For many years, I avoided modern mass media. The heavy presence of politicians on these platforms eventually persuaded me to open an account on the former Twitter, now X, in 2021. Since then, I have repeatedly considered closing it. Yet one grows so accustomed to this medium that, despite knowing it rarely yields reliable analysis or useful information, one reads its content daily like a person caught in a pathological form of self-injury, scarcely able to look past the carnivals of insult and abuse hurled at fellow human beings. This trait is not confined to our compatriots. Users in many other countries have likewise turned social media into platforms for shallow discourse and verbal abuse. The only difference is that the tone and vocabulary of these insults, humiliations, and disinformation vary with users’ cultural and educational levels. The degradation is so painful that the German scholar and philosopher Jürgen Habermas, himself the foremost theorist of communicative and discursive action, came in his later years to view the role of these media with grave concern.[1]
Over the past four years, two powerful and disturbing trends, which are not unrelated to each other, have become my chief source of anxiety. The first is the global coarseness and vulgarity evident in the writings and speech of certain politicians. The second is that in the writings and statements of some of our compatriots, particularly those in exile and migration, words and sentiments hostile to one another, devoid of any spirit of solidarity or of rationality grounded in collective ethics, have spread so widely that they inspire profound alarm. After much hesitation, I decided to write this note about the matter and, to some extent, about its political and social causes. The aim is not to deliver advice to my compatriots but to express my anxiety about the empty atmosphere prevailing among them, particularly in what is now called cyberspace, a domain that, despite internet restrictions inside the country, has spread widely. For reasons addressed below, this communicative decay is sadly even deeper and wider among our compatriots displaced to foreign lands.
Social Uprootedness Has Always Been Accompanied by Cultural Disorientation Throughout History
The collective vulgarity now circulating among the displaced people of our country reminds me of the condition of Russian emigrants after the October Revolution and the historic defeat of Russia’s aristocracy and its right-wing and liberal citizens. The scope and breadth of hostility among us displaced citizens of Afghanistan today, however, owing to the access of thousands of migrants to modern media, is far wider, more terrifying, and more astonishing than during that earlier period.
After the October Revolution of 1917, large numbers of Russian aristocrats, officials of the Tsarist state, generals, officers, and intellectuals opposed to Bolshevism sought refuge in Western Europe, particularly in Paris. The French capital was at the time one of the principal hubs of political exile in the world, much as Cairo was for African revolutionaries in the 1960s. Many of these emigrants, drawn from the upper classes or from the security and military apparatus of the Tsarist state, found themselves cast into menial work in France and elsewhere. They were forced into jobs as doormen, caretakers, and watchmen, positions far below their former rank and standing. Many remained unemployed and adrift, falling into destitution and aimless wandering, or were reduced to socially rootless lumpen figures.
This social and economic decline carried with it a horrific moral collapse and the erosion of any sense of solidarity or humanity. Social and cultural difficulties, the failure to adapt to the new host society, loneliness, and the absence of shared language and companionship combined to strip many of their self-restraint and patience. People nursed grievances against one another. Aimlessness, slander, and the elevation of these vices into the texture of daily life became routine. The literature of that emigrant period is astonishingly full of attitudes and expressions that, within Russian society of the time, one would have expected to hear only from ruffians and street thugs. A retreat from the language of the great literary and political figures of that era of Russia, figures of unparalleled stature in world culture, became the defining feature of emigrant writing. The culture of rootlessness, borne on a great wave of migration, brought with it a kind of counter-culture saturated with ugly and coarse speech. Endless gossip and nonsense, foul talk about the children of migrants, particularly their women and daughters, and slanderous attacks on family honour were widespread, and even formed the spice of social gatherings. People who had been raised on the finest Russian literature were now culturally steeped in a horrifying vulgarity. This grievous and despairing period drove some to suicide. It was a bleak era in which cultivated and learned individuals were utterly disfigured.
German liberal intellectuals during the Second World War met, with some differences, a similarly pitiful fate in exile, particularly in Switzerland. While German fascists massacred Jews, Roma, social democrats, trade union leaders, and communists, the communists themselves waged a magnificent struggle against domestic fascism alongside the Red Army. The fragile-minded liberals, however, could neither join the communists in resistance nor align themselves with fascism. In that atmosphere thick with hopelessness and helplessness, a number of them took their own lives.
The reverberations of that landscape of pain and grief were not, given the constraints of media at the time, global in reach as they are today. At present, however, such an atmosphere is widespread and pervasive among migrants from Afghanistan. Beyond the experience of defeat and rout that makes our condition resemble that of Russia in that period, other reasons exist as well.
For nearly half a century, ruinous and devastating wars have raged in our homeland. Naked violence has become part of our lives and of what we call our “socialisation.” In our daily language and behaviour, a continuity in the expression of physical and verbal violence by rulers and power-holders, and even in the conduct of ordinary people, can be observed, at the very least in the normalisation of violence. Half a century of war and killing has produced a bloodied social terrain that, within its embrace, has reinforced a culture of violence and of acceptance of violence through recourse to political and religious ideologies.
