Afghanistan: A heroic resistance that puts us to shame

Afghanistan: A heroic resistance that puts us to shame
By Gabriele Zamparini

Then the face of Big Brother faded away again and instead the three slogans of the Party stood out in bold capitals:

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

[George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four]

The Afghanistan’s puppet Karzai offered the Taliban “high position in a government ministry as a way to end the rising insurgency” in the country.

The infamous peace talks propaganda, so effective for the Western minds, is something the Afghans seem to be immune.

Reuters informed us:

Karzai said U.S. President George W. Bush and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon had both supported the idea of peace talks when he met them in the U.S. this month.

Taliban spokesman Qari Mohammad Yousuf told Reuters from an undisclosed location that talks with Kabul were out of the question.

"Karzai government is a dummy government. It has no authority so why should we waste our time and effort," Yousuf said.

"Until American and NATO troops are out of Afghanistan, talks with Karzai government are not possible." (…)

"On the one hand, America has put our leader's name on a wanted persons list and is calling us terrorists; and on the other hand, Karzai is talking about peace talks. It's a joke," Yousuf said.

Forget the Neo-Con, the Neo-Dem, the Neo-Lib and the Neo-Nuts. The role the demonization and dehumanization of the (many, many, many...) Empire’s enemies has played in supporting imperialism and colonialism can be more easily seen in those Western liberal and progressive writers, journalists, intellectuals and anti-war movement’s planners who always resort to human rights, women rights, gay rights’ violations of the Empire’s enemy of the month as the reason why we, the enlightened people, can’t surely sympathise, let alone support the “other” peoples who try to defend themselves and resist against wars of aggression and occupations, which is to say, colonialism and imperialism.

The word “resistance” is never used, as sympathy for those resistance fighters is never voiced by the same people who always express so generously sympathy and solidarity with “our troops”.

The dehumanization and demonization of the “other” is at the root of the mamma mia anti-war movement, whose influential policy makers lecture us why the peace movement doesn’t and can’t embrace the Iraqi resistance.

For the resistance in Afghanistan – a country that had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington – the problem doesn’t even arise. The Just War is just that, Just, and Cindy Sheehan [for whom I have deep respect] can then writes about “our troops” in the following terms:

Most of our troops are courageous and only trying to survive under unconscionable conditions and I want to publicly honor our young people who have had their lives stolen by the war machine in Afghanistan and send my heartfelt condolences to their families. Not even the evil empire of BushCo can corrupt or diminish our children’s forced sacrifices. Our troops stationed in Afghanistan need to know that the US peace movement supports them by working to get them home, too.

One of the few voices that have always had the intellectual honesty and the courage to call the Afghan resistance with its real name - “resistance fighters” - is Marc W. Herold, a professor at University of New Hampshire who’s been documenting the effects of American and NATO’s benevolence upon the people of Afghanistan.

Last year, I ended my piece, September 11, Afghanistan and “the survival of civilization” with a rhetorical question: Why don't we shout “Today we are all Afghans, Iraqis, Lebanese and Palestinians?”

One year later, the carnages of Iraqis, Afghans and Palestinians are carried out more efficiently than ever and it would seem we have become instead more American, more British, more European... and much less human.

In all these decades that signed the rise of one of the most brutal Empires in history, certainly the most dangerous for the very survival of Life on this planet, the Western anti-war movements have never ended any war of aggression and have never brought “our troops” home from the many places they were shipped upon the many lies Washington and its vassals used to save Freedom, Democracy, Human Rights... The Afghan resistance surely knows it.