The “poetic” Taliban (!!!!)
When I first saw this in the New Statesman, I thought it was some kind of sick joke, given the proximity to April 1st. Apparently not:
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And to add to the feeling of nausea, here’s an endorsement from “acclaimed author” William Dalrymple:
‘Afghanistan has a rich and ancient tradition of epic poetry celebrating resistance to foreign invasion and occupation. This extraordinary collection is remarkable as a literary project — uncovering a seam of war poetry few will know ever existed, and presenting to us for the first time the black turbaned Wilfred Owens of Wardak. But it also an important political project: humanising and giving voice to the aspirations aesthetics, emotions and dreams of the fighters of a much-caricatured and still little-understood resistance movement that is about to defeat yet another foreign occupation.’ —-William Dalrymple, author of The Last Mughal and the forthcoming, The Return of a King: Sha Shuja and the First Battle for Afghanistan, 1839-42
…and one Jon Lee Anderson, who thinks the Taliban are “harshly perceived”:
‘A remarkable and important book that reveals a hitherto concealed side to the harshly perceived Afghan Taliban. In Poetry of the Taliban, we see that within the movement there are warriors who have wounded hearts, lyrical souls, and a passionate love of language and ideas.’ —-Jon Lee Anderson, the New Yorker and author of The Lion’s Grave: Dispatches from Afghanistan
What next: a sympathetic reappraisal of Hitler’s artwork?
Let’s just remind ourselves of these agrarian fascists’ attitude to 50% of the Afghan population:
Letter to the Guardian:
The massacres of Afghan civilians have left huge numbers of widows and orphans, as well as uncounted wounded and traumatised people (Massacres are the inevitable result of foreign occupation, 14 March). A catalogue of strategic, political and military mistakes is likely to fuel further support for the Taliban, and thus increase the fears of Afghan women who dread a return to their oppressed situation before 2001.
Irrespective of when the troops are withdrawn, the international community has a duty not to abandon its commitment to Afghan women, remembering that their “liberation” was one of the grounds for the invasion of 2001.
Responding to the pleas of Afghan women’s NGOs, UK women’s NGOs who attended the UN Commission on the Status of Women this month have petitioned the UN to endorse a resolution on Afghan women and girls. This can be found on the website of the National Alliance of Women’s Organisations. A UN resolution requires the backing of governments, but so far no government has been prepared to pick this up and run with it. A UN resolution would at least ensure that the international community remains aware of the status of women in Afghanistan, and does all it can to support them once the troops have withdrawn.
Margaret Owen Director, Widows for Peace through Democracy
Annette Lawson Chair, National Alliance of Women’s Organisations
It really is a sign of the moral and political degeneracy of the liberal/”left”, that it’s now considered OK in some despicable circles, to come out as sympathetic towards the Taliban.
Fasterpussycat Miaow! Miaow! Miaow! said,
April 5, 2012 at 11:21 pm
What next: a sympathetic reappraisal of Hitler’s artwork?
And why not? Hitler was a trenchant anti imperialist and anti Zionist, it was only those Zionists who made him do bad things after all – before that he was going to send the Jews back to Milton Keynes where they all come from. “Next year in Fishermead” as they say in that grotesque parody of Easter, called “Flyover”.
Faster Pussycat Miaow Miaow Miaow! said,
April 5, 2012 at 11:28 pm
What next: a sympathetic reappraisal of Hitler’s artwork?
And why not? Hitler was a trenchant anti imperialist and anti Zionist, it was only those Zionists who made him do bad things after all – before that he was going to send the Jews back to Milton Keynes where they all come from. “Next year in Fishermead” as they say in that grotesque parody of Easter, called “Flyover”.
Emma Goldman said,
April 6, 2012 at 4:14 pm
Hitler wasn’t that anti-Zionist. he was quite keen in the early days see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haavara_Agreement
The Haavara Agreement (Hebrew: הסכם העברה Translit.: heskem haavara Translated: “transfer agreement”) was signed on 25 August 1933 after three months of talks by the Zionist Federation of Germany (die Zionistische Vereinigung für Deutschland), the Anglo-Palestine Bank (under the orders of the Jewish Agency, an official executive agency in then Palestine) and the economic authorities of Nazi Germany. The agreement was designed to help facilitate the emigration of German Jews to Palestine. While it helped Jews emigrate, it forced them to give up most of their possessions to Germany before departing. Those assets could later be obtained by transferring them to Palestine as German export goods.
