A recently published New York Times article reported on how the campaign message this year of a U.S. presidential candidate, Hillary Rodham Clinton, is apparently not being embraced by younger generations of women and feminists in the USA.

Two icons of American female success quoted in the story — Gloria Steinem and Madeleine Albright — in particular caused a bit of an uproar. While it seems that my progressive sisters on social media and elsewhere have this matter well under control and are putting everything into proper perspective for the press, for what it’s worth I offer a few independent observations of my own. After all, if Steinem and Albright are the type of people who are waving the banner for Hillary Clinton, then it’s important that we know all about them.

So, let us look a bit more closely at the two prominent women quoted in that story. And to deal with any lingering doubts or questions that may remain, a list of “Frequently Asked Questions” is provided for the benefit of readers at this end of this blog column.

Secret Agent Woman

In a recent television interview, Gloria Steinem, when confronted with the issue of why younger generations of women are today supporting presidential candidate Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton, responded: “When you’re young, you’re thinking, ‘Where are the boys?’ The boys are with Bernie or wherever,” implying that hormones, not intellect, are the primary factor for young women in deciding which political candidate to support.

She also mentioned something that made a whole lot of sense to me: “Women get more radical as we get older. It’s the opposite of men. Men tend to get more conservative because they gain power as they age, and women get more radical because they lose power as they age.”

It made sense to me because it helped explain why Steinem, at such an “unradical” young age in the late 1950s and 1960s, decided she would work as an operative for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), as this Chicago Tribune story recalls.

Author and professor Hugh Wilford, in his book The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (Harvard University Press, 2008), details how Gloria Steinem, a young, politically idealistic person, knowingly joined a CIA media front company (the Independent Research Service) to essentially help sabotage youth festivals in Europe in the late 1950s and early 1960s that were believed to be under communist influence.

When the whole thing came to light in 1967 as part of an exposé by the San Francisco-based muckraking magazine Ramparts, Steinem, to her credit, did not deny her four-year service to the CIA, as this television interview at the time shows. On the contrary, she was pleasantly surprised at how “liberal” the CIA really was: “…I had the conventional liberal’s view [of the CIA] as a right-wing incendiary group, and I was amazed to discover that this was far from the case — that they [the CIA] were enlightened, liberal, nonpartisan activists of the sort who characterized the Kennedy administration, for instance.”

Just to put it all into proper perspective: This was at a time when the U.S. war on Vietnam was raging with full CIA participation, and in an age when the “enlightened, liberal” CIA that Steinem worked for was waging secret wars around the world, and overthrowing democratic governments and installing puppet leaders more amenable to the whims of Washington and Wall Street.

In the years and decades that followed, as Steinem came to be increasingly respected as a symbol of American feminism, she never denied her earlier CIA ties — but never renounced them either. To get a more complete picture of Gloria Steinem’s importance to feminism and woman’s rights, though, you are encouraged to visit her website and spend some time looking around. You’ll find much to be impressed by there (except, of course, anything having to do with the CIA).

The Bureaucratic Butcher of Baghdad

At a campaign rally recently, Madeleine Albright, a respected U.S. diplomat and politician, said in support of Hillary Clinton: “Just remember, there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other,” as the crowd roared and Mrs. Clinton laughed heartily. Albright assured Clinton that she was “not only going to the White House, but to that other place” as well, and pointed upward to heaven (as opposed to hell), earning a warm hug from the candidate.

But have we forgotten so soon who Madeleine Albright was and what helped her to earn her esteemed place in history? During the presidency of U.S. president Bill Clinton, Albright served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. She later served as secretary of state in the Clinton administration, the first woman in U.S. history ever to do so. Impressive credentials, to be sure.

Yet it was in Albright’s capacity as U.N. representative that she had pushed hard for severe U.N. economic sanctions to remain in place as a punishment for Iraqi military dictator Saddam Hussein thumbing his nose at the mighty USA. In 1996, the CBS News program 60 Minutes, in a rare show of sympathy for victims of U.S. imperialism, aired a segment filmed in Iraq that showed the real victims of those U.S.-led sanctions — the civilian population of Iraq, and especially Iraqi children.

Reporter Lesley Stahl asked Albright, in her role as ambassador to the U.N., in an interview if the deaths of an estimated 500,000 Iraqi children were worth the moral price of keeping those sanctions in place. Albright’s infamous reply: “I think this is a very hard choice. But the price — we think the price is worth it. It is a moral question, but the moral question is even a larger one: Don’t we owe to the American people and to the American military — and to the other countries in the region — that this man [Saddam Hussein] not be a threat?”

This shocking statement was reported widely in news media of the Arab world at the time, but almost unreported in the domestic U.S. press. With those words, Albright was justifying the past deaths of an estimated half a million Iraqi children, and many more Iraqi people in the years to come. And notice the “we” in that statement, representing the consensus of the Democratic administration of then-president Bill Clinton and undoubtedly the support of then-First Lady Hillary Clinton.

Albright was in a position to exert some moral authority and call for the lifting of economic sanctions on the Iraqi people, but she would not and did not do it. She had sold her human soul by then.

It is true that Saddam Hussein (who the CIA originally helped put in power back in 1963) was a tyrant who did unspeakably horrible things to political dissidents in his country. But one thing he never did was condemn half a million or more of his own nation’s children to death. Madeleine Albright, on the other hand, had no qualms about doing just such a thing. If Saddam Hussein had earned the heinous title “The Butcher of Baghdad” in his lifetime, would it be going too far to say, then, that Madeleine Albright is “The Bureaucratic Butcher of Baghdad”? I don’t think it goes too far, and that’s exactly how I see her. And I know I’m not the only one in the world who thinks so.

