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“It cannot be overstated: there are no feminist bombs, feminist prisons, feminist cops, or feminist wars. There are only paid actors who have convinced people that their eventual demise and the demise of the planet is what will empower their lives today.”

– Nour Jaghama and Grace Siegelman [1]

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In November of 2001, Laura Bush, the First Lady of the United States indicated the War in Afghanistan, Operation Enduring Freedom was to “liberate Afghan Women.” Before long, leaders of the Feminist Majority Foundation, joined forces with the U.S. government in promoting the war as part of a coalition of hope for the women of Afghanistan.[2]

It should be pointed out that an organization of Afghan women fighting for human rights and for social justice in Afghanistan since 1977 opposed the attacks and the U.S. backed government set up to replace the Taliban. [3]

Women’s marches across America in advance of last year’s presidential election determined to “show the strength of our feminist movement” were strangely silent about the women of Palestine who together with children which according to a poll released 3 days after the election made up nearly 70 percent of verified deaths. [4][5]

While one can’t deny the spectacular achievements of women’s groups throughout the 20th century, divisions within the movement connected to class and race are visible.[6][7]

More significantly, it seems as if feminism is now entrenched in the beast of Western imperial control, just as it can be argued other forms of activism, like environmental activism, is secretly and probably unwittingly servicing financial elites.[8]

But there is an even more stunning revelation in play. The broader system that encourages and propels humanity in favour of antagonism toward women and life generally has been left untouched by today’s major feminist movements.

Today feminist movements by and large seem more concerned with the more narrow but agreed upon concerns around attaining gender equality. This is in fact the stated theme for this year’s International Womens Day – “Accelerate Action,” emphasizing the urgency of expediting progress toward gender parity. [9]

In a nutshell, it can be argued, women’s organizations today are proceeding to pluck the noxious weeds of the visible assailants at the stem. But, this radio program is endeavouring to pluck them out at the root and stop the patterns of oppression from continuing to devour the women, the communities and the very life from our planet. On the Global Research News Hour, this good gardening tip will be the focus of our examination of women’s rights on the Golden Anniversary of International Women’s Day.

In our first half hour, we have a conversation with Dr. Claudia von Werlhof, an academic currently focused on the critique of patriarchy, about what patriarchy is and how it can be fought. In our second half hour, we are joined once again by award-winning journalist, broadcaster and author Sonali Kolhatkar about the rise and fall of women’s rights in Afghanistan BEFORE THE TALIBAN CAME TO POWER. And then later we speak to CODEPINK’s Palestinian-American campaigner Nour Jaghama about the little spoken and unacknowledged defiance and resistance among Palestinian women and what needs to be done to ensure that the feminism we practice today is not used as a vehicle for military and capitalist gain.

Claudia von Werlhof, born in 1943 near Berlin, Germany, is a University Professor of political sciences and women’s studies in Austria at Innsbruck, mother of a sun. She co-invented the “Bielefeld School” in Germany, worked at the grass roots in Central- and South America, developed the “Critical Theory of Patriarchy”, co-founded FIPAZ (Research Institute for the Critique of Patriarchy and Alternative Civilizations), the “Planetary Movement for Mother Earth” and “BOOMERANG – Journal for the Critique of Patriarchy”. She is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization, Montreal.

Sonali Kolhatlar is a Journalist, activist, and artist, and the founder, host, and executive producer of Pacifica’s  popular weekly program Rising Up With Sonali which airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica radio stations. She is also the founding Co-Director of the Afghan Women’s Mission, a US-based non-profit solidarity organization that funds the work of RAWA.

Nour Jaghama is CODEPINK’s Palestine and Iran Campaigner. Nour graduated from DePaul University with a bachelor’s degree in International Studies in June 2022. She has been advocating for Palestinian liberation for over 5 years, including organizing within her university. She also organizes around related issues, such as abolition. She is co-author of the article Does Your Feminism Include Palestine?

(Global Research News Hour Episode 464)

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Transcript of Dr. Claudia von Werlhof, March 6, 2025

Global Research: Could you talk about patriarchy? I mean, what do you mean by that term? And when and why did it come into existence in the first place?

Claudia von Werlhof: Well, it’s a difficult story, but I did my best to dismantle it in a way. Because normally, if at all the term patriarchy is used, it is used as a term that defines something like a rule of men over women or the domination of men and something like a political category of rule over, but mostly nothing else. And what we learned also with Rosalie Bertell was that patriarchy has a totally different meaning, a much more general meaning that includes especially technologies.

