Truth and Memory.
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Today is "International Women's Day" and over the internet socialists, communists, and well meaning persons are celebrating a holiday that was first celebrated on February 28, 1909 by the Socialist Party of America, but today's date, March 8th, is owed to a tragic history.
On March 8, 1917 (February 23 in the Julian calendar), tens of thousands of Russian women took to the streets of Petrogad (St Petersburg) in protest demanding "Bread and Peace" for the lack of food due to World War One, and within a week Czar Nicholas II had abdicated his throne in what became known as the February Revolution.
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| International Women's Day on March 8, 1917 |
This would lead eight months later to the October Revolution and the rise of the Bolsheviks and 74 years of totalitarian communist rule that led to tens of millions dead. The February Revolution that took place on March 8th in our Gregorian calendar is the origin of the reason that International Women's Day is celebrated today, and that is problematic. However, it is here to stay, the United Nations formally recognized it in 1975.
This year's observance was especially problematic because they were also celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration which I called out in a Twitter thread. No sense of irony that feminists gathered in Communist China in 1995 at a time that not only were Chinese women's bodily autonomy completely under state control, and Chinese baby girls were slowly being killed in dying rooms due to their gender.
22 years later the New York Times was still gender washing the communist misogynist regime in China.
On September 25, 2017 at 8:11pm NYT Opinion tweeted: "For all its flaws, the Communist revolution taught Chinese women to dream big" and sparked an online conversation with many outraged at what they rightfully described as a white wash of a mass murdering dictatorship.
Some necessary context on the Beijing regime and women
Mao Zedong took power
on October 1, 1949 and ruled with an iron fist until his death on
September 9, 1976 and left a record of carnage difficult to equal over
27 years that included horrors inflicted on Chinese women.
Ten years prior to his death the old dictator launched the Cultural Revolution that began a decade of bloodshed that would claim millions of lives.
First generation dictator Mao Zedong was 72 years old at the time and
the communist regime had been in power 17 years and on May 16, 1966 the communist party May 16 Notification warned that the party had been infiltrated by counter-revolutionary
“revisionists” who were plotting to create a “dictatorship of the
bourgeoisie.”
Sexual horrors of the Chinese cultural revolution
China expert Frank Dikotter explained how in "1968, millions were sent to the countryside after they finished school,
some of whom were girls as young as 14. Thousands of young girls were
left at the mercy of villagers and raped.” Xinran in her 2002 The Good Women of China described how young girls suffered the worse of the sexual horrors in the Cultural Revolution: "The perpetrators were their teachers, their
friends, even their fathers and brothers, who lost control of their
animal instincts."
Mao died in 1976 and the decade long blood letting came to an end.
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| During Mao's Cultural Revolution thousands of young women were raped in camps |
But the communist regime continued on, after the founder's departure, and three years later began it's infamous one-child policy. On September 26, 1980 The New York Times ran a UPI story reporting
that "Chinese Reds Limited To a Child Per Family" and euphemistically
wrote "China intensified its population-control drive today by ordering
the 38 million Communist Party members to have only one child per
family" and how the policy would use "painstaking patience and
persuasion." 15 years later Time Magazine reported in 2015 that "patience and persuasion" included "forced abortions and sterilization, and a gender imbalance resulting from female infanticide."
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| Click here to see the 1995 documentary "The Dying Rooms" |
Tom Hilditch in the South China Morning Post (Hong Kong), reproduced in World Press Review, in September of 1995 described it as a "A Holocaust of Little Girls" and reported on the plight of a Chinese baby girl in an orphanage:
Mei-ming has lain this way for 10 days now: tied up in urine-soaked blankets, scabs of dried mucus growing across her eyes, her face shrinking to a skull, malnutrition slowly shriveling her two-year old body. The orphanage staff call her room the "dying room", and they have abandoned here for the very same reasons her parents abandoned her shortly after she was born. She is a girl. When Mei-ming dies four days later, it will be of sheer neglect. Afterward, the orphanage will deny she ever existed. She will be just another invisible victim of the collision between China's one-child policy and its traditional preference for male heirs. She is one of perhaps 15 million female babies who have disappeared from China's demographics since the one-child-per-family policy was introduced in 1979.
Communist China continued the one child policy until 2015.
Amnesty International, not a right wing group, monitored how Beijing's one child policy operated in practice and in 1996 published the report
Birth control policy in China
The official line
Family planning is “voluntary”, although birth control has been compulsory since 1979. Government demographers recommend stabilization of the population at 1.3 billion by the year 2000, which they say can only be achieved through “strict measures”. “Coercion is not permitted”, according to the State Family Planning Commission.
Some facts
-Women pregnant outside the plan have been abducted and forced to have abortions or undergo sterilization.
-Pregnant women have been detained and threatened until they agree to have abortions.
-People who refuse to comply with the policy have been harassed and some have been ill-treated by officials.
-“Above-quota” new-born babies have reportedly been killed by doctors under pressure from officials.
-The homes of couples who refuse to obey the child quotas have been demolished.
-Relatives of those who cannot pay fines imposed for having had too many children have been held hostage until the money was paid.
