"Take a look at this film of Taliban whipping women in the street: this your idea of the good guys? I’d get an argument about US support of the Afghan rebels, how we caused this. But if we hadn’t supported the rebels, we would have been criticized for leaving Afghans to the fate of the Soviets, because they weren’t white like the Slavs. Make no mistake: the Soviets were brutal SOBs who targeted children as a means of spreading terror; why wouldn’t we aid the resistance? If we had stayed in Afghanistan afterwards,the cynics would have called us colonizers. If we had invaded the Taliban for no particular reason before 9/11, the cynics would have called us imperialists. Nothing satisfies these people, because now they cannot abide clarity in anyone but themselves. They think they see things clearer than anyone else, but they’re blind men in a dark room full of mud, congradulating themselves for identifying the substance in their hands as dirt." A not-very-timely but still just a potent post from the Lileks archive.
No comments:
Post a Comment