That is something normally not seen and not conceived as a problem, but we did our best to define it that way. One could say that patriarchy is a system, and our civilization is patriarchal today as well, is a system that tries to change the natural order as such, especially the fact that Mother Earth, as well as women in general, are those who create life and who are the creators of life in general worldwide. And this is exactly what a patriarchal ruler or a patriarchal idea does not like.

They want to be the rulers themselves, and they want to be the creators themselves. So something like we could say that the planet is organized in a motherly way. The planet is our mother, Mother Earth.

And the fathers are just a term that is different. And the fathers in patriarchy, pater means father, that’s a Latin term, want to be the origin, arche. This is a Greek term, patriarchy, pater and arche.

They want to be the creators of everything. And this means that they have developed a system in which all natural conditions and women as creators are destroyed and replaced by something else. At least, this is their utopia.

The utopia of patriarchy is replacing the world as it is by something else, namely a fatherly world or an artificially produced world that is not natural anymore and is beyond women and nature, so to say. This is the big, I mean, movement that patriarchy that exists since about 6,000 years only, this is not much, has followed. It’s the path of patriarchy that we can see today.

And Rosalie was the first to acknowledge this in relation to our planet as such. So the military tries to something like to change the earth as a living being, as our Mother Earth, and transform her into a weapon of war. This is what she found out in her book, in her last book, Planet Earth, the Latest Weapon of War in 2000.

So this is the larger line that we have explained by our research. And that means that all these idea of rule of men over women only is just one feature or one part of the whole game. And that the whole game is essential for men as well, and for everybody else, and for nature as such, because it is destructive.

It’s first of all destructive. I call this method the alchemical standard procedure. It is a method that starts with destroying everything, and then using the matter that is left to rebuild it with something else together.

So in order to create some artificial world, and this world today is the machine world. So this in short is our definition of patriarchy, which is much broader and much more important than all these other definitions we had until now.

GR: What are prominent examples of patriarchy’s malefacts in the 21st century today?

CVW: Well, the whole technological development. I mean, the machine technology was the first attempt to replace a living nature that was defined as dead, dead matter by the sciences to replace her by a machine production or a machine world, which is important because the machine is not just a device or so, but is a system which is growing all the time because the machine tries to transform everything into machinery, not just what it did already, but all the rest. This is what Gunther Anders, one of the most important critics of machine production, and he’s a philosopher in Austria.

He said it’s the trend towards the one machine. Everything is becoming only a single machine or what Mumford called the mega machine. And this is exactly what is happening today with the new fourth industrial revolution.

That is all these technologies in the micro and macro level, starting with the earth, like Bertel, down to DNA, to synthetic biology, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, and all the biological technologies that are related to this concept of destruction, down to subatomic levels even, and all the atomic industry, of course, is part of the same game, and transform that into a totally new creation that has nothing to do with nature and its development and evolution anymore. So this is until we have the problem with transhumanism, that this technology also includes the human as such, men and women and everything, trying even to replace the mother by machinery. So you have that.

What is happening today is exactly the last phase or the last possibility this technology of patriarchy has developed.

GR: The counterforce, as I understand it, against patriarchy then is a female-dominated matriarchy. What’s an example of recognizing this principle and applying it in a practical way?

CVW: Well, no, matriarchy was never a female-dominated civilization.

I mean, a matriarchal civilization is much older than the patriarchal one, and it never developed a domination system or a system that was ruled by women instead of men. This is a lie that is repeated everywhere all the time. There have been so many researchers of matriarchal societies until now.

That is a knowledge that is not recognized anywhere, it seems, because matriarchal society was in tune with nature. And this is exactly the difference to patriarchal society that wants to destroy nature and replace her by something else. This is the difference.

By the way, very difficult to see that because patriarchs don’t tell their inventions as post-natural or anti-natural ones, but they say it’s the new nature, it’s the better nature, and it’s the second nature, etc., the more developed nature, because they try to avoid that people see what’s really happening. So the matriarchal stuff is something else, which is very different from patriarchy, especially in that it never developed a technology or anything against nature, but cooperated with nature all the time, something like a culture oriented towards the nature that was surrounding it. So this is the complete difference to patriarchal development.

GR: As I understand it, Indigenous peoples all over the world, as I understand it, they worked according to that matriarchal principle of working with nature and not working for the big buck or whatever. Is that essentially what we’re talking about reverting to?

CVW: Yes, as far as they are still matriarchal or nearly quasi-matriarchal, because most of the Indigenous peoples have been destroyed by colonizers, etc., so they have lost their matriarchal qualities as a society, but there are many left, many are left, and there are still matriarchal groups and societies around the world, but they are now threatened by globalization and everything and all that destruction that takes place, but they still exist. So you can prove that they really exist and have existed so far.

