As the Taliban swept through Afghanistan this month, a Gen Z
alt-right group ran a Twitter account devoted to celebrating their progress.
Tweets in Pashto juxtaposed two laughing Taliban fighters with pictures meant
to represent American effeminacy.
اضافة اعلان
Another said, the words auto-translated into
English, “Liberalism did not fail in Afghanistan because it was Afghanistan, it
failed because it was not true. It failed America, Europe and the world see
it.”
The account, now suspended, was just one example of the open
admiration for the Taliban that’s developed within parts of the US right. The
influential young white supremacist Nick Fuentes — an ally of Arizona
Republican Congressman Paul Gosar's and anti-immigrant pundit Michelle Malkin's
— wrote on the encrypted app Telegram: “The
Taliban is a conservative,
religious force, the US is godless and liberal.
The defeat of the US government
in Afghanistan is unequivocally a positive development.” An account linked to
the Proud Boys expressed respect for the way the Taliban “took back their
national religion as law, and executed dissenters.”
“The far right, the alt-right, are all sort of galvanized by
the Taliban essentially running roughshod through Afghanistan, and us leaving
underneath a Democratic president,” said Moustafa Ayad, executive director for
Africa, the Middle East, and Asia at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a
think tank devoted to countering violent extremism.
They’re looking at
Afghanistan, he said, “from a standpoint of us getting ‘owned,’ in the parlance
of the internet.”
This is not the first time that right-wing US extremists
have been inspired by Islamist militants; several white supremacists lauded
Al-Qaeda’s attacks on September 11.
The difference now is that the far right
has grown, and the distance between the sort of right-wingers who cheer for the
Taliban and conservative power centers has shrunk.
Florida Republican Matt Gaetz may be a clown, but he is also
a congressman who was close to the previous president. On Twitter this month,
Gaetz described the Taliban, like Trump, as “more legitimate than the last
government in Afghanistan or the current government here.”
Twenty years ago, in the aftermath of September 11, the
United States embarked on a war that would, in time, sell itself as a battle
for democracy. Back then, liberal democracy was almost universally venerated in
the US, which is one reason we had the hubris to think we could export it by
force.
Many, especially on the right, worried about the threat that militant
Islamist extremism posed to a modern, open society. The tragic journey of the
past two decades began with the loudest voices on the right braying for war
with Islamism and ended with a right-wing vanguard envying it.
At least before Thursday's devastating terrorist attacks,
there was a subtler form of satisfaction with the Taliban’s takeover among more
respectable nationalist conservatives. They don’t sympathize with barbarism but
were pleased to see liberal internationalism lose.
“The humiliation of
Afghanistan will have been worth it if it pries the old paradigm loose and lets
new thoughts in,” Yoram Hazony, an influential nationalist intellectual whose
conferences feature figures such as Josh Hawley and Peter Thiel, tweeted this
month.
What old paradigm? Well, a few days later, he tweeted, “What
went wrong in Iraq and Afghanistan was, first and foremost, the ideas in the
heads of the people running the show. Say its name: Liberalism.”
Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, the most important nationalist
voice in the US, seemed to sympathize with the gender politics of
Taliban-supporting Afghans. “They don’t hate their own masculinity,” he said
shortly after the fall of Kabul.
“They don’t think it’s toxic. They like the
patriarchy. Some of their women like it too. So now they’re getting it all
back. So maybe it’s possible that we failed in Afghanistan because the entire
neoliberal program is grotesque.” (By “neoliberalism,” he seems to mean social
liberalism, not austerity economics.)
It turns out that when the government deceptively invokes
liberal democracy to justify a war, liberal democracy can be discredited by a
grueling defeat. In his new book, “Reign of Terror,” national security
journalist Spencer Ackerman draws a direct line between our stalemated
post-September 11 wars and the rise of Donald Trump.
“Trump was able to safely
voice the reality of the war by articulating what about it most offended
right-wing exceptionalists: Humiliation,” he wrote.
Humiliation is a volatile emotion. Many have written about
its role in motivating Al-Qaeda.
Perhaps it’s not surprising that parts of the
right would respond to humiliation by identifying with images of brutal
masculinity.
Some of this identification might just be for shock value;
the alt-right is adept at using irony to occlude its intentions. But some of it
is deadly earnest.
“We’ve come across a lot of content that’s US-based extreme
far-right websites saying how good the Taliban victory is, and why it’s good
for their cause,” said Adam Hadley, director of Tech Against Terrorism, a UN-supported
project that monitors extremists online.
One neo-Nazi website has a tract
hailing the Taliban victory in part for showing that a small band of armed
fundamentalists can defeat the American empire.
As for the rest of the pro-Taliban right, the
Proud Boys and
incels and MAGA splinter factions, some of them are probably just trolling.
But
as groups such as QAnon and the civil war-hungry Boogaloo Bois show, a movement
can seem absurd and still be a source of real radicalization. “The classic
response to any of this is, ‘Ah, they’re just a fringe group,’ and then when
that metastasizes, a lot of people eat their words,” said Ayad.
If there’s one lesson of recent US history, it’s that
there’s no such thing as something too ridiculous to be dangerous.
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