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The dark side of psychiatric drugs

USA Today Magazine
Thorazine, Haldol, and other medication prescribed by psychiatrists can destroy the lives of people who take them.
VIRTUALLY ALL persons who go to psychiatrists are put on one or more drugs. However, psychiatric drugs, which are unpredictable and extremely deadly, do not cure anything, and instead destroy the life of the person who takes them.
The most dangerous of these are major tranquilizers, also known as neuroleptic (nerve-seizing) drugs or anti-psychotics. Of the more than two dozen in this class, introduced in the mid 1950s, the most commonly used are Haldol (haloperidol), Compazine (prochlorperazine), Thorazine (chlorpromazine), Navane (thiothixene), Prolixin (fluphenazine), Mellaril (thioridazine), and Trilafon (perphenazine).
Their purpose is to create "maximum behavioral disruption"--a goal clearly reflected in 1950 tests conducted with rats on Thorazine. Through chemicals, psychiatrists sought to sabotage thought processes and thereby deny the person control of his own body.
At the time the major tranquilizers were introduced, the lobotomy was touted highly and widely used by psychiatrists. With the procedure, the shredded brain was damaged forever, generating objections from family and friends of the patient.
The major tranquilizers were able to create a zombie state, identical to that seen after a lobotomy, in a person whose brain remained intact. For this reason, Thorazine became known as a "chemical lobotomy."
"[On Thorazine] my thoughts spun and never got too far. My hands were rubber and I could hardly hold a fork," said one patient who had been put on the drug by a psychiatrist. "After six weeks . . . I felt like my mind had been put through a meat grinder. No longer could I think clearly; no longer could I speak articulately; no longer could I act confidently."
Another stated that, after a week on Haldol, "I was unable to speak. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't say anything out loud and spoke only with the greatest difficulty.... It was as if my whole body was succumbing to a lethal poison."
The horrifying mental upheaval and devastation this lobotomizing effect causes was precisely what appealed to psychiatrists. These chemicals would enable people to be warehoused with the least "inconvenience" to psychiatrists and staffs of psychiatric institutions.
Today, these drugs are being used against the elderly in enormous quantities to straitjacket them chemically. By 1985, the National Disease and Therapeutic Index reported that, while adults 60 years and older made up 11 % of the population, they used more than one- third of all antipsychotic drugs. A study of 2,000 pharmacies in 1986 showed that 60.5% of prescriptions for nursing home residents over 65 years of age were for major tranquilizers and 17.1 % for minor versions.
A Harvard Medical School study of 55 Boston-area rest homes published in the Jan. 26, 1989, issue of The New England Journal of Medicine reported that 55% of the 1,201 nursing home residents it surveyed took at least one psychiatric drug with 39% being given anti-psychotics.
These are not prescribed to "treat" any condition. They are administered solely to turn the patient into a zombie incapable of complaining or presenting problems to staff Concerning their use on the elderly, Jerome Avorn, director of the program for the Analysis of Clinical Strategies at Harvard, pointed out, "Drugs do work. They do quiet them down. So does a lead pipe to the head."
Larry Hodge, administrator at the Life Care Center in Tennessee, described the impact on the elderly of these drugs: "Too often they were so zonked out during their meals that their heads were in the mashed potatoes."
Wilda Henry told The Arizona Republic that her 83-year-old mother became "a vegetable" five weeks after taking Haldol. This powerful mind-altering chemical, which the Soviet Union used for years to control dissidents, left her mother babbling, drooling, shaking, and unable to control her bowel functions.
Anise Debose of Washington, D.C., said her 76-year-old father entered a nursing home active, laughing, and talking. Four days later, after taking Mellaril and four other drugs, "He was restrained to a chair as rigid as a board when I saw him. His head was thrown back and his mouth was limply hanging down. Both eyes were closed. The impression all of us had was that he was dead."
In 1989, the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Aging reported that, while those over 60 years of age make up 17% of the population, they accounted for more than half the fatalities resulting from drug reactions. Acording to the American Hospital Association, of the 10,800,000 elderly admitted to hospitals each year, 1,900,000 are due to drug reactions. Four percent of those cases, an estimated 76,000 elderly a year, die. This annual death rate far exceeds the 58,021 Americans who lost their lives during the Vietnam War. An average of more than 200 elderly Americans die each day from drug reactions.
"People don't just die of old age," Theodore Leiff, professor of gerontology, Eastern Virginia University School of Medicine, points out. "Their deaths are caused by something." As case after case demonstrates, they are being killed behind the locked doors of nursing homes by lazy, incompetent, or criminal psychiatric staffs who use deadly drugs to quash complaints before they ever are voiced.
Creating insanity
These chemicals, capable of throwing the minds of users into chaos, have a long and well-documented history of creating insanity in persons who take them. In 1956, two years after the introduction of Thorazine, researchers reported that the drug caused psychosis, hallucinations, and increased anxiety. They speculated that this drug-induced insanity arose from the chemically straitjacketing effect of the drug.
In 1961, researchers reported the case of a 27-year-old man who was given Thorazine, after which he "complained of 'feeling like an empty shell, floating around in the air,'" and said that he heard voices coming "from two small men standing on his chest." The researchers concluded that Thorazine was the cause of the man's "toxic psychosis."
Yet another paper, published in The American Journal of Psychiatry in 1964, found that major tranquilizers can "produce an acute psychotic reaction in an individual not previously psychotic." A 1975 paper described a negative effect called akathisia, a drug-induced inability to sit still comfortably.
Researcher Theodore Van Putten reported that nearly half of the 110 persons in the study had experienced akathisia. "[One woman] started to bang her head against the wall three days after an injection of [a major tranquilizer]. Her only utterance was: 'I just want to get rid of this whole body."' A woman who had been given these drugs for five days experienced "an upsurge in hallucinations, screaming, even more bizarre thinking, aggressive and also self-destructive outbursts, and agitated pacing or dancing." A third woman stated that, while on the tranquilizer, she felt hostile and hated everybody, and heard voices taunting her. Others complained of an "abject fear or terror" that was difficult for them to explain.
Such drug-induced symptoms are far worse than any underlying problems a person might have. Even more damning is the evidence that the damage caused by these drugs can be permanent.
Many types of psychiatric drugs, including the major tranquilizers, can cause lasting, grotesquely disfiguring nerve damage known as tardive dyskinesia or tardive dystonia. The muscles of the face and body contort and spasm involuntarily, drawing the face into hideous scowls and grimaces and twisting the body into bizarre contortions. These horrifying effects occur in more than 20% of persons "treated" with major tranquilizers and currently affect 400,000-1,000,000 Americans.
Psychiatrists theorize that these drugs damage the muscle-control portion of the brain in a way that makes it permanently "supersensitive" to messages passing down nerve pathways into the brain. The result is that this portion of the brain becomes permanently deranged. While the precise location of this brain damage is not known with certainty, there is no question that it exists. It is clearly visible in the faces of its tragic victims.
In the same way that major tranquilizers can throw the muscle-control portion of the brain into chaos, they also can make the thought-control area of the brain supersensitive, driving the person permanently insane. A 1980 study published in The American Journal of Psychiatry described 10 patients who suffered from this condition, which has been labeled "supersensitivity psychosis."
In the first stage, the individual becomes psychotic for a few days immediately after he or she stops taking the drugs. In the second, the insanity that emerges upon withdrawal from the psychiatric drug is persistent and may be irreversible. In the third stage, the psychosis is evident even while the patient is taking the psychiatric drugs. The study notes that, when this stage is reached, "in most cases" the person is doomed to be insane for life. This condition has created thousands of tortured victims, permanently destroyed, cast out of mental institutions to forage in garbage cans while wrestling with inner terrors implanted in their minds by psychiatric drugs.
There also is evidence that these psychiatric drugs can cause people to become violent. A Canadian research team that studied the effects of psychiatric drugs on prisoners found that "violent, aggressive incidents occurred significantly more frequently in inmates who were on psychotropic [psychiatric or mind-altering] medication than when these inmates were not...." Inmates on major tranquilizers were shown to be more than twice as violent as they were when not taking psychiatric drugs. The researchers attributed the marked increase in violence to akathisia.
The Journal of the American Medical Association reported that, four days after a patient started taking Haldol, "he became uncontrollably agitated, could not sit still, and paced for several hours." After complaining of "a jumpy feeling inside, and violent urges to assault anyone near him," the man attacked and tried to kill his dog. The researcher noted the irony that the chemical could cause violence, "a behavior the drug was meant to alleviate."
Killers on psychiatric drugs
Another article published in the American Journal of Forensic Psychiatry described five cases of extreme acts of physical violence caused by Haldol. In the first, a 23-year-old male with a history of developing severe symptoms of akathisia after being given Haldol was injected with the drug in the admissions room of a psychiatric unit.
After the injection, the man escaped, ran to a park, disrobed, and tried to rape a woman. "When pulled off by the husband, he proceeded down the street, broke down the front door of a house where an 81-yearold lady was sleeping. He severely beat her with his fists, 'to a pulp,' by his own description, following which he found knives and stabbed her repeatedly, resulting in her death." He then ran into another woman who was with her child and "repeatedly stabbed the woman in front of the child, where upon he moved on to he next person he encountered, a woman whom he severely assaulted and stabbed to the extent that an eye was lost and an opening into the anus was created resulting in major surgery."
The report describes four other cases of violence attributed to akathisia caused by Haldol. One was a suicide. Another was a suicide attempt in which a man stabbed himself repeatedly and later remarked that "he could never even feel the knife when stabbing himself." The third was a man who beat his mother to death with a hammer.
In the fourth case, a man "had been receiving Haldol as an outpatient for approximately four months and described how progressively his head was rushing, that he felt speeded up, that he was in great pain in his head and had an impulse to stab someone to try to get rid of the pain. He went to the nearby grocery store he frequented on a regular basis and impulsively and repeatedly stabbed the grocer whom he had known for some time."
Many similar acts of violence have been linked with these psychiatric drugs. One example is the 1989 case of David Peterson, who walked out of a mental institution in Middletown, Conn., bought a hunting knife, and then stabbed a nine-year-old girl 34 times, killing her. Peterson said he killed the girl to get back at his psychiatrist for not changing the drug he was being given, a major tranquilizer, that was causing him "pain."
Continued...

Was Hans Asperger a Nazi?

When the question was put to Lorna Wing in 1993, in a transatlantic phone call, she was shocked by it. Was Hans Asperger, as a young man, a Nazi? The question referred to the Austrian pediatrician whose work gave rise to the well-known cluster of human characteristics known as Asperger’s syndrome. Lorna Wing was the influential London-based child psychiatrist, globally recognized as a leading expert on autism, who had brought Asperger’s syndrome international recognition. Wing, who also had an autistic daughter, had stated writing about Asperger’s work only in 1981, after Asperger himself was already dead, when her husband, who knew German, translated a clinical paper the Austrian published in 1944. It contained his observations of “autistic” behaviors—he used that word—in several boys he treated during the years his country was welded into the Third Reich. During that troubled time, and for decades afterward, Asperger lived and worked almost exclusively in his home country, and primarily in Vienna, at the University Children’s Hospital, where he was ultimately named Chair of Pediatrics. Asperger wrote only in German, creating a body of published work which, upon his death in 1980 at 74, was still almost entirely unknown in the United States and Britain, the countries where autism was then most recognized and most studied. Within a decade, however, thanks to the attention Lorna Wing brought to it, Asperger’s syndrome, if not the man himself, was on its way to worldwide renown, both as a diagnosis, and as a source of personal identity for many of those given it. But now, in 1993, this phone call. And the question specifically about the man himself. Hans Asperger…a Nazi? *** Fred Volkmar of the Yale Child Study Center felt uncomfortable even asking it that day in 1993. But he believed he should, because doubts about Asperger’s character had been raised. And a decision had to be made quickly about whether to posthumously honor Asperger by naming a condition after him in the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the “bible” of psychiatry. For months, experts led by Volkmar had been looking at studies, running field trials, and debating with one another, in conference rooms, by phone, and by fax, whether Asperger’s syndrome deserved that formal recognition. It would be something “new,” in that it recognized impairments in the ability to relate socially in individuals who previously were overlooked as needing support or therapy, due to their otherwise good and even superior levels of intelligence, as well as often precocious and sophisticated use of language. Some of Asperger’s boys, for example, were super smart, as well as creative. At the same time, these boys’ challenges in connecting socially were profound. For being a little odd in their intonation (often either flat or sing-song); for being unable to maintain eye contact with other people; for their tendency to take extremely deep interests in narrow subjects, which were often all they wanted to talk about, they were routinely bullied, friendless, and misunderstood as rude or hostile. Wing, who wanted to help similarly-behaving children she was treating in London during the 1970s and 1980s, saw significant overlap between these behavioral traits so detrimental to social connection—traits Asperger had described with the adjective “autistic”—and those of children with more “classic” autism: the boys and girls, more readily given the autism diagnosis, who exhibited extremely limited speech, and IQs often well below average. Wing began to promote the view, most popular nowadays, that all of these children’s challenges represent multiple manifestations of a single autism “spectrum.” It was to that end that she resurrected Asperger’s work—less to introduce a new diagnostic label, than to illustrate the breadth and depth of that spectrum. By 1993, however, Asperger’s syndrome was a serious candidate for inclusion as a standalone diagnosis in the upcoming revision of the DSM. Due out the following year—the book would recognize Asperger’s as one of the “pervasive developmental disorders”—or not—pending the conclusions of Volkmar’s working group. *** Volkmar’s Yale Child Study Center was the leader in Asperger’s research in the United States. At one point, a research request for volunteers with the condition had given Yale a roster of more than 800 families and individuals across the country. At Yale and elsewhere, clinicians who found the concept useful and relevant had been diagnosing patients with Asperger’s without waiting for the DSM to sanction its usage. Yet there was still vigorous disagreement over the validity of the concept. It was unclear whether individuals with the diagnosis were truly different in presentation from those described as “high functioning autistic,” an already familiar and much-used concept. Beyond that, it was evident that clinics were independently tweaking the criteria, leading to widespread inconsistency in how the Asperger’s label was applied. Given this, many argued that Asperger’s was not a necessary or useful addition to the diagnostic lexicon. On the other hand, the World Health Organization had just endorsed Asperger’s as a stand-alone condition. Of greater relevance, Volkmar himself was among those convinced of its validity, having seen plenty of people at the Yale Child Study Center whose symptoms appeared to justify a diagnosis of Asperger’s. Volkmar, charismatic, persuasive, and thorough, would be one of the final arbiters of whether the condition would be enshrined in the DSM. So it mattered when, with only months left till the new manual was due, he decided to investigate the question of whether Hans Asperger had been a Nazi. *** Eric Schopler, for one, was convinced of it. A psychologist based at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he was director and lead designer of Division TEACCH, the nation’s first-ever statewide public school program devoted to educating children with autism, which launched in 1971. As such, he was for many years America’s most respected authority on autism, certainly among his colleagues. He was also among those who considered Asperger’s ideas superfluous to the understanding of autism, not to mention sloppily conceived. His attacks on Asperger’s work in the 1990s were noticeably personal, reflecting an antipathy not justified by mere professional disagreement. “The seeds for our current syndrome confusion were sown in the rich soil of his few publications,” he once wrote. In Schopler’s view, Asperger had never “succeeded in identifying a replicable psychiatric syndrome.” Schopler’s antipathy can be understood as the bitterness of a man who, as a child, had to flee Germany with the rest of his Jewish family, and who remained suspicious of any adult—German or Austrian—whose career as a medical professional had thrived during the Nazi era. He had no more to go on than that; it was guilt by association. But this did not prevent him from launching a one-man whisper campaign to the effect that Asperger had probably been a Nazi sympathizer, if not a collaborator or actual party member. More than once, Schopler dropped such innuendos in print, in publications he oversaw, such as the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. There and else¬where, he pointedly made reference to Asperger’s “longstanding inter¬est