, but it was devised by Labour, and the same thing has been happening in prisons for fifteen years. To make people work for the minimum needed to survive with no hope of improvement or ability to leave is simply slavery. As has always been the case, it's a state of affairs that suits the slave owners very well.
“Yet my Mind was not at rest, because Nothing was Acted, and thoughts run in me that Words and Writing were all Nothing and must Die, for Action is the Life of all and if thou dost not Act, thou dost Nothing” — Gerrard Winstanley, ‘A Watchword to the City of London’, 1649