-Those helping families to have “above quota” children have been severely punished.
-Those committing human rights violations while enforcing the birth control policy often go unpunished.
A victim
An unmarried woman in Hebei province who had adopted one of her brother’s children was detained several times in an attempt to force her brother to pay fines for having had too many children. In November 1994 she was held for seven days with a dozen other men and women. She was reportedly blindfolded, stripped naked, tied and beaten with an electric baton.
Quote: ‘It was part of my work to force women...to have abortions. In the evening, when the couple was likely to be at home, we would go to their houses and drag the woman out. If the woman was not at home, we would take her husband or another member along and keep them in custody until the woman turned herself in.’ - A former family planning official, 1993
In April of 2010, Roseann Rife, Amnesty International’s Asia-Pacific Deputy Director said,"Forced sterilizations carried out by officials amount to torture and the haste of the procedures raises questions about their safety and possible health impacts."
Some would attempt to argue that it is the Chinese cultural baggage, and not the communist ideology that is responsible for this mistreatment of women, but other communist dictatorship have different, but equally misogynistic track records that have inspired works of great literature.
Shannon Quinn authored the essay "17 Moments In History that Inspired the Handmaid’s Tale" in History Collection and provides a summary of Ceauşescu's Decree 770 policy for women.
One of the specific events that Margaret Atwood found during her research process was “Decree 770” in Romania. This was a law that passed in 1967 that made abortions and all forms of contraception illegal. This had nothing to do with religious beliefs. It was an action that the government believed was necessary for the future of their country. The government already taxed married couples a 6% income tax if they did not have children between the ages of 25 and 50, but they realized that this was not enough to stop people from using contraception.
During the 1950’s, Romanian women were entering the workforce and having fewer children. By the 1960’s, abortion became a common practice, because there were very few birth control options available to women to prevent pregnancy. This began a sharp dip in the country’s birth rate. The Communist Party wanted the population to increase from 23 million to 30 million in a single year, so they enacted Decree 770. After the change of law in 1967, and women no longer had access to birth control, the number of babies born that year skyrocketed to roughly double what they had been the year before. Thousands of new preschools and nursery schools had to be built. Orphanages were overflowing with children whose parents could not afford them.
Aside from making abortions illegal and taking contraception off of store shelves, women’s bodies were literally policed. Decree 770 forced women to visit the gynecologist once a month to check for pregnancy, and police officers stood in the halls to make sure women complied. If a woman was pregnant, the doctors followed her progress very closely. Wealthy women were able to buy birth control pills and condoms on the black market, but poor women did not have that option. There were some cases where women caught the pregnancy before the doctors did, and some women died while attempting to give themselves an at-home abortion. The policy continued until the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1980’s.
Hundreds of thousands of women and children were subjected to this in Romania, and millions of women were forced to have children.
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| Elena Ceaușescu and Nicolae Ceausescu |
Women leaders in communist regimes are few and far between, such as Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, in China, Elena Ceaușescu in Romania, and Vilma Espín
in Cuba who became high profile figures because of their respective
husbands. They owed whatever power they had to their husbands.
Independent women with popular support and their own power base did not
fare well under these regimes.
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| 10,000 Romanian babies infected with HIV via dirty needles |
Imagine for a moment being born and placed in a cage as a newborn washed via a hose with cold water and never experiencing human touch. Fed like an animal and contracting HIV, hepatitis, and other diseases through dirty needles
used to inject the child with vitamins. All of this done to sell the
children, as one would any other commodity, on the international
black-market. Heartless capitalists? No, heartless Marxist- Leninists in
the Ceausescu communist regime in Romania. The regime decided it needed to increase its population and in 2013 Scientific American explained how this crime was systematically planned out and its aftermath in the article Tragedy Leads to Study of Severe Child Neglect.
Nicolae Ceausescu decreed in 1966 that Romania would develop its “human capital” via a government-enforced mandate to increase the country's population. Ceauşescu, Romania's leader from 1965 to 1989, banned contraception and abortions and imposed a “celibacy tax” on families that had fewer than five children. State doctors—the menstrual police—conducted gynecologic examinations in the workplace of women of childbearing age to see whether they were producing sufficient offspring. The birth rate initially skyrocketed. Yet because families were too poor to keep their children, they abandoned many of them to large state-run institutions.
Hundreds of thousands of Romanian children were subjected to this. However, a better world is possible, not a perfect one, but a better one.
Democracies with market economies and the rule of law do not engage in these horrors.
They have seen the rise of women leaders around the world: Golda Meir in Israel, Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom, Indira Gandhi in India, Angela Merkel in Germany, Vigdís Finnbogadóttir in Iceland, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in Liberia, Kim Campbell in Canada, Michelle Bachelet in Chile, Erna Solberg in Norway, Simonetta Sommaruga in Switzerland, and the list goes on for a while.
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| Prime Ministers Indira Gandhi and Margaret Thatcher |
International Women's Day should be a day to celebrate democracy and markets as instruments for the empowerment of women, and observe closely the dystopian record for women under communist regimes, and resolve to resist the system that inspired Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, not a day for communist self-promotion.
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