Western leaders taking cues on oppression from the Taliban – Watertown Daily Times

PARIS By now youve probably heard that the Taliban fighters whose battle fatigues look like those of neo-hippies on campus at the University of California, Berkeley are on the verge of being back in charge in Afghanistan. All thanks to the failed programs funded by Western taxpayers that were apparently more like Ponzi schemes. How else could one characterize what the U.S. Defense Department estimated as $815.7 billion spent to stabilize the country and develop its institutions when the result is the NATO-trained Afghan army collapsing like it was ordered from an online cheap goods store?

When NATO troops abandoned the Bagram Air Base earlier this year, ceding it to the Afghan army protgs whom they had spent the better part of two decades training, images quickly appeared online of the Taliban commandeering some nice, shiny gym equipment on that military base. The idea of the Taliban being back in power is enough to make a lot of people who made personal sacrifices in this war irate. But they see the straw in their neighbors eye rather than the beam in their own, as the biblical saying goes.

Apparently the Taliban are less militant than our own sanitary ayatollahs here in the West at least in the gym. They didnt even have to sign up for a time slot, apply hand sanitizer and wear masks. Judging by the lack of social distancing and other Covid-era behaviors in the Taliban gym videos, its hard to imagine that they would impose strict sanitary measures on the population the way our leaders have here in the West.

We in Paris have spent the past 17 months being placed periodically on house arrest for our own good, being forced to wear cloth over our faces for fear of government-imposed punishment, having our movement controlled, and now being segregated and marginalized if our personal choices dont align with those of our rulers. Moreover, when some people speak out against such oppression, theyre either censored or targeted by institutions or authorities promoting the governments official narrative.

And now were seeing the leaders of our so-called democracies introducing increasingly intrusive monitoring through digital technology such as smartphone applications and QR codes, all under the pretext of ensuring adherence to the governments chosen ideology of sanitary purity.

Those among us who have been relieved of critical thought after being bombarded with fear-driven propaganda now cry out for punishment when a Western woman whips off her symbolically oppressive mask in her local grocery store, proclaims her emancipation from the sanitary regime, or rejects the imposition of a medical act like an injection by claiming, My body, my choice.

Indeed, the women of Afghanistan are going to have to contend with the Talibans return to power. But since the pandemic, the governments of allegedly free and democratic countries are not really in a position to be giving lessons on liberty to the Taliban or to anyone else. Our governments dont get to claim moral authority regarding oppression when theyre increasingly responsible for perpetrating it themselves.

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Western leaders taking cues on oppression from the Taliban - Watertown Daily Times