A friendly reminder that both the Irish potato famine and the Scottish highland clearances were little more than masked genocide in the name of the British crown that fundamentally changed the culture, language, politics, and wealth distribution of both countries in ways that can still be felt today. So I’m not saying Prince Philip was a terrible person but I am saying there’s a fucking reason why the Scots and Irish are probably digging out the good whisky tonight.
On this day, 9 April 1945, Georg Elser, a factory worker and folk musician who tried single-handedly to kill Hitler, was murdered in the Dachau concentration camp. Working in a weapons factory and then a quarry, he gradually built up an arsenal of stolen explosives, which in 1939 he planted in a pub in Munich, which he knew Hitler visited every year on 8 and 9 November to celebrate the Nazi putsch of 1923. Unbeknownst to Elser, that year Hitler left early and the bomb missed him by minutes, instead killed six senior Nazis, as well as accidentally a waitress. Elser was later arrested and tortured, but insisted he acted alone and refused to give up any other names, other than one of a communist who had already died. He was sent to the concentration camps, where he was killed on the orders of Himmler just a few days before their liberation. Learn more about German resistance to Nazism in our podcast episode 4: https://workingclasshistory.com/2018/04/04/wch4-anti-nazi-youth-movements-in-world-war-ii/https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1690238627827947/?type=3
On this day, 9 April 1948, the Deir Yassin massacre took place when around 120 fighters from the Zionist paramilitary groups Irgun and Lehi attacked the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin near Jerusalem (content note: sexual violence). Over 100 to 150 or more Palestinians, including many women and children, were killed, among them people who had been decapitated, disembowelled, mutilated and raped. The incident led to many Palestinians fleeing in terror, and was a key event in the ethnic cleansing of the area, during which over 700,000 of the 900,000 Palestinian Arab residents of what became Israel were expelled or forced to flee from their homes. Learn more about the history of Zionism in our podcast episodes 17-18: https://workingclasshistory.com/2018/12/16/e17-anti-zionism-in-israel-part-1/ Pictured: Zionist military briefing at Deir Yassin https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1690713431113800/?type=3
Today, our world lost a feminist icon. Nawal El Sadaawi was an Egyptian feminist writer, activist and physician. In her book The Hidden Face of Eve, she described how she was subjected to female genital mutilation (FGM), which she fought against ever since, because it was a tool to oppress women. FGM was only in 2008 banned in Egypt.
Nawal was born in 1931 as the second child in a family that had both progressive and traditional views. Nawal was circumcised herself when she was just 6 years old, yet her father also insisted that his children got an education. Nawal did realise at a young age that girls were regarded as less valuable than boys. When both her parents died young, Nawal was left with the care of a large family.
In 1955, Nawal graduated as a medical doctor from Cairo University. She specialized in psychiatry. She later became director of public health for the Egyptian government but had to leave this position when she published her non-fiction book Women and Sex in 1972. In this book, she railed against FGM and the sexual oppression of women.
While the government continued to work against her (for example shutting down the magazine Healthwhich she founded), Nawal never stopped her fight for women’s rights. In 1975, she published Woman at Point Zero (a novel based on the true story of a woman on death row) and in 1977, Nawal published the book The Hidden Face of Eve, where she talked both about her own experience with FGM and her experience as a village doctor witnessing sexual abuse, prostitution and honour killing.
In 1987, Nawal was arrested as part of a group dissidents under president Sadat. She spent 3 months in prison. When president Sadat was assassinated, she was released. They then censored her work and her books were banned. Because of her fight for women’s rights, in which she didn’t shy away from conservative believers, she received death threats, was taken to court and later went into exile in the USA. There, she continued her fight for feminism.
In 2018, a BBC presenter suggested that she tone down her criticism, to which she replied
“No. I should be more outspoken, I should be more aggressive, because the world is becoming more aggressive, and we need people to speak loudly against injustices. I speak loudly because I am angry. ”
While she gained much international recognition for her fight for women’s rights , she never got recognition from her home country Egypt, something she really dreamed off. In 1996, she returned to Egypt.
Very interesting to read: this interview she gave: Saadawi, Nawal El, and Adele S. Newson-Horst. “Conversations with Nawal El Saadawi.” World Literature Today, vol. 82, no. 1, 2008, pp. 55–58.
