The Civilized War

(My apologies to readers for the lack of posts. I have been dealing with some significant health challenges and the frustration of having spent two years largely isolation because of my autoimmune condition)

“This isn’t Iraq or Afghanistan. [Kyiv] is a relatively civilized city where you wouldn’t expect this to happen”

These words were spoken by a white man on CBS-one of the U.S’s largest television networks. No one corrected him from mouthing these white supremacist words. The anchors simply looked on, listened on. We live in a world when it is still okay to say this, to insist that the mass killing of brown people in Afghanistan and Iraq is permissible, excusable even necessary.

This post is not any indictment of Ukraine, nor the brave people of Kyiv who have been awarded the badge of being “more or less civilized” because they have built enough coffee shops and bars to be considered integral enough for Western civilization to defend.

This IS a post that expresses how difficult it is to realize that all that I have feared regarding the worthlessness of Brown and Black bodies in white imagination is true. For years altogether, I have written again and again about the fact that the mass deaths of Iraqis and Afghanis and Pakistanis and whoever else were meaningless to the white world. White people agreed but many rolled their eyes-the extermination of “Islamist terror” in their minds required such killing and everyone who died was neatly imagined to be proximate enough that threat. If they didn’t say it, they thought it…all those people deserved to die.

I wish that this terrible moment, this world poised on the cusp of mass destruction, would change its ways. That it would realize, for instance, that it is not ONLY Ukrainian refugees who must be granted admission into Europe but all the other migrants from Syria and Afghanistan…those old wars now conveniently forgotten. This is not at all what is happening. Even as Polish authorities are allowing Ukrainians into their country, providing food and shelter, they continue to exclude all the other Brown and Black migrants who have been languishing at their door for months and months. Those babies-we can now see in unapologetic stances-are less cute, less worthy of life. This is no longer conjecture-it is now truth.

The real enemy was always Putin. The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were expansionist wars meant to express the sheer force of American might. The threat of “Islamist terror” was never ever as big as the disproportionate attention devoted to it, as the mass killing justified because of it. Its greatest impact was to devalue entire peoples are justly deserving of hatred. The tragedy of white people dying, “more or less civilized” cities being bombed is not only that a nuclear armed madman is targeting them, but that it reveals that it is still only white pain that motivated the world to act, to feel, to stand in solidarity.

My heart bleeds for the suffering of Ukraine. My heart also bleeds for the inalienable truth that stands exposed yet again-white lives matter. This would be a good thing if it were not for the truth that ONLY white lives matter. People can and must stand with Ukraine but they must also grapple with why they did not stand with Iraqis and Afghans who suffered in just the same way and at their hands,

They must understand that there are no civilized wars.

What is wrong with this picture?

You should never post when you’re angry I have been told. But as it turns out, I have been living in a state of constant anger these days. That anger rose to precipitous proportions recently when while anger-scrolling I came across the photo below:

I do not know all the characters presented below but (like you) I do know a few. The host is a brown woman but as I write in my book Against White Feminism, “whiteness” is not a skin color it is a system of race privilege that white adjacent brown people can uphold as well as anyone else. The lassitude of this picture, the over eager faces, the performative mirth all suggest an evening of smug self-satisfaction, of side hugs and back pats and “you’re amazings”. Next time I wonder how feminism lost its fangs…became irrelevant I can have look right here at this tableau of self-satisfaction.

( please leave your own reactions in the comments)

Modi's General

The Death of an Indian General Bipin Rawat may have averted nuclear war

It is usually the good people that have tragic deaths- elementary school teachers who shield their children from gunmen, Good Samaritans who jump in to save drowning people, the mom with three kids delivering meals for the elderly-all appear in reports of the worst accidents. Sometimes, although very rarely, bad people also die tragically.

