Malala’s shooting tragedy: the
need for its placement and understanding within its full and proper context
The news of recent shooting of a young girl, Malala Yousafzai, in Swat,
Pakistan, has spread like wildfire, all over the world, fueled by the wind
machines of the Western media, which have found a new opportunity for the
explosion of their chauvinistic, omissive, and hypocritical political, moral,
and cultural revulsions and condescensions. The feelings of shock and rage are
being stirred in people everywhere, including in Pakistan. This brief paper is a
spontaneous reaction to the one-sided, abstract, omissive, and hypocritical
exploitation and manipulation of this incident by the Western media,
politicians, and the so-called celebrities, as well as their stooges in
Pakistan. Basically, the story that is being radiated is that of a young woman
who was struggling for the right of going to school and was shot by the Taliban
because of that. However, her activities and role, and the role of Pakistani and
Western governments and media in determining, guiding, and rewarding these, are
much more complex than that, which are being almost totally omitted from the
partial and erroneous story being peddled.
When all the known facts and dots are tied together, it becomes clear that she
was doing much more than just struggling for the right to go to school and, in
fact, was being used as a pawn by the Pakistani and some Western governments and
news media, for the propaganda war, as part of the phony “war on
terrorism”-which, in fact is an imperialist war of US and NATO state terrorism
for geopolitical and economic domination and exploitation purposes. Nothing can
such brutality against a young, naïve, and vulnerable woman, who was
being used by such powerful forces for their information and “winning hearts and
minds” warfare. Their arrogant ignorance of the history, culture, and mass
psychology of Pathans-who constitute majority of the population of Afghanistan
and of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province of Pakistan, of which Swat is a part-borders
on insanity. They invade and occupy the lands of Pathans and then expect to win
their hearts and minds! That is the climax of arrogant insanity and stupidity
and now they are learning that truth, in a very hard way, after twelve years of
continuous, integrated, and high tech military-psychological-propaganda warfare,
in which they invested huge financial, military, and human resources. In spite
of their incomparable military, technological, and economic superiority, they
are now losing to the anti-imperialist Islamic forces of Taliban and their
allies in Afghanistan, who have become increasingly more powerful and popular
because of their increasingly more effective resistance to the imperialist
invasion and aggression and experience and competence in use of guerilla warfare
tactics that are suitable in the conditions of Afghanistan.
Malala had become a BBC blogger and the Pakistani government had awarded her the
Pakistan National Peace Prize in 2011, the same year in which she was one of the
five nominees, and a runner up, for the Dutch International Children Peace
Prize. According to some reports, the US president Obama’s special
representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, had also met her,
and she had pleaded with him for a military intervention in her region of
Pakistan. These are some of the known facts. There must also be many others that
are unknown and hidden. It is obvious that this young, naïve, and ignorant woman
was elevated to grotesque levels of prominence and publicity in the propaganda
war against the Taliban and their allies. It is very likely that she and her
family were well rewarded for their collaboration. All that has now resulted in
what happened to her. The shooter was masked and escaped after the shooting. It
is being alleged that it was ordered by the Taliban. However, there is no
definite proof of that yet. The only evidence being offered is some alleged
phone call by some alleged Taliban spokesman, who claimed Taliban’s
responsibility for the shooting. The key point is that the Western media and
politicians, as well as the Pakistani government, are also responsible for
causing this tragedy, by using, exploiting, and elevating this young and naïve
woman-who was totally ignorant of the nature and history of US and Western
imperialism in the region or internationally and of the nature of the conflict
and the resistance to imperialism-for their propaganda war and endangering her
life. Such methods are routine in the arsenals of Western imperialist powers.
Some recent examples are the award of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo,
a so-called Chinese dissident, who is not satisfied with the current level of
restoration of capitalism in China and was active in subversive activities
against the Chinese state and politico-economic system for the purpose of
establishing a US type of extremist capitalist system there, and the elevation
of a similarly shallow, ignorant, and naive Cuban woman blogger, Yoani Sanchez,
to even more bizarre levels of prominence and publicity than Malala’s. Yoani has
been given numerous prestigious international awards for her stupid little
blogs, betrayals of the Cuban revolution-of which she has been a beneficiary,
receiving free education, healthcare, housing etc.-, and advocacy of the
restoration of capitalism (covered up under the masks of “democracy”, “freedom”,
and “privacy”). Such shallow, ignorant, treacherous, and naïve “dissidents”, in
the countries and forces that are considered to be the enemies of US
imperialism, are given absurd levels of exposures and publicity by the mass
media of the US and other Western countries, while even the most knowledgeable,
profound, original, insightful, and creative political dissidents in their own
territories are shunned like plague, and, as a result, very few people know
about them or their ideas and work. This is just a small glimpse of the real
nature of the “free” and “independent” mass media of the West in general, and
the US in particular. As they also dominate the news, analysis, and mass media
culture and mass psychology in much of the rest of the world, such phony and
Orwellian “freedom” and “independence” are also internationalized.
Numerous political leaders and government officials, some so-called celebrities,
and the mass media in the West have shifted into high moral gears in relation to
the Malala shooting, inflating it into grotesque proportions, while, at the same
time, totally keeping mum, dumb, deaf, and blind on the incomparably greater
continuing monstrosities and atrocities committed recently, against the Muslim
populations of Afghanistan, tribal areas of Pakistan, Iraq, and Libya, in which
around three million-including tens of thousands of young girls, boys, and
women-were slaughtered or perished as a result of the destruction of
infrastructures; countless millions injured, maimed, and forced to flee to other
countries, as refugees; the whole fabric of cultural, social, and
politico-economic life destroyed; massive sectarian divisions and violence
created; massive unemployment and poverty created, especially in the formerly
prosperous county of Iraq; and the ongoing destruction of free healthcare and
education systems in Iraq and Libya, by the high-technology barbarism of US and
NATO imperialism. This constitutes an unmatchable historical hypocrisy. As far
as the individual acts of brutality and barbarity are concerned, innumerable
such acts have been committed by the US soldiers in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq,
and Libya. Each drone attack is incomparably more brutal and barbaric than the
shooting of Malala, in which
most of those killed are non-combatants, and a large number are children and
women. Similarly, there have been many bombings of wedding parties in
Afghanistan, with the same results. And what about the US soldiers sodomizing
Iraqi children in the Abu ghraib prison and urinating on the corpses of Afghans,
who were fighting against the invasion and occupation of their country, in
Afghanistan? What is more brutal and barbaric? These or the shooting of Malala?
Similarly, Pakistani government and military forces unleashed their own state
terrorism on the people of Swat and tribal areas, causing enormous losses of
life and other damages to parts of their own population, on the orders of their
masters in Washington, D.C. and London. They have also learnt from those masters
how to disguise their devilish faces with angelic masks. But, it is to the
credit of the evolving clarity of perception of most common Pakistanis that they
are no longer fooled by such masks of their rulers or their masters. They are
beginning to see right through them.
With mannequin-like wooden faces and expressions and sharp mechanical tongues
and electronic voices-which are accompanied by that ever-present and
world-famous plastic American “smile”-the TV anchors and commentators emit
torrents of words of indignation and condemnation at the brutality and barbarity
of the enemy, in cases like that of Malala, words that are incomparably more
applicable to the incomparably more massive, monstrous, barbaric, and brutal
actions of their own government and state, which they totally omit and ignore,
without even batting an eye! One wonders at the powers of the forces that can
produce such mass psychology, behavior, and even physical characteristics!
In the US, among others, the mass murderers of Muslims, President Obama and
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, have expressed shock and disgust at the
brutality and barbarity of Malala’s shooting. Writing in the Washington Post on
Wednesday, Laura Bush, wife of the modern Genghis Khan of Iraqi mass slaughters,
former President G. W. Bush, had this to say about Malala shooting:
"We must speak up before these acts occur, work to ensure that they do not
happen again, and keep our courage to continue to resist the ongoing cruelty and
barbarism of the Taliban. Malala Yousufzai refused to look the other way. We owe
it to her courage and sacrifice to do the same."
Even the singer Madonna put in her two bits in the obscene chorus, saying that
Malala’s story made her cry. During a concert in Los Angeles, she dedicated a
song to Malala and said, “The 14-year-old schoolgirl who wrote a blog about
going to school. The Taliban stopped her bus and shot her. Do you realise how
sick that is.” After a striptease, she showed the name ‘Malala’ stenciled on her
naked back.
Of course, all these unmatchable hypocrites and phonies had absolutely nothing
to say about the countless millions of mass murders and other crimes committed
by themselves through their high-tech military forces. They even falsify the
story of Malala by reducing it to her struggle to go to school. Taliban have
publicly made it clear that they are not against women’s education or their
going to schools. However, in accordance with their religious and tribal
cultural traditions and principles, they advocate separate schools for males and
females. The above-mentioned Western liars and hypocrites, and their puppets in
the Pakistani government, also totally omit their own role in grooming Malala
for their propaganda machine and endangering her life, in the current situation
in that region, in which a life and death struggle and war are going on between
imperialist and anti-imperialist forces that are predominantly organized around
Islamic identity and culture. When it comes to individual cases like Malala,
they shift into high gears of moral, cultural, and political indignation and
revulsion. But, in relation to the incomparably vaster mass murders and
atrocities committed by themselves and their own forces, the gears are shifted
to neutral and the engine is turned off. One does not hear a sound. The bodies
and minds of these guys would put any car or machine to shame. Most politicians,
mass media, academics and other “experts”, and overwhelming majority of
Americans exclusively focus on the individual or small scale violent actions of
the victims of US imperialist aggressions and invasions, labeling them as
terrorists, barbaric, brutal etc., while not even uttering a sound about the
wholesale, massive, and incomparably more destructive high tech state terrorism
of their own ruling class, represented by the government, state, and the
military.
It would be relevant to end this paper with a quote of the great German-American
philosopher, Herbert Marcuse, whom I had also quoted in an earlier paper, which
went into a somewhat deeper analysis of the conflict in South Asia,
https://imperialismandthethirdworld.wordpress.com/2011/12/03/us-and-nato-imperialism-in-south-asia-the-developing-pakistan-quagmire-by-fazal-rahman-ph-d/
Near the end of Marcuse’s very complex historical, dialectical, and
philosophical analyses and ideas in his book, one finds this insight and
prediction, which has been repeatedly confirmed by the high-tech politico-economico-military
barbarism of US imperialism: “The facile historical parallel with the barbarians
threatening the empire of civilization prejudges the issue; the second period of
barbarism may well be the continued empire of the civilization itself.”
(One-Dimensional Man, Beacon Press, Boston. 1964, p. 257). Like it or not, we
are in the midst of that Second Period of Barbarism and the Pakistani
government, military, police, and intelligence services have been acting as the
local agents of that great international technocratic barbarism, which is
incomparably more powerful and worse than any previous barbarisms.
Fazal Rahman, Ph.D. October 11, 2012
First posted on
https://imperialismandthethirdworld.wordpress.com