Alright brothers, lean in a little closer, now everyone hold up your guns and shout Allah Akbar!
Allah Akbar! *Click.*
I just saw this.
Some Taliban dude driving a bumper car in Kabul.
Apparently, the Taliban leadership is admonishing their fighters not to act like tourists and take selfies and shit.
Good luck stopping that, Habib. You're gonna need it. Chances are, you ain't ever going to be able to stop it and you know that as well as I do.
My advice? And I'll note I can drop some pretty fucked up, harsh advice on people from time to time...
Let 'em have at it. All of 'em. Every day, any time they're not on duty and on slow days when they are. I'm serious. People are people.
Your country has known nothing but war for 43 years. Let people...especially your people...act like human beings for a change. People deserve a chance to be human, to set down their guns and live a life.
I don't give a damn if they are my enemy, people need a fucking break. My guess is that the Taliban are as tired of this fucking war as everybody else. I can't even imagine being my age, let alone younger, and having known nothing but war.
Do you realize that when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan I was like, six years old?
Think about that for a second.
Of course, the fact that the fucking Taliban are as susceptible to internet-driven dumb shit as any of the rest of us infidels are tells me you probably didn't win as much as you thought you did there, Habib.
Have fun with that, and the long-term implications thereof.
They won the war. If they can't make something of the peace, what were they doing it for?
If they, or their leaders, cannot unbend, what was even the goddamned point?
If they cannot stop, then the next war will be over cell phones and internet dumb shit...and who really won this one, then?
I'm quite serious here.
Give these people 20 or 50 years and they'll be just like us, For better and worse.
Imagine...in some village high in the Hindu Kush in 2071 some old exalted white-beard elder, perhaps the Malik of his village...pulling out an ancient cell phone, plugging it in to charge it, pushing some buttons and then a breath and an exhaled "Allah Akbar" when the old thing fires up, so he can show his grandchildren and his great-grandchildren the Selfies he took in Kabul with his battle buddies and their AK-47's to show them that yes, he really had been there and done that and got the fucking T-shirt.
And he'll show them that and some old memes and shit with a gleam in his eye as he remembers, as the memories, the courage, the pride and thrill of being part of something, the smell of blood and gunpowder and smoke, the terror that still keeps him up some nights, and the faces of old friends long dead all come flooding back... It is an ancient mariner, and he stoppeth one of three...by thy long gray beard and glittering eye, wherefore stopps't thou me?
And of course, one granddaughter, resolutely not wearing Hijab, will make some snarky comment about how he looked back then while smoking a Chinese cigarette...to which he will reply with profanity. His great-grandchildren will listen to American rap music, there will be young men in the village who use drugs, or who fuck each other up the ass. And there will, in point of fact, be those who are agitating for or going off to fight in the next Jihad, the next war. Life never changes, people are the same wherever you go, and in this way every place, every country, is always the same. It doesn't matter what the country is or how Fundamentalist.
Fucking Christ, some of the stories I heard from my Saudi neighbor in the college dorm were pretty mind-blowing. Drugs and alcohol and homosexuality and the beginnings of internet dumb shit were, 20 years ago and I'm sure now, just as prevalent in Saudi Arabia as they were and are everywhere else. You just have to know the right people in some countries.
And people party harder in places where you just might get your head chopped off for doing it.
And the hectoring of the holy men and the Imams will be ignored by some, and others will see in it their chance for glory or redemption or the relief of boredom in the next fight.
And the government in Kabul will, in one fashion or another, do what it has to to go along to get along in the world, and there will be those who hate them for that, too.
But do you know what that old man will say?
He will say, proudly and in all seriousness (and with no self-awareness) that he fought so that his people could do what they wanted in their own country...and as ridiculous as it sounds now, as alien as what they want or wanted might be to us, I'm telling you that's how it will be then.
And sometimes he'll think back to when he was one of Allah's own warriors and wonder what it was all even for.
And he will tell his great-grandchildren about watching Star Wars with the guys and about them talking about how they were like Han and Luke fighting against the American Evil Empire.
Never once thinking about the implications of any of that, of how much Western culture itself was a part of their opposition to it.
Or that modern Fundamentalism of the kind that birthed his own movement was largely an American invention, as was...for that matter...his own movement's Mujahideen progenitor which was armed by the CIA and the US military-industrial complex via the Pakistani ISI with Saudi money for the purpose of fighting the Soviet Army.