in the German Youth Movement,” hinting at a connection between Asperger and the Hitler Youth. Still, perhaps because Schopler kept his allusions subtle, most people who knew of Asperger’s syndrome in the 1990s were unaware of any controversy concerning Asperger’s past. Volkmar, for example, did not hear about it until late in the DSM review process. But it was not Schopler who brought it to his attention. During the field trials Volkmar was running in order to test the pro¬posed criteria for Asperger’s, two Yale colleagues he held in high esteem raised the subject. One, Donald Cohen, the longtime director of the Yale Child Study Center, had published widely on autism. The other was a young star in the field, a clinician and investigator named Ami Klin. As a psychology PhD candidate in London, Klin had caused a stir with a brilliantly designed study showing that autism affected children’s responses to the sounds of their mothers’ voices. It had been Cohen who personally recruited Klin to Yale in 1989. The two men formed a close mentor-protege relationship based on both a fascination with autism and a powerful sense of Jewish identity. Cohen was an observant Jew and a dedicated student of the Holocaust. Klin had been born in Brazil, the son of Holocaust survivors, and had earned his undergraduate degree in history and political science at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The question the two men kept turning over was whether Asperger might be implicated, in any way, in the medical atrocities ascribed to the Nazis who ruled Vienna. Both knew that the medical profession had already embarrassed itself by its failure to ask this question about several doctors and researchers who had practiced under the Third Reich. Modern textbooks still carried references to diseases named for Nazi-era scientists whose ethics were repellent, if not criminal, such as neurologists whose significant discoveries were made by dissecting the brains of children and adults murdered by the Nazis. A Dr. Franz Seitelberger of Vienna had been a member of the SS, while Professor Julius Hallervorden of Berlin was known to select live patients whose brains he planned to study after their deaths by “euthanasia.” Hallervorden infamously said, “If you are going to kill all these people, at least take the brains out so that the material gets some use.” Yet the terms “Seitelberger disease” and “Hallervorden-Spatz disease” still appeared in academic publications. In 1993, Asperger, dead 13 years, never a great presence on the world stage, remained a little-known figure. Uta Frith had published a cursory review of his life and work in 1991, to accompany her translation of his big 1944 paper. In addition, a talk Asperger gave in Switzerland in 1977 had appeared in translation in the magazine of a British autism organization in 1979, but it was not widely distributed. In short, Volkmar could get little information about Asperger on his own, and had no true “Asperger expert” to turn to. It was in that context that he called Lorna Wing, the one person he knew who had met Hans Asperger (one time, over tea), and posed the question to her: Was Hans Asperger, as a young man, a Nazi? Lorna Wing gasped. “Hans Asperger, a Nazi?” He could hear her indignation. She spoke of his deep Catholic faith and lifelong devotion to young people. “A Nazi? No,” Wing said. “No, no, no! He was a very religious man.” It was a short conversation, but it settled the issue. A few months later, the DSM-IV appeared. Ninety-four new mental disorders had been proposed for inclusion, but only two made it. One was Bipolar II Disorder. The other was Asperger’s Disorder. *** In 1993, Wing and Volkmar knew nothing, of course, of the information about Asperger that would be unearthed in the years ahead. The first warning sign came in 1996. That year, Ami Klin, along with Volkmar and psychologist Sarah Sparrow, began putting together a book they planned to title Asperger Syndrome. Yet Klin still could not shake his misgivings. And, because his name would be on the cover of the book, he decided that something more than a phone call to Lorna Wing was necessary in order to establish that Asperger’s hands were clean. In late 1996, Klin began writing to archives and institutes in Germany and Austria, seeking any documentary or other information on the Austrian doctor. This yielded little. But then a professor in Cologne, Germany, referred him to Austrian historian Michael Hubenstorf, who taught at the Institute of the History of Medicine at Berlin’s Free University. “We would like to be able to write that he was a benevolent doctor whose primary concern was his patient’s [sic] well being,” Klin wrote Hubenstorf. “But we are not sure of that.” Hubenstorf responded a few weeks later with a four-page letter and a five-page catalog of Asperger’s career postings, promotions, and publications he had assembled. Klin’s concerns, he wrote, were justified. While he had found no record of formal membership in the Nazi Party, Hubenstorf informed Klin that Asperger’s “medical career was clearly set in a surrounding of German Nationalists and Nazis,” and that he was regularly promoted within that setting. He believed the doctor might have downplayed his previous connections to known Nazis such as Professor Hamburger, his onetime mentor, whom Hubenstorf described as “the most outspoken Nazi pediatrician of them all.” No ‘smoking gun’ had been found—no evidence that Asperger had directly participated in any Nazi medical crimes. “It remains unclear how much of a fellow traveler he was,” Hubenstorf concluded. But his advice to Klin was to err on the side of caution. He recommended against publishing “anything before the utmost effort has been made to clear Prof. Asperger’s past.” In the end, Klin chose not to take Hubenstorf’s advice. Weighing everything, he recognized that no “smoking gun” had been found—no evidence that Asperger had directly participated in any Nazi medical crimes. In the meantime, Klin had received a copy of an obituary of Asperger that portrayed him as a warm, gentle doctor devoted to the care of children. Asperger’s daughter, Maria Asperger Felder, also vouched for her father’s reputation when Klin reached out to her. Herself a psychiatrist, she wrote that her father had been at odds with the Nazis’ racial determinism, that he had been an enemy of children’s suffering, and that he had never lost “his lifelong interest in and his curiosity about all living creatures.” This was the story of the benevolent doctor that Klin had hoped would turn out to be the truth. In 2000, Klin, Volkmar, and Sparrow published Asperger Syndrome, with a foreword by Asperger’s daughter. *** The “benevolent doctor” version of Asperger had strong appeal, and would inform many assessments of his work. Indeed, an overwhelmingly positive narrative of Asperger as a man of moral rectitude came into focus in the new millennium, elevating him almost to the status of hero. Increasingly, he was seen as a cautious yet brave and canny saboteur of the Nazi project to exterminate intellectually disabled children. This image of him echoed the assessment made by psychologist Uta Frith, in 1991, that Asperger had been an ardent defender of the “misfits” the Nazi eugenics program was designed to destroy. “Far from despising the misfits,” Frith wrote in the introduction to her definitive translation of his 1944 paper, “he devoted himself to their cause—and this at a time when allegiance to misfits was nothing less than dangerous.” The hero image was amplified by Berlin psychiatrist Brita Schirmer, who in 2002 called attention to Asperger’s “humanity and his courageous commitment to the children entrusted to him in times when this was by no means obvious, or without danger.” In 2007, the Dublin-based psychologists Viktoria Lyons and Michael Fitzgerald wrote a letter to the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders that celebrated Asperger as a man who “tried to protect these children from being sent to concentration camps in World War II.” And in 2010, the British autism historian Adam Feinstein published the results of his own reporting trip to Vienna to investigate the rumors that Asperger was sympathetic to Hitler. “The very opposite is more likely to be the case,” he concluded. This view of Asperger rested on a number of compelling stories. It was said that he had twice narrowly escaped arrest by the Gestapo while working at the Vienna Hospital, and that he had risked his own safety by failing to report the names of disabled children to the authorities. An entry in his diary, written during a 1934 visit to Germany, seems to shudder at the gathering Nazi storm: “An entire nation goes in a single direction, fanatically, with constricted vision.” His Catholic faith, and his membership in the Catholic youth organization known as Bund Neuland, have also been cited as evidence of his association with a progressive morality that was at odds with the Nazi agenda. Above all, this view rested upon Asperger’s clear statements, from early in the Nazi era, defending the right of mentally challenged children to society’s support. During the 1938 talk in which he described his autistic cases for the first time, he declared, “Not everything that falls out of line, and thus is ‘abnormal,’ has to be deemed ‘inferior.’ ” Likewise, at the conclusion of his better-known 1944 paper, the one that later caught Lorna Wing’s attention, he saluted the medical profession’s “duty to stand up for these children with the whole force of our personality.” Thus, the case seemed strong for Asperger as a humanitarian and liberal thinker. It was an optimistic and inspiring portrait that spoke to modern sensibilities. And it would prove to be seriously flawed. *** One of the best-known laundry detergents in the world goes by the brand name Persil. Originally manufactured in Germany, Persil is the Tide of Europe. In Austria, after World War II, the word came to signify, with grim humor, the furious, sometimes ludicrous, efforts made by Germans and Austrians to clear their reputations. Prompted by the Allies’ “denazification” policy, an effort to purge Nazi Party members and collaborators from positions of influence, millions scurried to track down witnesses to their innocence. Especially prized was the testimony of Jews who could vouch for some moment of kindness or decency shown as the Holocaust unfolded. Often, those seeking to clear their names portrayed themselves as having been victims also, claiming that they had been threatened with arrest by the Gestapo, or stymied in their careers for standing up to Nazi policies. Others insisted that they had gone along with the Nazis as a ruse, and that they had secretly resisted the Nazi system from within. At the end of the process, those who succeeded came away with a document the Austrians called a persilschein, or “Persil certificate,” confirming that they had been certified innocent, or “clean.” Even at the time, there was much cynicism about persilschein. Without doubt, there were at least some authentic secret resisters among the Austrians. But a good many of these claims were nothing more than whitewash jobs. Michael Hubenstorf’s letter to Ami Klin had pointed to the possibility that Asperger’s past had also been whitewashed to some degree. Indeed, a second look at the hero narrative offers reasonable grounds for skepticism. To start with, the story of Asperger’s near arrest by the Gestapo had only one source, and that was Asperger himself. As far as is known, he brought it up twice in public: in a 1962 talk and during a 1974 radio appearance. To any astute Austrian familiar with the persilschein phenomenon, this raises the suspicion that Asperger embroidered on his experience of being politically vetted by the Nazi authorities, or perhaps even concocted the story in full. This vetting was a process most public servants had to endure under a law passed after the Anschluss to weed out Jews and anyone else deemed “unreliable.” No doubt Asperger’s being a non-party member was looked into, but in the end the Nazis cleared him. Another flag should have been Asperger’s membership in Bund Neuland, which was, by Asperger’s own account, crucial to his development as a young man. While ardently pro-Catholic this group also espoused an anti-modern, pan-Germanic nationalist philosophy, and its tensions with the Nazis stemmed primarily from the Reich’s anti-Church position. Otherwise, there was a fair amount of common ground between Bund Neuland and the Nazis. For example, a 1935 issue of the Neuland monthly periodical highlighted the problem of “excessive Jewish influence” in the upper reaches of society, and discussed the need for “a clean separation” between the “Jews of Vienna” and the rest of the population. Then there were Asperger’s own words. His 1934 diary entry about all of Germany moving “in a single direction, fanatically” has been cited—originally by his daughter, and then by others, relying on her account—as evidence that he condemned the Nazification of Germany. Read in full, however, it seems more ambiguous, with hints of awe and admiration as well as consternation: “An entire nation goes in a single direction, fanatically, with a constricted vision, certainly, but also with enthusiasm and dedication, with tremendous discipline and control, with a terrible effectiveness. Now only soldiers—soldierly thinking—ethos—Germanic paganism…” Moreover, it is the sole known excerpt of Asperger’s writing that suggests concern about where things might be headed as of 1934. Four years later, on October 3, 1938, there was no ambiguity in the language he used to open a historic address he gave to an assembly of his fellow physicians. The words he used sounded startlingly pro-Nazi, and came at the beginning of the talk in which he discussed his cases—whom he called “autistic psychopaths”—for the first time. This was a full seven months after the Nazi Anschluss, when Austria was absorbed into the Third Reich, yet Asperger’s opening lines were nothing short of a valentine to the newly Nazified Austria. “We stand in the midst of a massive renovation of our intellectual life, which encompasses all areas of this life—not least in medicine,” he began. This new thinking, he said, was “the sustaining idea of the new Reich—that the whole is greater than the parts, and that the Volk is more important than any single individual.” In a handful of words, this was the defining vision of German fascism, which Asperger, in the next breath, applied to his fellow doctors. This “sustaining idea,” he urged, “should, where it involves the nation’s most precious asset—its health—bring profound changes to our entire attitude.” This applied, he said, to “the efforts being made to promote genetic health, and to prevent the passing on of diseased heredity.” It was hard not to miss the clear reference to the Nazi-driven “science” of race improvement through eugenics. “We physicians must carry out the tasks that fall to us in this area with full accountability,” Asperger declared. This salute to the Anschluss, to the Nazis, to the suppression of individuality, and to the task of purifying the genetic lineage of the nation should by itself have dealt a fatal blow to the idea that Asperger secretly resisted the Nazi agenda. A review of other medical talks and papers printed that year in the same weekly journal where Asperger’s appeared shows that the opening of his talk was far from typical. Defenders of Asperger sometimes argue that he had a hidden anti-Nazi agenda—that he sought to throw the Gestapo off his scent by paying lip service to the regime. Brita Schirmer described the preamble as a “deft chess move” on Asperger’s part. His defenders usually assert, as a corollary, that the full text of Asperger’s speech, together with his 1944 paper, constitute an unambiguous argument to protect and nurture all vulnerable children, no matter the level of their disability. But Asperger did not, in either the talk or the paper, make that argument. Despite recognizing in passing that autistic traits can be seen in children of both stronger and weaker mental capacity, he had little to say about helping the latter. Rather, he focused on the boys who possessed what he called “social worth”—a term he did not apply to all children. The boys in the group he favored would later be known as the “Asperger’s type,” and decades later as “Aspies.” They were those he described as being “more lightly affected,” as well as not at all rare in the population. Virtually every account of Asperger has him describing his boys, with affection, as “Little Professors”—this presumed a reference to their intelligence and their sometimes pedantic style. (That turns out to be a myth; Asperger himself never actually used the term Little Professors.) Asperger made this preference explicit in his 1938 talk, where he admitted that he “thought it more rewarding to choose two [of his] not so severe and therefore more promising cases” to present. That would always be his pattern. In 1944, when discussing his “more lightly affected” children, Asperger was effusive in celebrating how far they could go, dwelling especially on those who had the potential to reach the uppermost echelons of society. To be sure, he was convinced—and said—that autistic traits were more often a detriment than a benefit for the majority of people who had them. But he was pleased to report that, for some, autism delivered special intellectual talents, and that those so endowed could “rise to high-ranking occupations.” He cited, as examples, professors and scientists and even an expert on heraldry. He also reported that some of the more able children he had treated had become assets to a country at war. During the third year of the Second World War, Asperger noted, he had received letters and reports “from many of our former children” serving on the front lines. In 1941, he wrote that these boys were “fulfilling] their role in the professional life, in the military, and in the party.” Thus, again, his boys had demonstrated their “social worth”—in terms that the Third Reich appreciated. That said, Asperger’s vision of special education and what it could achieve was not quite as exceptional as his supporters suggest. Contrary to popular understanding, special education had its place in Nazi Germany. The Reich allowed that disabled children who could become productive citizens should be afforded support and education to achieve that end. Even the Hitler Youth had special units for the blind and the deaf. But the Nazis drew a line where the cost of supporting a child was expected to exceed that child’s ultimate material contribution to the state. For that child the Nazis had no use; his or her life was worthless. Asperger did not go that far in anything he published, and the Catholic faith he professed opposed sterilization and euthanasia. But he never did advocate for the children he seems to have considered less “rewarding.” Indeed, he appeared to write off the possibility of improving outcomes for those whose autistic traits were accompanied by a “pronounced intellectual inferiority.” Rather than lay out a path to helping them, he simply noted the “tragic” fate of such individuals, or at least a sad minority of them. “In the less favorable cases,” Asperger wrote, “they roam the streets as comic originals, grotesquely unkempt, talking loudly to themselves, addressing people in the manner of the autistic.” When speaking of these “less favorable cases,” Asperger never celebrated their autistic differences. Rather, his tone was one of pity. *** Eric Schopler never made the detailed case presented here for a less heroic version of Asperger. Instead of evidence, he had instinct, which perhaps came from being a Jew who had lived part of his life in Germany. Perhaps this instinctive suspicion also explains the nearly complete silence concerning Asperger on the part of one of his most famous contemporaries—Johns Hopkins child psychiatrist Leo Kanner. In 1943, Kanner published psychiatry’s seminal article on autism—the