When nearly three generations not only speak of war and violence but also experience it, whether by choice or by force, it is only natural that their talk should turn to battle lines, arms transfers, the wounded, the burial of the dead, the collection of dismembered bodies, the formation of coalitions, the killing of enemies and even of allies, and the ideological sanctification of violence. They become, in a way, the accountants of a bloody barbarism continually sanctified and reproduced through the literature of war and jihad. War destroys not only buildings, orchards, fields, schools, and universities. More importantly, it destroys cultural bonds, social networks, and traditions. Under our social conditions, fighters of this kind burn books and paintings, kill teachers, set schools on fire, demolish beautiful sculptures, sever the hands of sculptors and musicians, smash musical instruments, persecute songwriters and composers, and ultimately destroy the memory and cultural institutions of vast social masses. Those who carry out such acts, knowingly or otherwise, find themselves in a terrifying cultural vacuum. They not only experience the horrifying trauma of war and bloodshed but also transmit it into the empty bowls and ruined homes of impoverished people. In such a spiritual void, behind the silent veil of ash left by the eternal fires of war, cultural barbarity prevails over human beings emptied of reason, feeling, and decency.
The Morality Police and patrols of past and present, each with their own instruments, one wielding the whip and the rifle, and the other deploying vile language, march against the light and against knowledge. This squalid marketplace finds more and more buyers, at least in the vulgarised cyberspace and under the scandalous and ethically bankrupt rule of global capitalism. It is natural that within the fabric of this debased culture, no thought is produced. Instead, the space for critical reasoning is taken over by campaigns of accusation, calumny, and abuse.
The legacy of war and unbridled fury is not only material damage. It is also the plunder and looting of values, culture, and learning. A striking example is the destruction of the Buddha statues and the various acts of “iconoclasm,” along with the thefts at the Kabul Museum. People across our country were first subjected to slaughter, orchards were set ablaze, and then great cultural and historical monuments were destroyed so that no heritage might remain in the historical memory of those to whom it belonged. Watching films and reports from this unfinished era of ruin in our country, one gleans little beyond visual and audio testimony of confiscation and plunder.
This tradition of destruction is not new in the contemporary world or in our lands. Our history is filled with festivals of book-burning, with the obliteration of so-called “heretical” symbols, with the ruin of cities and irrigation networks, and with the uprooting of civilisations. In the present era, however, the means of recording and documenting destruction have expanded with modern technology, and we can easily trace such acts. In other words, even as the cultural infrastructure of collective memory is destroyed, the means of recording its destruction are now abundant. Violence aimed at demolishing the historical and cultural symbols of an entire land denies people the chance to learn from what their ancestors created and from what they have possessed throughout history. When this is not achieved through material destruction, it is achieved through the fabrication of narratives and the denial of history and historical memory. As though hard destruction were not enough, recourse is taken to soft destruction, which is in many respects more effective. The history of lands and civilisations is placed beneath the scissors of censorship and forgery, and fabricated narratives are forced upon the people. A particularly painful example is the denial and negation of the ancient history of the geography known today as Afghanistan. When societies are subjected to such material and immaterial devastation, the foundations of ethics and empathy within them naturally erode, and the dehumanisation of brothers, sisters, neighbours, fellow townspeople, and schoolmates becomes possible.
When such a terrifying atmosphere extends beyond the borders of a single land and acquires a global dimension, as has occurred today with the spread of racism by the far right against the social backdrop of neoliberalism, it becomes a nightmare for humanity and for the civilisational horizon. When the leaders of the world’s greatest states and the commanders of its most fearsome armies speak of “the destruction of civilisations” and local thugs and ruffians echo them, one must indeed be deeply alarmed by the policies of such a destructive international order.
When masses of people cannot read, understand, and learn from their own past, and cannot build upon it, they easily fall prey to deception and violence. Resorting to illusion, they continually invent deceptive myths and fabricate history and culture. Protecting cultural heritage and values is not a marginal matter. It is part of a defining human endeavour to preserve humanity itself against the killing of culture, against self-destruction, and against the destruction of others.
Sadly, modern social media, contrary to initial expectations, have themselves become instruments of destruction and cultural disfigurement.
