Touchstone
By Cicero | Related entries in War
I recently ran across a five year old article called The Torture Place, about Abhaseen Barikzy, an Afghan communist who was tortured at the hands of the Taliban. I recommend reading it as a reminder of what we’re up against in this war. Here’s a snippet of his experiences in captivity:
Then Fazal-ur Rehman said to the commander, ‘I want to kill a very bad pagan among the prisoners to receive more blessing from Allah,’
Barikzy waited. His frienBarikzy waited. His friend avoided bringing him out for any more torture, but Barikzy says he saw the Taliban’s worst punishments of other prisoners: “For Uzbek people, they wanted them digging in the mountain without having any purpose. Forty people digging a big hole in the side of the mountain. Then they asked them to go inside the hole, and they exploded it, and all of them died in there.
“The Massoud followers, they told them, ‘Because you live in a mountainous area, you are used to cold weather,’ and then tied them upside down on trees and put lots of water on them. By the next morning they were all dead, their bodies iced.
“Then there were 50 or 60 Hazara (an ethnic minority from central Afghanistan). They tied their hands and feet and put them in line, and a man had a hammer and nails, and he was beating the nails into the heads of the people. As soon as the nails got in, the blood rushed from their mouth and nose and they died.”
Last he describes a military pilot suspected of being a spy. “They put a butcher’s hook in his throat and hung him, pretending that he was a sheep and calling out, ‘Who wants to buy sheep meat?’ and the others were mocking him, saying, ‘I want 2 kilo of the leg,’ and they would cut the leg and pretend to sell the meat.”
I really don’t have much to add to Barikzy’s story. It speaks for itself. I was struck by the commander who said, ‘I want to kill a very bad pagan among the prisoners to receive more blessing from Allah.” I think his reasoning is emblematic of what we’re up against with respect to Islamic fascism. We in the West desperately want to believe that we can find common, rational ground and negotiate with Islamic fascists. The Commander exemplifies why negotiation, in the end, is folly. For them, they merely buy time with negotiation. Their life on Earth is not important; it’s what comes after that matters. We should be mindful of this while we lodge complaints to Iranian mullahs who race towards making isotopes.
While Iranian Muslims and the Taliban are opposed to each other, they share a central core belief: Allah’s up there. Period. Get there, and don’t worry about here. Just get through your two seconds on Earth and score points with Allah by killing his enemies. If such thinking isn’t a part of historical Islam, is something new and in the minority, then so be it. Whatever it is, and wherever it came from, it’s here on Earth now — magnified by cell phones, web sites, plane tickets and easily-obtained passports to Western cities.
Through all the hurricane news, it’s been frustrating to see the US, EU and UN falter at containing Iran’s nuclear program. It’s like reading a script right out of the League of Nations. Islamic tyrants manipulate the West into disharmonious dithering while they build Allah’s Blessed Bomb.
After he got out of captivity, Barikzy was at a UN shelter:
Finally, two men came to the [UN] shelter and asked his plans for the future. “I told them to send me overseas,” he says. “They asked where I wanted to go, and I said, ‘To the United States, because there is good security there and I feel safe.’
Barikzy was a secularist. Given his treatment at the hands of real fascists for being one, he might just as well have been called ‘The West.’ His experience with fascists is a touchstone for us to compare our freedoms to. I’m sure he thinks they’re worth preserving now that he is here, even if some among us carry too much angst to understand we’re in the fight for our lives.
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September 23rd, 2005 at 3:15 am
An extremely heartwrenching story, but one passage in particular struck me.
Perhaps you mean the Iranians in power. It has been well documented that many Iranians decry the Shahs’ rule, but they simply don’t have the numbers to overthrow them, nor do they have the will.
Simply put, even though Iran is in the Axis of Evil, I suspect that only the minority feel the way you illustrated here.
Thoughts?
September 23rd, 2005 at 8:50 am
Allah’s up there. Period. Get there, and don’t worry about here.
That mindset has less influence than you think it does. Yes, radical Islamists are willing to die and are comforted by relgious beliefs, but the “get there and don’t worry about here” attitude is not the driving force behind their war. It is simply a device the leaders use to send their soldiers off to die. Those in power still very much want to stay on Earth and enjoy the spoils of victory. This is still a war about power and Earthly gains for those at the top.
September 23rd, 2005 at 10:52 am
Elyas and Justin,
It’s true that the Mullahs of Iran and their party are in the minority. But given the Iranian mullahs’ nuclear mission, their minority status seems irrelevant compared to the threat they pose to the world. Once they have Allah’s Bomb, it’s a whole new ball game for the entire planet. Whether or not their fundamentalist ideology is in the majority or the minority makes little difference if there is no credible threat to stop them — either internally within Persia or externally from the West.
The majority of Iranians are no more capable of mutilating people than the majority or Afghans are. Yet Abhaseen Barikzy’s suffering is emblematic of an international movement devised to counter the West, such as it is. They draw potency from the silent majority — among Muslims and among secularists.
The more I read history, the more I realize that the great Bogeyman of history are silent majorities that fail to act upon their convictions. There may be sound reasons for silence and fear in the face of minority extremists; but nonetheless, those extremists have made lots of horrible history. Was all that horrible history written in spite of or because of the silent majorities?
Perhaps good can overcome evil only when evil gets beyond the boiling point. Before that, when evil simmers, the good is either too trusting, considerate, open-minded, comfortable, in denial or afraid to abate evil’s flames while it’s possible. Perhaps there’s a name for that phenomenon, which is so recurrent throughout history.
September 23rd, 2005 at 2:29 pm
Good point.
September 23rd, 2005 at 3:00 pm
Very good point, indeed.
This is very similar to the popular theme that evil can triumph simply by having good people do nothing, or the theme that the opposite of good is not evil, but rather apathy. This is a theme with considerable force.
I feel as if good has to have some apathy, innately. To some extent, the good of the world DO have to tolerate, trust, be open-minded, and so on. To do otherwise is to relinquish some good. An active good stomps on any deviation from good, wherever it sees it. Before long, we realize how fascism can be a successful enough form of government to actually come into power, on occasion. (Luckily, we currently have considerable vigilance for it, as well.)
Work through this cycle enough times – good/apathetic -> good/activist -> fascist -> evil -> good/apathetic – and if you’re like me, you come to see good’s main adversary as not evil, nor even apathy, but finally, innate ignorance. In any typical situation, we don’t recognize evil precisely enough to excise it while leaving the good. Our tools are still too blunt, and so are our senses. We can’t know, most of the time. (Though I suppose we could improve that.)
September 23rd, 2005 at 6:15 pm
There is a well of nationalism, and national pride, and an obsession with humiliating national enemies, that runs deeply in Iranian popular culture. It’s a result, in part, of the complex interplay of Persian history and Islam. People everywhere tend to be compromising, get-along, non-fanatical. But the degree of that isn’t always the same from one nation to the next.