one that introduced the concept to his field. It was so influential that, for some years, textbooks still referred to autism as “Kanner’s syndrome.” Also a Jew—one who assisted hundreds of Jews fleeing the Holocaust in gaining entry to the US, and then finding work—Kanner may have viewed Asperger as too comfortably ensconced in Nazi Vienna, and thus preferred not to recognize him. Interestingly, on the single occasion when Kanner mentioned Asperger in print, he misspelled his name. But instinct was not evidence. In short, there was still no smoking gun. And then there was. *** In May 2010, a soft-spoken Austrian academic walked into Vienna’s City Hall and its ceremonial gathering place, the Wappensaal, where a symposium honoring the memory of Hans Asperger was under way. Herwig Czech was a 35-year-old historian and lecturer at the University of Vienna. He had been invited to speak at the symposium by organizers from the Vienna children’s hospital where Asperger had done his most important work. A number of autism’s research luminaries were in attendance, and Lorna Wing herself was scheduled for an afternoon talk. There was still no smoking gun. And then there was. Czech’s academic specialty was the role of medicine during the Third Reich. It was a hallmark of his work to unearth the discrepancies—often embarrassing—between the accounts medical professionals gave of themselves after the war and their actual conduct during it. Czech’s interest in this area was perhaps connected to his dawning awareness during his boyhood that his warm and loving grandfather had been “a convinced Nazi.” It was not something the old man ever talked about openly, but the knowledge lay heavily on Czech, given what he was learning at school about the darkness of those years. Which brought Czech to City Hall, some 30 years after Asperger’s death. Before him, in their hands, all of the seated attendees held the day’s program, its cover featuring a black-and-white photograph of a young Dr. Asperger, wearing a white lab coat and engaged in deep conversation with a young boy—presumably one of his patients. The symposium’s title appeared above the photo: “On the Trail of Hans Asperger.” The event had been prompted by the growing international recognition of Asperger’s work. Over two days, presenters would explore the man’s career and offer assessments of the latest scientific findings regarding Asperger’s syndrome. The organizers had received word beforehand that Czech had stumbled across compromising details regarding their honoree. This could not have been welcome news, but in the spirit of scientific inquiry, they encouraged him to keep digging and to report whatever he might find. But once Czech was standing in front of them, there was a slight awkwardness to the situation: Among the 150 or so audience members were his daughter and some of his grandchildren. The title of Czech’s talk, printed in the program brochure, was “Dr. Hans Asperger and the Nazi Child Euthanasia Program in Vienna: Possible Connections.” Awkwardness gave way to surprise, and then shock, as Czech drew a portrait of Asperger that left the hero narrative in tatters, based on a trove of original documents he had excavated. There was, for example, a 1941 letter Czech had found in the archives of the Spiegelgrund—the facility on Vienna’s outskirts which superficially resembled a hospital, but which functioned in reality as a killing center for severely disabled children. Those chosen for death at the Spiegelgrund were poisoned by phenobarbital, which was administered in suppositories, or mixed into the children’s meals. The drug, in sufficient doses, causes the lungs to malfunction. As a rule, “pneumonia” was listed as the official cause of death. Asperger’s letter, addressed to the Spiegelgrund’s administration, reported on the recently conducted medical evaluation, at the University Hospital, of a little girl named Herta Schreiber. The handwriting was Asperger’s. Herta was then 2 years old, the youngest of nine children—of whom five still lived at home—and she had been sick all spring since contracting encephalitis. Her condition did not appear to be improving, and in June her mother had brought her to be seen by Asperger at his clinic. The letter contained an assessment of Herta’s condition. It was apparent that she had suffered some sort of major insult to her brain: Her mental development had halted, her behavior was disintegrating, and she was having seizures. Asperger seemed unsure of his diagnosis. He noted several possibilities: severe personality disorder, seizure disorder, idiocy. Then, in plain prose, he offered a decidedly nonmedical opinion: “When at home, this child must present an unbearable burden to the mother, who has to care for five healthy children.” Having expressed his empathy for Herta’s mother, Asperger rendered his recommendation: “Permanent placement at the Spiegelgrund seems absolutely necessary.” The letter was signed “Hans Asperger.” Everyone in the audience grasped the meaning of Asperger’s letter. It was a death warrant. Indeed, Czech confirmed that Herta was admitted to the Spiegelgrund on July 1, 1941, and killed there on September 2, 1941, one day after her third birthday. Records state that she died of pneumonia. Notes from the hospital archives quoted her mother as agreeing, through tears, that her daughter would be better off this way, rather than living in a world where she would face constant ridicule and cruelty. It was Czech’s assessment that Herta’s parents supported the Nazi agenda. The effect in the room was powerful. As they listened, members of the audience stole glances at the picture of Asperger and the boy on the cover of the program. Suddenly, the celebratory nature of their gathering seemed wildly off key, as Czech went on delivering, in a quiet, affectless voice, more disturbing news from the Nazi past. In February 1942, he reported, Asperger was the senior pediatrician representing the city of Vienna on a commission asked to review the health status of 210 Austrian children residing in mental hospitals in lower Austria. Several months earlier, the government had begun taking steps to apply mandatory education laws even to children in these hospitals, as long as they were “educable.” A panel of seven experts was charged with compiling a list of the names of those children who should, despite their mental challenges, start attending classes in either traditional academic or special-education settings. In a single day, Asperger and his colleagues went through the records of all 210 children. While 17 were found to be too young for compulsory education, and 36 too old, the panel designated 122 of them as ready for schooling. That left 26 boys and 9 girls. Their fate, Czech reported, was known, and he believed Asperger knew it as well. A written summary detailing the commission’s composition, purpose, and procedures clearly stated that those children judged to be not “educable” were to be “dispatched for Jekelius Action” as quickly as possible. When that was written, Erwin Jekelius, a former assistant to Asperger’s mentor Franz Hamburger, was the fiance of Hitler’s younger sister, as well as director of the Spiegelgrund. “Jekelius Action” was a euphemism the commission’s members would have understood quite well. Asperger once said he took a “great risk” by refusing to report children to the authorities. This, clearly, was not one of those times. Czech also shared findings suggesting a greater affinity between Asperger and the Nazis than Asperger had admitted to. According to the file the Nazi Party kept on him, he was repeatedly judged to be an Austrian whom the Nazi authorities could trust, even more so as the years went by. Each time Asperger applied for a post or a promotion, he was cleared as someone who, though not a party member, abided by Nazi principles in the performance of his job. In one instance, a party official wrote that he “conforms to the principles of the policy of racial hygiene.” In the years following his talk, Czech would discover other evidence of how far Asperger went to conform. He found letters in Asperger’s handwriting that used “Heil Hitler” as their closing salutation. This was not mandatory. He also unearthed a job application filled out in Asperger’s hand in which Asperger described himself as a candidate for the Nazi Doctors Association, a group that functioned as a medical policy arm of the party and was instrumental in closing the medical practices of Jewish physicians. He also learned that Asperger had applied to be a medical consultant to the Vienna branch of the Hitler Youth, though there is no record of him having been accepted. All in all, in Czech’s view, Asperger took care during the war to safeguard his career and to burnish “his Nazi credibility.” Asperger, it would appear, did what was necessary. Czech spoke for only 20 minutes or so that day at the Vienna City Hall. Then he stopped to take audience questions. In that pause, Dr. Arnold Pollak, the director of the clinic where Asperger had worked for much of his career, leapt to his feet, clearly agitated. Turning to the room, he asked that everyone present stand and observe a moment of silence in tribute to the many children whose long-forgotten murders Herwig Czech had returned to memory. The entire audience rose and joined in wordless tribute.

Daniel Johnston & Mothman connectixon

Quote
Was Daniel Johnston Influenced by Cosmic Superhero Mothman?
-by Ogden Pearl, WENR
One of the first people Daniel Johnston met after escaping from a circus outside of Austin in 1985 was fellow Appalachian mystic, Andy Colvin. The two discovered they were both the youngest, seemingly brightest (or at least most unusual) children of fundamentalist Christian families from West Virginia, and took it from there. At the time, Colvin was in a band, Ed Hall, that was rising in the Austin scene. Daniel was a fixture at Andy's early shows with Ed Hall, along with other well-known figures like the Butthole Surfers, Scratch Acid, the Seemen, artist Frank Kozik, and director Richard Linklater.
Colvin and Johnston first met at the McDonald's on the UT campus, where Johnston worked. According to the story, the two walked to the art building, where Colvin was a graduate student in photography, along with Ron English (who later collaborated with Daniel also). Along the way, Colvin showed Johnston a special spot in the creek where he had done some performance-art "rituals" and interviewed people with his new gadget: the 8mm video camcorder. This was the exact spot where Daniel Johnston was found a few months later, tripping on acid and asking for a "baptism" to drive out the demons in the area. Subsequent interviews with Daniel have him describing a "supernatural" experience where he saw the vampiric "mind-control programming" enslaving everyone around him. It was as if Daniel had finally met the "eyeball bat" that his art had been reflecting for so many years. At that time, no one knew that the eyeball bat was identical to the ancient symbolism of creativity-inducing birdmen like the Garuda, Thunderbird, Thoth, Horus, Piasa, Roc, and--seemingly--Mothman.
What has never been revealed before is that Colvin took an acid trip that night as well. While Colvin describes it as "12-hours of hell" that he simply had to endure by shutting out everything around him, he never described it as "supernatural." Strangely however, Colvin quickly went into a personal tailspin that ended up with him being unfairly (according to the Austin Chronicle) marginalized from the Austin music scene. Coincidentally, Colvin's fall happened at the same time Johnston had to go into temporary musical retirement. While Johnston was able to pull it back together musically, Colvin was never able to maintain more than a small cult following for his paranormal songs. Colvin's first album Charlie Manson Street, named so because Colvin and Manson grew up on the same street, was virtually blacklisted in Austin due to opposition from Ed Hall, who wanted to change the scary...and political lyrics of songs they had co-written with Colvin. While Colvin's 1990's Seattle band, I.V. League, had a CD release that garnered a bit of notice in Hollywood, it was considered to be too "far-out" for commercial audiences...
Finally, here in 2006, we begin to see that there are many parallels between the fates of Daniel Johnston and his rejected Mothman twin, Andy Colvin. Many of these parallels can be seen in The Mothman's Photographer, a 32-hr. "paranormal news series" recently produced by Colvin, who happened to be a childhood Mothman witness. Andy and his interviewees bare their collective soul in this fascinating study of a community torn apart and creatively reassembled by either the paranormal, or by the national security state (you be the judge). Whatever you decide, there is plenty of evidence here that the Eyeball Bat of Daniel Johnston is also the Mothman of Andy Colvin. Colvin's series has the same homemade quality and genius as Daniel's early cassettes. A few of Colvin's early musical cuts are included on the bonus audio CD that comes with The Mothman's Photographer series. It seems that Daniel wasn't the only one who met the devil in Austin in 1986. Even though Daniel doesn't appear in this series, it is still valuable for helping describe the forces, both good and bad, behind Daniel's genius. Quote
For more info, go to eBay and search: "Mothman Photograph Book DANIEL JOHNSTON"
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DR FRANK JACKSON, 59A, PRINCES ROAD, BRIGHTON, EAST SUSSEX BN2 3RH
                            
TEL. 01273 603766 - EMAIL frankjackson59@google.com - www.fulltable.com/fj
text and images throughout copyright
      

Something wicked this way comes
‘Simon’. said Annie, ‘have you looked at the papers today?’
‘What papers?’
‘Those ones,  lying on the table in front of you. The local one,  the Argus. Look at the front page’.
‘What? You mean, on the front?’
‘Look at the front page!’. said Annie, wondering if she might get away with manslaughter, if she murdered her brother.
‘Oh, this, you mean? Why didn’t you say so?’ Annie wondered again whether a plea of murder due to temporary insanity might also work in a court of justice.
‘Rioting residents create night-time mayhem over new council parking charges. Police arrested over thirty supporters, one of whom, Mrs Ethel Blaine, accused the state of being a new dictatorial regime. “ Its disgraceful!” she was heard to cry. “They all ought to be strung up! Bring back the gallows on every street-corner!”’
‘No!’ shouted Annie in exasperation. ‘The headline below it!’
“Well, I wish you’d say’. grunted Simon.
Annie sighed. Simon was never at his best in the morning. He was always terribly lazy, stupid and indifferent.
‘Simon’. she said. ‘You are terribly lazy, stupid and indifferent in the morning’.
‘What?’ mumbled Simon. through a mouthful of toast.
‘Never mind’. said Annie, in pity. ‘ My case rests. Here, I’ll read it to you.’. She snatched the paper away and began to read aloud.
‘Eye-witnesses have seen what they describe as a large winged figure, flying over their roof-tops. Though the thing was vague, it seemed to resemble a heavily-built man with long claws. “It was very frightening” said Mrs Birtwhistle, 74, of Richmond Road, Brighton, who witnessed the strange creature one evening as she was watering her garden. “It just swooped across out of nowhere, and then disappeared up the road. It was really big, and made this funny growling sound as it went”. Other witnesses have described it as having strange glowing eyes, and large teeth. It should be said that some have described it as a UFO (Unidentified Flying Object). Whatever it is, readers are asked to send in their sightings. Who knows, it may be an alien from outer space visiting us! Let the Argus know, so that we can solve this little mystery???”

‘Well’, said Annie finally. ‘What do you think of that?’
‘Well’, said Simon, through another mouthful of toast, ‘It would seem that we have another mystery on our hands. All right, let’s go for it. After all, I’ve only being threatened with death and destruction a few times up till now, not to mention being attacked by a ferocious wardrobe, so I might as well carry on a bit further’.
‘Simon’, said his sister, cheerfully. ’There are times when I can almost like you’.
‘Think nothing of it’.
‘No, I won’t’. said Annie and ducked just in time to miss the piece of toast that Simon threw  at her.
The next day, Simon received a present, or rather it hit him rather painfully, on the back of the head. He picked it up. ‘Another  dirty old trainer as usual. I suppose it’s got a message inside it’. ‘You’re absolutely right”. agreed Annie. She rummaged around inside the smelly old trainer. ‘Annie’, said Simon, disgustedly. ‘You don’t know where that’s been’. But Annie wasn’t listening. She found a scrap of paper inside and started reading. ‘Simon, listen to this’.
Please come to meet us now.
This is very urgent.
There is a daemon on the loose.
Immediately.
Pronto!
The four fingers.
‘Sounds serious’. Simon suggested. ‘Let’s go now’. Annie nodded. An hour later, having taken the bus into the centre of Brighton, they stood outside the black gate in the little cobbled alleyway, that was the headquarters of the Brotherhood of Four Fingers and a Thumb, of which they were now full members. ‘I wonder who else is going to be there?’ remarked Annie, as she pressed her thumb on the button and the gate swung open. ‘Perhaps Adrian and Sniffer, maybe’, suggested Simon. ‘It did sound like an important meeting. Well, at least important enough to throw an old boot at me’.
‘You’ll never get over that, will you?’
‘Well why don’t they throw them at you?’
‘Well, I’m a girl’.
 ‘Well, I never. So you are. I suppose you have to have some excuse’.
They walked through the overgrown garden, pushed open the big black door, and then tramped up the staircase, turned the handle on the next  door at the end of the landing, and walked in.
‘It’s quite bright in here isn’t it, remarked Simon cheerfully. ‘Makes a change. What’s that smell? Oh, it’s Sniffer. Sorry, Sniffer, didn’t see you on the floor down there’.
The grey furry bundle raised  what appeared to be its head, grunted, and then settled down again.
‘Oh, and the carrion bird’. Simon said brightly.
 The large seagull,  perched on the windowsill, glared. ‘Hello, brats. So glad you could finally make it’ Adrian snapped.
 ‘What’s happening, then?’ asked Annie, addressing the four elderly men, in shabby grey suits, sitting behind a long wooden table. Annie noticed there were papers and maps of Brighton spread all over its surface. The smallest of the four fingers jabbed his finger at the largest map, which was covered with lines and crosses in red ink. ‘This, I’m afraid’, he said. ‘We fear that we have a daemon in town’.
“Not a…daemon!’ gasped Simon. ‘ perhaps it’s just come for it’s holidays. What is a daemon anyway?’ he asked, turning to Annie. ‘I think’, said Annie, slowly, ‘that the fingers are just about to tell us’.
She turned expectantly to Little Finger. ‘Well’, said the little fat man hesitantly, ‘there is not a great deal of information about them, I’m sorry to say. What we do know is that they are rather large, dark, furry, with long muscular arms that end in sharp claws. They have very big, bat-like wings, and feet that are also clawed. They look rather like big dogs, with sharp teeth, and are very nasty indeed’.
‘Oh, said Simon, ‘well that lets out Sniffer, then’.
‘Oi’, said Sniffer, ‘I heard that’.
‘Adrian and Sniffer, though. can tell you more’ interrupted Index Finger.
‘That’s right’. nodded Adrian. ‘Me and the boys, we…’ “No, Adrian’. said Annie firmly. ‘The correct pronunciation is “The boys and I….’
‘As I were saying’, Adrian went on, ‘Me and the boys were cruising, right? And we saw this big, black thing winging its way towards us, and I sez to the boys, I don’t like the look of that, so scatter, mates. So we did and it went past us, like. But it wuz  pretty nasty. I would’nt be too happy coming up against it’.