He won't give any of that any thought, if he was ever aware of the grand scheme of things at all.
Because that/s how people are. Good luck with that, Habib.
Think I'm nuts? Think I'm wrong?
Taliban fighters, various and assorted terrorists that we've captured, hell, prisoners in Guantanamo, have said as much to us already. I've read, heard from people that I know who dealt with prisoners over in places like Afghanistan, accounts of captured gomers comparing Mullah Omar or Osama Bin Laden to famous footballers and shit. I'm serious. How in the hell does Soccer fit in with these idiots crazy ideas of what Islam should look like?
(And while I'm at it, consider how many American idiots regularly try to depict Trump like he's a boxer or something when he's really an old fat guy who's never thrown a punch at somebody who could or would fight back in his life.)
The Taliban are going to find out that they cannot defeat human nature. If they try too hard, they'll die trying,
And they will lose.
Of course, this post isn't really about Afghanistan, except to say that what's going on there should be a warning for every extremist movement, for every cultist of the Orange Asshole or follower of some crazy holy man.
I started out as a conservative.
I almost certainly have better conservative priors in any traditional sense than plenty of Republican members of Congress.
I've been there and done that, and no one cared, mostly because I didn't go along with the crowd. Now lots of the values that I was taught land me firmly on the other side of the political fence and now that my beard is turning white, I'm Okay with that.
In my own life, in the last 30 years I've seen tons of stuff that was absolutely unacceptable when I was a conservative kid with a religious education growing up in a moderate conservative family in rural Northern Michigan.
I've seen everything from conspiracy theories to fascism to smoking weed to outright murder to teenage pregnancy go from being regarded with horror to just normal to wholeheartedly accepted by conservative Republican voters.
And that doesn't even touch on the idea that some New York fat cat sometime-liberal like Donald Trump could become a Republican President or that all this functionally happened because "Owning the Libs" (who now act a lot more like the Republicans of my youth did than, say, acting how the Democrats did in the oh-so-liberal 1990's under Bill Clinton) became more important than anything else.
Hell, while I'm at it I know more than one person...in my own former and again current neighborhood...that was an ardent Clinton supporter or the son of one...who is a Trump Supporter almost 30 years later. On the next street there's a house that used to be owned by an old guy who was an Army veteran and GM retiree who thought Bill Clinton was some great thing. Some descendant of his has the place now and flies a Trump flag. Can't help but wonder what old Ernie would think of that.
And given the values I was taught, I look at things like that idiot kid who ran over those cyclists in Texas, or at somebody like Kyle Rittenhouse or Lauren Boebert and I despair.
We're dealing with people who'd rather shoot their neighbors than live with them, and they think it's funny.
We have Republican members of Congress who try to act more like celebrities than like legislators. I have to wonder who pays for and produces some of the videos Blowbert puts out, among other things.
We're dealing with people who'd rather see their 15 year old daughter get pregnant and have a kid than have an abortion and maybe salvage her life. And they'll double down on it when their liberal neighbor points out that she's made life harder for herself and her whole family.
Hell, we're dealing with people who'd rather die of a deadly virus than get vaccinated for it because getting vaccinated is something "liberals" (or, god forbid, moderate conservatives) do. Or they'd rather take horse medication and shit their innards out than get vaccinated even when the vaccine is the right (and thus far, most reliable) medication.
Because some dumb shit made a political issue of this one vaccine, and those fools who are against all vaccines seized on that idea for their own selfish reasons.
And now Republican voters are mostly the ones dying at the behest of their politicians and other Republican voters applaud them for it.
How the hell does that make any sense?
Just as experience and getting a little smarter have made the Taliban unrecognizable from how they were 20 years ago, and thus perhaps more effective? So have groupthink and generalized stupidity, as well as simple opposition to this, that and the other thing and feral, tribal loyalty for its own sake made the conservative movement dumber and by orders of magnitude in the last decade increasingly unrecognizable to me from how it was 20 years ago.
I've written plenty about my own experiences with internet dumb shit and stupidity during my own exit from conservatism and Christianity.
Internet dumb shit clearly won that war, too.
And I think there's a bit of a warning to be found in that, too.
We need to stop this shit.
Revolution is when the masses make the revolution. A people’s revolution. But even when the revolution is made by others in the name of the masses, expressing what the masses want, it can be revolution. A people’s revolution because it has the support of the masses and interprets the will of the masses. ~Muammar Gaddafi
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