Faster Pussycat Miaow Miaow Miaow! said,
April 7, 2012 at 5:02 am
More pernicious, toxic nonsense from Reshit-store. As you well know Reshit-store, from your annotated and well jizzed-over copy of Mein Kampf, Hitler though Zionism was a joke and that Jews were incapable of constituting any form of state except as a ‘university’ for ‘crooks’. The nazis never passed up any opportunity to rob all they could from the living or the dead. Take their money now as there will be plenty of time to deal with them later – if they congregate in one place, so much the better.
It is one of the (smaller) ironies of life that the work of the Marxist Lenni Brenner is quoted approvingly by the likes of Reshit-store and other neo-nazis on their holocaust denial websites as proof that the nazis and the Jews were bezzie mates and the Shoah never happened.
Roger said,
April 6, 2012 at 2:17 am
There actually is a fascinating book by Frederic Spotts called Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics which does re-evaluate his ‘art’,
Spotts argues that as far as one can tell (a great many of ‘his’ pictures are postwar fakes) Hitler actually did have some real talent in painting buildings (enough to actually make a living selling paintings and postcards to tourists in Vienna) but failed to get into art school due to a complete inability to depict life or action (when he does include figures in his street scenes they remind you of nothing so much as LS Lowry’s matchstick men – but of course not in a good way).
As dictator however he was far more involved in the design of buildings, iconography, vehicles, planes etc than generally believed – but after his fall the likes of Albert Speer, Leni Riefenstahl and Ferdinand Porsche were able to take the credit for his more striking and original ideas (the VW beetle, the Olympic Stadium, ‘The Cathedral of Light’ etc).
Speer indeed seems to have been primarily Hitler’s project and site manager executing Hitler’s designs – a role which he later extended as wartime Armaments Minister to virtual master of Occupied Europe’s economy and of its armies of slave labourers.
Clearly the man who designed the swastika flag had a real genius for graphic design – if only as in Norman Spinrad’s satirical SF novel The Iron Dream Adolf had followed his brother Alois to America and become a commercial illustrator who expressed his racist fantasies through the writing of pulp fiction rather than the organisation of genocide.
Monsuer Jelly est Formidable said,
April 6, 2012 at 3:18 am
breathtakingly vile. utterly sick fucckking cuernts.
T. Marshal-Nichols said,
April 6, 2012 at 7:38 am
You do reveal yourself as the most incredible philistine. If you banned all literature celebrating or glamorising tyrants, which dressed up acts of barbarism and incredible brutality as heroic acts, then you’d be banning a significant chunk of classic western literature. You’d be getting rid of great swaths of Shakespeare, much of classic Greek and Roman literature, all that nineteenth century guff celebrating empire, and so, so much more. And some of that stuff is quite good, written by great authors – despite the dubious claims it makes about the historical personalities involved.
Even today there’s much literature celebrating war, presenting it as noble, some of its alright, some of its trash, however I wouldn’t want to start banning it. (Then you probably like this stuff when it’s shooting up Muslims.)
What your really objecting to is the idea that Muslims could have any kind of culture. All you’re revealing is what a racist you are.
Monsuer Jelly est Formidable said,
April 6, 2012 at 11:14 am
nobody has sed anthing shud be ‘banned’. you thick demented arsetrumpetting fuckking MoRan.
Juan P. Lewis said,
April 6, 2012 at 11:51 am
“What your really objecting to is the idea that Muslims could have any kind of culture. All you’re revealing is what a racist you are.”
I’m tired of this argument. The Taliban are not the Muslims. Racism is to think that a bunch of fascist psychopaths are the true representative of Muslims.
“If you banned all literature celebrating or glamorising tyrants, which dressed up acts of barbarism and incredible brutality as heroic acts, then you’d be banning a significant chunk of classic western literature.”
I don’t think the blog is objecting to the publishing of the book, but to the glamorization of a fascist movement by an allegedly left leaning magazine. William Dalrymple is talking about the Taliban as if their problem was that they’re not understood. He’s presenting them as anti-imperialists, when in fact they are a movement foreign to Afghanistan, opposed by many Afghans and with an imperialist ideology.
Juan P. Lewis said,
April 6, 2012 at 11:53 am
oh, by the way,
“What your really objecting to is the idea that Muslims could have any kind of culture”
The first thing the Taliban did was to wage a cultural war against the Afghan heritage. They are the ones denying a culture to Muslims.
