I find “Christ and the Soldier” by Siegfried Sassoon a
gripping tale of war and carnage. The poem was written after the Battle of the
Somme and is a conversation between a soldier and Christ which ends:
"Lord Jesus, ain't you got no more to say?"
Bowed hung that head below the crown of thorns.
The soldier shifted, and picked up his pack, and slung his gun, and stumbled on
his way.
"O God," he groaned, “why ever was I
born?”
I was
born in Afghanistan in 1981 and lived my early childhood in Kabul under Soviet
occupation; I survived the brutal guerrilla war against the Soviets, I lost
friends and family to Mujaheedin War of Kabul, I kept my spirit through the
Taliban reign of tyranny and I braved journeys to escape to Europe. I know what
it is like to be on the other side of the European border, the large
governments united to keep the little man at bay. I believe there are lessons
to be learned from wars to strengthen tolerance and foster shared values.
I am
now a British Citizen and live in Brighton. I watch in astonishment racist,
xenophobic, anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiments taking root in most of
Europe. In some countries they are translated in to legislation and far right
parties are part of governing coalitions. Even if they aren’t in power, the far
right influences political and social policies in the EU; recent examples are Sweden,
Denmark and the Netherlands. For years the EU manipulated social policies under
the guise of “European Values” to remodel nationalism. In this climate,
identitarian and ethnic agendas were strengthened to bolster “self-pride”. We live
in a society of intolerance and darkness and fail to understand the
complexities of past wars and contemporary challenges, doomed to repeat the
mistakes of the past and blunder our way in to modern conflicts.
I
have learned a few things about conflict and intolerance from personal
encounters and its history in Europe, which I will attempt to summarise here.
First is the fallibility and weakness of humans: people despair when faced with
tough choices and under threat, and when we despair we commit depraved acts. In
order to engage with people, we ought to see behind their shortcomings so we
understand their point of view. The second is the false belief in the superiority
of European culture or nations: other people are not malign or evil and what we
recognise as a nation or group is often an artificial construct. Third is the
power of lies. Anyone with some
political awareness must have seen how misinformation has shaped our societies
recently. Finally, and most importantly, is the fragility of our peaceful
existence. My world has crumbled on several occasions and no one saw it coming.
We lost our home and lives the third time in a flash, and as unexpectedly as
the first time; we were astounded by the power and speed of the storm that
swept comforts from under our feet and blew our dreams away. We are all
responsible for sustaining peace and tolerance by creating positive stories
about our collective identity and confronting false myths.
Fear
of Evil and the myth of monsters
I was
seeing a woman early 2018 and on one of the first few dates she invited me to
the cinema to watch “The Shape of Water”. The movie is about Elisa, a mute
living with a closeted artist who is transfixed by classic Hollywood TV shows
and a boss who turns out to be a Russian spy with a heart of gold. Elisa takes
on the task of saving a captured alien water monster from painful death at the
hands of Richard Strickland. He is a man with the looks of a classic, square
jawed protagonist; only he's the actual monster, murderous and literally
rotting alive. The film removes all pretences of the outsiders being dangerous
and instead, paints them as unconventional heroes and the monsters are the
conventional heroes. I thought it was an interesting choice she made for a
movie date particularly with anxieties and fears around dating an Afghan man
and my history of resorting to unconventional solutions in order to survive in evil
situations. Perhaps partly thanks to the movie we did bond and are happily
together.
The
movie Director Guillermo del Toro at Bafta thanked Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
author, for “picking up the plight of Caliban and she gave weight to the
burden of Prometheus, and she gave voice to the voiceless and presence to
the invisible, and she showed me that sometimes to talk about monsters, we
need to fabricate monsters of our own”. I believe Frankenstein, Caliban and Prometheus
and other tales and myths of monsters are also tales of ordinary people. Many
of us won’t recognise this until we are facing the same kind of fear, tragedy
and rejection.[1] The
classic monsters are very much like us; they have worries, fears, aspirations
and dreams that are very similar to us. We want them to be like us but not just
quite us, so we are comfortable to rationalise their suffering.
I am
not arguing that Evil do not exist, it does; the real question to investigate
is where is the true evil and its often not the people we are led to believe to
be monsters but very much hidden within the structure and system we choose to
place our trust in. We should be looking within rather than seeking monsters. We
all recognise Hitler or Stalin as evil but in their time they enjoyed massive
support and were seen as heroes. Our take on them is a lesson from history, a leaf
from memories that were carefully constructed to help us shape our opinion. In
other words, it’s a distortion of true events and reality. It is impossible for
us to grasp the reality unless we understand the bureaucracy of governments,
nationalism and the banality of evil. The machinery of the state projects as
omnipotent and we believe it will never fall foul to deviants. In their time
Hitler or Stalin at most would be thought as deviants; very much like Victor
Orban. Its deviants like Victor Orban that we should be mindful in their use of
state machinery and perfecting that palatable racism, which is a public
language that doesn’t sound racist on the surface but its pronouncement are
intolerant and xenophobic.
The
three groups we identified are: Monsters, tragic but not vicious; Evil,
malicious but conceal by power as protagonist; and average person, mostly
indifferent and majority of humanity. The last and unspoken group is the great
people who do great deeds and are good natured.
The superiority
complex
The
political right claims to be concerned with fostering self-pride and
recognising white identity but that is the language they use to conceal their
agenda which is to mobilise resentment against the left, political elite and migrants.
The far right has used immigrants as a political device and as a symbol of
government failure and part of a process of eliminating white heritage and
identity. This message resonates with the public and has led them to success
and power in several European countries.