‘Thank you, Adrian’, said Little Finger.
‘I think, Adrian’, Simon said, ‘That your spatters are masterful, but your dribbles lack conviction’.
Adrian looked at Annie sharply. ‘Wot’s ‘e talking about?’
‘Take no notice, Adrian’, replied Annie, ‘he talks fluent rubbish these days’.
‘You’re telling me”. growled Adrian.
‘Adrian’s right’. suddenly announced the large hairy bundle on the floor. ‘ I got a smell the other night, and I didn’t like it. It wasn’t a natural smell. It was, as if’, Sniffer hesitated, ‘it was as if it came from another world’ They were all silent. Finally, Third Finger said, ‘this calls for a council of war’.
The Council of War
‘Right, said Annie. ‘First thing, what is this daemon  doing here?’ The four fingers nodded, and then Third Finger spoke. ‘It has been drawn to our attention that it might be a scout, a spy, if you like, finding out what are our possible defences are’. ‘You mean, like an invasion, or something?’ asked Simon, incredulously. ‘Just so’, said Little Finger. ‘We believe it is here to look at ways and means of attacking this city, and then on to the rest of the country. We also believe that there are many thousands of them, which is why it is so important to stop this creature, and capture it, if possible. Otherwise…’ he shivered.
‘And who is going to try to do that? I mean, capture this daemon or whatever, and stop it from informing all it’s friends?’ asked Simon.
‘You are’. replied Little Finger, happily.
Simon opened his mouth, and then shut it again with a snap.
‘Next point’. said Annie quickly. ‘How are we to do that, and what support can we depend on?’
‘Now, we don’t know about the faeries’, said Little Finger. ‘because they are a law unto themselves, and unless they are threatened, they will do nothing to help. No, not them’.
‘That’s a pity’, groaned Simon. ‘ I was really hoping to see that lovely Radigund again’.
‘You mean the one that threatened to skewer you on her sword, and stick your head on the end of a pole?’ asked Annie, rather spitefully.
‘Yes, that’s the one, she was gorgeous and, anyway, it was just girlie talk’.
‘YOU…..!’ Annie screamed furiously, but Index Finger intervened quickly.
‘Please don’t argue. We thought the dragons might help, but I think they are looking after their borders, and I don’t think they are able to help us’.
‘Dragons?’ exclaimed Annie and Simon at the same time. ‘What dragons?’
Index Finger looked surprised. ‘I thought you knew. There was a battle between the dragons and the daemons a few years ago, and it resulted in a lot of damage and some people getting hurt. But it was all kept quiet, and nothing was said about it. The dragons won, by the way’.
‘Was that the one where all the windows in that awful art college got broken, and a few roofs wrecked?’ asked Simon.
‘That’s right’. replied Index Finger. ‘But that was some years ago’.
Then who else?’ asked Simon. ‘I’m feeling very practical at the moment. How about Indira and Pei-Ying?’
‘No’, said Annie firmly.’ I don’t want them getting  involved  at this stage’.
‘I know’, cried Simon, ‘because Annie and me are, as they say on television, “field operatives”, we have to have some backup, some support. How about those Japanese schoolgirls to give us a hand? They fought really well with us in that big battle under the pier, you remember, Annie?’
‘How could I forget? Ugh!’ said Annie. ‘But for once, in your dim, dismal little life, you have a good idea. How do we get in touch with them? With Mariko, I mean. She was the leader. Oh, I’d really like to see her again. She was so brave, and helped us so much in that battle’.
‘She will come when she is needed. Leave that to us,’ said Little Finger, ‘we can do all that’.
‘Right. said Annie. ‘Plan of action. Simon and I, notice Simon, proper grammar this time, will….I’ve forgotten the word…..’
‘Reconnoitre’ said Simon smugly.
Annie glared at him. ‘And find out where he is, or it is, and find out what he’s up to, or it’s up to and then keep him, or it, under……?’
‘Surveillance’.
‘Simon, I’m going to kill you one of these days’.
‘Could I just ask you’, asked Index Finger. What do those words mean? Just for our records, that is’.
‘No problem at all’, Simon replied cheerfully. ‘Reconnaitre means to keep something or somebody under observation, and surveillance means to keep watch or spy on something or somebody, to make sure they don’t make any trouble’.
‘Ah’, said Index Finger, ‘Thank you’.
‘As I was saying, before I was so rudely interrupted’, Annie  continued angrily, ‘We need to keep an eye on this daemon, and find out what…it’s up to, to see if it’s a spy or not. So we need Adrian and his …“boys”…. to keep track  of it as well. And we need Sniffer’.
Sniffer raised his head.”Don’t worry he said. ‘I’ll keep my nose to the ground and let you know if I find anything’.
‘I think that your nose is permanently glued to the ground, Sniffer’. said Simon innocently.
Sniffer stared at him suspiciously but said nothing.
‘Then that is all we can do at the present’, said Little Finger, ‘and we must be vigilant and keep in touch with each other. I declare this meeting closed’. They all got up and trooped out of the door, except Adrian who chose to flap out of the window. ‘See you around’. he called as he left. Sniffer left quickly, as soon as they went out of the black gate. ‘As my mate said, see you around’. Little Finger stopped and looked after him. Then he turned to Annie and Simon. ‘You will be careful, won’t you?’ he spoke quietly. ‘And don’t forget the talisman, Annie’. He walked off quickly after the other fingers.
Annie and Simon walked home silently, neither saying a word. Oh, dear. thought Simon, I’m in the doghouse now. I wonder if it was because I knew two words more than she did? At least, I looked in the dictionary before I opened my mouth. ‘Annie’, he said brightly, ‘How does it feel like to be a field operative?’
Annie suddenly turned around, and slapped him very hard across the face. Simon, shocked, felt his cheek where she had hit him. He noticed his lip was bleeding. ‘Annie!’ he called. She was standing at a shop window full of rather boring furniture, staring at it. Simon walked up behind her. He saw her reflection in the window. Her face was wet with tears. He put his hand on her shoulder, but she shook it off furiously. ‘Leave me alone!’ she shouted.
‘All right, then!’ Simon snapped, and walked off in the direction of home. Then he stopped and looked back. Annie still stood there, but she looked very small, and sad, and forlorn. Simon walked back to her, looked at her still wet face, and then, without thinking, pulled her into his arms and hugged her. Annie resisted at first, and then hugged him back. ‘Annie’, Simon said quietly, ‘Let’s go and find somewhere to sit down. I know what’s wrong’. Annie followed him to a bench outside a now closed Sainsbury’s store, and they sat together.
‘Annie’. Simon repeated. ‘I know what’s wrong. It’s the talisman, isn’t it? Tell me’.
Annie looked at him in astonishment, and then down at her hands and sighed. ‘Yes, it is the talisman. It’s ….it’s the burden of having to bear it. But it’s not just that. It’s just that….’ She began to cry again. ‘Come on, Annie,’ urged Simon. ‘You’re doing well so far’.
‘’Oh, shut up. No, it’s because everyone we’ve met seems to think that we can do everything. The four fingers, Adrian, Sniffer, everybody. When we started all this, I never thought how frightening or how nasty it might get. But it’s got much bigger and more serious. We’re fighting things that we don’t know anything about. We don’t know what’s going to happen. We’re just finding out things and it’s as if we we’re looking around in the dark. Simon, I really mean it. I’m frightened’.
‘’So am I’. Simon said quietly. Annie looked at him in astonishment. ‘But…but you never seem to be frightened at all, Simon!’ ‘Oh yes, I am’. replied Simon. He was looking straight ahead of him. ‘The difference is that I have a different way of coping with things. I make fun of things and make silly comments and jokes, because that’s my way of doing it. I’m as frightened of this daemon as you are, but I prefer to make fun of it. That’s how I am. But, I think, that the talisman will protect you and me, I hope. But don’t be afraid of the talisman, Annie. I think it will help us more than we know’.
Annie was quiet for a moment. ‘I know you’re right. But I wish we knew more than we do’. Simon looked at her again, and then said in a low voice, ‘Annie, you’ve never, ever hit me before’. Annie looked down at her feet, her hands clasped before her.
‘Simon, I’m truly, truly sorry that I did that. I really didn’t mean to. It’s just…just that I really don’t know what’s happening, and I took it out on you. You were using all those grand words, that I know you only just looked up in the dictionary, and I was really furious with you, because I thought you were making fun of me. But I know now that you’re just as frightened as I am, and I should have realised it. I’m really sorry, Simon, I really am. It must be as bad for you. But I do think that we’ve got to see this through. After all, we are detectives aren’t we?’
‘So we are. I forgot about that. Let’s go,  Annie. I’m hungry’.
‘Simon,’ said Annie in a very small voice, that he had never heard before, ‘will you take me home?’ Simon paused and then grinned. ‘Come on then, stupid. Let’s find our way home’. Annie got up and linked her arm around Simon’s. For once he didn’t argue, and tell her how soppy she was. They both went home for supper.
But the next few days seemed pointless and frustrating. There were no other reports of the daemon in the newspaper, and though they both walked around the city for hours on end, they were still no nearer finding out where the daemon might be hiding. Even though Annie wore the talisman every time she went out, it remained dim and quiet. They both felt irritable and confused. ‘This is hopeless’. said Simon. ‘Well, we’ve got to keep trying’. replied Annie. ‘I suppose you would say that. I’m a man of action, but I suppose you can’t help being a girl’. Simon grinned. Annie stopped and glared at him.
‘Simon’, she said rather too sweetly. ‘You know that I am anti-violent, anti-sexist, anti-abuse, and anti- a lot of things, but you are sorely trying my patience on all of those counts. Either you are truly wicked, which I don’t want to believe, or you are seriously winding me up’.
‘Bit of both, I think. Annie, hold on. I do believe I see Adrian up there, and he’s coming down for a bit of a bumpy  landing’.
Sure enough, Adrian flapped down and landed beside them with a thump. ‘Coming down on a wing and a prayer, were we, Adrian’. Simon remarked.
‘It’s me old war wounds’, snapped Adrian, ‘and less of your lip. But we spotted it, and saw where it went. You know those allotments, up past Fiveways? You know, where you go into those woods,  and then there’s all these garden plots down in the valley? Right. Well, it’s in there, in one of them wooden hut things, what are they, garden sheds? It’s about halfway down, and it’s painted this yukky pink. It belongs to some old fella that’s just gone into hospital for a checkup. I don’t think he even knows it’s there. Sniffer pointed us to the right place, ‘cos he found all its droppings, and followed the tracks. “Right horrible smell, it was”, he said. Then Cassidy saw where he went. He’s real sharp, Cassidy. We didn’t go near it, ‘cos it would rip us to shreds if we got near it in the air. But we found it, all right’.
‘Thank you Adrian’. said Annie sincerely. ‘No problem’. answered Adrian, ‘but…..’ and he sidled up closer to them.  ‘ You watch it, both of you. That, whatever you call it, is really nasty. It’s big, very big, and it’s got really serious claws on it’s hands and feet, which I reckon are about two inches long. And it’s got nasty red eyes. Told my lads to keep well away from it, otherwise it might tear ‘em apart. Even Sniffer’s dead worried about it. So, you be careful. I don’t want you two getting slaughtered’.
‘Thanks for the warning Adrian. I didn’t know you cared’. said Simon.
‘I don’t want you pair on my conscience. Anyway, for what it’s worth, we always look after our own’. muttered Adrian, awkwardly.
‘Thank you very much, Adrian’ said Annie. ‘We really mean it. Don’t we, Simon?’
‘Yes, we do’. Simon replied, with some effort.
‘Right, then. What are you two planning?’
‘We’re going to find it tonight, aren’t we, Simon? About eight.’
‘OK,’. Adrian said. ‘Me and the lads will be circling around above you. We’ll be there. But I reckon you might need some backup, just in case’.
‘Simon, we really do need to get in touch with Mariko and her friends. I know they will help us. We’ve really got to try and capture this daemon, somehow, and stop it from whatever it’s doing. Adrian, can you contact Mariko, in time for tonight?’
‘No problem’ said Adrian immediately. ‘That lass always keeps her word. If you need her, she’ll be there’.
‘Thank you again, Adrian,’. said Annie. Without another word, Adrian soared away. Annie watched him. ‘Isn’t he beautiful when he’s flying?’ she said in admiration. ‘Certainly better than when he’s on the ground’. grunted Simon.
‘Ooooh, are you jealous, Simon?’
‘You must be joking!  I’m really glad your’re  back to your old masterful self. But fancying a seagull! It just confirms my opinions that you really are totally mad’.
‘Shut your beak, Simon. Let’s go home and get prepared. And you’re so excited about seeing Mariko again, aren’t you? You fall in love with every girl in sight. First it’s Indira and Pei-Ying, then its that awful faerie, Radigund, who was going to stick you with her sword and put your head on the end of a pole, and now it’s Mariko. I just despair when I think of you becoming a proper teenager’.
‘I can see that we may have some problems about jealousy in our  sibling relationship in the future. At least you’ve become normal, or some resemblance to being normal’.
‘Ooooh, but you really like her, don’t you? Go on, admit it!’
‘You be quiet, you horrible little sister!’
‘But you do, don’t you. Oooooh, I bet you do. Yes you do! Yes you do!’
‘Horrible, disgusting sister, I don’t want to commit murder before I have to’.
“Oooooh! Yes you do! Oooooh Mariko! Ooooooh, Mariko!’
They continued in this way for the rest of the way home.
Later that evening, they found themselves walking through the belt of woodland that ran alongside the allotments in the little valley that ran from north to south. Behind them, they could easily see the sea, a strip of pale blue under the darker blue of the sky.  About halfway along the path, they found a gap in the fence that separated the wood from the allotments. Sure enough, there was the small pink shed, with just a single door and a window at the front, which faced towards the sea. But what they also noticed was the terrible smell that came from it. Simon pulled a face, and Annie wrinkled her nose in disgust. ‘It must be in there’, whispered Annie, ‘let’s get closer’.
They carefully stepped through the overgrown allotment until they crouched each side of the door. Annie looked up and saw several seagulls circling high above. Annie nudged Simon, and pointed upwards. He, too, looked up, and then nodded. ’Listen’, Annie whispered in Simon’s ear. ‘It’s talking to itself’. Simon pressed his ear against the door. He could hear a language that was  something between a snarl and a deep croak.
‘Googledeebadkillbadadeumansyahcomefromseanastywaternahnahnaheyheyhey- kissemgoobyeguggledawipeoutallkillalldestdroit…….’
‘I can’t understand a word it’s saying’ whispered Annie. ‘I think I can, though, or at least I can follow some of it’. whispered Simon back. ‘How?’ whispered Annie, incredulously. ‘You can’t speak daemon!’ ‘No’, whispered Simon, ‘but I do speak fluent rubbish, as you’ve told me many times, and daemon is not much different from that’. He listened intently again at the door ‘It’s not good, Annie, not good at all. They’re all going to come in from the sea and try and kill everybody….’
‘What! The horrible things!’ Annie shouted. She stood up and kicked the door hard.
What happened next was a confused blur. The door of the pink shed flew  off, turning over and over until it crashed onto the ground almost twenty yards away. A huge black figure stormed out of the empty doorway, whirled and faced Simon and Annie, who had flattened themselves against the wooden walls of the shed. It snarled and its red eyes gleamed, its long muscular arms flexing, long bright claws gleaming. But, suddenly, there were small, hooded figures running about them, striking at the beast with long wooden sticks. One struck the daemon on the side of the head, and then another, and another. The daemon howled and lashed out furiously with its claws. But the small figures jumped back and surrounded it, lashing out with their sticks. The daemon suddenly spread its great black wings and flapped upwards furiously, soaring upwards into the sky, the seagulls above swerving desperately to avoid it. It disappeared into the early evening light.
‘Mariko!’ shouted Annie. One of the small hooded figures turned, and pushed her hood back, revealing Mariko’s lovely oval face. ‘Annie!’ she cried, and the two girls embraced. ‘Simon!’ Mariko cried, and gave him a big hug too, that made Simon very pleased. The others all crowded round, pushing their hoods back, uttering cries of delight. Mariko introduced them all again, including Jojo, the girl who had her arm broken in their last battle. ‘How are you, Jojo?’ asked Annie. ‘I mean, your arm’. ‘Oh, it is fine’, beamed the girl. Good enough to hit that thing very hard’, holding up the stick she carried. ‘Wow’, Simon replied, feeling rather excited. ‘I’ve never been rescued by a group of Japanese hoodies before! What are those things, by the way?’