And the Middle East is not the only place where Albright is an unpopular U.S. governmental figure, either. Witness the scene at a bookstore in Czechoslovakia (where Albright is originally from) just a few years ago: Some pro-Serbian activists approached her and criticized her role in the American-led 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, calling her a “war criminal”. Albright responded with an ethnic slur: “Disgusting Serbs! Get out!”

This is the eminent person chosen to help rally for Hillary Clinton in her current election campaign — an eminent person who literally condemned to death not only Iraqi children but also directed to purgatory any women in the U.S. who do not support Clinton as U.S. president. No wonder many young women activists are now taking Albright (and Clinton and Gloria Steinem) to task. They know the score, and are more in touch with what feminism means today than those three icons will ever be.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS (FAQs)

Question-1: All right, Mr. Smarty Pants — who are you going to vote for in the upcoming presidential election, a man or a woman? A liberal or a conservative?

Answer-1: It’s none of your business; that's what we have private balloting for. But I can tell you who I did vote for in the recent past for U.S. president: Dr. Cynthia McKinney. She would have made a damn fine U.S. president — not because she’s a woman or because she’s African American, but because of her stated policies of the massive redistribution of wealth in the United States and her commitment to human rights and environmental protection. I’m all for that.

Did she ever have a chance at getting elected U.S. president? Well, she would have, if more people had joined me in voting for her. And I sure don’t remember any icons of American feminism coming anywhere near McKinney’s campaign at the time. One thing is for sure: Cynthia McKinney would have shaken up the white male-dominated worlds of Washington and Wall Street in ways that Hillary Clinton (and Barack Obama too, for that matter) would never dare to do.

Q-2: What have you, a typical male, ever done about advancing the cause of womanhood?

A-2: Well, there’s always more that can be done on behalf of our sisters and getting them elected and placed in important decision-making positions, and we should always be committed to doing that. And what have I personally ever done for women? Well, I started out young in childhood: When my drunken, alcoholic father would be beating my mother to a pulp in the middle of the night, I would be the only one of three young boys to bother with protecting or defending her. In fact, it was I who eventually threw that chauvinistic pig of a husband/father out of our lives forever, thereby bringing some measure of peace and stability to the family. I was also put to work at a young age (in violation of labor union rules and child labor laws) so as to help my single mother pay the bills.

Many years later, when I was working at my first newspaper reporting job at the Tahoe Daily Tribune in South Lake Tahoe, California, I once wrote up a nice story on a prominent woman politician in our city. At that point, my boss (a female managing editor) promptly killed the story, saying that the prominent local woman who I chose to interview happened to be a political enemy of our newspaper publisher (a fat, obnoxious, middle-aged Republican white male). So, my news story was censored and never ran, teaching me a valuable lesson about how women’s issues really work in the USA, especially in the media. I could go on with more examples, but you get the picture.

Q-3: How dare you equate the honorable Madeleine Albright with a cold-blooded killer! Where is your sense of shame?

A-3: Probably back there somewhere in the 1990s with all the Iraqi mothers who had to lose their innocent children to starvation, malnourishment and lack of medical attention — all so that Washington and the United Nations could make a geopolitical point in the Middle East region.

And the same goes for all the mothers of Afghanistan and Iraq who lost their loved ones during the unlawful U.S. military invasions of their countries, respectively, in 2001 and 2003 — invasions that were fully supported at the time by Hillary Clinton and other “liberal” members of the Democratic Party, both male and female. I’ll stand on the side of Afghan and Iraqi women any day of the week; they know what it really means to take the brunt of war policies carried out by powerful, well-connected U.S. women like Madeleine Albright and Hillary Clinton.

Q-4: What do you suggest we do, let the Republicans come back into the White House again? That would be a total disaster. What can’t people like you just get behind the Democrats now and support Hillary Clinton?

A-4: Sure, right. As if the drastic escalation of the so-called “war on terror” by President Obama, a Democrat, hasn’t been a disaster in itself for the U.S. and the world these past eight years. Sister (and I’m assuming you’re a woman here), you should know your American history better than that by now. The U.S. presidential election is little more than “The Great American Ping-Pong Game” staged with great fanfare and obscene amounts of money every few years, with the two players being the Republican and Democratic party elites — and the ping-pong ball they swat back and forth being us, the voters.

It’s all about money and power, and who holds it and who doesn’t. Like many other people, I stopped voting Democrat (and started voting progressive) years ago and have never regretted it for a moment. It’s time for many more of us to opt out of the ping-pong game, overturn that playing table, change the rules, and make it a more honest and equitable game for all — not just for the wealthy, privileged few.

And if supporting Hillary Clinton and her ilk is absolutely your thing, then go for it. I guess all I can really say to you in that case is: Sisters for Hillary, Unite! All Power to the (Wealthy White Female) People! Unoccupy Wall Street! Chelsea Clinton for President in 2024!

Q-5: Self-hating women can be just as obstructive as men when it comes to moving women’s rights forward. Why don’t you understand that?

A-5: Oh, I get that part, all right. What I don’t understand is how you can have people of strained credibility like Secret Agent Woman (Gloria Steinem) and The Bureaucratic Butcher of Baghdad (Madeleine Albright) as your supporters, and then condemn to purgatory, as Albright literally did the other day, other feminists and women activists who don’t “get with the program” of voting for an elitist politician like Hillary Clinton.

The “self-hating _________ (fill in the blank)” label is a very useful tool for shaming people: There are the so-called self-hating Jews and Muslims, the self-hating Blacks/Latinos/Asians/Natives/Whites, the self-hating Christians and Protestants, the self-hating Republicans and Democrats, the self-hating Progressives, even the self-hating Yuppies. (Wait a minute, scratch that last one.) Where does it all end? Stop the harmful accusations and the negative labeling, for starters. Maybe then we can get somewhere and start changing things for real.