And what I see in the alternative movements, social movements around the world in the south of this planet, most of them really want to return to a matriarchal society, even if they don’t call it like that. The term matriarchy is not really used or patriarchy in that way, but from their content, it’s very clear that they want to return to a nature-based and cooperative society without rules, domination, and all that stuff that we know from patriarchy, especially in modern times related to capitalist patriarchy. So this is clear, they want to return.

It happened in Europe as well, when Europe became modern, in modern times, and all these movements of the peasants and the women were related to a return to a matriarchal past, because Europe was a matriarchal society as well. But normally it’s not recognized, but this is a fact. So we have that in common.

But until now, it is very difficult to return from a patriarchal society to a matriarchal one. This has never happened until now, but people want to do it in a way. It would be a solution for many, many problems.

GR: A lot of the problem is that it’s not, these issues, they’re not well explained by media, especially today. Could we alter the media, given its strong allegiances to the corporate and military sectors? Can we counter patriarchy in the media, or is media like the military so patriarchy-dominated that it should be abandoned altogether?

CVW: Yes, but the media wouldn’t do that. I mean, we know what the media are and how they function.

I mean, there are alternative media. And of course, I think that the situation is going to be worse always more. I mean, I call it an alchemical war system in which we are in now, and you will have wars around the world always, and people will have to try to get to another civilization.

Of course, they will try to. But until now, there is no understanding of the real problem that is what I call patriarchy. It’s not understood at all, and most people really react aggressively because they think, oh, men are now to be blamed, et cetera.

But it’s a question of much more than just men. It’s a system. I call it also, it hates life.

It’s a hatred of life that we are experiencing because everything which is alive is going to be destroyed by these technologies and these interests behind, like the military and capital, et cetera. And this is what is occurring, but people until now do not understand what is really happening. So this is a question of how to, yeah, well, how to make this known.

I mean, people will know when they are treated like transhumans now, or when these technologies are experienced as bad and as destructive, maybe then they will understand because then they are affected personally even, and maybe they will change their mind. But I don’t know. I mean, I am preparing the publication of my book, which is already in English translation, and it’s called Fathers of the Void.

And a subtitle is on the delusion or on the mania to create a new world. So this is meant by patriarchy who say that they are constructing a better and higher and a more civilized world, but a world which is beyond nature, women and all what we love. So the question of hatred is for me very important as the ultimate term that explains what is really happening.

They don’t like us. They want to do away with us. They hate us.

I mean, as the living beings and the living planet we are. So this is the problem. And this, by the way, this gender question you mentioned in the beginning, the gender question has nothing to do with any women’s movement.

This is something from above that prepares women and men to lose their sex, what is called sex generally. Gender is a social term, the social term, and sex is the more biological term. They want to try to destroy us by losing our sex in the form that is the natural sex we have.

So this is a part of this technological project of transforming the world into an anti-natural and a totally alien to nature civilization where most people don’t, all these trans discussion, et cetera, don’t understand whom they are serving when they just participate in this game.

GR: Have you gotten any negative feedback for your work on fighting patriarchy?

CVW: Well, the gender question, this is not feminism. Feminism is what we had in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. This was further on destroyed more and more by neoliberalism.

And all these approaches that came from high above like gender, et cetera. So this is not feminism. Feminism is something that is where I come from and that tries to define what is the problem.

I mean, this is our critical theory of patriarchy is exactly one of the outcomes of real feminism. There is the gender and other questions of the political participation of women in war, et cetera. And what you quoted in the beginning is something that we, of course, abhor.

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The Global Research News Hour airs every Friday at 1pm CT on CKUW 95.9FM out of the University of Winnipeg.

The programme is also broadcast weekly (Monday, 1-2pm ET) by the Progressive Radio Network in the US.

The programme is also podcast at globalresearch.ca

Notes:

1. https://www.globalresearch.ca/feminism-include-palestine/5870276
2. https://www.defenddemocracy.press/white-feminists-wanted-to-invade/
3. ibid;
4. https://www.globalresearch.ca/feminism-include-palestine/5870276
5. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/11/8/nearly-70-percent-of-deaths-in-gaza-are-women-and-children-un
6. https://www.unwomen.org/en/news/stories/2019/3/compilation-womens-activism-thats-changed-the-world
7. https://sociology.iresearchnet.com/sociology-of-race/multiracial-feminism/#google_vignette
8. https://www.globalresearch.ca/promoting-a-new-tyranny-under-the-guise-of-saving-the-planet/5760178
9. https://www.internationalwomensday.com/Theme