Sunday 10th of May 2026
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on women, jews and freedom....

“…. he confined himself to sitting down at table and drinking; he refused to eat any of the dishes, because they were prepared by Christians. Christians have to be very patient to tolerate such impertinence. In the Jewish religion it denotes a system of defiance and aversion for other sects. Now, does a sect which wishes to carry its hatred as far as the table of its protectors, deserve to be protected?”

         — CHARLES FOURIER (1772 - 1837)

 

THE INFLUENCE OF CHARLES FOURIER DOES NOT STOP AT CRITICISING THE JEWS [NOTE: THIS WASN’T ANTISEMITISM, JUST AN OBSERVATION]. 

TO MANY PEOPLE, FOURIER WAS THE FIRST TO MENTION AND ADVOCATE “FEMINISM”. AS WELL HE PROMOTED THE FREEDOM OF HOMOSEXUALITY. HIS MOST IMPORTANT PHILOSOPHICAL WORK REVOLVE AROUND THE CREATION OF EGALITARIAN SOCIETIES, ENLIGHTENED UTOPIAS — AND PROBABLY KIBBUTZ…

IN THE AGE OF “ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE”, OF GLOBAL WARMING, OF ALL LIBERTIES BEING THROTTLED AND CONTINUOUS STUPID WARS, WE SHOULD INVESTIGATE “FOURIERISM”…

 

Political / Government – Fourier never suggest any government and suggested voluntary participation for the phalanxes to work. Emulation of the initial community would be inspired by the first community and spread because of the benefits that the community would have and produce.

Ecology – because of the eventual international spread of Fourierism, Charles believed war would be eliminated in our society and armies would arise only for large scale projects that would engage in mainly ecological projects such as climate transformation.

WHY FOURIERISM - Charles Fourier’s ideas for Fourierism arise from a need for a better work environment and liberty for all. Although he felt industry could produce wealth he thought its methods were alienating. The Phalanx would be a type of work unit in which work was distributed on a rational and rotating basis. Fourier thought that the phalanx would produce triple the products of industry because of the industrial attraction and concord of the passions in the Phalanx communities. Fourier thought that his ideas would produce liberty for all. He felt liberty if not enjoyed by all is unreal and with Fourierism we would be able to secure liberty.

https://blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/utopia/?p=215

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WE CAN OBSERVE THAT ALL ABRAHAMIC RELIGIONS ARE MALE ORIENTED. THE STATUS OF WOMEN IN AFGHANISTAN IS APPALLINGLY DECIDED BY THEIR MALES, NOT BY THEMSELVES. THE SAME GOES FOR IRAN — AND in AMERICA, WHERE A LARGE  PROPORTION OF WOMEN STILL LIVE UNDER MALE DOMINATION DESPITE APPEARANCES. THE TECHNIQUES OF DOMINATION ARE VARIED AND CAN BE SUBTLE....

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Arielle Angel has the same recurring nightmare. She's on a plane when she suddenly realizes her destination is Israel. Panic grips her. Dilemmas flood her mind: Who will she call when she lands? And who will she even tell that she's there? Sometimes the dream ends when the plane touches down in the Holy Land. Other times, she doesn't wake up until after she arrives and meets her Israeli relatives. 

Angel, 41, editor-in-chief of the American magazine Jewish Currents, has visited Israel several times. She grew up in a "very Zionist" household in Miami, within one of the most conservative Jewish communities in the United States, and came of age during the era of the old American Jewish consensus where "Judaism" and "Zionism" were synonymous, the two solid pillars of a self-evident identity. The Israeli flag at school, the March of the Living in Poland, Jewish summer camps, extended stays in Israel. In her youth, when Angel spoke about what Israel did, she used the first-person plural: “We did.” 

But she has moved on and has no intention of returning, not even for a visit.

Today, Angel identifies as anti-Zionist, like many of her colleagues at Jewish Currents, a left-leaning publication in American Jewish journalism. Since her appointment as editor-in-chief in 2018, as part of an initiative to revive the dormant magazine, the publication has become much more than just a collection of articles and essays on culture and politics. For many of the 10,000 subscribers to the quarterly print edition (and some 2.5 million annual visitors to its digital version), it represents a community hub and a critical space for discussion about a left-wing American Jewish identity that is trying to reinvent itself.