‘These’, said Mariko. ‘These are bokken. They are Japanese training swords. Look, they are shaped like a traditional Japanese long sword, and tapered and slightly curved, just like a real sword. But they are to train with, though how to use them has become a martial art in itself, and as you can see, they are very effective. There was a very famous Japanese warrior monk a very long time ago, called Miyamoto Musashi, who fought all his challenges with a bokken.’
‘What happened?’ asked Simon.
‘He killed them all’.
‘Ah’, said Simon, ‘I see’.
Just then there was a flap of wings, and Adrian landed alongside them. ‘Great job, girls’, he squawked. ‘You didn’t half give it a good thumping’. The girls all chorused greetings.
‘Smarmy creep’. muttered Simon. Annie kicked him, discreetly. Adrian didn’t seem to notice. ‘Anyway he wung it off fast. ‘No, said Annie firmly. ‘It’s winged, not wung’.
Adrian grunted. ‘As I was saying, he wung off sharp. I’ve got two of my boys watching ‘im, to see where he goes. Now one of us is going to take a look inside that shed, and see what he’s left’.
He looked expectantly at Simon. ‘Let me try’, said Mariko. She got as far as the doorway before she reeled back, coughing and gasping. One or two of the other girls began to cough and sneeze. ‘That smell, it’s awful!’ gasped Mariko. ‘I just couldn’t go in there!’ They all looked again at Simon who stood there with his arms folded.
‘Simon, darling. My lovely, brave brother. Sweetypie. You wouldn’t mind going in to have a look, really? Just to please your little sister. Mariko really wants you to, don’t you Mariko?’
 ‘Oh, yes, Simon. I would be so proud of you’, and she put her arm through his and gazed up at him with lovely, appealing almond eyes.
 ‘Ugh!’ exclaimed Adrian in disgust. ‘You lot are worse than my Gerry’.
‘I knew this was coming. I knew I was going to be the fall guy’, groaned Simon. ‘All right, then’. He strode manfully to the doorway of the shed. Everybody stood back, but all the Japanese girls cheered enthusiastically.
Simon stood in the doorway and struck a dramatic pose.
“it is a far, far better thing I do, than I have ever done before!’ he cried, and disappeared inside. A few moments later, they heard a shout of ‘ Yuuuuck!’ and then there was silence. The silence continued for another two minutes. ‘Do you think he’s all right?’ asked Mariko, anxiously. Annie looked up. There was Simon, standing in the doorway, one hand leaning on it, and the other holding a large sheet of paper between his thumb and his forefinger. He dropped it on the ground, and then fell forward on his face. ‘Get up, Simon’, said Annie. ‘All right’, Simon replied cheerfully. ‘Just thought it was worth a try’. grinning at Mariko, who had looked anxious. They al crowded around the large piece of paper, which was covered in filthy smudges.
‘’It’s an ordinance survey map of Brighton and Hove’ said Adrian, triumphantly. ‘I should know, ‘cos I fly over it all the time. That thing has put marks over things like the police station, the fire station, the town hall and so on. That, mates, is an invasion map’.
They all looked at it again. ‘Bit smelly, isn’t it?’ said Adrian again. ‘Bet it was a bit filthy in there wasn’t it?’ nodding his head in the direction of the shed. ‘You don’t know what I’ve been through to get this. Those daemons really are messy eaters’. replied Simon, with the air of a martyr.
‘Yeah, so what?’ sniffed Adrian. ‘I’been through worse things’.
‘I bet you have’. snapped Simon, darkly.
‘Stop arguing, you two!’ What we need to do is to take this rather filthy map to the four fingers. They might be able to make more sense of it. That daemon won’t come back here, so we have to have a strategy. Adrian , where are you off to?’ But Adrian was already in the air. He was circling around above them, two other seagulls flying close to him. They seemed to be having an urgent conversation. Adrian flew back down and settled himself close to their little group.
‘My boys lost him. He went out over the sea, and then changed his mind and came back inland again. They’ll try and find him, but he’s still around. We’d better watch out. He’s lost his map, so I reckon he might try and get it back. You’d better watch yourselves’.
‘I think, said Mariko, ‘that we have done enough for tonight, and we should go home now. Tomorrow might be quite different’. They all nodded.  The Japanese  girls carefully wrapped up their swords and put them into the leather holdall bags, they had collected from behind some bushes. Aniie rolled up the daemon’s map and put it into a plastic bag. She went over to Mariko. ‘Thank you so much, Mariko, and thank you all for helping us. We really appreciate it’. ‘Thanks too, Mariko, and everybody’, said Simon. ‘Even you, Adrian’. Adrian made a very rude sound with his beak.  ‘Let’s go home, everybody’. Annie said finally. ‘Enough of the hugs and kisses. This is not over yet’. So they did.
‘I’m starving. announced Simon, as soon as they got home. ‘What do you say to a nice fry-up, Annie?’ ‘I’d say, yes’, said Annie brightly, ‘but only after you’ve had a good bath. You still reek of that daemon’. ‘I suppose so’. muttered Simon. ‘I suppose I’ve got to wash behind my ears, as well, haven’t I?’ ‘Certainly’. said Annie. ‘Do it now. At once’. She stopped on the stairs. ‘Ooooooh,! Mariko! I’m so proud of you! Ooooh!’
‘I think I will definitely try to kill you one day’. Simon snarled.
Half an hour later, he was down in the kitchen. ‘About six eggs, and some rashers of bacon. Right’. He opened the refrigerator door. ‘Here we go. And some fried bread’. He opened the breadbin, and pulled out a sliced loaf. ‘Tomato ketchup now’. He opened one of the cupboard doors, and pulled out a bottle. ‘And now the grand finale. A bottle of Coca-cola and two glasses. There, that looks good. Now, frying-pan on the cooker and here we go….What’s that smell?’ He heard a sharp rasp of breathing behind him. Simon froze. He stared at the line of saucepans hanging on the wall in front of him. ‘Oh, no’. he said quietly. Slowly, he turned.
There was the daemon. It seemed to fill the kitchen. It   was black and furry, and its wings were folded behind like a carapace. It looked like a very large black beetle, except for its long canine snout, and its open jaws, that showed a row of very large glistening teetn. It was slavering, and dripped onto the floor. Its arms were very long and muscular, and hung down to its powerful knees, that were crouched, ready to spring. Simon, not for the first time in his life, felt very afraid. It was the sheer size, and menace of the thing that frightened him, and also its filthy smell.
‘Oh, its you’. Simon said, more brightly than he felt. ‘It’s always polite to knock before you come in’. The daemon knocked aside the kitchen table as if it wasn’t there.
‘Wassadeguggmapman!’
This came out as a harsh guttural snarl.
‘Watch it’, said Simon ‘I’ve got a frying-pan in my hand, and I’m not afraid to use it’.
The daemon suddenly lashed out an arm that knocked the frying-pan out of Simon’s hand and sent it clattering to the ground. Simon groped around desperately behind him, and pulled a large iron saucepan from the wall. The daemon moved closer on its padded feet.
‘GUGGYOBOYWASSADEMAPMAN!’
‘YOU LEAVE MY BROTHER ALONE!’
The daemon whirled around incredibly swiftly. There was Annie, standing in the doorway, her eyes blazing, fists clenched by her sides. The daemon suddenly swiped out at her. Annie ducked. The daemon’s claw ripped out a whole piece of the doorframe where Annie’s head had been a moment earlier. Simon leapt forward, and slammed the large iron saucepan over the daemon’s head. It screamed,  pulled it off, and whirled around to meet Simon, who backed away swiftly. Annie, crouching on the floor felt her left hand raised. A terrible white beam of light shot out and hit the daemon in the back. It howled and disappeared in a great gout of flame and black smoke. The kitchen was filled with it, but both smoke and flame suddenly drew in on itself, and disappeared. There was only Simon, crouched by the cooker, and Annie huddled at the doorway.
They both stood up and silently moved the kitchen table back to where it was, in the middle of the kitchen, picked up the chairs and sat down. Annie sat with her head in her hands. Simon, who still felt rather shaky, put his hands down on the table. Yes, they were trembling slightly.
‘What on earth is going on?’ demanded their mother who appeared in the doorway in her dressing-gown. ‘Have you two been fighting again? Look at this mess!  And what’s that awful smell? Don’t tell me Simon, you’ve been trying to fry a boiled egg again! You two just clear all this up! I’ve already got a headache, and three lectures to do tomorrow!’ “Yes, Mum’. mumbled Simon. Their mother looked very searchingly at them, but thought better of it, and marched off to bed. Simon looked at Annie. There were tears trickling down her cheeks. ‘Come on, Annie. It’s only Mum giving us a telling off’.
‘I killed it , I killed it! I always said to myself that I would never, ever kill a living thing, and I killed it!’ Annie sobbed. Simon stared at her. Then he got up and walked around the table and stood over her. Annie looked at him. ‘Go on, Simon, hit me. I hit you. Get your own back. Slap me across the face, hard!’ Simon slowly raised his hands, and then gently cupped her face between them. ‘Annie, I would never hit you. You are my sister. You didn’t kill the daemon. The talisman did’. Annie looked at him, speechless. She had never known her brother to be so gentle and kind towards her. Her eyes started to trickle again.
Simon glanced down. The talisman was pulsing urgently with light on her finger. ‘Annie, will you trust me, just this once! Please!’ He was still gently holding her face. She looked up at him and nodded. ‘Then put your hand down on the table! I’ve suddenly got an idea!’ Simon rushed over to the other side of the kitchen and grabbed a recipe leaflet from the pin-board,  that his mother was keeping for another meal. ‘Annie, get a pencil! There’s probably one in the table drawer!. Annie scrabbled around, and finally found one. Simon was looking intently at the talisman on Annie’s finger, which was flashing on and off, urgently.
‘Annie, do you remember our uncle Bob, who used to be in the navy? Well, when he stayed with us, he taught me Morse code. I can’t remember it very well, but I think that the talisman is trying to tell us something in that!’
‘Simon’, said Annie slowly, ‘first you talk rubbish, then you understand daemon and now you can talk , whatever it is, Morse code’.
 ‘You don’t talk it, it’s a code. Be quiet and let me concentrate. Hold your hand very still.’
. Simon looked at the talisman, and started to write, his mouth moving as he did so. Annie used her other hand to wipe her eyes. She was fascinated by the way in which the talisman flashed and blinked. Then, it stopped and became dim again. Simon was scribbling furiously, on the back of the recipe. Then he turned it around and pushed it over to Annie. ‘There’s a lot of blanks, because it was going too fast  for me. But it definitely is a message’. Annie stared at the piece of paper. This was what it said.
Had to   _______  ___  Daemon  to  protect  ___  Only  ___  Do  ___  hate  __   No  _____  way  Daemon  _____  kill  ___  Must  ___  let  ______  both ___  imp______  __  sorr_
‘Come round the table, Simon. We must be able to fill in these blanks. They have to be quite simple words’. They sat together and began to study the message. Ten minutes later, Simon said quietly, ‘I think we’ve got it’. They read it again. Annie had printed it out neatly, since she thought Simon’s handwriting was awful. It now read:
Had to destroy the Daemon. to protect you. Only way. Do not hate me. No other way.  Daemon would kill you. Must not let happen. Both you important. Am sorry.
‘Its grammar is worse than mine’. muttered Simon. They looked at the talisman on Annie’s finger. It was still cold and dim. ‘We’ve got to meet the fingers tomorrow’. said Annie firmly.  ‘Definitely. But we’d better clear up the kitchen first, or Mum’ll go ballistic, and have something to eat, and then go to bed’. ‘Well, at least it apologised’. replied Annie, wearily. ‘And you’ve learnt how to spell “daemon”’.
Next morning, as it was the holidays, they found themselves sitting around the usual table on the seafront to the four fingers, with Adrian,, and Sniffer, lying on the floor, slurping his bowl of Guiness, as usual. They had just explained everything that had happened. Annie read out the talisman’s message to them again. The daemon’s map was spread out on the table in front of them, and the fingers were examining it excitedly.
‘This changes everything!’ exclaimed Little Finger. ‘They are planning an invasion! This settles it!’
‘Settles what?’ demanded Simon.
‘We must, find more allies as soon as possible! It is now the only way of ensuring our survival!’
‘Who do you mean?’ asked Annie.
Index Finger replied quickly, ‘the dragons, though it is very difficult to contact them. We will have to do a lot of research for that, and it may take some while. But at least, by removing the daemon scout, we have bought ourselves more time to find ways of doing so It will have had no chance of taking back the information it wanted’.
‘Hang on’, interrupted Adrian, ‘dragons as well? It’s going to be a right traffic jam up there. I need my flying space, you know’.
Third Finger, normally the quietest, looked at Adrian sharply. ‘Simon and Annie have only, so far, encountered one daemon. Can you imagine thousands of them attacking us?’
‘Yeah, all right’, said Adrian, grudgingly. ‘I see your point’.
‘Are there any more allies we can count on?’ asked Annie.
The four fingers looked at her expectantly. ‘Yes, said Little Finger. ‘The faeries’.
Simon and Annie looked at each other. ‘The faeries!’ they both exclaimed.
‘Yes, of course!’
They were both very silent on the way home. Finally, Simon said, ‘I’m not very happy about this, Annie. This is going to get nastier than ever. How on earth are we going to persuade the faeries to join us as allies?’ ‘Perhaps we might have to pass a test, or something’. replied Annie. ‘Knowing faeries, I bet that’s what we’re going to have to do’. She looked around at Brighton as she walked. There was the Royal Pavilion in all its splendour. There was the Theatre Royal, there was the library, and everywhere there were people, some in shorts, in groups, all wandering around, some eating, some sucking ice-creams, and children, some wailing to be carried, other just walking with their parents, looking around them with wide eyes. Annie dreaded to think what might happen if a daemon invasion  ever happened.
‘Simon’, she whispered quietly. ‘We’ve got to go through with this, whatever. I can’t bear to think of what might happen to all this. All these people, and everything else. We’ve got to try and stop whatever awful thing might happen. We can’t just let it destroy us. We just can’t’. Simon stopped. ‘No, we can’t. You’re right, just for a change. I’m with you all the way. I’m not going to let filthy old daemons take all this from us. Let’s do it’. Annie looked at him incredulously. ‘You are the same brother that I ended up with, aren’t you?’ ‘Of course I am’. replied Simon. He stopped again and looked at her directly. ‘We’re together on this, brother and sister. I’ve no idea what else we going to be in for, but we’ll do it together, you and me. All right, now?’ Annie said nothing but just simply hugged him. ‘Thank you, Simon’. was all she could say.
‘Come on , fruitcake. Let’s go home’.
And so they did.

Womens is at the Crux of a transformatted globaal protailariatee

by Bromma (September 2012)
Introduction
Exodus and Reconstruction
available from leftwingbooks.net
Hundreds of millions of working-class women are flooding out of the countrysides of the world into the cities. In an epic upheaval, pervaded with human suffering, these women are being channeled into the manufacturing and service industries of a radically transformed global economy. This wholesale relocation and reorganization of capitalism’s core work force is at the very heart of globalization.
The exodus of impoverished working-class women is rooted in two historic processes: the destruction of small-scale farming and the rise of a new global system of production and distribution—a system greedy for flexible, exploitable labor. These virtually unstoppable forces are pushing huge numbers of women out of family farms, and pulling them into new labor markets.
Each process, in its turn, represents a major change in capitalism and capitalist politics. Pushing women out of the countryside breaks the back of traditional rural patriarchy, one of the principal bulwarks of class rule for centuries. As a result, the family and gender are being challenged and refashioned.
At the same time, the new transnational labor pools drastically reshape women’s experience as workers, giving them wider contact with other women and allowing them—forcing them—to become cosmopolitan on a whole new level.
In other words, even as the new wave of capitalism extends its reach, it simultaneously revives and modernizes its own worst enemy—its antagonist class. The women of the exodus, and their daughters, will determine the future of anti-capitalist struggle.
Working-class women
Distracted by the chaotic spectacle of capitalism on steroids, it's easy to miss what’s actually at stake. Still anchoring our new social reality is a truth carried over from the old: the main source of all profit in the world—the foundation of capitalism—is the exploitation of labor.
