We might not be enthusiasts of their brand name of liberty, nor are we prepared to emulate their peculiar ways, however their unconquerable spirit is something that in these dark and overbearing days we can all admire.
With unnerving rapidity, royal contraction, much talked about over the recent years, now has palpably and noticeably occurred in Afghanistan. The chain of events leading to it was lightning fast, and it is unlikely to leave anybody across the length and breadth of this earth unimpressed or unmoved. Future visitors from the antique land of Afghanistan undoubtedly will have tales to tell of the shattered visage of the brand-new Ozymandias, the hubristic “king of kings” upon whose works “the Mighty” have indeed until quite recently looked with wonder and despair, or will they? It is a belief that after the humbling scenes just witnessed by the global town, in genuine time and from the sands of Afghanistan, is turning quickly into contempt and ridicule.
Those with a little bit of historical memory, in addition to ability for linking dots and drawing parallels, will recall the topic that in the mid-1960s preoccupied the geostrategists of the decaying and moribund British empire. It was how to save what with shrinking imperial resources could still be controlled by drawing the line, also in desert sand as it turned out, and abandoning everything that lay “east of Aden.” The concept was to reconfigure what possessions and status were still undamaged, yielding where retrenchment was clearly inescapable, and recomposing the still workable fragments of the imploding empire to make the decrease less disorderly and a minimum of a little more stylish, if unpreventable. The crazy scenes at Kabul airport surely make any pretense of beauty rather risible this time around. What Shelley’s creative level of sensitivity presciently prepared for, disguising poetic premonitions of his own country’s future with inoffensive images drawn from the ancient past, is again coming to pass. The new Ozymandias’ trunkless legs of stone are again extending, this time from Afghan sands, “frown, And old and wrinkly lip, and sneer of cold command” all there, still vainly alarming the periodic passer-by with tried arrogance, however rather pathetically lacking its intimidatory compound of yore.
There is undoubtedly a component of historiosophical consistency (закономерность as they would call it in Russian) in this latest royal crash, but there is also more than just that. Like a cancer patient, every empire likewise is bound to die too soon, but when and how are nevertheless highly private matters. The procedure may be extracted or sped up depending upon the particularities of every imperial system. But when, as Tucker Carlson has cogently argued, “we are led by buffoons and everything they touch relies on mayhem” the opportunities of a Rome- or Ottoman-style extended pain are decreased, in favor of an accelerated death.
The puzzled, ridiculous, contradictory, and constantly moving rationales directing royal policy in Afghanistan are solid proof of specifically the buffoonery to which Carlson has drawn attention. Nancy Pelosi’s demand sternly provided to the triumphant celebration, known to champion what by contemporary Western standards is a drastically misogynist world-view, “to’ [have] women at the table’ when a political solution is hammered out, alerting the group that ‘the world is watching,'” is a regaling example of not just unpardonable buffoonery, however of appalling lack of knowledge also, laced with a big dose of idiocy.
Predictably, who and how “lost Afghanistan” (a reworking of the old “China question” of seventy years ago) is presently among the hottest subjects. However what the beat conqueror actually lost is mankind and honour. Thousands of wretched local partners, as normal, have actually been left high and dry. They, of course, benefit as much sympathy as those who joined the Wehrmacht in 1945. Politically unaware former members of the beat armies are venting disappointment over pals senselessly exploded and the general embarrassment and glaring stupidity of how everything ended. Persuaded and politically illiterate, the empire’s home population, disregarded and driven to torment and misery, surviving on occasional “stimulus” handouts from their masters, are not even intense enough to ask about the two thousand million, or maybe trillion, or quadrillion, quid flown over on pallets to Afghanistan during the last twenty years to corruptively finance the nation-building chimera. So far it has not struck any of the bamboozled imperial zombies to ask why is it that just they were overlooked of the “nation-building” free cash distribution gold mine.
A few of those funds, as we have actually found out, were commandeered by the fleeing puppet “president” who provided himself at the airport with a number of carloads of cash, a few of which needed to be abandoned on the tarmac for lack of area in the vacation plane. A nice retirement fund for the leaving dedicated public servant, to be sure. Hopefully some Afghan mendicants unblemished by the profession’s benefits looked out enough to help themselves to the abandoned loot that, by dint of force majeure, might not be stolen.
So now all the empty talk of “nation building” and “liberating downtrodden females” lies shattered in the desert of Afghanistan. By large determination, the locals have actually recovered their liberty, toppling and shaming the magnificent autocrat whose traces in their land, unlike the previous conquerors’, will simply liquify, likely not leaving even trunkless legs of stone to protrude in the desert to mark his undesirable, ephemeral existence in a land piously dedicated to its eccentric brand of liberty and fiercely connected to its own strange methods.
We may not be followers of their brand of liberty, nor are we prepared to imitate their peculiar methods, however their unconquerable spirit is something that in these dark and oppressive days we can all admire. We are all Afghans now.