This is what happened last Thursday. At a little after noon Indian Standard Time, a Russian made military helicopter carrying General Bipin Rawat, the top soldier in India, his wife and thirteen other people crashed in Connoor in the state of Tamil Nadu. A short cell phone video shot by a tourist shows the helicopter hovering low and ominous before it disappears in a swathe of clouds. A loud crash is heard seconds later. The life of General Bipin Rawat is over.

In the aftermath, Indian television which, since the takeover of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2014, doles out heaping helpings of rabid nationalism even on ordinary days, has been eulogizing the dead General. To listen to them one would think that the General was a jolly man with the soft heart of an overgrown Boy Scout. As funerary rites proceed, retired Indian generals have shown up on screen their hazy Zoom images reciting hagiographies; the time the General felt empathy for a paraplegic, or that other time he was nice enough to speak to a contingent of female soldiers.

The reality of General Bipin Rawat was markedly different. If Prime Minister Narendra Modi can be likened to a contemporary Hitler in the making, his hatred of Indian Muslims a parallel to Hitler’s revulsion of German Jews, then General Bipin Rawat would be his Heinrich Himmler. Himmler, let me remind you, was the man who came up with the idea of death camps. It turns out that Rawat liked the idea of camps too. In January 2020, not long after he assumed the “Chief of Defense Services” position Rawat delivered a speech in which he advocated the development of “De-radicalization Camps” where Kashmiri Muslims could be interned. “These people need to be taken out separately, possibly taken into some deradicalization camps” he declared with his usual vim and vigor. Rawat even spilled that “there are already de-radicalization camps going on in our country” a statement that others in the Indian Defense establishment then tried to walk back.

General Rawat however kept at it. If the Modi Administration was systematically passing laws like the Citizenship Amendment Act which demanded that Muslims (and only Muslims) provide identification papers that showed they were actually born in India and hence were “real” Indian citizens-Rawat stepped in to criticize innocent civilians who protested its passage. Rawat believed that the Indian Army (allegedly secular) should stay a primarily Hindu and be subject to the diktat of the triumvirate which included himself, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah. Notably, the post that Rawat occupied was one that the Modi Administration created for him so that he could reorganize the military along the lines that would be useful to a Hindu nationalist India increasingly keen on provoking its neighbors.

Even before he took on this tailor-made position, Rawat “proved” himself to Modi by carrying out “surgical strikes” across the border into Pakistan in February 2019-a reckless incursion between two nuclear armed neighbors that appeared motivated by the ultra-nationalist BJP Government’s desire to get a boost in the approaching national elections. Not only did he want to provoke Pakistan, he was also the commander in Ladakh near the Chinese border and took hawkish positions In favor of carrying out offensive attacks against that neighbor. This is probably why the Indian media is blaming China for the crash of Rawat’s helicopter.

In 2018, when an Indian Army Major stationed in Indian-occupied Kashmir tied a civilian to the hood of his Jeep while it was being pelted by stones-Rawat said the Major was “entitled” to do so. In fact, Rawat went on to make the use of civilians as human shields a rule-saying that individual officers were entitled to do so based on the circumstances. When the United Nations issued a report decrying this and other draconian tactics, including torture and extra-judicial killings of innocent civilians-Rawat said that the report was “a selective compilation of unverified information” and “motivated” by other ends.

One of General Bipin Rawat’s loved sayings was the cliche that “offense is the best defense”. Forgivable if favored by an ordinary man, its frequent use by this crazed, Hindu nationalist General, was a warning to the world. If the already hawkish Hindu nationalists of Prime Minister Modi’s Administration weren’t terrible enough for the fate of peace in the subcontinent, the addition of a trigger-happy, Hindu nationalist General who advocated camps for India’s Muslims, thought nothing of soldiers tying them to hoods of their cars, were keen on starting wars-was a death knell.

It would not have taken much for General Bipin Rawat, wrapped as he was in Hindu nationalist vitriol himself to carry out Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s orders for a nuclear strike against Pakistan or China thus initiating a nuclear war that would destroy the world. Heinrich Himmler-Hitler’s top military man did not die before he killed hundreds of thousands of innocent Jews, perhaps it is lucky that Fate intervened in the case of Modi’s chosen Man.