….

ADAPTED FROM Haaretz, Itay Mashiach

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SEE ALSO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xs0zS8FCNlY

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A DOSE OF FOURIERISM:

Philosophy was right to vaunt liberty; it is the foremost desire of all societies' creatures. But philosophy forgot that in civilized societies liberty is illusory if the common people lack wealth. When the wage-earning classes are poor, their independence is as fragile as a house without foundations. The free man who lacks wealth immediately sinks back under the yoke of the rich. The newly freed slave takes fright at the need of providing for his own subsistence and hastens to sell himself back into slavery in order to escape this new anxiety that hangs over him like Damocles' sword. In thoughtlessly giving him liberty without wealth, you merely replace his physical torment with a mental torment. He finds life burdensome in his new state. . . . Thus when you give liberty to the people, it must be bolstered by two supports which are the guarantee of comfort and industrial attraction. . . .

Equality of rights is another chimera, praiseworthy when considered in the abstract and ridiculous from the standpoint of the means employed to introduce it in civilization. The first right of men is the right to work and the right to a minimum [wage]. This is precisely what has gone unrecognized in all the constitutions. Their primary concern is with favored individuals who are not in need of work. They begin with pompous lists of the elect from privileged families to whom the law guarantees an income of fifty or one hundred thousand francs for the simple task of governing the people or sitting in an upholstered seat and voting with the majority in a senate. If the first page of the constitution serves to provide administrators with guarantees of affluence and idleness, it would be well for the second page to pay some attention to the lot of the lower classes, to the proportional minimum and the right to work, which are omitted in all constitutions, and to the right to pleasure, which is guaranteed only by the mechanism of the industrial series. . . .

Let's turn to fraternity. Our discussion here will be amusing, at once loathsome and learned. It is amusing in view of the imbecility of the theories which have purported to establish fraternity. It is loathsome when one recalls the horrors that the ideal of fraternity has masked. But it is a problem which deserves particular attention from science; for societies will attain their goal, and man his dignity, only when universal fraternity has become an established fact. By universal fraternity we mean a degree of general intimacy which can only be realized if four conditions are satisfied:

Comfort for the people and the assurance of a splendid minimum;

The education and instruction of the lower classes;

General truthfulness in work relations;

The rendering of reciprocal services by unequal classes.

Once these four conditions are met, the rich Mondor will have truly fraternal relations with Irus who, despite his poverty, will have no need of a protector and no motive to deceive anyone, and whose fine education will enable him to associate with princes. . . . As for the present, how could there be any fraternity between sybarites steeped in refinements and our coarse, hungry peasants who are covered with rags and often with vermin and who carry contagious diseases like typhus, mange, replica and other such fruits of civilized poverty? What sort of fraternity could ever be established between such heterogeneous classes of men?

— CHARLES FOURIER

“de la methode mixte” La Phalange [1848]

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MEANWHILE:

Women in the People's Republic of China are considered to be among the most "liberated" in the world.1 This was not always the case; in fact, traditionally only Japan and some of the Islamic countries had a worse record than China as regards women's rights. In the twenty-five years since the establishment of the People's Republic of China, the masses of Chinese women have evolved from one of the most op- pressed to one of the most "liberated." To achieve this phenomenal transformation within one generation, the Chinese Communists had to change not only the legal status of women but also the entire socio- political order that had kept women oppressed for centuries.

This is remarkable considering that male supremacy was inherent in traditional Chinese culture. In the words of Confucius: "To be a woman means to submit."2 This submission spanned the woman's entire life through the Confucian doctrine known as "The Three Obediences and Four Virtues." The "Three obediences" were reserved first to her father when young, to her husband when married and to her sons when widowed. The "four virtues" included "women's virtue," "women's speech," "women's appearance," and "women's chore."3 With a few rare exceptions, such as the Empress Dowager Tzu-hsi who wielded tremendous power at the turn of the century, women were second-class citizens for centuries.

https://asj.upd.edu.ph/mediabox/archive/ASJ-16-1978/dorros-women-china.pdf

 

The history of the Cooperative Movement in China began a quarter of the way into the 20th century, when Chinese modernizers and sympathetic foreigners promoted cooperatives as a tool for reforming the Chinese economy.

