Bombing Feminism into the World
The baby boomer, who grew up watching Hollywood movies in which blond-haired men rescue women from the animalistic brown man, is once again overcome with concern for women's rights in Afghanistan
By Karim Bettache
These are some unreal days. We read article after article in which authors posit that the mission in Afghanistan was a failure because the women are once again under the yoke of the Taliban. I hope you all see what is happening here. Articles like this carry the assumption that during the twenty-year long occupation by foreign invaders, Afghan women were better off than in a country run by some of its own people.
We call this White Savior Feminism. A new generation of the multiracial global community is completely done with it. The Western baby boomer, who grew up with the Orientalism of Hollywood movies in which men with luminous blond hair had to save (his) women from the animalistic brown man — the bearded Arab — firmly believes that the man without melanin in his skin is a much better alternative for the simple native woman. The baby boomer who never learned in school about the horrors of European settler-colonialism, still thinks that colonialism also had its good sides, because the white gentleman modernized and civilized the backward natives.
The reality, however, shows us a very different story. Sexual abuse of children became a tremendous problem during the occupation of Afghanistan, but deliberately ignored by the American occupier. In fact, the black and white photo from the 1970s of the ladies in miniskirts you see above was taken in Afghanistan: An open and modern society, right before America and its allies created the monster called the Taliban by funding the Mujaheddin with billions of dollars to fight against the Soviets, starting under Carter in 1979. Something similar happened in Iran, which was a democracy before America (and the UK) — fearing that the government would nationalize its oil fields — funded a dictatorship so brutal that religious fundamentalists were able to use popular discontent to take over the country and transform it into a conservative religious state. Indeed, a little history and the will to understand things quickly paints a very different picture than the so-called heroic feminist intentions of the American aggressor.
It is shocking that such a huge proportion of Westerners have no idea of the history of American interventions - let alone US support for “Islamic” fundamentalism - to realize that the loss of women's rights was often a direct result of American imperialism. We see this very limited way of thinking every time establishment Westerners write about US interventions. (Interventions that are simply seen as war crimes by the rest of the world.) We now see it again with the coverage of the US occupation of Afghanistan: the absurd self-delusion that makes (often seemingly quite intelligent) people believe that America spends billions of dollars on genocidal wars to bomb feminism into its victims. As if the US foreign policy establishment, aka the Blob, really gives a damn about what happens to these people. They have slaughtered more people in Afghanistan than the Taliban has ever done.
It is striking how all these op-eds in the West do not mention a single word about the fact that the foreign occupier has turned the country into a complete hellhole for two decades now. (Four if you count the foreign jihadist occupiers supported by the US, UK, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan.) It is also striking that they have forgotten that Obama admitted that America had implemented an official policy of torture, that it had secret prisons all over the world to avoid treating prisoners humanely, and that Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib were sexually abused. The authors also seem to forget that America is close friends with Israel and Saudi Arabia, countries in which I would not want to be a Palestinian or Saudi woman, respectively.
The total blindness of Western ladies and gentlemen who merely see the entire Afghanistan fiasco as a Taliban problem while completely ignoring the fact that a foreign invader has been violating human rights for 20 years on end by bombing the country into the Stone Age, shows how deeply ingrained their colonial mindset is. So deep that they can no longer put themselves in the shoes of those they purport to care so deeply for.
So let me end with a thought experiment:
Imagine the Iranians occupying the US for twenty years, slaughtering hundreds of thousands of American citizens, while simultaneously bombing several European countries, resulting in millions of deaths. They kill your children, your father, your mother, your grandparents…. Yet, the newspapers are full of stories about how the Iranians have come to save the US from those backward Christian conservative men (who were supported by the Iranian government forty years earlier with billions of dollars). For twenty years the Iranians occupied your country, ostensibly for the good of the American woman. And as soon as Iran withdraws, people all over the world cry out: “how bad it will be for the American woman, that she’ll be handed over to her fellow countrymen, those horrible American men!” And people all over the world are pleading with the Iranians to stay in the US to protect the women….
Absurd is it not?
You can bet that for the global majority outside the West, our writings on the US occupation of Afghanistan sound at least as absurd.
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