Anarchy, State and Afghanistan, 2001/09/19:12:48
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Reading about Afghan history is getting me down. These are seriously unhappy people, and there's no way I'm taking one little bit of responsibility for how messed up their lives are. Afghanistan has no oil wealth, the West (the U.S. in particular) gave some assistance in throwing the Russians out (which was held to be quite important at the time, although to hear tell now it was all a matter of training terrorists to kill Americans) and the subsequent distintegration seems to have more to do with tribal factionalism than anything else. At least one Arab (Iranian) commentator I've read argues that Afghans don't think of themselves as Afghans but as Tajiks or Pushtoon or whatever--that is, they identify with their tribe, not their country. Afghanistan in this view is not a nation-state but a geographical region, and anarchist utopia, filled with people joyously going freely about their business unfettered by the evil influences of the nationalist State. Anarchists need a reality check: nation-states are like democracies; obviously terrible, except compared to the alternatives. Like the paleo-leftists who are currently coming out of the woodwork where they've been decently hiding since they lost the Cold War, anarchists are quick to tell us, "But we don't mean that!" when faced with the living reality of their ideas. What do they mean, then? Nation-states and their governments exist for a reason, and the reason is that they fill a real need in people's lives--the need to not be killed, enslaved or otherwise used as an involuntary means to other people's ends. In civilized countries the majority are not anarchists because they recognize the value of the State, and they have the power to govern themselves to a substantial degree. The only known alternatives to the State are tribal warfare and ethnic homogeneity (and except in rare, exceptional cases such as medieval Iceland, tribal warfare with the goal of achieving ethnic homogeneity via serial genocide gives people the chance to try both these alternatives at the same time.) This is a time of choosing sides. I choose to oppose people who treat women not like slaves but non-human animals, who use torture and terror routinely, and who have sworn to destroy human liberty throughout the world. Others choose differently. This is not a friendly, academic disagreement--people who choose differently are my enemies, and I am their enemy. I spent the last decade of the Cold War arguing with people who I thought were honestly misguided. I was wrong to give them the benefit of that doubt--I gave them far more credit than they were due. Today, now that the massive propoganda machine of the Soviet Union is gone, the voice of the Left is virtually silent on its own role in supporting the dying stages of the Russian Empire, an empire that was killing and torturing up to the bitter, bitter end. The people who said, "The Soviet government has a perfect right to exist AND LOOK AT WHAT TERRIBLE THINGS THE AMERICANS ARE DOING OVER HERE!" were engaged in a war of distraction, a concerted attempt to move the focus of debate to a completely irrelevant issue. The Soviet Union killed 40 million of its own people, one way or another, not counting those killed fighting the Germans after the Soviet-German alliance fell apart in 1941. That total also does not include the uncounted millions who have died in other countries under Soviet-sponsored governments elsewhere in the world. Count all the people the Americans have killed world-wide in the past century. Count even, if you are pathologically minded, the people killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, although it would be a little weird for you to do so, unless you're going to count in the same way for everyone else, as well. The Americans have not killed as many people world-wide in the past century as the Taliban have killed in the past ten years in one sparsely populated region of mountainous wasteland. The Americans have not dehumanized their women, refusing to allow them to be treated by male doctors and refusing to allow women to be trained as doctors or nurses (and refusing to give girls the basic education they need to be trained as doctors and nurses in the first place). The Americans have not made ethnic or religious minorities wear badges singling them out for "special treatment". The Americans have done...what? They have given a hundred million dollars a year to supply humanitarian aid to the Afghan people, and most of it has been prevented from reaching the people it was meant to help by the Taliban, whose leaders now vilify America for...what? There are many, many fronts on which this war will be fought. But the first front is public opinion. There's lots of information available on who Muslim Militants are and what they believe in. Lots of it is written by Muslims who are appalled by what their co-religionists believe, just as many Christans are ashamed of what their more radical fellow-travellers espouse. But when comparing Militant Muslims with the West, anyone who says, "The Americans are just as bad" is either inexcusably ignorant or a raving moral lunatic. And anyone who is capable of expressing an opinion on this matter is also capable of typing "Afghanistan recent history" into google and reading the results, so I think their ignorance can only be willful, which means that moral lunacy is the only verdict for the sort of person who could even hint that the West is anything like as bad as the monsters who destroyed the World Trade Center, and who are quite capable of striking again. |