SV: SV: SV: Plight of Buddhist art

[Lars Martin Fosse]

rohan.oberoi at CORNELL.EDU [SMTP:rohan.oberoi at CORNELL.EDU] skrev 1. mars 2001
02:12:

Congratulations on a fine piece of rhetoric!

I realize that this thread has already generated so much heated mail that
it is unwise to continue. I'll therefore give a few comments and then step
down from my soapbox.

> The one with
> real effect is the Washington policy (faithfully implemented by the
> UN) of economically punishing a people (16 million Afghans) who are
> already known to be in such drastic straits (leave aside for the
> moment the actions of Washington that helped bring this about) that
> many are at present starving to death; this in retaliation for no more
> than the exercise by the government of the Taleban of their right of
> sovereignty under the UN charter (the same right under which Norway
> refuses to extradite suspects facing the death penalty to the US).

This is an oversimplification. The Taliban regime is behind a number of
acts that may be construed as inimical towards the US and other western
countries, such as support of "terrorism" and drug smuggling. Since the
West has behaved atrociously in a number of places of this world, I won't
make a moral song and dance about it, but I will suggest that the Taliban
are faced with the dilemma of the man in the lion's den: if you walk into a
lion's den and get mauled by the lion, you can blame the lion for being
cruel and insensitive, or you can blame yourself for being stupid. My point
is that the Taliban have been asking for trouble. They should have been
busy rebuilding their country and soliciting help where help could be had,
instead they invite enmity from potential friends.

> This being an academic list, I would expect people to be wary of
> attributing 'inherent' qualities to whole populations (as Dr. Fosse
> does when he accuses "Afghans" as a whole of "religious fanaticism")
> before first considering contingent responses to circumstances.

First of all: if I were to say that Germans in the thirties were Nazis, it
would normally be understood that not ALL Germans were Nazis, only a large
group of them. When I say that Afghans can be accused of religious
fanaticism, I am not saying that they ALL are religious fanatics, but that
there are enough fanatics around to make a difference. Your literalism does
you little credit. Normal discourse is usually shorthand.

  Given
> first that the rise of the Taleban coincided with utter despair among
> ordinary Afghans that the ongoing war among gangs of rival mujahideen
> -- all of them established with American arms and money -- could ever
> be resolved and law and order established, there are excellent reasons
> (not forgetting the alleged Pakistani support for the Taleban) other
> than such inherent fanaticism for the Taleban's rise, and this has
> been widely commented on.

I am also aware of the background for the Taliban's rise to power. That is
part of the Afghan tragedy. However, explaining why the Taliban came to
power is not quite the same thing as excusing their actions, which could at
least be said to be unwise.

Given second that the Taleban's
> announcement coincides with increasing starvation and despair in
> Afghanistan, where prices have at least doubled following the UN
> sanctions, and given that the Taleban have been in power for over four
> years without destroying the Bamiyan statues, there is every argument
> for seeing their latest policy too as a contingent response to
> desperate circumstances rather than as an inherent outgrowth of their
> 'fanaticism'.

It seems to me that this is what I suggested myself, in a slightly
different language. I interpret the Taliban threat to destroy statues as a
ploy to gain political or economic advantages. As far as I remember, they
have made similar threats before.

> Dr. Fosse - when you, as an Indologist, a Norwegian, a human being,

In this context, I think I'll settle for being human being. I don't speak
on behalf of Norway.

> are complicit in the international policy that says the Taleban
> government must be treated as international pariahs and the Afghan
> people as legitimate casualties of an extradition dispute, what right
> do you have to protest when they behave desperately and irrationally?

Did I say they should be treated as international pariahs? I don't think I
did. My point is, however, that they are not simply behaving desparately,
they are being stupid. They have other options, such as not to support
Islamic militant groups in other countries (and Osama bin Laden), stopping
the export of heroin (they banned it recently, after the crops failed, I
believe, but how serious this is, remains to be seen). Etc. And they might
cooperate better with the aid organizations that are already in
Afghanistan.