This accelerated during the Guomindang's peak control of the country in the 1930s, when cooperatives were a significant plank of the Guomindang's development policy. After the Communist Revolution, cooperatives became the first form by which the Chinese economy was brought under socialist principles in the 1950s. Even after reform and opening up, cooperatives remain a significant part of the modern Chinese economy.

 

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The modern cooperative movement arose in the early 19th century as a response to the negative social consequences of the Industrial Revolution and thus was a response to the same conditions that begot the wider labor movement. Two men are typically credited with developing the modern concept of the cooperative enterprise: Robert Owen in Britain and Charles Fourier on the European continent.[1] They advocated that, instead of having businesses be owned by private individuals who pay workers wages and then keep all remaining profits, businesses be set up that gave ownership to the workers themselves as a class. These proposals soon developed into a social movement that was present in many countries; in 1895, the First International Co-operative Congress was held, which lead to the foundation of the International Co-operative Alliance.[2]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_cooperative_movement_in_China?

 

PLEASE VISIT:

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

         RABID ATHEIST.

         WELCOME TO THIS INSANE WORLD….

4 movements...

[1996] — The Theory of the Four Movements appeared in the war-torn France of 1808.1 By any standards, it was an outlandish, disorganised and disconcerting mixture of ingredients. A well-observed critique of marriage, of the iniquities of free competition leading to 'industrial feudalism', of the tedium of work in civilisation and of the errors of the French Revolution was set side by side with assertions about the copulation between planets, oracular pronouncements about the life-span of the earth, extravagant promises about a new religion of 'voluptuousness' and a cryptic prospectus of the amorous and gastronomic delights which would accompany it. No author's name appeared on the title page and the place of publication, Lyons, was misleadingly stated to be Leipzig. Finally, whatever the other merits of the book, the exposition of The Theory of the Four Movements itself was bewilderingly brief: barely four pages, much of it in a footnote, scarcely more than the space-filling digression on the sad decline of provincial theatre.

Some of these obscurities can be attributed to worries about cen­sorship during the First Ernpire.2 So can some of the circumlocutions. For instance, the war between France and England was prudently renamed 'the battle against insular monopoly'. The author had already discovered that Bonapartist officials were par­ticularly allergic to military pessimism. But, generally, the bizarre form of the book faithfully reflected authorial intention. The author, the enigmatically named 'Mr Charles at Lyons', was in fact the genuinely obscure Charles Fourier, a small silk broker and commer­cial traveller around the fairs of Europe. He did not intend the book to clarify, but to tantalise. His book should provide no more than 'a glimpse' of the truth. It was only to be a prospectus. The theory itself would be revealed in a six-volume treatise, once supported by one thousand subscribers.

But when the book was published, ridicule was the only attention Fourier received. Reviewers did not notice 'the pearl in the mud':3 those intimations of a great scientific discovery discreetly deposited by Fourier amid the queerly assorted passages which made up the book. Their attention was riveted by the promise that the Earth would recover its 'northern crown' and that the sea would taste of lemonade. The mockery hurt. France was therefore 'punished' by the author's silence. The first instalment of the promised treatise did not appear until 1822.4

Despite its weirdness and its inauspicious reception, The Theory of the Four Movements did represent an important moment in the history of political and social theory. Not only did it announce the most extraordinary utopia of the nineteenth century, it was also perhaps the first to define 'the social problem' as the nineteenth century came to conceive it. The evils of 'free competition'; the poverty that accompanied civilisation; the uselessness of the rights of man without a right to work or the right to a minimum standard of living; the resort to adultery or prostitution as the product of women's subordination; the hypocrisy and 'cuckoldry' which belied civilised marriage; the misery, waste and overproduction which resulted from the lack of association between capital, labour and talent; the tedium and monotony of 'civilised' work: these were issues repeatedly raised in subsequent nineteenth-century dis­ cussions of the 'social question' or 'the social evil'.

Equally novel was Fourier's definition of the 'social'. This was now a sphere which at once undercut and transcended the tra­ ditional domains of law, morality and politics. Furthermore this depiction of the 'social problem' went together with the rejection of all pre-existing moral and political theory and its supposed result, the French Revolution. Henceforth change was no longer to be expected from the political and ethical realm, but from 'the indus­ trial and domestic'. Politics itself became no more than a symptom of the 'declining' phase of an 'incoherent' social order, a pathologi­ cal product of the mistaken premises upon which civilisation was based. Similarly, the unit of change was no longer the polity, the social change of the future was to be cosmic.

