Part One:
Two Conflicts, One Precipice
A few years ago, when a Pashtun “expert” appeared on a media outlet that often fuels ethnic and linguistic strife in Afghanistan, and labeled non-Pashtuns as “bastard” and “inauthentic,” many were outraged. However, some non-Pashtun ethnocentrists found a convenient pretext to justify their views and intensified their efforts to sow ethnic discord. This activity mirrors the behavior of some Pashtun individuals, including certain media owners and so-called experts who are likewise engaged in similar divisive tactics. Generally, when insults come from an uneducated or ignorant individual, they are not taken seriously and are attributed to their lack of knowledge. However, when an educated and literate person engages in such behavior, it provokes strong reactions. The promotion of hateful rhetoric (slander, humiliation, and resorting to verbal violence to suppress rivals and enemies) by the educated class indicates a serious societal crisis that should not be underestimated. Multiple factors contribute to the spread of hate speech, which requires extensive time to examine fully. Here, we will focus on two aspects that are evident in almost every aspect of life in Afghanistan. The impact of these factors on political, cultural, and social events is so profound and extensive that, if not the entirety of the country’s history, they certainly play a crucial and central role in most historical events.
Tribal Totalitarianism
Despite the advance of capitalist modernity in Afghanistan in recent decades and the concurrent decline of feudalism, it is undeniable that Afghanistan, alongside its feudal structures, still retains certain tribal frameworks, particularly evident in Pashtun-populated areas. Although tribal mentality has undergone some transformations in this context, it continues to resist modern rationality. No matter how much tribal thinking adapts to modern intellect, it cannot completely purge itself of past habits because the feudal foundation in Afghanistan has not been entirely eradicated, thereby extending the life of its feudal superstructure.
Tribal and feudal politics and culture are intertwined with totalitarianism, chauvinism, and ignorance, leaving no room for individual freedom and democracy. Tribal mentality, being intellectually weak and deficient, lacks the potential to confront modern rationality and thus resorts to coercion and violence to protect itself. Violence, coercion, and insults are tools that tribal mentality employs to defend itself against modern reason and scientific logic in the short term. From this perspective, tribal ideology necessitates a superior religion, intellect, language, ethnicity, and power to compel its subordinates to accept its “sacred book,” which claims to solve all present and future problems, eliminating the need for independent thought. When ethnic-linguistic supremacists realize that the era of Abd al-Rahman Khan’s despotism and totalitarianism has ended and that tribalism is dying, they, unable to confront the irreversible wave of capitalist modernity characterized by pluralism, become frantic and desperate. They make frantic efforts to defend their “authentic” language and identity against “Bastard” and “inauthentic” languages and identities but resort only to insults and slander.
Chauvinists forget that the era of tribal aristocracy has passed, and as Karl Marx posited, capitalism reduces all sacred and unattainable phenomena to mere smoke and air. If chauvinists want to preserve their language, they must do so through scientific, academic methods and healthy academic competition, not through tribal violence. If they truly believe that their ethnic language and identity are “authentic” and “legitimate,” they should not fear that the introduction of Persian words and terms such as “Danishgah for university,” “Danishkada for faculty”, “Dadsitan for prosecutor”, and others, in place of Pashto words or terms like “Pohantoon for university”, “Pohanzai for faculty”, and “Saranwal for Prosecutor”, will cause the demise of the Pashto language and the ethnic stature of the Pashtuns.
Ethnocentric Mentality
Afghanistan is a country of ethnic minorities, and these minorities have felt the oppression of the ruling Pashtun class deeply for centuries. While this oppression has a class dimension, encompassing landlords and feudal lords from other ethnicities within its dictatorial framework, it also has a significant ethnic aspect. This ethnic oppression has led to the formation of a rigid and ethnocentric mindset among the minorities. In confronting Pashtun chauvinism, this mindset resorts to violence and childish insults, lacking any substantial arguments. Thus, it is not only tribal totalitarianism that, due to its intellectual defeat against modern reason, reacts violently and rudely when facing others. Narrow-minded ethnocentrism, too, lacking rational arguments and embittered by repeated defeats, acts violently and one-sidedly when confronting Pashtun chauvinism. This explains the fundamental causes of the ongoing ethnic strife between Pashtun and non-Pashtun ethnic ethnocentrics in Afghanistan—strife that has consistently created crises and paved the way for foreign intervention. Both groups of ethnic ethnocentrists, despite considering themselves fundamentally different from one another, ultimately fall into the same abyss: exacerbating ethnic discord and diverting the public’s attention from major issues to trivial ones.
At a time when Afghans are besieged from all sides by terrorism, Islamic extremism, poverty, unemployment, crime, and corruption, with the cries of the downtrodden echoing to the heavens and no one to hear them, some blind chauvinists are preoccupied with the notion that their ethnicity and language are superior while deeming others inferior, unworthy, and foreign. These individuals, bearing titles like “professor,” “researcher,” and “expert,” instead of addressing the fundamental issues of their beleaguered homeland and using their “expertise” and “scholarship” to alleviate the sufferings of the country’s lower classes—whom they claim as their own—create media programs that only add to the crises. Do we not have enough problems that we now have to add the debate over who is authentic and who is not?
Tracing the origins of ethnicities and languages based on labels like “authentic” and “inauthentic,” “insider” and “outsider,” “superior” and “inferior,” “big brother” and “little brother,” “rooted” and “rootless” is the work of fascists and racists. Regardless of ethnicity, language, or race, people have equal human rights and status, and no ethnic group or tribe has the right to consider itself superior to others. Ethno-linguistic fascism, no matter how powerful and intimidating it appears, is inherently vulnerable and frail, and will eventually collapse. The grandeur of fascism is often so exaggerated that it blinds itself to its vulnerabilities and weaknesses, leading to its downfall. Historical experience shows that fascism, like any other extremist movement, does not have a stable and lasting political life and even falls to weaker opponents.
Part One:
You can read the Persian version of this analysis here: