The Taliban is Terrible – And Terrorism has Nothing to do with It

(Why Terrorists are Often Morally Superior to Soldiers)

By

David Gottfried

The Taliban and their extremist Islamic cohorts are winning in Afghanistan. Joe Biden is making George Mc Govern look like Patton or Rommel.   I despise the Taliban for what they represent, for their objectives and for what their ascension to power may bring about in the world. 

Of course, most Americans know nothing about the Taliban.     Since they don’t know what the Taliban stands for, they seize on reasons to hate them.  The media is quick to support the government by spreading the approved propaganda.   The supposedly liberal media, and just about everyone else, calls them terrorists. We have been trained to believe that terrorists are bad and so we reflexively hate anyone labeled a terrorist.

I submit to you that most terrorists are morally superior to soldiers.  The Taliban are an odious lot of rabid religious reactionaries, but their alleged terrorism is not their sin.

Terrorists are often called terrorists because no recognized government backs them or controls them.     Soldiers by contrast are working for their respective governments.

Because terrorists operate independently of recognized governments, terrorists are the bastard children of power politics, unruly fighters who do not murder because a government commanded them to murder.   Soldiers, however, are supported by governments. 

Governments, if we have the balls to speak plainly, are pompous, arrogant amalgamations of assholes who believe that they have the right to be in power.   Concomitant  with holding power is the notion that you have the right to terrorize some other group of people, e.g., A Spaniard spits on a basque, a Frenchmen spits on a Huguenot, an American spits on a black.   Of course, you can terrorize a minority group within your country because you are in power and they are not.

Indeed, at a symposium held at Columbia University, Roger Hilsman (Under Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs under John F. Kennedy) said to me, in 1980, that the warring leaders of governments were, by and large, murderers of a sort.  

Of course, there is a thing called International Law, and the fuss pots who have concocted this specious and slow-witted discipline will tell you that government-sponsored maiming is legal whereas the work of terrorists is always illegal.    However, the wiser critic will remember what jurists at Yale recognized in the Great Depression:  What is considered legal and illegal is simply a reflection of what the bastards in power want us to think.  Very simply, Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) was right on the money when he says to his Waspy-wife-to-be that Presidents are murderers just like the men in the mafia.    

By contrast, since terrorists are not ordered by any government  to fight, they are fighting because they believe in something.

The Vietcong, G-d bless them, wanted to free the people from the tyranny of landlords, the West and stooges of the West.

The Hagenah and the Palmach were called terrorists by the British.  They were fighting to build a homeland for the Jews in Eretz Yisroel, the land of Israel. 

The Palestinian fighters, as much as I despise them, are also fighting because they believe in something.

However, why does a soldier fight? Why does an American soldier incinerate innocent villagers with napalm?  He doesn’t know anything about the country where he is fighting.  As late as 1972, or eight years after we significantly widened the Vietnam war,  many Americans still did not know that their government was supposedly fighting for the South Vietnamese against the North Vietnamese.

Why does an uneducated American fight?  He does it because he is ordered to.  He does it because he cannot find a job, and the military will pay for college.  He is nothing but a hired gun.  And, given the deteriorating composition of the American military, and their degraded intellectual capabilities, they are really nothing but highly intelligent attack dogs.     

(Undoubtedly, you will chastise my acid comments about our soldiers.  Today, almost no Americans, outside of Southerners, blacks and Latinos,  have anything to do with the US military.  They feel guilty about this so they give the military undeserved praise every chance they get.  By contrast, during World War Two, between 10 million and 18 million Americans served (Every resource I have ever consulted provides another tally for our troop levels).  In those days, when people were much more familiar with the ways and means of the military, they were not seduced by uniforms like a gay man at a leather bar, and they realized that the military had a penchant for constantly doing exceptionally stupid things)  

Ergo, we have to give round 1 to the terrorists.  They are fighting because they passionately believe in something and are willing to kill and die for it.  The soldier, by contrast, fights only because he has been ordered to.  Of course, the idea that we should kill someone who never laid a hand on us simply because we have been ordered to is the same idea that says we should shove Jews into a gas chamber because we have been ordered to.

