Saturate fats and media disinformation are not good for Afghanistan, argues Fred J.
25 September 2001
The article Bomb them with butter urges us to think in new ways, but it looks as if it only advocates the usual western way to handle problems: bombing and bribing.
Let's consider the idea, and ignore the fact that entire power infrastructures too would need to be dropped over the Afghan territory to make all the nice electrical media gadgets work.
What media will be included to let the Afghan people have the full load of the proposed alternative? CNN? Time Warner? Should free access to
information include porn? Should - for historical reasons - Nixon's "read my lips" be included to teach them to trust western politicians?
Shots from slums and sweatshops in NYC, Manila and Mexico to give them a glance into their bright future? Footage from Chile, Grenada
and the like to show that the west principally defends human rights with always the same means: bombing and bribing?
Perhaps people should consider that lacking
'perspectives' may not only be denied by whatever Afghan government, but are a result of years of western politics and economics?
What makes westeners think that the Afghan people desire the same future they are likely to have, a future with all the advantages of capitalist
economy, starting with McDonald's, Microsoft and Walmart and not ending
with devastated ecologies, privatization of formerly common goods and as a
result of the attack on WTC and Pentagon the tightened control of private life?
How much do they have to assimilate to be part of what it is arrogantly defined as
'civilization'?
And is it possible that the
religious fundamentalism is easily matched with the scary mixture of religious and economic fundamentalism that is in the back of the war
likely to begin soon, a war that has been waged since decades, since colonialism and economic exploitation began?
The idea of bombing Afghanistan with western culture and its instruments
still is war: a pedagogical one, an oppressive one; and it solves the problem as little as a dime in the beggar's hat: you might have a good
feeling, the beggar a slice of bread or a can of beer; it won't change anything else and it does not even have that goal. rather than that it is
to make the problem vanish.
It's gratitude and magnanimity instead of rethinking the fundaments of an inequality - with the consequence that
the some roots of current problems and desasters are growing within western soil.

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