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MEREDITH TAX

Meredith Tax has been a prominent feminist voice and political activist since the late 1960s. She was the founding chair of the International PEN’s Women Writers’ Committee and the founding president of Women’s World, a global free-speech network that opposes gender-based censorship. Among her books are The Rising of the Women and Double Bind: the Muslim Right and The Anglo-American Left.

You have written about the Rojava Revolution [a de facto autonomous region calling itself the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria]. How do supporters of the Rojava Revolution strike the right balance between being supportive of the people there, while remaining objective about reports of alleged human rights violations happening in that area?

There are good reasons to defend the people of Rojava. First, they fought ISIS more effectively than anybody else on the ground. Second, they are trying to do interesting things politically, particularly in terms of women. To me, they are a great source of new ideas and a possible magnet for progressives in the region and the rest of world as well. They are providing a type of political experimentation that we very much need because we don’t have a lot of liberated areas in the world where this scale of political experimentation can be attempted.

We have to recognize Rojava is a work in progress: they are going to get some things wrong and we are going to disagree with them on certain points. I’m not interested in criticizing how anyone does stuff when they are in an existential fight for life against ISIS. You can voice criticisms, but the question is: how can you do this in a way that is productive?

The Rojava self-administration has been very open about letting human rights groups into its areas for inspections and not sending them with minders like dictators do. However, it’s been very hard to get into these areas so it’s very hard to assess what’s going on except from the volunteers who go into these areas and then come out. I would say it’s probable that some human rights violations have been committed, but they are not systemic. They would be particular to a person or a small brigade in most cases. The cantons are new and the people who are fighting are peasants, many of whom are just beginning to be educated; and violations always happen during war.

When human rights violations are committed, the self-administration tries to find the perpetrators and they put them on trial if they think they have done something wrong and this is all done in public. They have admitted to recruiting under-age fighters in the past, but they say this practice has stopped. They definitely practice conscription, but they also do not send people to the front lines who don’t volunteer. People who are conscripted are used as domestic police or border guards. As far as I can tell, they are trying to address human rights violations. This is what is being said by the people I know who have served with them.

The main accusation that has been leveled by the Turkish state and Syrian opposition groups against the YPG/YPJ [the Kurdish ‘People's Protection Units’] is ethnic cleansing. This is the accusation that was pushed by Amnesty International. There was a United Nations report that completely exonerated the Kurds of this charge. The report assesses all parties involved in the Syrian civil war. It accuses many of the groups of horrible abuses, such as using chemical weapons, bombing civilians, starvation tactics, summary executions, etc. The worst thing it says about the YPG/YPJ is that they have been accused of recruiting child soldiers (people under 18), detention under harsh conditions of a 17-year-old who was accused of working for ISIS, and confiscation of computers and cellphones in areas that were liberated from ISIS. I suspect they confiscated computers and cellphones to gather intelligence from them, not for personal use. If that’s the worst that you could say about a party in this civil war, it’s not that bad.

How should the Left respond to Far Right nationalist and religious movements around the world?

I don’t think they have responded very well at all. I don’t think they have a clue. The US Left, which is the part of the Left that I know most about, needs to understand what’s going on in the world. There is a tendency now to view everything through the prism of domestic policy, and to only talk about fighting back against Donald Trump over domestic issues. While I think the domestic stuff is central, it can’t be considered in isolation from global factors.

We live in a period of globalization. We live in a period when essentially fascist or proto-fascist forces, from Trump to rightwing forces in France and Germany and Holland and Russia, are coming together and coalescing as an international movement as they did in the 1930s. I think that is what we’re seeing today. The people who are attracted to this movement in America certainly have their roots in White Supremacy, but that is true in Europe and other places as well. Unless you can see the global component of this and how these groups are supporting each other, you are going to be up a tree.

What are your thoughts about rightwing groups’ claims that leftists are trying to suppress free speech on college campuses?

I think it’s important to oppose giving a platform to people who are really Nazis and fascists and Klan people. However, if a Harvard idiot sociologist writes bad things about black people, he should be answered by arguments, not by closing him down. The whole tendency to try to shut down discussion is very bad for the Left. I think we need to distinguish between people who are just idiots or have a rightwing agenda, and fascists who are advocating the murder of certain groups and hate crimes. I’m not a free-speech absolutist because I think we do have to identify people who are encouraging hate crimes and try to prevent their word from spreading. I’m talking about people who literally say, ‘go out and kill Muslims’.

Some commentators have said that identity politics has hurt the American Left. What are your thoughts on this topic?

I think it’s important to think about the politics of identity in a complex way. Everybody has multiple identities. That’s what intersectionality is all about. For example, I’m a Jew, I’m a leftist, I’m a feminist, I’m old. The problem isn’t that people bring their identities into politics, it is when they have no politics other than their personal identity. That subjective approach leaves out people and it fragments movements. This is the kind of stuff that goes on at college campuses, according to some of the students I talk to. Identity politics can be very reductionist. For instance, the people who stress class politics often underestimate race; and in the US a lot of issues come down to race. And they also tend to leave out the oppression of women. I think such mechanical materialism has to be countered by a more holistic analysis that would attract people to a better way of doing politics.

Do you think that the commentators who claim democrats have to choose between supporting marginalized groups and promoting a class-based form of politics are offering a false choice?

Absolutely. You have to do both. You can’t frame the working class solely in terms of white people. The working class is multi-racial and multi-ethnic. It holds a lot of immigrants, including ones that are undocumented. If you want class politics, you have to look at all that. You also have to deal with the contradictions within the working class. For example, the conflicting positions on the environment between some of the skilled workers and construction workers who supported the Keystone Pipeline and everybody else who wants their children to be able to breathe and survive. I also don’t think we can leave climate change out of this topic. Climate change has to underpin everything that we do. We need to build a vast coalition that insists the planet isn’t completely destroyed. ■