The Truth about the Afghan Girl

And The White Savior Industrial Complex.

So as innocent and hapless migrants were drowning in the English Channel as the English and French watched , the white savior industrial complex came up with a story to reiterate just how noble and good white people really are. The story involved the infamous “Afghan Girl” whose actual name is Sharbat Gula and whose photo was taken without consent some three decades ago by National Geographic photographer Steven Curry at a refugee camp in Peshawar, Pakistan.

Here is the New York Times Story which hails the fact that Sharbat Gula has received asylum in Italy while ignoring the fact that National Geographic and Steven Curry have stolen from her for decades by NEVER sharing a single penny of the millions they have made from her image.

Here is Sharbat Gula”s real story which I wrote about a few years ago;

“In late 2014, the National Geographic website published a list of five of its most memorable covers and the stories behind them. Among the five was Steve McCurry’s photograph of the green-eyed Sharbat Gula, a young Afghan girl living in a refugee camp in Pakistan. The other covers featured a dog named Betsy, a very tall tree, an ape named Koko and a hot spring in Yellowstone National Park.

The “Afghan girl” was left nameless when her picture appeared in June 1985. It was only years later that the magazine returned to find her. The 2002 story on finding the “Afghan girl” renewed the picture’s popularity before Ms Gula was forgotten again.

So it was until last month, when Pakistan’s authorities arrested her in Nauthia in north-west Pakistan and charged her with using fake documents to remain in the country.

The judge ruled that under existing laws, Ms Gula would have to be deported. Things looked dismal for Ms Gula, who suffers from Hepatitis C and is the sole breadwinner for her family, until last Saturday, when a government official announced that she would be permitted to stay on humanitarian grounds.

But according to the latest reports her deportation is actually going to take place later this week.

It is tragic that Pakistani authorities will not let Sharbat Gula stay. Her dependence on their mercy illustrates the vast chasm between the photographer who took her picture and her own hapless life. Bits and pieces from National Geographic’s own reporting reveal more of the story.

A 2002 article begins with the revelation that Ms Gula “remembers her anger” at being photographed back in 1985. McCurry insisted that she told him “he could take her picture.” No explanation is provided as to how the angry Ms Gula, who did not speak English, would have communicated this to McCurry.

The rest of the 2002 story is a challenging read: Pashtuns are “the most warlike of Afghan tribes” and Sharbat Gula has skin “that looks like leather”.

Even more alarming are the pictures that go with it, not for Ms Gula’s lost youth but for the fact that they show her being subjected to a DNA test, and reveal the use of a forensic examiner and a forensic sculptor to aid in confirming her identity.

As the saga of Ms Gula’s arrest unfolded, the old orientalist binary was at work: the government officials of a poor, foreign country wrangling with an even poorer woman, the ugly fight of the wanting versus the wanting watched by a morally superior West, smug inside its own sealed borders.

At the heart of this debate is the assumption that photographs represent real and unassailable truths, that the details of their composition and arrangement are always incidental and politically neutral. As critic Teju Cole has pointed out, this assumption is false and misleading.

Far closer to the truth is the fact that in arranging and selecting subjects and pictures that resonate with western imaginings of the exotic and wild Orient, these pictures confirm existing prejudices.

The “Afghan girl” is an example of just that, its feral undertones and high contrast colours confirming precisely the stereotypes seated in the western mind.

Good photography can shred the clichés and enable a deeper, more accurate seeing than the most superficial kind.

None of this has been true in the case of the forgotten Ms Gula, her nameless childhood picture worth more than her penniless, middle-aged reality.”

Steven Curry and National Geogtaphic need to be held responsible for the theft of millions of dollars from Sharbat Gula. But of course, when opportunistic white men and white, orientalist institutions like National Geographic steal from them …. it is entirely okay.”