Francesca Cassinelli

“One particular contribution, featured on the cover of Time in 2016, shows a nearly naked Sudanese teenager, pregnant with her rapist’s child—an image that no magazine would feature of an American girl. Discussing her 2018 photo book, Of Love & War, Addario’s own bravery at going out into a war zone is front and center, while the heroism of the civilians actually enduring war, imposed by the United States and its allies, never comes up.”
― Rafia Zakaria, Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption

“Durante la violación, llevaba en el bolsillo de mi cazadora Teddy blanca y roja una navaja, mango negro brillante, mecánica impecable, cuchilla fina pero larga, afilada, perfecta, radiante. Una navaja que yo sacaba con bastante facilidad en esa época globalmente confusa. Me había acostumbrado a ella; a mi manera, había aprendido a usarla. Esa noche, la navaja se quedó escondida en mi bolsillo y la única idea que me vino a la cabeza fue: sobre todo que no la encuentren, que no decidan jugar con ella. Ni siquiera pensé en utilizarla.”
― Virginie Despentes, Teoría King Kong

“One particularly distressing example of the high cost to feminist progress exacted by the war is what happened in Pakistan after the capture of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in 2011. In the run-up to his capture, the CIA and the U.S. military allegedly worked with the charity Save the Children in hiring Dr. Shakil Afridi, a Pakistani physician, to run a fake Hepatitis B vaccination program as a front for their surveillance operations.15 Per CIA instructions, Dr. Afridi and a female healthcare worker visited the bin Laden compound under the guise of administering vaccinations and managed to gain access, although they did not see bin Laden. In 2012, all foreign Save the Children staff were expelled from Pakistan, and in 2015, the entire organization there was required to shut its doors, despite having denied (and continuing to deny) that it was involved in this effort. The CIA managed to get their guy, but when the Pakistanis, irate at not having been told about the raid, expelled U.S. military trainers from Islamabad, they were immediately threatened with a cut of the $800 million aid package that the U.S. had promised, thus exposing yet again the coercive power that aid wields. The loss of aid money was not, however, the worst impact of the tragedy. As the British medical journal The Lancet reported, the unintended victims of the tragedy were the millions of Pakistani children whose parents now refused to have them vaccinated amidst rising rates of polio, a disease that vaccination had essentially extinguished in Western countries by the mid-twentieth century.16 In their view, if the CIA could hire a doctor to run a fake vaccine program, then the whole premise of vaccinations became untrustworthy. Within a few years of the raid, Pakistan had 60 percent of all the world’s confirmed polio cases.17”
― Rafia Zakaria, Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption

“is a phenomenon of failed democracies, and its novelty was that, instead of simply clamping silence upon citizens as classical tyranny had done since earliest times, it found a technique to channel their passions into the construction of an obligatory domestic unity around projects of internal cleansing and external expansion.”
― Robert O. Paxton, What Is Fascism? From the Anatomy of Fascism