Don’t underestimate the impact of pictures of little white children as refugees. The majority of white Americans just shrug their shoulders and resume brunch when you show them atrocities involving black and brown people, but they are genuinely shook by atrocities against little blond girls.
2 Likes
I appreciate this post and perspective as I have a hard time seeing positives lately. Sending solidarity.
I don’t think NATO would accept a country into that has a peace deal to not join NATO
https://twitter.com/etbrooking/status/1502407302657282049
1 Like
One of these things is not like the others, the Taliban are the legitimate leaders of Afghanistan. Fairly obvious when they outlasted their opposition despite practically unlimited financial and military support from the West for two decades.
1 Like
How did they gain their legitimacy?
By having the same values as a majority of the country, i.e. that the Quran should be the foundation of society and that any liberalization from overly strict interpretations of the the Quran should come from within rather than be imposed from the outside. Not surprising that even if an Afghan woman believes she should have more rights, it’s doesn’t follow that she wants a foreigner killing her father and grandfather to give her those rights.
We owe these people everything.
i get you, i was just attempting humor at “letting the chips fall where they may.”
this subject requires its own long form discourse. i would just point out two freeze peach experiments in russia. i realize those experiments may not be fully applicable to societies like usa, or even greater western europe, but it nonetheless fits a pattern of authoritarians which are in those societies anyway.
one was glasnost which was an attempt to make all speech free in the 80s and 90s. leading to sometimes hilariously unintended outcomes, eg Sakharov getting booed for calling the Afghan war a crime, and Solzhenitsyn (!) being elected as the people’s delegate and at some parliamentary congress openly advocating for Communist party to seize control and declare a military lockdown.
and the other was putin quickly moving to control a rapidly changing media in 00s and 10s. which started with a veneer of corruption investigations, but quickly turned to mysterious murders of journalists, transfer of media companies to government friendly owners, radicalization turning up to 11, an order of magnitude technological explosion of disinformation. it’s interesting that laws controlling or censoring journalists came at the end of the dictator takeover, not in the beginning.
1 Like
I think you should read about how the Taliban gained their power. I doubt you will find anything about them having the same values as the majority and instead imposed their interpretation of islam onto the population.
Btw: How many successful peaceful revolutions do you know? You have no idea how grateful I am that the people of the GDR went onto the streets and made the fall of the Berlin wall happen. I always get start crying watching documentaries of this event since I know how rare that actually is.
By your reasoning: Since the there are usually more men than women and men might actually like their dominance over women that the Islam grants them women should submit to them because the majority thinks dominating women is the way to go and we westeners should simple accept that fact even so we know that women might actually disagree?
1 Like
it’s also kinda the reason the west is so united. many of the exiled politicians are out there lobbying the US, UK, Germany, France, EU governments arguing how and which sanctions to implement and who targets.
Good article by the author of the great book, no good men among the living, that gives some insight about why some people in the countryside prefer the Taliban over what they’ve had for the last 20 years.
1 Like
I have just visited the facility in my hometown where 60 people from Ukraine will arrive tonight. The first two families (well only the women, teenagers and a baby) arrived just as I was there helping to prepare the area. I have to admit it did feel chilling to see girls who look like they could be my daughters, knowing they are from Kharkiv.
10 Likes
There was an amazing documentary on Afghanistan under the Taliban done recently on BBC World News
It takes 20 years to do a revolution? The Afghan liberals had all the support they could ever dream of for 20 years, and they would have continued to receive all the money and weapons they desired even after the US troops if they were able to maintain a functional government.
If it was going to work, it would have worked.
1 Like
Yikes.
17 Likes
Yes I believe the west will Marshall plan ukraine back. We bounced back from 6 years of war with nazi Germany and Japan.
Russia will revert back to some USSR / North Korea country economically.
People won’t forget this. The fact that Russian is the most sanctioned country on earth speaks volumes.
You are just way too jaded.
Congress has already appropriated $15b. Most of that not weapons.