The Taliban Victorious

America delenda est, inshallah

The appropriation of the Taliban's victory by western righties is probably not a positive phenomenon. If you are in the reactionary online dialogue, you know what I mean, so I won’t bother with a long-winded preamble - but here’s a salient example:

The imperial citizen is instilled with a unique thought process, different than that of the merely national or provincial citizen. The Globalist American Empire (GAE) is insidious and pervasive - even its internal opposition elements are afflicted by Imperial Thought, and their view is often as myopic as that of the GAE itself. The imperial thought process sees every provincial development as essential to the home country. It projects the home country onto the provinces, and distorts the happenings in the provinces with the understanding of the home country.

Very little in this world is unequivocal. Whether or not the defeat of the American Empire in Afghanistan is a positive development remains yet to be seen. Any astute historical observer knows better than to make such a judgement so hastily. Is the ascension of barbarians a positive development? Is the enemy of the enemy always your friend? The fate of the imperial citizen is tied to that of the empire they are subject to, and the destruction of one, for all its faults, may easily entail the destruction of the other.

The example above is perfect insomuch as it projects the two primary elements of post-Enlightenment western civilization onto another civilization with no such tradition. Conservatism and liberalism are the two forces we imperial citizens see in contention in the home country - do these represent every possible mode of societal or political conflict? Can we even say that there is any such conflict in Afghanistan? Was the US even defeated?

The United States pulled its soldiers and diplomats from Afghanistan, and the Taliban seem to have simply reverted the country to its natural state. From what I have read, the Taliban have halted military operations outside of the capital, Kabul, and are more or less peacefully transitioning power (as peacefully as middle-eastern regime change tends to get) from Afghanistan’s current regime. Its President Ghani seems to have relinquished power and left the country. There seems to be little or no serious military, political, or social opposition to the Taliban’s assertion of power.

So, it does not really seem to be the case that a conservative religious force defeated a liberal, godless force, so much as one side just picked up and left, and the country almost instantly reverted to its natural state. It’s natural state is certainly religious - but it is neither liberal nor conservative - it is Islamic. These two conflicting ideas have nothing to do with Islam - it is a western conflict, often afflicted artificially onto other nations who would like nothing better than to have nothing to do with it. The celebration of the Taliban’s “victory” over the US government is almost like the reverse side of this phenomenon - to appropriate the conclusion of that affliction for our own political ends, when it really has as little to do with us as our own internal conflict has to do with them.

A single province on the edge of an empire is not essential to the empire. To regard the regime change in the imperial province of Afghanistan as a “positive development,” we must first ask, in what way does this positively bestow some benefit onto the Empire’s internal dissidents? Is this a case of “If it bleeds, we can kill it?” Is the empire even bleeding? It is certainly retracting - it will likely bleed at some point. Certainly, American soldiers have bled in Afghanistan, but I speak in political metaphor here.

I see no tangible benefit. We can rattle of a list of goods - American lives saved, American treasure saved, etc. - and while these are good, they have little to do with the political conflict that pervades American culture, to which I am speaking. I certainly understand why some people are experiencing a morale boost. Morale is, of course, important - but it reeks of a sorry state of desperation to take so distant an event and almost vampirically parasitize some form of satiation from it, especially given the hardships the Afghans have endured and will likely endure as a result of this event. It vividly brings to the fore the decadence of the imperial mind.

Morale is beneficial, but morale unearned, derived from the success of others and not your own, is an unhealthy form of indulgence that we would do better to avoid. It is not for us to celebrate what we did not achieve. To do so is to become more complacent. Let us save the celebrations for when they are not vicarious, but sincere.