Wednesday, July 30, 2008

They're Fighting, Killing and Dying in Afghanistan So That I Can Be FREE!!

That's so fucking awesome man!!! What does Afghanistan have to do with my "freedom"? How will a fundamentalist government in Afghanistan affect my "freedom"? (I'm using scare quotes because right-wing warmongers have no goddamned idea what freedom means when they blurt it out to rationalize some idiotic political belief. But let's talk about actual freedom and how the possibility of a fundamentalist government in Afghanistan could affect that.)

Will a fundamentalist government in Afghanistan affect:

  1. My freedom to surf the internet in Canada? No.
  2. My freedom to travel in Canada? No.
  3. My freedom to type things on my blog? No.
  4. My freedom to join a union? No.
  5. My freedom to vote for the political party of my choice? No.
  6. My freedom to protest? No.

And on and on it goes. The idea that the nature of the government in Afghanistan or any other distant, impoverished nation will adversely affect Canadian freedoms is absurd. About the only real danger to the freedoms of wealthy country citizens is when corporate employers take advantage of corrupt puppet-regimes to transfer jobs and security away from those citizens and give them to people brutalized and oppressed by the capitalist system.

But, say the warmongering idiots, if Afghanistan becomes a haven for Islamic fundamentalist terrorists, we Canadians will be endangered. And you know something? There's a tiny bit of truth to that theory. Too fucking bad that the US foreign-policy geniuses allowed Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to inculcate fundamentalism among the youth of Afghanistan. Too bad that they overthrew a secularist [albeit tryanical] government in Iraq and replaced it with one that epouses Sharia Law and close ties to the theocrats in Iran (both supposedly bad things according to the warmongers). Too fucking bad that the corruption and brutality of the Karzai/Warlord regime in Afghanistan has produced an unending stream of Afghan males for the insurgency there.

To sum up: The claim that "the troops" (god bless 'em) are dying for my freedom is absurd. Particularly when the actions of the warmonger bush II and Harper regimes are the ones stirring up anti-Western hatred with their naked imperialism.

3 comments:

jeff cliff said...

Whether or not the troops over there are actually fighting for your freedom or not(I have my doubts), you should understand that freedom in one part of the world is connected to freedom in another, Afghanistan or not.

1) Labour rights effect labour rights of those across borders. If there is anywhere in the world where people can be compelled to work for free, and if the fruits of their labour can be transported, then to the extent that the transportation/infrastructure allows, wages will slowly, but steadily drop where they trade with. And really, that amounts to less control of the means of production by the working class, and with that, less power for unions. It isn't an instantaneous effect, and I haven't heard *too much* about non sex-based slavery in afghanistan, but the Taliban doesn't seem to be very interested in political freedoms such as labour rights and automation, from what I can tell.

Now it might not be direct. Afghanistan doesn't have very good infrastructure for trade, but it is certainly possible that horrible working conditions could be occurring there. It could be as simple as people fleeing afghanistan and going to neighbouring countreis, where they can be exploited in factories there for lower wages than even the locals are willing to work for. It's happening around Iraq, I see no reason why it wouldn't happen there.

2) Violence is not containable to a geographic location. It takes about a day and half to get from anywhere to anywhere on this blue marble, if the money flows right. And people do not forget. The victims of the northern alliance/taliban/ISAF/USA, those who have lost children and parents, they will not necessarily just forgive and forget, and we should not expect them to. Whether or not we are the originator/subject of violence, doesn't matter. Violence will spread, and hence *drumroll* political freedoms will be decreased in response to this(want to know how to get a country to decrease their political freedoms? Allow for some violence to affect them, so that the right-wingers in that country can use that as an excuse to do so). Genocide campaigns may very well result from what has happened in Afghanistan/surrounding area. Whether or not we're helping/hindering at this point doesn't matter. There is a real potential for a slow increase in violence in that region, an increase of political instability, and for more lives to be lost. Don't forget, russia is involved, too, and not in a good way(think chechnya).

Also, as technology improves, the ability for an individual to cause harm to others increases. Although nuclear weapons are one example, they are not the only example. But they are an easy one to understand. There is a company that is marketing small nuclear power plants that can power a single building. Their specific technology may or may not allow for weaponization, but others will. With or without diy-fab tech, the day will come when every single human being, or a sizable minority of human beings have the power in their hands to destroy every single other human being, or at least numbers that only nationstates can reach today. And do we want that day to come when so many of us have festering hatred dwelling within them from past genocides, or heads full of snakes from war?

Your life and liberty are at risk.

3) As far as your freedom to surf the internet, you never had that freedom. It is not a charter right and your privilege to do this can be revoked at the whim of your ISP. Let's not forget Telus doing this to their Union not too long ago. They would have gotten away with it had it not been for bad PR...but PR is a function of media consolidation, and this is on the uptake lately.

Afghanistan is not saudi arabia. What happens in afghanistan is not as important as what happens in saudi arabia. But it is important. Now whether or not we should be there, mucking around with things, in the way we have been, is a different matter entirely.

thwap said...

I don't think that we disagree. As I said, corporate globalization, punishing workers in the developed countries by moving to poor countries with no labour rights, is the one way that poor conditions in Afghanistan can remotely affect us.

And we're in complete agreement on how Western imperialism is creating more anger and therefore danger for us.

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