Climate change and the accompanying prolonged summer laziness prevent us from realizing that in other parts of our planet there is a harsh winter – and I am not referring to the … weather conditions. I’m sorry if my topic today doesn’t go along with sun creams, rackets, sunbeds, the general foolery of the Greek summer, and as far as I’m concerned, I don’t have a problem if you don’t even bother to read it judging that, these poor vacations of yours, shortened and made expensive, you won’t let any moron ruin it for you, especially now that it’s coming to an end, if you haven’t already stockpiled it as a nostalgic reserve until next year. I understand you completely, we’re still friends.
We have news from Afghanistan. No, it’s not good news. This is no surprise – it would be a surprise if we had good news. For decades, Afghanistan has been an experimental laboratory of dystopia. Compared to what takes place in Afghanistan, the dark visions of George Orwell, Aldous Huxley or Philip Dick look like amusement parks for slightly perverted adults. When we say that nothing worse can happen in that ill-fated place, more new records of paranoid authoritarianism are being constantly broken, and the bar of social insanity is being raised higher and higher.
These days the Taliban are celebrating the third anniversary of their seizure of power. Since the mood is celebratory, they thought to have a feast with a bill, based on an earlier decree of 2022 – a “social traffic code” so repugnant as to scandalize even the United Nations field mission (the UN missions, as you understand, are not easily triggered). So under this new “code”, Afghan women, with threatened penalties ranging from warning to confiscation of property and imprisonment, will not only have to continue to have their faces and the rest of their bodies fully covered when they are out of the house (these are last year’s news), but also to make sure that “their voice is not heard”, as well as “not to turn their gaze towards people of the opposite sex who do not belong to their family”. Can we figure this out? Does it fit in our minds? A “gaze direction” surveillance police or a “voice volume” surveillance police? Not even in our darkest Orwellian nightmares.
Yes, but Afghanistan is “far away” – some will argue in good faith. Why should anything that happens in Afghanistan concern us? In other words: how many chances are there that something that is happening today in Afghanistan will happen in Greece (note: put your own country here) one day? And vice versa: isn’t it much more likely that what is happening today in Greece will happen in Afghanistan one day? No debate, the latter is much more likely – and that’s certainly how a ‘modern’ Afghan capital city girl, a “Kabul girl” in the early 1970s would answer to you (the relevant photos are irrefutable evidence). But if you had the foresight and described to that same ‘girl’ how her peers would dress, behave, and move, about half a century later, she would just as surely think you were crazy. You see, even the most extreme dystopia scenarios need only two of our own ‘oversights’ to materialize: our willful blindness when the first alarming signs begin to appear and our willful ignorance when they are imposed. Then it’s too late.
Petros Tatsopoulos is a writer and former Member of the Greek Parliament.
Adaptation to English of the original article published in “The TOC”, August 26, 2024.
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