20 September 2001
"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face--for fifty years." -- Me, after Orwell, upon hearing Bush's speech tonight
Amongst themes too numerous to comment on here, our president mentioned that the individuals who destroyed the World Trade Center last week were enemies (and haters of) democracy and freedom. Fair enough. I have for about a year now caught a whiff of something coming out of Afghanistan that reeks very much the Naziism that Bush drew parallels to. The extreme regimentation of society, the laws against everything from television to singing and regulating hair and beard length, and the extreme sexism. All these outrages go, collectively, beyond authoritarianism and into the realm of totalitarianism.
Totally absent, however, was any further investigation along these lines. Why did this grotesque monstrosity of a system arise? We asked that of Naziism during and after the Second World War: depriving tyrants of the hardship used to fuel their rise was one of the reasons for the Marshall Plan and the forgiveness of the war debts of the most evil regieme in history.
But not a peep on that here. Not a peep about the frustration so many people in the Middle East feel about the lives of dark-skinned, dark-eyed people being valued less than that of fair-skinned people by the power brokers in the Western world. Not a word about the West's failure to stand up to Israel's imperialistic colonization of the occupied West Bank. No, it's all this mysterious, evil, antidemocratic movement that appeared for no good reason at all.
And quite a bit more than a peep about the need to pursue once more, with vigor, all the unsavory Cold War power-brokering (in the name of fighting a "war on terrorism"), that was responsible for breeding so much of the resentment in the first place!
This "war on terrorism" thus has a very good chance of becoming a new Cold War, only one without any humanitarian side-effects. My guess, absent other information and at this early stage, is that it may last a half-century, just like the original Cold War did. A boot stamping on a human face for fifty years.