> When the Afghans have been subjected first to widespread destruction
> by the Russians, then to the funding and arming of disparate private
> groups by the wealthiest country in the world to the point where the
> nation's capital became the permanent battleground of those groups,
> and then to the active and effective hostility of that same country
> with all other nations (except a few like Pakistan and Turkmenistan)
> acquiescing, by what logic can you attribute their adoption of extreme
> ideologies and desperate (and unpleasant) actions to their inherent
> failings rather than to the pressure of contingent circumstance?

You forget that the policies of the Taliban make it difficult for a Western
nation to support them. Don't forget the way they treat women: how would
you "sell" this to female Western voters? I don't buy the idea that Taliban
politics are merely the result of contingent circumstance. Their cultural
policies are a tragedy, destroying Afghanistan's own heritage, and this has
not been forced upon them by the West. But I will concede that Western
policies toward Afghanistan have been detrimental to Afghan interest, and,
as I already said, callous. As for the infighting among the various
mujahideen groups, I believe M. Hasan Kakar in "Afghanistan. The Soviet
Invasion and the Afghan Response, 1979-1982" claims that the Pakistanis
generated the split among the Afghan groups in the Pakistani interest.
However, I believe that the Afghans were always somewhat divided, so that a
split could easily have been generated anyway. The Pakistanis were
responsible for the distribution of American aid to the mujahideen, and
they explicitly supported the religious groups, again in their own
interest. Which perhaps explains some of the religious fanaticism.

> Forgive me, but if your hypocrisy is not clear to you it is quite
> revolting to me; you sound like a German of, say, 1941, complaining
> that Poles are violent terrorists by nature.

Oh dear, here I go again, being revolting. I really shouldn't do it!

Rohit Chopra wrote:
>I second that, it seems almost to comply to the classic definition of
>orientalist stereotyping. It is interesting that if a white European or
>American group or individual commits a reprehensible action, it is always
>made out to be the case of an "pathological, disturbed individual" or the
>work of some aberrant group (such as David Korresh's cult for instance).

We are not talking about individuals or groups, but of a political
movement. If you care to check out European history and political debate,
you will find that we have had our own "Taliban movements" (albeit a few
centuries ago), and we have had modern movements that were just as
reprehensible as the Taliban, if not more so. And we have criticized them
in the same manner. This is not a case of "white vs. brown", but a case of
"the Enlightenment" and "liberalism" vs. medieval theocracy. In other
constellations, it might be a case of "the Enlightenment" and "liberalism"
vs. fascism or some other reactionary or authoritarion ideology. (I here
use "the Enlightenment" and "liberalism" as symbolic of a set of attitudes
and values).

>Thus neo-nazi white
>supremacist groups are conveniently designated part of a lunatic fringe in
>chiefly white, western societies, whereas the Taliban is supposed to
>represent the innate "fanaticism" of all Afghans or even Islam.

The neo-nazi groups are (for the time being, at least) a lunatic fringe.
This is both a statistical and a political fact: they are simply marginal.
The Taliban are not marginal. I did not say that the Taliban represent the
"innate fanaticism" of all Afghans or even Islam". Here, you are putting
words in my mouth, and you are doing so maliciously. Ideologically, the
Taliban seem to be fairly isolated, even the Iranians are critical of them.
Islam is not a monolithic phenomenon, and it would be idiotic to claim that
the Taliban are "typical" of that religion.

Enough said. Except: I still don't fathom why the greatest culprit of them
all, the Soviet Union, is so conveniently forgotten in this debate. The
Russians are now busy doing to Tchechenya what they were doing to
Afghanistan, using more or less the same tactics and methods. The West is
not exactly standing up to them (rather to the contrary, I suspect), but
that does not unburden the Russians of all guilt.

All the best,

Lars Martin Fosse


Dr. art. Lars Martin Fosse
Haugerudvn. 76, Leil. 114,
0674 Oslo
Norway
Phone: +47 22 32 12 19
Mobile phone: +47 90 91 91 45
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Email: lmfosse at online.no