General

Hillary Clinton’s faux feminism

by Belen Fernandez, Al Jazeera, May 13, 2016.

A Clinton presidency
would help to obscure the fact that the US establishment is toxic for
women.




Last
year, while researching an essay for an upcoming
collection
titled False Choices: The Faux
Feminism of Hillary Rodham Clinton, edited by Liza Featherstone, I
discovered that Clinton had deleted a rather incriminating section
from the paperback edition of her
autobiography.


In the
original version, she detailed the lengths to which she went as
secretary of state under Barack Obama to ensure the success of the
2009 coup d’etat in Honduras against slightly left-leaning President
Manuel Zelaya.


After the
coup, Clinton explained, she and select regional counterparts
“strategised on a plan to restore order in Honduras and ensure
that free and fair elections could be held quickly and legitimately,
which would render the question of Zelaya moot and give the Honduran
people a chance to choose their own future”.


Never mind
that the Honduran people had already chosen Zelaya for the immediate
future. 
In the United States’ view, apparently, opting for anything
less than totally right-wing in Latin America is also a “false
choice”.


Feminist
illusion


As per
Clinton’s stated vision, elections were held in Honduras – although
the fact that they took place under an illegitimate coup
administration naturally meant they were neither “free” nor
“fair”.


The mootness
of the Zelaya question having been officially rendered, Honduras
began its descent into an ever-deepening human rights abyss,
predictably euphemised
by Obama & Co as a “restoration of democratic practices”.


The
indicators of the alleged democratic renaissance in Honduras, it
seems, include a soaring level of impunity and wanton violations by
state security forces.


In a
2014
op-ed
for
Al Jazeera America, economist Mark Weisbrot noted some additional
by-products of the coup: “The homicide rate in Honduras, already
the highest in the world, increased by 50 percent from 2008 to 2011…
Femicides skyrocketed.”


This final
detail alone should do some serious damage to the marketed image of
Clinton as a fervent champion of women’s rights – an illusion
dutifully upheld by Clinton supporters who endeavour to cast the
slightest opposition to the presidential hopeful as sexist and/or
anti-feminist.


Were
American political campaigns governed by reality rather than deceit,
the illusion would have definitively shattered after the recent
assassination of Honduran human rights and environmental activist
Berta
Caceres
.


As
historian Greg Grandin notes in an
article
for
The
Nation
,
Caceres had held Clinton responsible for legitimising the coup
against Zelaya, and claimed that Washington was partly to blame for
post-coup Honduran laws essentially criminalising political protest.

Grandin
summarises: “Caceres called it ‘counterinsurgency’ carried out
on behalf of ‘international capital’ – mostly resource extractors –
that has terrorised the population, murdering political activists by
the high hundreds.”


Plenty
of non-lethal repression has taken place, as well. 

I spent four
months in Honduras
in
the aftermath of the coup and witnessed police blast even elderly
women with pepper spray-loaded water cannons as they marched
peacefully against the coup in the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa.

Of course,
as I point out in my essay for False Choices, it’s not only in
Honduras that Clinton’s projected feminist orientation fails to
cohere with reality.


Her
previous support for the American war on Iraq, for one thing,
certainly didn’t translate into many rights for the Iraqi women and
girls blown up, maimed,
raped,
or otherwise made to suffer by the armed forces of the US.


Democratising
oppression


In other
areas of the Middle East, too, Clinton-advocated policies have also
proven highly destructive to the lives of females – not to mention
their male counterparts.


According
to the United Nations
,
Israel’s summer 2014 assault on the Gaza Strip killed 2,251
Palestinians, most of them civilians; 299 were women, and 551 were
children.



Clinton’s
takeaway from the operation, as
told
to
Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic: “I think Israel did what it
had to do.”
As for
Clinton-sanctioned international economic belligerence, WikiLeaks
cables have
revealed
machinations
by her State Department to prevent a minimum wage increase – to a
whopping 62 cents per hour – for Haitian assembly zone workers,
including those employed by contractors for Fruit of the Loom, Hanes,
and Levi’s.

As I remark
in False Choices: Hey, US corporations need to eat, too!


None of this
is to imply, however, that Clinton – or any other individual on the
American political scene – is the problem. The real problem is the
system itself, which encourages punitive policies at home and abroad
in the interest of maintaining elite dominance.


It may be
easy to argue that electing a female president would constitute a
victory for democracy, equality, justice, and other terms the
political class has expunged of real meaning. But while a Clinton
election might indeed serve to democratise oppression, it would
hardly herald progress.


Rather, a
Clinton presidency would help to obscure the fact that, as things
currently stand, the US establishment is fairly toxic not only for
women but for living things in general.