The world would be a much better place if people learned to hate discipline, order and obedience.  (If at times I seem anti-Catholic, this is the reason:  I find that so many Catholics make very good toy soldiers as their Church teaches unquestioning obedience.  Catholic Croatia, Slovakia and Vichy France were ardently pro Nazi.  “Hearts and Minds,” a scathing documentary about Vietnam, shows us a Catholic Vet returning to his New Jersey town and receiving a hero’s welcome.   He is a coarse, stupid man who says he became a very good soldier because the nuns in Catholic School beat him to a pulp to teach him obedience.) 

Of course, the cretinous media gives us another reason to hate terrorists:  They are such bloody, gruesome killers.

I suppose it is gruesome and bloody to capture people in the middle of the night, gouge their eyes out and kill them.  We Americans, by contrast, kill with so much more cleanliness; we don’t even have to get our hands dirty. 

Actually, the way we kill people brings to mind something the Wehrmacht said about the gas chambers:   Some German officers believed that some German soldiers would be roboticized, depersonalized or in some way adversely effected if they had to personally kill thousands of Jews.   To relieve their conscience of killing, they used gas  chambers and they put some distance between themselves and their prey.  Similarly, our airmen flying over a third world country from many thousands of feet are relieved of any trauma they might endure by seeing pregnant bellies split open, the blood gushing from Mother and fetus  alike.    (I liked John Mc Cain for standing up to the reactionaries in his party, but I was nauseated by Americans who cried over his captivity in Hanoi. What do you think he was doing over Vietnam?  Dropping Fortune cookies over the country?  He was out to murder slanty-eyed devils.)

Hey, if there are any moronic good ole boys from Alabama reading this, I have a question for you:  If your fried chicken eating locality were getting bombed every other day, and every other day a few or a dozen or several dozen people were killed, what would you do to an airman you shot down.  You would probably roast him alive and present him to Jesus as a sacrifice. 

I heard one United States airman say that he felt like he was in a “symphony”  when bombing people from a distance of 30 thousand feet.  (How artistic. I suppose Wagner and Hitler would find his association between bombing and music well within the German aesthetic of “Storm und Drung.”)

While Vietcong terrorists ambushed in the jungle, often barefoot and half starved, courageous Americans killed from 30,000 feet and retired for the night with a meal of steak and baked potatoes.    

Of course, terrorists are frightening.  Indeed, the root word is terror because they mean to spread terror.  However, governments terrorize all time.    The death squads the United States supported in El Salvador spread terror in ghoulish ways, the United State’s Pheonix program instilled terror and the Nazi’s stuka dive bombers emitted a terrifying, paralyzing wail that screamed instant and imminent oblivion.

I suppose someone will try to attack my thesis by noting that terrorists have used gruesome anti-personnel weapons, or bombs that upon exploding spew dozens or hundreds of nails and knife-like objects designed to slice human flesh.  However, the U.S. military were pioneers in this mode of murder and used it long before Arab and Islamic terrorists got the idea.  In Indochina, we dropped bombs which released thousands of splintery, metallic objects which pierced human flesh, were designed to be very hard to remove and which, if I remember correctly, did not show  up on x rays. 

Since the terrorists are no more bloodthirsty than soldiers commanded by governments, we have to give round two to the terrorists as well.  Of course, if we tallied up the numbers – where is a mathematical wonk like Robert Mc Namara when you need him – you will find that compared to governments, terrorists are about as lethal as Bugs Bunny.   About 60 million were murdered in World War Two, almost all of it by governments.  Shit, given all the murder committed by soldiers enslaved by governments, perhaps  what we really need are millions of terrorists to bring down the dirty governments of the world.