Sue R said,
April 6, 2012 at 10:20 am
I love the way that the pro-Taliban, pro-Muslim imperialists always leap to accuse anyone raising teh slightest doubt about the latest activity of their chosen saviours of extreme racism. Just what ideas exactly are teh Taliban open to? Remember, they have a fairly limited range because anything too different could render them an apostate or guilty of some sort of thought crime. This is all about rehabilitateing the Taliban, so that NATO and the USA can pull out. Fine, but don’t pretend these people are any sort of heroes.
Monsuer Jelly est Formidable said,
April 6, 2012 at 3:31 pm
Emma Goldman said,
April 6, 2012 at 4:09 pm
What’s upset Jim Denham is that the Taliban write better poetry than Sean Matgamna – but doesn’t everyone?
Sue R said,
April 7, 2012 at 9:36 pm
Could Juan P Lewis provide examples of Western literature glorifying war and destruction? I can’t think of a single Shakespearean play that does so, in fact, Shakespeare deals with the anxieties and uncertainties of political power which may sometimes lead to war, but it is hardly gung-ho. I also don’t remember any of the usual figures of Western literature writing pro-war books. George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, George Orwell…have I missed something. Could Juan P Lewis prove he knows what he is talking about and provide quotes.
rkipp said,
April 8, 2012 at 12:33 am
Rudyard Kipling, The White Man’s Burden, 1899
This famous poem, written by Britain’s imperial poet, was a response to the American take over of the Phillipines after the Spanish-American War.
Take up the White Man’s burden–
Send forth the best ye breed–
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild–
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.
Take up the White Man’s burden–
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain
To seek another’s profit,
And work another’s gain.
Take up the White Man’s burden–
The savage wars of peace–
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to nought.
Take up the White Man’s burden–
No tawdry rule of kings,
But toil of serf and sweeper–
The tale of common things.
The ports ye shall not enter,
The roads ye shall not tread,
Go mark them with your living,
And mark them with your dead.
Take up the White Man’s burden–
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard–
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:–
“Why brought he us from bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?”
Take up the White Man’s burden–
Ye dare not stoop to less–
Nor call too loud on Freedom
To cloke your weariness;
By all ye cry or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent, sullen peoples
Shall weigh your gods and you.
Take up the White Man’s burden–
Have done with childish days–
The lightly proferred laurel,
The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years
Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers!
rkipp said,
April 8, 2012 at 12:42 am
Jessie Pope, “The Call” (1915)
The following poem is perhaps the best-known example of Jessie Pope’s jingoistic war poems, exhorting young men to enlist and save England, or be labeled cowards. Her reputation was such that Wilfred Owen originally entitled “Dulce et Decorum Est” as “To Jessie Pope.
Who’s for the trench—
Are you, my laddie?
Who’ll follow French—
Will you, my laddie?
Who’s fretting to begin,
Who’s going out to win?
And who wants to save his skin—
Do you, my laddie?
Who’s for the khaki suit—
Are you, my laddie?
Who longs to charge and shoot—
Do you, my laddie?
Who’s keen on getting fit,
Who means to show his grit,
And who’d rather wait a bit—
Would you, my laddie?
Who’ll earn the Empire’s thanks—
Will you, my laddie?
Who’ll swell the victor’s ranks—
Will you, my laddie?
When that procession comes,
Banners and rolling drums—
Who’ll stand and bite his thumbs—
Will you, my laddie?
Sue R said,
April 8, 2012 at 6:41 pm
These are two poems out of thousands. Hardly an entire tradition. Reading Kipling’s ‘The White Man’s Burden’, he is actually correct. The WEuropeans spend money developing these agricultural countries in order to be able to exploit them, providing an infrastructure and paid employment, they are them kicked out and are not given any recompense. That is what is going on in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and all the other places European wealth has been poured into to make the country fit for capitalist exploitation. Did you know $2, 000,000,000 a week is being spent in Afghanistan by the Americans? What couldn’t the American Government do with that money in America itself? The Jessie Pope poem is barely above the level of music hall.
Monsuer Jelly est Formidable said,
May 5, 2012 at 7:30 am
look
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/may/04/taliban-poetry-book-denounced-british
checKKOWT the demented Guardian reader scum bolloX coomNTRS UNDERNEATH. They shud be exterminated.