By Steve Hynd
Josh Mull at The Seminal comes up with a short list of timely examples of ignoring the humanity of Afghans, treating them as aliens, objects. He writes:
"Those men and pregnant women our soldiers were carving bullets out of, those are the Afghans who "don�t like or don�t trust" foreigners, those are the Afghan boys who just like to have their picture taken, and they�re the ones who are "shocked and awed" by our bloody bombing campaigns. That�s what we get when we deal with them on these orientalist terms. Our military carried out a nauseatingly gruesome massacre of Afghan civilians, covered it up, and then smeared the journalist who tried to report it. And why not? Afghans aren�t people, they�re an alien culture who hates foreigners, and we�ve got to use our awesome shock and awe strategy to defeat them, right? Nonsense.
Respect for Afghans is sorely lacking on all sides of the Afghanistan debate. It�s 2010, nine years into the war, and we�re still talking about Afghanistan in these orientalist terms. Yet it confuses and bewilders us when stories of war crimes and cover-ups like Derrick�s seem to go unnoticed. We know why nobody wants to hear about the massacre. We don�t want to think about them as human. This has to change now."
I think that's being too nice by half. Maybe it's because I'm a Brit but I'm all too familiar with the kind of apologist for colonialism who starts with utterly ignoring the humanity of "wogs" (and who believe that the wogs begin at Calais). In Britain, we call them Little Englanders or Colonel Blimps. There's a nasty strain of the same kind of Imperialist sociopathy in America nowadays, only the wogs begin at Laredo. Some progressives, who should know better, have stars in their eyes from the attention afforded them by military luminaries and have developed a kind of Stockholm Syndrome because they're too interested in preserving their access and too little mindful of their progressive ideals. Consequently have come to more and more echo those Blimps who have pushed their pablum notions of COIN as a happier, gentler, war winner to the forefront of America's foreign policy.
Americans are like everyone else - tribal AKA - bigoted. My mother is in her late 80's. She had a physical today and the Doctor asked me when her spirit went down. I told him honestly that it was in November of 2008 when a black man was elected president - the end of the world as she knew it. But this is not just an American thing. I lived in Munich, Germany in the late 60's and early 70's. At he time Munich had a 15 percent Turkish minority and civil rights demonstrations were going on is the US. I remember a Bavarian friend telling me that he understood - they had a Turkish problem. We are a tribal species - there was a time when it was a survival characteristic. Those times have changed but we haven't. I too am tribal - I can't tolerate those who are.
ReplyDeleteRon, my observations are exactly the same as yours. The hotlinks are now inactive but Discrimination is alive and well, everywhere was something I put wrote five years ago.
ReplyDeleteThis You Tube video from WikiLeaks is the most recent illustration of savage tribal behavior.
Wikileaks has obtained and decrypted this previously unreleased video footage from a US Apache helicopter in 2007. It shows Reuters journalist Namir Noor-Eldeen, driver Saeed Chmagh, and several others as the Apache shoots and kills them in a public square in Eastern Baghdad. They are apparently assumed to be insurgents. After the initial shooting, an unarmed group of adults and children in a minivan arrives on the scene and attempts to transport the wounded. They are fired upon as well. The official statement on this incident initially listed all adults as insurgents and claimed the US military did not know how the deaths ocurred. Wikileaks released this video with transcripts and a package of supporting documents on April 5th 2010 on http://collateralmurder.com
Watch Tuesday's Democracy Now interview with the Wikileaks guy and Glenn Greenwald. It's very informative!
ReplyDeleteBtw, hope to get my email problem sorted Thursday, assuming the computer geek shows up as promised.
Kat