The victory
of the Taliban over the military forces of Uncle Sam in Afghanistan raises some
unpleasant questions for Dixie. Writing
of the motivations of the Taliban, Mr
Pat Buchanan says,
‘
. . . to brand the Taliban terrorists and pariahs is not new to them. What they
seek is something for which they have proven they are willing to die.
‘What
is critical for them is to restore the Taliban to their previous dominance; to
create an Islamic Emirate; to make themselves the moral, social, and political
arbiters of a more purely Islamic Afghanistan. And to be rid of the
outsiders and their alien values. They want to be able to stand up and say to
the Muslim world: "We have shown you how to do it. We fought America, the
world superpower, for 20 years until we forced the Americans, tails between
their legs, to get out of our land, and then put their puppets up against a
wall."’
In this
instance – loyalty to one’s fatherland and its culture, even to the death – the
Taliban are shaming the South rather badly.
It is often said that in the South, memory and tradition live; that
Christianity is vibrant; that the extended family is a beloved institution; and
so on. To be sure, there are still
glimmers of those things in the South, but overall they are faint and growing
dimmer.
We must
admit the disquieting truth: Most
Southerners, for the moment, would rather be a part of the un-Christian Yankee
American Empire rather than experience any deprivation or discomfort to free
ourselves of Washington City’s perverse and destructive influence. Not so the Taliban:
‘Geopolitically,
what matters now is how the Taliban have written a whole new script, showing
the lands of Islam, as well as the Global South, how to defeat the
self-referential, seemingly invincible US/NATO empire.
‘The
Taliban did it with Islamic faith, infinite patience and force of will fueling
roughly 78,000 fighters – 60,000 of them active – many with minimal military
training, no backing of any state – unlike Vietnam, which had China and the
USSR – no hundreds of billions of dollars from NATO, no trained army, no air
force and no state-of-the-art technology.’
--Mr
Pepe Escobar
Thus, it is
unsurprising that in the South what was unthinkable not long ago is now the
agonizing ‘new normal’: The Governor of
Arkansas vetoed legislation this year to protect female athletes from confused,
‘transgender’ males; North Carolina repealed a law in 2016 (HB 2) that mandated
separate bathrooms and locker rooms for men and women and vetoed local laws
granting special rights to LGBT people; the Republican Party, the party of
choice of most conservative-minded Southerners, now
officially celebrates Pride Month; the Southern Baptist Convention embraces
Critical Race Theory; etc.
What is
happening in the South is simply an extension of what is at play in the whole
West. The author Paul
Kingsnorth explains:
‘Ultimately,
without that higher purpose to bind it, society would fall — as it has — into
“emotivism”, relativism and ultimately disintegration. If every culture is
cored around a sacred order — whether Christian, Islamic or Hindu, the
veneration of ancestors or the worship of Odin — then the collapse of that
order will lead inevitably to the collapse of the culture it supported. There
is a throne at the heart of every culture, and whoever sits on it will be the
force we take our instruction from. The modern experiment has been the act
of dethroning both literal human sovereigns and the representative of the
sacred order, and replacing them with purely human, and purely abstract, notions
— “the people” or “liberty” or “democracy” or “progress.”
‘I’m
all for democracy (the real thing, please, not the corporate simulacra that
currently squats in its place), but the dethroning of the sovereign — Christ —
who sat at the heart of the Western sacred order did not lead to universal
equality and justice. It led — via a bloody shortcut through Robespierre,
Stalin and Hitler — to the complete triumph of the power of money, which has
splintered our culture and our souls into a million angry shards.
‘The
vacuum created by the collapse of our old taboos was filled by the poison gas
of consumer capitalism. It has now infiltrated every aspect of our lives in the
way that the Christian story once did, so much so that we barely even notice as
it colonises everything — from the way we eat to the values we teach our
children. Cut loose in a post-modern present — with no centre, no truth
and no direction — we have not become independent-minded, responsible,
democratic citizens in a human republic. We have become slaves to the self and
to the power of money; broken worshippers before the monstrous idol of
Progress. “In the ethics of the West,” wrote Spengler, “everything is
direction, claim to power, will to affect the distant.”’
Mr
Buchanan’s statement, similar in spirit to Mr Kingsnorth’s, pierces the
Southern soul like a sword:
‘Is
what we have on offer—one man-one vote democracy—truly appealing in a part of
the world where democracy seems to have trouble, from the Maghreb to the Middle
East to Central Asia, putting down any deep roots?
‘The
Taliban's God is Allah. The golden calf we had on offer was democracy. In the
Hindu Kush, their god has proven stronger.’
If the South
had not abandoned Christ, we would be willing to deny ourselves like the
Taliban, dig in our heels, irritate the Yanks (using peaceful, non-violent
methods), and wait until they get so frustrated with us that they turn us
loose. But the South has accepted the
‘golden calf’ of Yankee democracy and materialism, and just as in Afghanistan,
it is leading to chaos. Mr Declan Leary
is exactly right when
he says, ‘We must consider the possibility that the gospel of American
Progress—democracy, liberalism, equality—failed in Afghanistan not because it
is not Afghan but because it is not true. Because, if we are really being
honest, it’s not doing too hot on the homefront either.’
The South,
along with the rest of the States, has ‘suppress[ed] the natural human passions
toward order and loyalty, faith, place, and blood, with shallow promises of
voting rights and forward motion’.
This has
consequences, . . .
The rest is
at https://www.geopolitica.ru/en/article/what-taliban-victory-means-dixie
.
--
Holy Ælfred
the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!
Anathema to
the Union!
