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Bullying & Patriarchy (Part 7)
War is the ultimate patriarchal evil.
(I’m not sure why this was in my Drafts.) While Georgie Porgy squatted in the White House in the early twenty-first century, I concluded that war is the ultimate patriarchal evil. Starting a war is the ultimate bullying.
Gathering weapons and tanks by another country’s border or building a wall along that border is an extreme form of bullying. It’s large-scale bullying: bullying an entire country or culture or people. Invading another country because you’re a fascist patriarch is an extreme and especially violent and murderous form of bullying on a vast scale.
I’ve always been instinctively anti-war. This didn’t require any research. I didn’t need to listen to any lectures on the topic. It was simply the only opinion on the matter that made sense to me. As an undergraduate, I was delighted to see a professor and students protesting a gulf war, and I took one of their “No Blood for Oil” buttons.
At the time, I still considered Aunt Ethel a wonderful person. She was charming and charismatic and kept up a consistent “wonderful person” performance… until my late teens, when she began verbally abusing me and manipulating me unexpectedly. I was thoroughly brainwashed to have unquestioning loyalty to that side of the family and felt hurt but blamed myself instead of questioning her. I had no idea she was…