The Taliban and the Last Man

By Wayne Allensworth

Some thoughts on the debacle in Afghanistan:

The Taliban fighters’ cause, expelling an alien occupier, gave them the fire in the belly to endure and win, wearing down a high-tech empire in an iron age country. The technology didn’t matter in the end, nor did the billions spent, much of which was probably stolen by self-interested tribesmen who didn’t mind lying to infidels. To paraphrase Kipling, only fools–in this case, our ignorant, insular, hubristic, arrogant globalist overlords–try and hustle the East.

What did the decadent globalist Blob have to offer Afghanistan? Take a look:

This was an unwinnable war from the beginning, as the Soviets and British had learned in earlier futile attempts to subdue Afghan tribesmen. Fighting it so women could get driver’s licenses and “LGBTI people” could “celebrate” their “contributions to society” make the war losses all the more disheartening.

In the late 1970’s, Iranian revolutionaries dubbed Washington “the Great Satan,” and militant Islam emerged as the most violent counter force opposing the cultural encroachment of what would emerge as full blown globalism in the 1990s. Anti-Western Russian nationalism after the fall of the Soviet Union, and the first signs of a brewing populist revolt represented by Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot, foreshadowed things to come.

What the American Remnant must understand is that the same phenomena that inspired reactions then–the dismantling of the nation state, the expansion of global institutions, and the encroachment of a decadent, vile, mass media-driven global anti-culture that acted as acid eating away at the moral fiber of the countries it infected like a plague bacillus–were part and parcel of a radical revolution whose capital was Washington, DC. 

The Cold War and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union masked the possession of our institutions by an ideological demon that proved to be a far worse threat to the real America than Communism had ever been. What’s worse is that the emerging globalist regime was able to mobilize the American people and direct them against the system’s targets. The globalists waved the flag at us, and we charged like a doomed Light Brigade. In many ways, the American Remnant proved to be its own worst enemy.

It would have been far wiser following the 9/11 attacks to concentrate on defending our country with tighter borders, an immigration moratorium, and the expulsion of radical Islamists, rather than to invade and occupy Afghanistan. Retaliation could have been restricted to a limited punitive expedition. But real “homeland security” was never “W’s” first priority. “W’s” crusade against “evil” was actually focused on Iraq, long a neocon target. The Afghan invasion provided the needed spark to set up the invasion of Iraq and a course for twenty years of futile warfare.

“W’s” support of mass immigration, his rejection of “racist” profiling that facilitated the 9/11 terrorists, and his obsessive love of foreigners all indicated that there was no effective distance between neoconservatives and neoliberals. The words “nation” and “homeland” had been drained of any substantive meaning, yet our people were still clinging, not just to God and guns, but to a delusion about the actual nature of a system they still wanted to believe was functional and reasonably fair.

What globalism produces is the culture of “the Last Man,” and the Taliban are anything but Last Men. If we want to salvage something here in this country, we had better realize what the end game is and act accordingly. The Last Man is a Lotus Eater, an Eloi in a sea of Morlocks. We don’t have much time.

Wayne Allensworth is a Corresponding Editor of Chronicles magazine. He is the author of The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia, and a novel, Field of Blood.