Labor is the jackpot. It’s the ultimate resource, the indispensable commodity. Slave and semi-slave labor performed by billions of oppressed people is the primary source of all wealth in the world. It’s the host on which the rest of our parasitic economy feeds. Oppressed labor enriches capitalists and subsidizes the lifestyles of an array of middle classes. Investment money, infrastructure, war funding, necessities, luxuries—all of it’s extracted from oppressed labor.
Most of the world’s exploited labor comes from women. Women work in the sweatshops and the giant factories. Women sow and tend and harvest the world’s crops. Women carry and birth and raise children. Women wash and clean and shop and cook. Women care for the sick and the elderly. All of this—layer upon layer of labor—is what makes human society possible. Ripping it off is what makes capitalism possible.
The primacy of women’s labor is normally edited out of political discourse, but it’s a fact beyond dispute. More than half of the world's women have formal jobs. (In some countries in Asia and Latin America, the percentage is well over 60%.) On top of this, women predominate in millions of illegal and semi-legal “off the books” jobs, where they are normally heavily exploited. Meanwhile, some 70% of women’s labor, worth tens of trillions of dollars a year, is unpaid altogether. Most of the world’s women average 31-42 hours per week on family housework alone. Women “do two-thirds of the world's work, receive 10% of the world's income and own 1% of the means of production.” [1]
Throughout history, groups and classes of men have fought over the precious resource of women’s labor. All women, but especially working-class women, who constitute the world’s most valuable source of wealth. Hundreds of millions of these women, the core and majority of the working class, lack any private property or social privilege. They have no ownership, claim or control over the means of production. This sets them apart from the upper stratum of wage workers—labor aristocrats and privileged sectors subsidized from capitalist profits.
Instead, they belong to the “lower and deeper” layers of the working class, compelled to offer their labor up for exploitation within capitalism for sheer survival. This part of the working class stands as capitalism's main labor force and, historically, its direct antagonist.
Many of these working-class women are paid wages; many are not. Few are paid for all their labor. Most are destitute or economically vulnerable. They labor under extreme duress—facing not only the threat of hunger, but also dependency, slavery and male violence backed up by tradition, family structure and law. Their labor and life experience—and their class position—is often substantially different from that of even the men in their own families.
The multi-sided struggle to own, control and exploit this fantastically profitable labor force is expressed on many levels and in many forms: migrations, wars, genocide, cultural movements, populist rebellions, changes in family structure, colonialism, shifting geopolitical alliances, the rise and fall of governments.
Today, the women at the center of the world working class are experiencing dramatic and fundamental changes in their work lives and their social lives. Capitalism, entering a new phase of development, is remaking the working class. This is where a new revolutionary politics must start.
The rise and fall of post-War anti-imperialism
The capitalist system faced a mortal challenge from the socialist-led anti-imperialist movements after World War II. For a while, the global order was rocked back on its heels; for a while, a powerful anti-capitalist alternative seized the imagination and mobilized the best efforts of billions of people. Generations of working-class women threw themselves into this revolutionary struggle, hoping to break out of captivity. For several decades, this appeared to be a real possibility.
But as we know, capitalism survived and surmounted this challenge. When its repressive powers became insufficient, it sought out neo-colonial solutions. It exploited every weakness of middle-class and male opportunists. It regrouped, adapted, and outflanked its enemies on every level. It learned to thrive on chaos. It found ways to turn rapid global economic integration and privatization into new profits and new forms of social domination.
It’s important to recognize that in order for capitalism to survive, it was literally forced to mutate into a new form, like a virulent virus that’s become resistant to antibiotics. It was only under severe pressure that capitalism transcended its old limits and expanded into new terrain. To accomplish this, capitalism had to adopt radical measures, tearing down its own obsolete forms of social organization, putting at risk the future of nations, long-standing social contracts, genders, races and traditional family life.
Threatened with a deadly revolutionary challenge from below, capitalism innovated. In contrast, most of the anti-capitalist opposition, stuck in an old paradigm, failed, retreated or degenerated into corruption and mysogyny. Working-class women mostly found themselves firmly locked down again under capitalistic male domination, even where the struggle for liberation had once been strong.
Vicious male colonial dictatorships were replaced by equally vicious neo-colonial male dictatorships. Liberal social contracts in the metropolis—unneeded vestiges of an earlier era—were ripped up and flushed away. New middle classes and new patterns of privilege arose to destroy old, dysfunctional structures of privilege. New technologies transformed markets, industries, technology, media and methods of social repression. New forms of patriarchy replaced old forms. Whole established workforces were pushed aside in capitalism's twin struggles for survival and profit.
The post-war wave of socialist-led anticolonial struggles faltered and receded. Imperialist nations, especially the U.S., continue to savagely attack less-powerful nations and nationalities around the world. Genocide and national oppression are still essential features of world capitalism. Therefore struggles for national freedom continue. And some have progressive leadership.
But neo-colonialism and the global re-organization of capitalism have radically reshaped the political landscape. Dozens of nations in Asia, Africa and Latin America that broke the grip of old-style imperialism through popular insurgency and armed struggle are now active participants in a new global capitalist order, under willing regimes. (These nations, which incude China, Vietnam, Iran, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Nicaragua and many others, may constitute the majority of the world’s population.) In many other places, imperialism has succeeded in installing neo-colonial “nationalist” leaders, or cut deals with corrupted “anti-imperialists.” Third World nationalism no longer routinely embodies, as it once did, the progressive hopes of the world working class. In fact, many former revolutionaries have become agents for global capitalism.
    When 360,000 gold and coal miners walked off the job in South Africa in 1987, protesting the poor pay and grim working conditions of apartheid-era mines, a charismatic young man named Cyril Ramaphosa, the firebrand leader of the National Union of Mineworkers, led the charge.
    But as the police opened fire on workers engaged in a wildcat strike at a platinum mine two weeks ago, killing 34 people, Mr. Ramaphosa, now a multimillionaire business tycoon and senior leader of the governing African National Congress, found himself in a very different position: on the board of the company the workers were striking against, the London-based Lonmin. [New York Times, August 31, 2012.]
And today, regrettably, many of the most militant and successful “anti-imperialists” are reactionaries—a motley assortment of authoritarian regimes, right-wing populists, local capitalists trying to negotiate a piece of the action, religious fundamentalists, warlords and gangsters. Struggles for national freedom tend to degenerate into a contest over neo-colonial ownership and control of national resources, including women’s labor and bodies. On this new terrain, the interests of working-class women are seldom represented by male-dominated “anti-imperialist” struggles.
There is no going back to the past period of anti-imperialism. To challenge modern global capitalism, a future, progressive anti-imperialism will have to defeat neo-colonialist politics and overthrow its legacy of corruption and male opportunism.
New terrain
Globalization is definitely a work in progress. It’s too massive for anybody to plan in advance, and it’s too volatile for anybody to manage efficiently. The biggest capitalists struggle to ride the wave of change without getting swept under themselves. In fact, the transition to globally integrated production and distribution has already been tremendously chaotic, accompanied by widespread economic devastation. It continually generates extreme social turbulence; wars, riots and political crises of all kinds.
The full outlines of a new capitalist model are not yet visible to anybody. But it’s already evident that the tremendous ongoing changes in the capitalist system revolve around the exploitation of labor, especially working-class women’s labor.
Globalization has hit already-impoverished working-class women like a sledgehammer. For many tens of millions, it means leaving home forever; it means life-or-death changes to a whole way of life. As we will see, the latest wave of globalization has finallly set in motion the long-delayed destruction of small-scale agriculture—and along with it patterns of rural patriarchy that persisted for centuries. Globalization triggers migration on a scale never seen before; migration that permanently changes women’s labor and how it’s controlled by men. It generates whole new industries on a whole new scale. It transfers enormous amounts of women’s domestic labor out of traditional families into enormous international service industries. It promotes an increase of public male terror to supplement and supplant private male terror in the family. It sponsors new ranks of neo-colonial women—capitalists, overseers and operatives cooperating with capitalist men in the exploitation of working-class women.
The decline and fall of traditional rural patriarchy
To understand what’s happening to working-class women, we have to look at the massive social changes they are experiencing. That means starting in the countryside.
That may not be an intuitive idea. When we think about capitalism, we tend to think about factories and cities. But actually, right up until our day, hundreds of millions of workers have been engaged in farming, as rural laborers or doing unpaid labor on family plots. (It was only in 2007 or 2008, experts say, that urban population surpassed rural population.) [2] This is where most working-class women labored for centuries.
Until the last decade or so, the most populous class in the world was considered to be “the peasantry”—a controversial term that includes a variety of family-based small-scale agriculture. Family farms have played a fundamental role in the capitalist system, long after the introduction of large-scale agriculture. Family farming not only survived, but was in fact actively promoted and subsidized by modern capitalist governments as a way to strengthen the national economy and buttress social control. In Japan, for example, small farms rose to new economic and political importance after World War II.
In other words, hundreds of years after the rise of mass production manufacturing, and the explosion of the industrial revolution, most of the world’s people were still engaged in farming, much of it subsistence or semi-subsistence, on relatively small parcels of land. This part of the rural population has continued to labor under conditions carried over largely from feudaltimes.
Why did it take so long for capitalism to completely modernize agriculture and make it a predominantly mass-production industry, like it's doing today? The answer is revealing: even small-scale “peasant” agriculture was fantastically profitable to capitalism, and politically advantageous as well.
As we know, the profits of capitalist agriculture based on African and Indian slavery are actually what jump-started Eurocapitalism’s industrial rise. But slavery was social and political dynamite. Slaves of different origins and genders united quickly in resistance. They waged continuous war against the slave-owners, and sabotaged production whenever they could. Eventually slave agriculture was broken by this resistance. (Interestingly, a replacement form of rural exploitation of African Americans was based on family farming: sharecropping.)
Family farming was remarkably effective in squeezing out the maximum output of labor, both in the fields and in the home. In particular, male-dominated rural family life efficiently and ruthlessly extracted unpaid labor from women—the bulk of the rural working class. Most of the value of this labor, characteristically under the local control of male family members, could be readily extracted further up the line by large landowners, processors, merchants and marketers, suppliers and, at the top of the pyramid, the giant corporations and banking houses. Furthermore, all the risks of agriculture—bad weather, pests, natural disasters, poor market conditions—fell on the individual farm families.
Women trapped within separate family units could be intensively exploited and intimately supervised 24 hours a day. This was a form of social organization that made it difficult for rural women workers to unite with each other, and that also made it difficult for them to build the stongest possible unity with proletarian men.
So rural patriarchy based on family farming continued on as a mainstay of capitalism; co-opted from feudalism, it was adapted and cemented into the foundation of capitalist society. The rise of modern capitalist nations was often based on the existence of discrete rural markets, rural traditions and family-based patriarchal rural mythologies, which served as essential components of modern nationalism.
As capitalism overthrew feudalism, rural life often maintained a patriarchal continuity. In fact, modern capitalism relentlessly attacked any surviving remnants of independent power exercised by women in rural areas. For the most part the means of production were still owned or controlled by men. Family men functioned as foremen and overseers over “their” women. In the fields and in the household, “peasant” men usually owned and directed the labor of hundreds of millions of women. They set women to work and organized the exploitation of their labor for their own benefit and for the benefit of capitalists. This domination, backed by violence, was completely integral to the capitalist economy and to the capitalist social order, just as it had been to feudalism.
Above and beyond its stability, and its fantastic profitability, the glorified rural patriarchal family served capitalists as the standard cultural model for the exploitation of women’s domestic and reproductive labor in all parts of society; a foundation for capitalist gender roles that was expanded and modified to serve urban capitalism.
Family-based rural patriarchy was so deeply imbedded within capitalism for so long that abandoning it was nearly unthinkable. A change of such magnitude would require the development of much more advanced global transportation and commodity markets and a tremendous reorganization of labor. It would require a major overhaul of polical systems everywhere. It would be a sea-change in capitalism.
That sea-change is what’s happening now.
Traditional rural patriarchy based on family farming is finally, steadily, decisively, being crushed by global capital. It’s impossible to overstate the consequences of this process for working-class women and for capitalism. The world’s most profitable reservoir of productive labor—the basic working class, mostly women—is essentially being re-deployed in a radically new configuration.
Destruction of small farming
The fall of traditional rural patriarchy began after World War II with the drive for industrialization in the colonial world. Western imperialism was hungry for cheap factory labor and cheap consumer goods, and many Third World ruling classes were happy to oblige.
Walden Bello describes what happened in Asia:
    Asian governments placed the burden of industrialization on the peasantry during the phase of so-called developmentalist, industry-first policies. In Taiwan and South Korea, land reform first triggered prosperity in the countryside in the 1950s, stimulating industrialization. But with the shift to export-led industrialization in 1965, there was demand for low-wage industrial labor, so government policies deliberately depressed prices of agricultural goods. In this way, peasants subsidized the emergence of Newly Industrializing Economies….
    ...[In China and Taiwan, the] golden age of the peasantry came to an end, and the cause was identical: the adoption of urban-centered, export-oriented industrialization….
     True indeed is the observation of the rural advocates Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao that the urban industrial economy has been built “on the shoulders of peasants.” [3]
During this period, Western capitalism, under the guise of the so-called “Green Revolution,” touted the virtues of large-scale commodity farming, using corporate seeds, pesticides, fertilizer and machinery. This further undermined family farming, weakened the self-sufficiency of many rural nations and created widespread misery.
However, it wasn’t until the 1990’s that the decline of small farming turned into a complete collapse. Bello describes what he calls “the typhoon of trade liberalization”:
    The forcing of peasants to subsidize industrialization was indeed harsh. But at least trade policies at the time helped to mitigate the pain by barring agricultural imports that were even cheaper than local commodities. Practically all Asian countries with agricultural sectors tightly controlled imports via quotas and high tariffs. This protective shield, however, was severely eroded when countries signed the Agreement on Agriculture (AOA) and began joining the World Trade Organization (WTO) starting in 1995.
    The AOA forced open agricultural markets by banning quotas, which were converted to tariffs, and required governments to import a minimum volume of each agricultural commodity at a low tariff. At the same time, under the pretext of controlling the heavy subsidization of agriculture in developed countries, the AOA institutionalized the various channels through which subsidies flowed, such as export subsidies and direct cash payments to farming interests in the northern hemisphere….
    With massive American and European subsidies distorting global prices in a downward direction, developing country agriculture became “non-competitive” under the conditions of WTO-mandated trade liberalization. As the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) notes, “instantaneous import surges following the adoption of the AOA in a number of developing countries led to ‘consequential difficulties’ for “import-competing industries.” The report continued, “Without adequate market protection, accompanied by development programs, many more domestic products would be displaced, or undermined sharply, leading to a transformation of domestic diets and to increased dependence on imported foods.”
    This historic shift to dependence on food imports was, needless to say, accompanied by the displacement of millions of peasants.
    Even before the AOA took effect, the World Bank was predicting that Indonesian farmers would lose out under the new regime. Indeed, since 1995, farmers in rice and other basic commodities have been marginalized. Meanwhile, competitive pressures induced by trade liberalization led to the expansion of commercial plantations at the expense of smallholders.
    In the Philippines, corn farmers, chicken farmers, cattle raisers, and vegetable growers were driven to bankruptcy in huge numbers. In Mindanao, where corn is a staple crop, many farmers were wiped out. As analyst Aileen Kwa has described, “It is not an uncommon sight to see farmers there leaving their corn to rot in the fields as the domestic corn prices have dropped to levels [at which] they have not been able to compete.” With production stagnant, land devoted to corn across the country contracted sharply from 3,149,300 hectares in 1995 to 2,150,300 hectares in 2000.
    In China, tens of thousands of farmers, including those growing soybeans and cotton, have been marginalized with China's entry into the WTO. Indeed, to maintain and increase access for its manufacturers to developed countries, the government has chosen to sacrifice its farmers….
    In Sri Lanka, thousands of small farmers staged street demonstrations to protest the import of chicken parts and eggs, claiming they were being driven out of business. The FAO concurred, noting that import surges on major food items like chilies, onions, and potatoes made local production “precarious, as reflected in the significant drop in areas of production.”