For these reasons, The Theory of the Four Movements was acknowledged not simply as a pioneering exploration of the social, but also as a founding document of socialist thought. In Harmony which was within reach of humanity, there would be no need for the conventional sanctions of political and religious authority. Here then was one primitive source of all those nineteenth and twentieth­ century visions of the 'withering away of the state' taken as a conse­ quence of the solution to the 'social problem'.

https://files.libcom.org/files/Fourier%20-%20The%20Theory%20of%20the%20Four%20Movements.pdf

 

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PLEASE VISIT:

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

         RABID ATHEIST.

         WELCOME TO THIS INSANE WORLD….

the women...

The Women Deliver conference in Melbourne exposed the global decline in humanitarian aid amid escalating conflict. Aleta Moriarty was there.

Women Deliver is the largest gathering of women leaders, rights advocates and activists anywhere in the world, bringing together 6,000 people from 189 countries.

Alongside the activists were former leaders Julia Gillard, Jacinda Ardern, Helen Clarke and Justin Trudeau, who confronted the defining crises of our time: a world at war, the global rise of authoritarianism, the unchecked power of corporations, and the systematic erosion of the multilateral system.

Out of it came the Melbourne Declaration for Gender Equality, a global commitment to rebalance power, resources and accountability for girls, women and gender-diverse people.

A world at war

Conflict was front and centre, with representatives from almost all conflict-affected regions and countries, including Myanmar, Palestine, Lebanon, and Afghanistan.

According to the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP), 61 active state-based conflicts were recorded in 2024,  the highest number since records began in 1946. The International Committee of the Red Cross puts the total number of armed conflicts at 130, double the figure of fifteen years ago. The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED) estimates

one in eight people worldwide is now exposed to conflict.

The burden falls disproportionately on women and girls. UN Women reports that in 2024, approximately 676 million women and girls, 17% of the global female population, lived within 50 kilometres of active conflict zones, the highest share since the 1990s.

Sexual violence remains one of the most systematic features of contemporary warfare.  During the Bosnian War, rape was widely used as a weapon. Women were systematically detained, forcibly impregnated, and held captive until they gave birth, denied abortion by design, their bodies conscripted as instruments of ethnic cleansing. The erasure of a people, all delivered through the bodies of women.

The UN Secretary-General’s 2025 Report on Conflict-Related Sexual Violence documented an 87% increase in cases since 2022, widely acknowledged as a significant undercount, given the stigma, fear of reprisal and restricted humanitarian access that prevent reporting.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo alone, 38,000 cases were reported by service providers in North Kivu in the first months of 2025. In Sudan, UN Women reported a 288% increase in demand for lifesaving support following rape and sexual violence in April 2025.

These are not mere statistics; they are women, each one a universe of relationships and possibilities,

unmade by atrocity and crime.

“(We need) a little reflection of what is happening and what it does, conflict. What conflict does to an actual human being, right? said Afghan woman and refugee Zohra Mousavi from Bridge to Safety.

“We always forget about that, we forget about the lives of people. We talk about numbers. It becomes just incredibly difficult to then narrow it down to remember that we’re talking about humans.”

A flood of people

Conflict uproots lives on a vast scale. UNHCR recorded more than 123 million forcibly displaced people in 2024, approximately one in every 67 people on Earth.

Among the most acute situations is Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh, a country where the average income is around $2000 a month. It is the world’s largest refugee camp, home to around 1.3 million stateless Rohingya refugees, approximately three times the population of Canberra, with more than 75% of them women and children.

The camp is one of the most desperate and densely populated places on earth, with 47,000 people crammed per square kilometre and residents living in bamboo and tarpaulin shelters, acutely vulnerable to landslides, flooding, fires and cyclones.

“Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh…are living in such horrible conditions. I was there last year. Six thousand five hundred learning centres have shut. When I went, there were children roaming around in every single street trying to look for things to do when they should be at school, said Noor Azizah, survivor of the ongoing Rohingya genocide and co-executive director of the Rohingya Women’s Collaborative Network.

