Women and Empire

David Swanson reviews "a detailed look at several parts of the world, starting with Latin America and the Caribbean, where the U.S. government's driving mission is the maintenance and expansion of bases, and where communism has been replaced as an excuse by drugs as much as by terrorism" — The Bases of Empire. This observation stands out:

In the chapter on Okinawa and elsewhere in the book, and certainly in my own experience in Italy, we see the anti-bases movement being led by women. This book suggests that a woman's perspective is more strongly opposed to militarism than a man's. Sadly, this seems to be true only in nations that have been less militarized and where women have been more severely suppressed. Where militarism is fully accepted, and where women's rights include the right to join in the killing, women seem to do so. Certainly women in the United States Congress are happy to fund the empire and its wars.

Mr. Swanson writes from the Left, with all the preconceptions that that entails. I would argue that the women he writes about, in Italy and Japan, are not "severely suppressed" but rather much freer than the ones whose "rights include the right to join in the killing."