    In India, tariff liberalization, even in advance of WTO commitments, has translated into a profound crisis in the countryside. Indian economist Utsa Patnaik has described the calamity as “a collapse in rural livelihoods and incomes” owing to the steep fall in the prices of farm products. Along with this has come a rapid decline in consumption of food grains, with the average Indian family of four consuming 76 kg less in 2003 compared to 1998 and 88 kg less than a decade earlier. The state of Andra Pradesh, which has become a byword for agrarian distress owing to trade liberalization, saw a catastrophic rise in farmers' suicides from 233 in 1998 to over 2,600 in 2002. One estimate is that some 100,000 farmers in India have taken their lives owing to collapsing prices stemming from rising imports. [4]
The destruction of small farming and traditional rural life Bello describes in Asia is in fact a worldwide phenomenon. Anuradha Mittal describes an example in Latin America:
    As a result of the removal of tariffs on agricultural products, Mexico, a country once self sufficient in basic grains, today imports 95 percent of its soy, 58 percent of its rice, 49 percent of its wheat, and 40 percent of its meat. This has resulted in Mexican corn farmers being put out of business. More than 80 percent of Mexico's extreme poor live in rural areas, and more than 2 million are corn farmers. There is no way they can compete with subsidized American agribusiness. Everyday, an estimated 600 peasant farmers are forced off their land. [5]
In his 2005 paper, “The Farm Crisis: How We Are Killing the Small Farmer,” Steven Gorelick describes the trend in rural life:
    In China, for example, the modernisation of agriculture has already led to the uprooting of more than half the rural population in the last two decades. In the coming years, economic forces will pull so many Chinese from their villages that 600 new cities will be required to handle the rural exodus, according to China’s Vice Minister of Construction.
    The global economy has been equally ruthless with farmers in other parts of the South. Pastoralists in West Africa have been displaced by cheap meat imports from Europe, while Indian farmers that grow traditional oilseeds like sesame, linseed, and mustard are being driven under by soya imported from America.
    Mexican beef producers are losing ground to US producers, whose inroads into Mexico’s markets have tripled since NAFTA was ratified. In Ladakh, a region in which 90 percent of the population is in agriculture, traditional barley staples are being displaced by Punjabi wheat and rice trucked over the Himalayas. One Ladakhi farmer wondered “what will happen in the future, now things are changing so much? Will we need farmers or won’t we?” [6]
Actuallly, agriculture is booming—for some. As small farmers are pushed out, factory farming moves right in. Corporations are eager to acquire arable land, which has risen dramatically in price.
Sometimes, impatient capitalists skip all the rigged pretenses of “free trade” and simply evict small farmers outright. In Africa, western-based corporations are partnering with corrupt governments to seize small farms, forcibly removing family farmers and replacing them with corporate agribusiness:
    The half-dozen strangers who descended on this remote West African village brought its hand-to-mouth farmers alarming news: their humble fields, tilled from one generation to the next, were now controlled by Libya’s leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, and the farmers would all have to leave.
    They told us this would be the last rainy season for us to cultivate our fields; after that, they will level all the houses and take the land,” said Mama Keita, 73, the leader of this village veiled behind dense, thorny scrubland. “We were told that Qaddafi owns this land.”
    Across Africa and the developing world, a new global land rush is gobbling up large expanses of arable land. Despite their ageless traditions, stunned villagers are discovering that African governments typically own their land and have been leasing it, often at bargain prices, to private investors and foreign governments for decades to come…. [7]
The devastating effects of factory farming and “free trade” on small farmers have been paralleled by the rapid rise of multinational agribusiness, following the trail blazed by the “Green Revolution.” Giant integrated corporations like Cargill and Monsanto and Archer Daniels Midland now control everything about agriculture from top to bottom: the land, the seeds, the fertilizer, pesticides, the feed stocks, the labor force, the processing of farm products, transportation, financing, marketing. In addition, global capitalism is boldly seizing and privatizing what used to be public inputs: water, clean air, genetic material, the oceans. (This is the process that Vandana Shiva calls the “new enclosure of the commons.”) [8] They are externalizing the costs and the poisonous side-effects of factory farming and manufacturing onto the public, demanding tax subsidies and dumping toxic wastes into public spaces and poor communities.
The changes in food production have been especially devastating.
    Because of the successful Green Revolution, agriculture in the Third World has become a modern commodity business, food production worldwide has soared to levels never seen before in history—and directly because of this, millions of people have died from starvation and malnutrition. The paradox can be defined as the more food, the more deaths from lack of food. Former famine nations like India and Bangladesh now export food....
    No oppressed nation is too poor to take part in this great transfer of food into the neo-colonial economy. Every “aid” project by the metropolis only accelerates the transformation of agriculture from growing food directly for the producers to producing abstract commodities for multi-national trade. [9]
Obviously the changes to capitalist agriculture have tremendous negative effects on our health, climate, food supply and on biological diversity, effects which any liberation movement will eventually have to address.
In the meantime, they have helped set in motion the greatest wave of migrations ever seen; migrations which are transforming the class structure of the world and undermining specific, older forms of patriarchal control. They embody a revolution in how capitalism exploits working-class women, its irreplaceable labor force.
The decline of small farming, and along with it rural patriarchy, determines how much of the working class actually encounters globalization: as the end of a way of life; as an exodus.
The great migration and its “feminization”
Throughout its history, capitalist expansion has been accompanied by population shifts from the countryside to the cities. This isn’t new. But the scale and reach of current global migration, triggered largely by the destruction of small farming, is astonishing. Hundreds of millions of people crisscross the globe; even more migrate to new lives inside their own countries or regions.
At least 200-250 million Chinese have already left rural areas for work in the cities. [10] Researchers say that two-thirds of the entire rural population of China and Indonesia (the world’s fourth most populous country) will migrate in the next couple of decades. [11] Over two million farmers are forced off their land every year in India. [12] (Some 8000 rural migrants arrive in Delhi every week.) [13] Giant shantytowns explode around the large cities of the world, populated largely by people leaving the countryside. Globally, roughly a billion people are living without formal employment in these giant sprawling townships. [14] Unicef estimates that there are 300 million children living on the streets. Many of them were born in farm areas, but will never themselves be farmers. 800,000 Asian women migrate to the Middle East each year, mostly to work as maids. [15] (At least 384,822 Indonesian women went to just one country—Saudi Arabia—to do domestic work between 1990 and 1995.) [16] In 2006, the UN estimated that 1.2 million people, most of them women and girls, were “trafficked” annually. [17] Millions of immigrants enter the U.S. and Europe every year. As of 2009, there were more than 400,000 foreign spouses in Taiwan—a country of just 23 million people—with 20,000 new transnational marriages registered each year. [18] This is largely the result of a skyrocketing global “bride industry.” (Roughly 4,000-6,000 women a year enter the United Sates by way of “mail order bride” agencies.) [19] Newly-rich Taiwanese families hire hundreds of thousands of Filipina, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Thai and Mongolian domestic contract workers. [20] There are hundreds of thousands of foreign “entertainers” in Japan. [21] Hundreds of thousands of Nepalese women, mostly minors, work in the brothels in India. [22] Hundreds of thousands of immigrant women work in the sex industry in Europe. In 2004, more than 1,000 Russian women were doing sex work in the Republic of Korea. [23] Migrant women from Myanmar are the dominant labor force in hundreds of factories in Thailand. [24] At the same time, millions of unaccompanied foreign men travel to Thailand, mostly to purchase sex from women who migrated from the Thai countryside. (Roughly 5 million men in 1996.) [25] Between 1960 and the late eighties, according to Fausto Brito, nearly 43 million people left the Brazilian countryside toward the cities, emptying out whole agricultural regions. [26] 85% of Filipina nurses work outside the Philippines. (There are over 400,000 foreign-born nurses of various nationalities in the U.S.) [27]
The statistics are endless, the facts stunning. The working class is morphing in front of our eyes.
We should avoid oversimplifying this tidal wave of migration. Some of it is a continuation of well-established migrations of long standing. Some of it is from urban areas, not the countryside. Some of it is temporary, at least in original intent. Some migration is “pulled” rather than “pushed” —that is, made up of migrants, including middle-class people, who are simply looking for a better life. And millions of migrants are refugees fleeing civil war, disease, domestic abuse and natural disaster.
Nevertheless, massive working-class migration out of the countryside has reached unprecedented proportions, and is characterized by a qualitative change in migratory patterns. Its effects are basically irreversible. Traditional village life and traditional rural family structure are not coming back. Many migrants do return to their home areas, especially during times of economic downturn. But generally they do not return to small scale agriculture, and they resist rejoining traditional rural patriarchal life. In fact, many returnees leave again at the earliest opportunity.
Within the hurricane of migration, remaining rural families trying to cling to their land now depend on remittances from daughters and mothers. This is happening in countries as diverse as the Philippines, Cuba, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Haiti. In the year 1998, the UN says that roughly 70 billion dollars was sent back home by migrant women; that figure skyrocketed, with total remittances (from men and women) reaching about $300 billion of formal remittances alone in 2005. [28] In some cases remittances have become the largest financial inflow for whole countries and regions, frequently exceeding 10% or even 20% of national GDP. [29] (The governments of Indonesia and the Philippines sponsor public advertising campaigns to praise as “heroes” the women who work abroad because of their indispensable role in the national economy.) [30]
While this flow of remittances allows some rural families to hang on temporarily, it transforms their way of life drastically. And it is clearly insufficient to restore the material basis for traditional rural life. In fact, a larger and larger percentage of remittances are sent to family members who have themselves abandoned the countryside for the city.
Moreover, migration is becoming increasingly “feminized.” As the UN puts it in a 2007 report on the feminization of international migration:
    Although a net feminization of flows has occurred in certain regions, what has really changed in the last decades is the fact that more women are migrating independently in search of jobs, rather than as “family dependents” traveling with their husbands or joining them abroad. In addition to this change in the pattern of female migration, the other significant change taking place concerns the level of awareness on the part of migration scholars and policy-makers as to the significance of female migration and the role of gender in shaping migratory processes and, most importantly, the increasingly important role of women as remittance senders.
    It is nonetheless true that in recent decades the number of women (and men) migrants has increased significantly in response to changing labor markets globally, particularly the massive demand for cheap female labor from poor countries to fill the growing demand for caregivers in rich countries…. The care crisis in the developed world thus provides an outlet for the catastrophic failure of development policies worldwide, and most particularly for the effects of the neoliberal structural reforms imposed on poor countries over the last decades, which have resulted in growing unemployment and underemployment, reduced social services, labor displacement, and increased poverty in many countries and regions. [31]
Note that this particular UN study limited itself to international migration, which is heavily concentrated in domestic work and sex slavery. Yet internal and intra-regional migration, including the rivers of working-class women flowing into the giant export-oriented manufacturing zones, is actually even more extensive.
All these migrations cause gender upheavals.
For instance, in China, a long-standing bias against female children—enforced by selective abortion and female infanticide—is coming to a halt. What were formerly considered “surplus” young women have become the labor force of choice in urban global manufacturing, and are now seen as valuable resources by rural families. [32] Both men and women migrate out of the Chinese countryside. But it is women who are heavily concentrated in the job-rich export-oriented factories. [33] Their remittances are prized. (Chinese migrant men are concentrated in construction, where their employment hangs by a thread within the world’s biggest real estate bubble.)
The social effects of feminized migration are diverse. When working-class women migrate today, they often leave spouses and children behind, temporarily or permanently. The results vary, but are typically devastating to traditional life and gender patterns.
As one 1990 study of China put it:
    It is estimated, based on the current trend of sex ratio at birth, that by 2029 there will be a surplus of 30 million men over women (at reproductive age) in China alone. Furthermore, with the opportunities offered by the market economy, Chinese rural women increasingly aspire to work in the cities and "marry out". As women's marriage migration patterns and the marriage market correspond to the spatial hierarchy of capitalist development, it can be foreseen that entire villages in most peripheral areas will be extinct in the near future when their men are unable to find marriageable women. [34]
Yet on the other hand, a report from North-East India finds that,
    Aging population has been increasing more rapidly in rural areas, owing to the exodus of males from our villages giving rise to “feminization of farming”. Due to rapid migration of young women as well, it is now becoming “Geronto farming”, farming taken care off largely by older women. [35]
In the Mekong Delta of Vietnam, there is a “bachelor bomb,” as young women leave home to look for mates. Thanh Nien News reports that, “Rural girls are abandoning their villages in search of love and money in the cities, leaving behind packs of lonely young male workers.” Tens of thousands of women, with the “help” of numerous matchmaking agencies, travel overseas to marry men in Taiwan and South Korea. Many more find jobs in the factories and fish processing plants around Ho Chi Minh City and other urban centers. [36]
Sri Lankan women are leaving rural areas by droves to work as maids in the Middle East, Japan and Europe. (Over 125,000 migrate to the Middle East as domestic workers each year.) [37]
Michelle Gamburd studied Sri Lankan families from villages in the Naeaegama region in 1997.
    Ninety percent of all migrants were women. Of the migrant women, 30% were single, and 70% were married, separated or divorced. Most of the women in this latter group had at least one child, and approximately half had husbands who were under- or unemployed.”
Most women migrants in Naeaegama leave their children in the care of their mothers or mothers-in-law, since their husbands, even when unemployed, refuse to do “women’s work.” The minority of men who challenge existing gender roles to care for their own children face ridicule.
Instead, many men left behind by migrant women hook up with moonshine production and drinking clubs, wasting their wives’ remittances and terrorizing the villages with drunken violence. The clubs are elaborately organized. They often give donations to schools, temples, and politicians and maintain cozy ties with law enforcement.
    For men whose incomes are eclipsed by those of their wives, or who fail to make the most of their wives’ salaries, alcohol provides relief from personal responsibility…. Responsibility falls on the alcohol for any foolish actions and on the absent wife for the drinking itself. With prosperity in the village resting primarily on female migration to the Middle East, involvement with kasippu [moonshine] production and distribution provides poor men with alcohol, money, community, political clout, and a means to reassert the male power and respect lost in the face of women’s new economic role. [38]
Let’s be clear: the process we are witnessing is not “changing rural women into workers.” Most of the women of the exodus are already working-class—even if their husbands and fathers may not be. [39] These women have been working as agricultural laborers, either on large capitalist farms or as unpaid labor on family farms owned and controlled by men serving capitalism. They have been working in family businesses and performing the endless hours of domestic and care work that made rural capitalism possible. As we saw, that labor isn't just a remnant of feudal times. Rather, it was long ago transformed into a mainstay of global capitalism and integrated into the foundations of modern capitalist economies.
In their previous lives, these women were exploited and controlled primarily from within male dominated rural families, a situation which isolated them and effectively repressed them from expressing their own class politics. Rural patriarchy has now been forced to disgorge huge numbers of these (working-class) women into a burgeoning transnational labor market in order to better serve the new capitalism. Although much of their labor is redirected into manufacturing, a large and critical proportion of their work is the same kind of work they used to do “at home” —farm labor, domestic and care work.
A transformed working class
The economic and social changes that make up globalization have set off a huge, multisided brawl among men over how the new economic system is going to work and, above all, who gets to control and profit from women’s labor. That’s because all the upheaval caused by globalization creates new male winners and losers.
Today, as a juggernaut of mutant capitalism finally acts to pulverize the world’s “peasantry” and to drive working-class women directly into gigantic transnational industries, the exploitation of women’s labor is being dramatically reconfigured. Women are being busted out of traditional rural and urban patriarchal families to serve capitalism better. Groups of men of all classes are fighting desperately to resist or, failing that, to get a piece of the emerging post-modern patriarchy. Large numbers of men are falling out of productive life completely.
The International Labor Organization says, “For the past 30 years or so, the trend across the world has been for female labor force participation to rise, while the male participation rate has been falling... [M]ore men have been forced into the margins of the labor market, if not out of it altogether.”
The ILO notes that “the types of employment and labor force involvement traditionally associated with women—insecure, low-paid, irregular, etc.—have been spreading relative to the type of employment traditionally associated with men—regular, unionized, stable, manual or craft-based, etc.” [40] We might add to that list of declining male jobs: “overseers and foremen over rural women.”
What academics call the “feminization of work” is happening not just in the “developing world,” but in the metropolis as well. In Europe and the U.S., an increasing percentage of married women of all classes and nationalities make more money than their husbands. (Among African Americans, for instance, that percentage jumped from 18% in 1970 to 30% in 1996.) [41]
Families are still important units of male supremacy. But they are changing, and becoming less rigid and sacrosanct. A unifying theme of the new capitalist order is that the labor of working-class women is too valuable to leave in the hands of the “man of the house.” Women’s labor is now to be controlled more directly by capitalists and their professional agents, without all the clumsy and inflexible local mediation formerly assigned to husbands, fathers and brothers. Working-class women must be “free” to move from country to country, from industry to industry, from household to household. They are needed in the industrial zones, needed in the giant factory farms, needed as nurses and “entertainers.” Their domestic work is increasingly moved out of thier own families and merged into great global service industries. Women clean house and raise somebody else’s kids halfway around the world. Poor women have always labored at this kind of domestic service, and have often been separated from their families to do so. Wealthy families employed servants from the ranks of the poor, and especially from colonial nations. But the scope, internationalization and commercialization of this labor market has increased exponentially.