“We need funding to make sure our people are not just surviving. They need food. People are living on seven dollars a month now… And because people are not able to live with these short stipends, women are looking for jobs in really dangerous jobs, you know, leaving the camps, young children are doing sex work.”

Candy over human aid

At the very moment need has surged, the humanitarian system has been eviscerated. The withholding of support itself becomes a weapon, as deliberate and as deadly as any other. In addition, broader aid cuts have systemically targeted programming that supports women, whether this be for sexual and reproductive health or to support women’s rights.

Between 2024 and 2025, more than 30% of global humanitarian funding disappeared, driven primarily by cuts to USAID, but triggering wider contraction from other major donors, including Germany and Sweden.

The Council on Foreign Relations reported that total humanitarian funding had dropped to 2016 levels, with agencies now forced to

cut food from the hungry to preserve dwindling resources for the starving.

Data from the Council on Foreign Relations starkly demonstrate this.

A paper published in The Lancet forecast that global aid cuts could result in between 9.4 and 22.6 million additional deaths by 2030. This is comparable to the number of deaths attributed to COVID-19, yet receives a fraction of the attention.

“This erosion of multilateralism is not part of efficiency, it is part of militarisation, it is not a reform or a merger, it is an attack and all of it must be resisted,” said Kate Gilmore, former United Nations Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights, adding, “The most critical impacts of the deliberate dismantlement are being borne by ‘we the peoples….

(this) death march is not austerity, it is atrocity.

The obscenity of the richest man in the world, holding a chainsaw, celebrating these cuts that have led children to die or enter sex work, should plague all our minds.  According to Forbes, Elon Musk’s net worth reached $800 billion in February 2026, exceeding the GDP of Sweden, Norway and Singapore. In 2025 alone, he added approximately $194 billion to his personal wealth.

Australia’s aid declining

Australia’s aid budget tells a story of quiet retreat. While nominal figures appear to be rising, the aid budget is going backwards once adjusted for inflation or measured against Gross National Income.

In 2025–26, aid represented just 0.63% of the federal budget, small by international standards, and it keeps falling.

Australians grossly overestimate our aid contributions. A 2015 survey found that 19% of Australians believed aid made up at least 5% of the federal budget, around 8 times more than the actual figure of 0.63%.

Attacks on humanitarian aid workers

It hasn’t just been humanitarian funding that has been targeted, but the frontline humanitarian workers themselves, in numbers we have simply never seen before.

The last two years have been the deadliest consecutive years for humanitarian workers ever recorded. In 2024 alone, a record 383 aid workers were killed, more than double the annual average of the previous decade, driven primarily by the war in Gaza and the civil war in Sudan, which together accounted for the majority of deaths.

The Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement lost 38 staff and volunteers in 2024 alone, while 289 UN personnel were killed in Gaza,  the largest loss of UN staff in any single crisis in history. Likewise, among them was Australia’s very own Zomi Frankcom, struck by an Israeli drone while delivering food for World Central Kitchen in clearly marked vehicles. We still await the results of the official investigation.

SEE: laizawmi.....

“We are in the midst of a complete breakdown of the international system, said Agnes Callamard, Secretary General of Amnesty International.  “In the past, we warned of the imminent possibility of the breakdown. Right now, what we are saying we’re past warning. We’re in the middle of it

“We have found that there are predators who are intent on destroying the system through violations of international law and of the multilateral system. But it’s not just that they violate it, that they are insisting that these (systems) are dead.”

Ushering in the preventable death of millions has left many asking how a system so fundamental to the world’s most vulnerable could be destabilised so rapidly and easily by so few. 

This was one of the central questions at Women Deliver, and the answer many participants kept returning to was that the international multilateral system needs to decentralise. Get the money, the power, and the decision-making out of institutions that can be captured overnight, and into the hands of the grassroots actors already doing the work.

Connecting every crisis discussed at Women Deliver 2026 is not complexity; it is choice. The big question is whether governments like ours will make more humane choices, with real resources, real leadership. real accountability, and the political will to match.

https://michaelwest.com.au/women-deliver-conference-glimmers-of-hope-amid-the-doom-and-gloom/

 

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PLEASE VISIT:

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

         RABID ATHEIST.

         WELCOME TO THIS INSANE WORLD….