The
centre-left has been shunned for its failure to offer a sufficiently radical
alternative and has been reduced to a small radical alternative section that is
more of a geographic phenomenon. We have radical groups on the right and on the
left who don’t talk to each other or like each other. This schism in European
politics is unprecedented and a new height of political intolerance.
Apart
from the radical left the success of populism has compelled all major parties
to adopt an anti-immigration policy, but they all got it wrong, except for the
populist right wing. The problem is not migration, it is needed by the labour
market and a prerequisite of the international trade system. The problem is
fear of migrants. It’s essentially a failure of optimism, a failure of
imagination; the future is seen as bleak, full of problems, no jobs and
dominated by people with dysfunctional cultures. This will come up in every
social survey and the populist solution is to scapegoat the immigrants for what
otherwise is a lack of political vision.
Populists
have used this fear to perfect a rhetoric that balances finely its racist views
while toning down pronouncements to plausible deniability level of racism.
Outright recourse to hateful speech will damage social cohesion and is still
unacceptable. It argues to promote a sense of racial purity. It has
successfully promoted racism while denouncing it. Its lines and ranks are
filled by racists and bigots but they will deny any such agenda.
The
centre-right and centre-left took immigration literally but gradually have come
to realise mass disillusion with their policies and now use the same
simplified, sensational, repetitive and slogan based language as the populists.
I saw
this in Kabul in 1992 where shallow, banal and sinister people took charge and
everyone else jumped on the bandwagon to enjoy in their success by lending gravity
to their bigotry; to extract meaning and purpose in what otherwise is cliché,
rotting and malicious. This led to the rise of Taliban and turning a bad
situation into worst.
The
power of lies
When
politics and society is balkanised and groups hold irreconcilable views people
find it easier to believe in misinformation and lies rather than seek and
verify facts; its because we take comfort from the tightness of our group and
questioning group beliefs are seen as disloyal. The political elites use
repetitive and stereotypical messages which are generally lies to create
zealots and fanatics rather than promote understanding.
When
the war broke out in Kabul city my family fled to the countryside. The country
side was controlled for the past 15 years by Mujahedeen with conservative
Islamic customs and traditions. Kabul was under the government controlled until
1992 when collapsed. Kabul was liberal by comparison with universities,
cinemas, theatres and education and jobs for women, yet it remained deeply
Afghan with traditions, religion and customs running deep. When I arrived in
the village my great uncles and relatives questioned me on fundamental
principles of Islam. They were shocked to find out that I was well educated on
Islamic traditions and history. They believed that all people living in Kabul were
infidels and enemies of God. It was considered an honour for true Muslims to
kill Kabuli heathens. Several weeks after our arrival one of my cousins who was
my age would still regularly seek assurances from me to confirm that all
Kabulis were not apostates and reprobates.
I
wondered why the false belief was so strongly rooted but only had to wait until
the evening. On the first night the family gathered in an orchard under a fig
tree and after tea and meal were listening to the radio. The radio station was
not the one I used to listen to in Kabul but was run by Hizbi Islami, a fundamentalist
faction. The content and language of the programmes were very new to me and the
description of ongoing brutal war in Kabul was absolutely false – nowadays they
would be called “fake news” – yet everybody believed in it. The mass killing of
civilians trapped in the besieged city was portrayed as a necessity to cleanse
the soul of the country. Tens of thousands of people died in a war that should
be classed as genocide but to their compatriots who believed in different
politics or loyal to a specific faction it wasn’t a cause for concern.
As
the number of people fleeing war from Kabul grew in the countryside, they
started to question the “news” and provided another side of the story. One day
during the Friday prayer in the mosque the Imam who had ties with Hizbi Islami
warned the public about new rumours and called them fake. He said they were
spread by malicious people who have come from other places and warned there
will be consequences for those spreading those rumours or what we will call
“fake news” – and that anyone spreading them would be punished.
Tens
of thousands of people, including my family members, were killed in a war
shaped by lies in Kabul. Lies about Jews, Soviets, Germans and other groups
killed tens of millions of people in Europe. Those lies are back and it seems
like we haven’t learned much from it. We won’t be able to argue in good
conscious that we were never warned about it or did not understand the
consequences of where lies will take us. Questioning “Fake News” means
questioning our assumptions and way of life and its uncomfortable, its easy to
condemn others. But courage by definition is confront our darkest beliefs and
looking inward for solutions.
The unexpected
storm
Government
and its institutions by its nature produce a narrative of stability, deceiving
us that the collapse of current order is unimaginable. This is very
counterintuitive to the lessons of history. Every book or movie of any conflict
will tell us that the protagonist lived a peaceful and serene life which was
ruptured by war. For instance, Ivan’s Childhood is an Andrei
Tarkovsky’s film about experiences of a 12-year-old protagonist living in two
sharply contrasting worlds. The dark, dank shadows of reality and another
familiar life of idyllic scenery and bathed in a soft, nurturing sunlight. The
film won a prestigious Golden Lion and a flattering review from none other but
Jean-Paul Sartre.
The
perfect antidote to the nature of government is populist rhetoric; it produces
the dynamics of crisis where escalation and dominance is the solution to
problems of social dialogue. This create unreasonable fears and prompt
otherwise unnecessary schism.
There
is no reverting back from this situation until a disaster strike. It will
destroy the political equilibrium and alter some social moralities and myths. A
new leadership will rise which will oversee the creation of new myths about us
and translate harshest lessons into political doctrine to guide the future.
[1] What we think as Evil is described as unattractive, vile and
foul. their tragedy deepens. This is
further deepened by rejection. They are alienated further as society recoils
from them. As an allegory of our responsibility to children, outsiders, or
those who don’t conform to conventional ideals of beauty, there isn’t a
stronger one