What was once unpaid labor may now be paid, if poorly. More to the point, the family middlemen of rural patriarchy are being cut out of the loop. Capitalists now extract the profit of exploited labor more immediately in the marketplace, rather than indirectly, farther up the “food chain.” Working-class women’s labor in the fields and factories and the private homes of others is becoming massively socialized and endlessly mobile. It’s re-organized and stratified according to the needs of the new global markets. It’s encouraged and organized by parasitic governments and a corrupt army of labor agencies, slave traders and professional smugglers. Nobody’s asking permission from the husbands or fathers for any part of that.
The transformation of the working class, with women at its core, holds tremendous long-term promise for revolutionary change. The geographic and social barriers among working-class women are gradually breaking down, and working-class women are becoming increasingly cosmopolitan. Which is not to say that the new unleashed global capitalism is kind to working-class women. In fact, more than ever, capitalism is their direct, implacable, brutal enemy.
The chaos of this latest wave of globalization is itself particularly violent for women. Women predominate among the refugees and the destitute and the enslaved. Old and new methods of labor exploitation and social control advance virtually uninhibited by custom or regulation.
While corporations have gained unlimited new transnational mobility, the movements of working-class women are harshly restricted and regulated by national border controls and racist segregation. At every turn, governments, migration agencies, smugglers and labor brokers defraud and tax migrant women.
Millions of working-class women are leaving their children behind in order to survive in the global economy. Conditions of working-class labor, as always, are unrelentingly harsh. Much of working-class women’s labor is, in fact, slave or semi-slave labor—unpaid, carried out under duress, involuntary.
Violence is endemic where working-class women live and work. Where they are concentrated, capitalists and warlords manipulate and encourage dispossessed men to terrorize them, to push them off the streets and out of public life.
And there is something more: the destruction of traditional family-based rural patriarchy brings with it a powerful reactionary male political backlash.
Millions of men are losing “their” women, and “their” jobs, and it’s driving them crazy. Today the main opposition to capitalist globalization comes not from the weakened anti-imperialist Left, or—yet—from working-class women, but rather from militant right-wing men. The anger of male dispossession fuels reactionary populist, fundamentalist and fascist trends in every part of the world. These right-wing movements are typically led by men of the middle classes, furious at losing the privileges they held under the previous male capitalist order. But millions of poor and de-classed men are joining in, forming a kind of united front of misogyny.
Finally, working-class women face the rise of new layers of neo-colonial women. Women who profit from sex slavery. Women managers in the factories. Women war criminals, women politicians, women agents, women functionaries, women household employers. In traditional rural patriarchy, there were also women—often in-laws—who played enabling roles in male domination. These old-paradigm female overseers are currently being phased out along with “their” men as part of the new globalization. Rising up to replace them are new cadres of modern professional, military and ruling class women who are better equipped to control working-class women inside the new global patriarchy.
For those of us trying to rebuild a radical anti-capitalist movement, the reorganization of the world economy and the accompanying changes in how women are exploited and controlled have fundamental significance. Because as a result of this transformation, the core of the working class—capitalism’s historical enemy—is also being transformed. This reconfigured working class, with women at its heart, will be the ultimate source of new waves of resistance and revolution. It will spawn new labor movements, new cultures, new parties, new insurgencies, new armies. We are at a major historical turning point, full of promise.
In time capitalism will pay a heavy price for its extended lease on life. It is being forced to virtually jettison traditional rural patriarchy, a critical bulwark of social control for centuries. It is dispossessing and angering countless small time patriarchs. It is disrupting traditional gender roles. It is sending hundreds of millions of women journeying across countries and cultures as they figure out how to survive. It is placing the nature and future of male domination in question. These changes make capitalism deeply vulnerable in the long run.
In the meantime, though, working-class women are caught in a free fire zone. On one side, the brutal power of global capitalism, exploiting working-class women’s labor through compulsion and violence. On the other side, men dispossessed of “their” women by the new capitalism, who are increasingly resorting to radical and violent measures to “defend” and “reclaim” their patriarchal birth right, or at least grab a piece of the action in a new male order.
Working-class women are fighting back, but they are in a position of strategic weakness. Their struggles typically still lack the capacity for collective physical self-defense—a precondition for fundamental change.
Still, change is coming. From the protests in the mean streets of Juarez to the revolutionary underground of Afghanistan to the anti-slavery safe houses of Cambodia, women are challenging fundamentalism, violence against women, imperialist occupation and corporate exploitation. Within the great migration, working-class women are forming new labor movements and new communities, united by common experience and taking advantage of whatever tools are at hand, including cell phones and the internet. The era of male revolution has ended, but a new era of working-class revolution is starting to unfold.
With every passing day, there are new flashpoints, new possibilities. We can open a newspaper and see something like this:
    Bangladesh, once poor and irrelevant to the global economy, is now an export powerhouse, second only to China in global apparel exports, as factories churn out clothing for brands like Tommy Hilfiger, Gap, Calvin Klein and H&M. Global retailers like Target and Walmart now operate sourcing offices in Dhaka, the capital. Garments are critical to Bangladesh’s economy, accounting for 80 percent of manufacturing exports and more than three million jobs.
    But with “Made in Bangladesh” labels now commonplace in American stores, Bangladesh’s manufacturing formula depends on its having the lowest labor costs in the world, with the minimum wage for garment workers set at roughly $37 a month. During the past two years, as workers have seen their meager earnings eroded by double-digit inflation, protests and violent clashes with the police have become increasingly common. [42]
Eighty percent of these garment workers—some 2.4 million—are women.
What we see in the newspaper is only the tip of the iceberg. Most of what bubbles up out of working-class women’s anger is invisible to us in the metropolis. When we do hear news about women active in political struggles, including movements led by men, it’s hard to predict where they are headed.
For example, how can we say what the future holds for working-class women of the so-called Arab Spring? Will they carve out a new political space, or be pushed to the margins? Or how about the hundreds of thousands of girls—children—who are fighting as soldiers in civil wars and warlordistic conflicts around the world? Most of them are virtual prisoners today—what will they be tomorrow? Thousands of women were recently involved in huge strikes against Honda and other giant manufacturing corporations in China. Will women step forward to take leadership of these struggles? Groups of women have formed all-women guerrilla armies in Kurdistan. How will that evolve? The Zapatistas claim that women are at the heart of their uprising. What does that mean practically for the future of working-class women? Armed women gangsters are emerging in some of the free-fire zones and urban wastelands of global capitalism. Will some of them become “political”?
It’s impossible to say what an international insurgency of working-class women will look like. All we can predict with any confidence is that entirely new kinds of organization and unexpected tactics will be generated by experimentation and sacrifice—just as they always are when the working class changes and advances.
The future, as usual, is mostly hidden.
But what we should notice, because it is right in front of our eyes, is that the many-sided male brawl over how to exploit and control women’s labor within the new capitalist order defines and shapes today’s global politics. Until working-class women take the field in their own behalf on a world scale, they will be trapped within this essentially male politics, a deadly violent politics that is all about them.
Whatever radicals in the metropolis decide to do, or not do, capitalism has moved on. Its current incarnation demands the thorough commodification and internationalization of agriculture, industry, commerce and services. It needs rapid access to mobile and flexible pools of workers, especially working-class women. To make this happen, capitalists are rolling the dice, scrambling to extend their domination even as they allow some of capitalism’s deepest social moorings slip free. In desperation, under duress, capitalism has found it necessary to socialize the labor of working-class women on a whole new basis, to essentially remake the working class in a more advanced and cosmopolitan form. In the process, the central role of working-class women in the world economy is being pushed rapidly out of the shadows.
New capitalism is here, bringing with it new politics. At the most fundamental level, this politics is not about oil. It’s not about religion. It’s not about imperialist men versus anti-imperialist men. It’s about women and women’s labor: women at the heart of a transformed global proletariat.

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Footnotes
[1] This saying has been called the “informal slogan” of the U.N. Decade For Women. Quoted in United Nations Development Fund for Women, “World Poverty Day 2007: Investing In Women—Solving the Poverty Puzzle.” Recent statistics on women's work, including most of those above, can be seen in “World's Women 2010: Trends and Statistics,” United Nations, starting on page 75. The 70% statistic also comes from the UN, quoted in “Unpaid Work,” World Savvy Monitor, May 2009.
[2] For instance, “Urban Population to Surpass Rural: UN,” Reuters, September 28, 2006.
[3] Walden Bello, “Free Trade vs. Small Farmers,” Foreign Policy in Focus, April 27, 2007.
[4] Ibid.
[5] “Losing the Farm: How Corporate Globalization Pushes Millions Off the Land and Into Desperation,” interview with Anuradha Mittal, Multinational Monitor, July/August 2003.
[6] Steven Forelick, “The Farm Crisis: How We are Killing the Small Farmer,” International Society for Ecology and Culture, February, 2005.
[7] “African Farmers Displaced as Investors Move In,” New York Times, 12/21/2010.
[8] Vandana Shiva, “The Enclosure of the Commons,” Third World Network, August, 1997. This is an edited extract from a longer version which appeared in The Enclosure and Recovery of the Commons published by The Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, India.
[9] Butch Lee and Red Rover, Night-Vision: Illuminating War and Class on the Neo-Colonial Terrain, Vagabond, 1993, pp. 100, 103.
[10] This is a commonly used figure, originating with the UN (See, for instance, The World Bank News and Views, September 24, 2010.) It may in fact be low, but the general scope of the migration is clear in any case. In 2003 the Asian Development Bank forecast more than 300 million migrants to the cities by 2010. (See David Lague, “The Human Tide Sweeps into Cities,” published by the United Nations Public Administration Network, January 9, 2003.) Facts and Details website says that 230 million had migrated from the countryside by 2010, a number expected to reach 250 million by 2012 and surpass 300-400 million by 2025. A translation from China's People's Daily reveals that the government itself is encouraging the migration of between 300 and 500 million people from rural areas to towns and cities by 2020.
[11] Australian National University Research School of Economics, RUMiCI Project, “Rural-Urban Migration in China and Indonesia: Patterns, Consequences, and Policy Interventions.”
[12] Indian government estimate, quoted by Anuradha Mittal, “Industrial Agriculture: Land Loss, Poverty and Hunger,” from the International Forum on Globalization.
[13] John Pickford, “Goodbye Village, Hello City,” BBC World Service, June 15, 2001.
[14] A good source on the topic of the growth of urban slums and shantytowns is Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, Verso, 2006. Another source is Robert Neuwirth, Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World, Routledge, 2005. Although his politics are clearly pro-capitalist, Hernando de Soto provides fascinating information on the extent and dynamism of the informal economy in Latin America: The Other Path: The Invisible Revolution in the Third World, Harper and Row, 1989.
[15] UNFPA State of World Population 2006; A Passage to Hope; Women and International Migration, p. 23.
[16] This figure is for recorded work contracts according to the Indonesian government, reported by R. Amjad, “Philippines and Indonesia: On the Way to a Migration Transition,” Asian and Pacific Migration Journal, 1996, p. 335. Cited in Rachel Silvey, Political Geography 23, 2004.
[17] UNFPA State of World Population 2006; A Passage to Hope; Women and International Migration, p. 44. The term “trafficking” is controversial. The U.N. defines it as “the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purposes of exploitation. Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs.” United Nations n.d.(a) Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children: Supplementing the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, article 3(a). New York: United Nations. The 1.2 million figure itself may be conservative. Somaly Mam, the Cambodian activist, says that at least one million children are sold into prostitution each year, and that that overall there are 30 million people toiling as slaves in various industries around the globe. (See http://www.somaly.org/slavery, September 2012.)
[18] “Taiwan Curbs Foreign Bride Firms,” BBC, August 1, 2009.
[19] American Immigration Lawyers Association “INS Mail-Order Bride” report, March 1999.
[20] Pei-Chia Lan, Global Cinderellas: Migrant Domestics and Newly Rich Employers in Taiwan, Duke U. Press, 2006, Introduction, etc.
[21] See, for instance, “Japanese Police Report Human Traficking Victims in First Half of 2005,” humantrafficking.org update 43 which quotes the International Organization for Migration estimate that 150,000 sex trafficking victims were working in Japan's sex industry. Multiple reports state that 88,000 of the 130,000 foreign nationals who enter Japan on entertainer visas every year are Filipina women. Also see UNFPA State of World Population 2006; A Passage to Hope; Women and International Migration, p. 44.
[22] The Coalition against Trafficking in Women reports a figure of 100,000 Nepalese women in prostitution in India. Some other sources use even larger figures. (See here for more resources.)
[23] UNFPA State of World Population 2006; A Passage to Hope; Women and International Migration, p. 26.
[24] Marwaan Macan-Markar, “Economic Crisis Hits Myanmar's Migrant Women,” Asia Times, September 1, 2009.
[25] Jillian Fortier and Kyle Seltzer, “It's Not a Victimless Crime: A Peek Into the Sex Industry,” Powerpoint presentation, slide 6. Also “Sex Tourism In Thailand,” p. 1. A good resource on sex slavery in Thailand is the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women web site. Also Deena Guzder, “The Economics of Commercial Sexual Exploitation,” Pulitzer Center, August 25, 2009.
[26] Fausto Brito, “The Displacement of the Brazilian Population to the Metropolitan Areas,” Estudos Avancados, May/August 2006. (See the English language version online here.)
[27] Moira Herbst, “Immigration: More Foreign Nurses Needed?” Bloomberg Businessweek, June 21, 2009.
[28] UNFPA State of World Population 2006; A Passage to Hope; Women and International Migration, p. 13.
[29] Wikipedia provides numerous statistics about remittances, and numerous citations. So does the UN: “Feminization of Migration 2007: Gender, Remittances and Development,” UN International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women, 2007.
[30] Pei-Chia Lan, Global Cinderellas: Migrant Domestics and Newly Rich Employers in Taiwan, Duke U. Press, 2006, pp. 44-49.
[31] “Feminization of Migration 2007: Gender, Remittances and Development,” UN International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women, 2007, pp. 1-2.
[32] Maggie Farley, “Women in the New China,” Los Angeles Times, November 22, 1998.
[33] “In East and South-East Asia, women provide up to 80 percent of workers in export processing zones,” according to “Women Swell Ranks of Working Poor,” International Labor Organization, ILO/96/25, July 30, 1996.
[34] M. Lu, “Where Have Our Women Gone? Crisis of Reproduction and Family in Rural China and Southeast Asia,” ACM Bulletin, February 1990, p. 251.
[35] From publisher description of Devi and Bagga, “Ageing in Women: A Study in North-East India,” Mittal, 2006.
[36] Thanh Nien News Special Report “‘Bachelor Bomb’ Threatens Rural Areas.”
[37] “Exported and Exposed: Abuses Against Sri Lankan Domestic Workers in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates,” Human Rights Watch 19:16C, November, 2007, p.1. Other estimates, including unregistered workers, are much higher.
[38] Michele Gamburd, “Breadwinner No More,” Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy, eds. Ehrenreich and Hochschild, Metropolitan Books, 2003, pp. 190-207.
[39] The view that working-class women could have a different class position from the men in their immediate families is not part of Left orthodoxy today. However, some revolutionary Marxists use this concept as part of their analysis of capitalism's class structure and the role of working-class women. See, for instance, Butch Lee's commentary in People's War...Women's War?, Kersplebedeb, 2006, p. 43. During the formative years of the Chinese Communist Party, it was argued that “women were by virtue of their gender for all intents and purposes part of the propertyless class.” (Christina Kelley, Engendering the Chinese Revolution: Radical Women, Communist Politics and Mass Movements in the 1920’s, U.C. Press, 1995, Chapter 1.)
[40] Guy Standing, International Labour Organization, Geneva, “Global Feminization Through Flexible Labor: A Theme Revisited,” reprinted in World Development Vol. 27, #3, 1999, pp. 588, 600.
[41] Richyard Freeman, “The Feminization of Work in the USA: A New Era for (Man)kind?” in Gender and the Labour Market, ed. Gustafsson and Meulders, St. Martin's, 2000, p. 10.
[42] Jim Yardley, “Export Powerhouse Feels Pangs of Labor Strife,” New York Times, August 23, 2012.