Today’s modern media and the global reach of cyberspace are such that countless people have access to them. From behind a hidden trench, the release of all the indignities and insults that masses of war-stricken people, and particularly some migrants, experience daily has itself become a kind of culture among rootless masses cut off from their social foundations. As for migrants, with the absence or weakening of social control and the social rejection they encounter daily, many feel no sense of belonging or ownership in their new societies. The “native” population, for historical, cultural, and social reasons and out of a sense of superiority and racism, continually and institutionally pushes migrants away and subjects them to systematic discrimination. Migrants are humiliated in the labour market, when searching for housing, at the doctor’s clinic, at the bazaar, at university, and everywhere else. Ruling capitalist systems prepare and reproduce such conditions. In advanced capitalist societies, a kind of “permanent fascism” persists. This is a fascism that, after the defeat of German National Socialism in the Second World War, is generally not as bare and crude as the racism of developing societies, yet it exists, and its social effects are far more terrifying. Members of new minorities experience it daily in their flesh. The experience is extremely painful and pitiless, often invisible but always present, like a shadow in the dark. Many humane and altruistic qualities are wounded in people exposed to such a frightful onslaught, and these victims themselves become continually prepared for violence, particularly verbal and communicative violence. A person humiliated in the foreign police office, in the immigration office, at the social services desk, at the bazaar, in the queue to buy bread, in migrant camps, and in countless other places returns the pain and grief of that humiliation to their family, friends, and compatriots. In the cultural and social void into which they have fallen, they easily turn to bitterness and spite.
On the other hand, such attitudes and verbal violence among some of our migrants are reinforced by the continuation of the culture and habit of the “Facebook operators,” meaning the salaried Facebook handlers. This ugliness and vileness, initiated by rival political currents, by the Taliban, and by factions and institutions of the Republic, became in the later years of the Republic a profitable sector. Certain bodies and individuals employed salaried operatives who continually levelled accusations and slanders against people and dehumanised their opponents. The same practice continues today on a larger scale, with even greater access to modern social media.
With the rise of racism and the spread of a culture that strips away all sense of disgrace from the leaders and elites of one’s own ethnic group, matters reached the point where some turned to praising and embellishing the worst, most primitive, and most repulsive forms of despotism. The bloody face of the current rule in our country is being made up, in the name of ethnic loyalty, by men and women who, together with their children, enjoy the blessings of individual and social freedom within the embrace of “open societies.” Men and women who themselves drink in the taverns of the West until dawn and toss their forelocks in dance halls now justify the stripping of the most basic rights and freedoms from the women and girls of Afghanistan. On the other side, in confronting this institutionalised vulgarity and intellectual monstrosity, some who imagine themselves to be fighting for justice engage in the moral whitewashing of “their own” criminals while condemning others, thus elevating worthlessness to the level of high virtue. The pages of social media are filled with crude, bodily attacks on “others” and on those who think differently. In this polluted atmosphere, many become polluted themselves. Others, faced with an unparalleled despair and bewilderment, lay down their shields and choose isolation.
Among our migrants today, a great deal is written about those who are called “others.” Yet amid this clamour and in this polluted atmosphere, what is missing are texts that, instead of flailing about in widespread disarray and verbal frenzy, can properly explain and analyse the causes of this atmosphere without the writer themselves being disfigured into a monster devoid of ethics and of any commitment to humanity. Is it possible to reach something that, like a ray of light in a dark forest, might cry out a small opening of hope? I do not know. But I consider the effort worthwhile.
The core of this globalised recklessness is formed by an unleashed and unbridled logic, born of bad culture, that takes shelter behind race and language. In its struggle with “others,” it sees before it not masses of human beings but objects. It regards “others” as enemies and dehumanises them, as if they were not fellow human beings or political opponents. From this perspective, others are thieves and plunderers who have always looted and continue to do so. In this seemingly defensive but in reality annihilating equation, local and global power-holders treat “others” as foreigners and reduce them to poisonous “objects,” objects that have come from the “filthy holes of Somalia, Afghanistan, India” (Trump) and elsewhere to “the lands of superior human beings.”
The transposition of this kind of thinking into lands such as ours leads the elites of dominant groups to claim a form of exclusive ownership over countries and cultures, and to deny “others,” reduced to objects, the right to any share in ownership of the homeland. This is what is happening, shamefully, in our country, where the original inhabitants and compatriots are treated as migrant outsiders and are being stripped of their citizenship rights, of social justice, and of political and social participation.
To restore the relations of domination damaged by struggles for justice and by the efforts and rise of “non-self” lands, of non-self ethnicities and tribes (the West in China), these power-holders have turned, or have long since turned, to politics of “annihilation” and the expulsion of “others” rather than embracing solutions based on coexistence and shared well-being. This dressed-up chauvinism is in constant search of culprits and blames others for all social miseries and crises. This phenomenon is reflected, with some differences, both in lands marked by a culture of domination and primitive tribal thinking and in the advanced neoliberal capitalist lands of the West. What does not change is the underlying orientation towards domination. In the “centre,” especially in the United States, the new technology giants extend this debasement through their anti-cultural monopolism, peacefully or coercively, across a digital bureaucratic jungle. In the “periphery,” consumerist thugs, weapon in hand or fist in the air, carry out the same work.
In “peripheral” lands, this form of charlatan politics differs in certain respects from the far-right populism of the “centre.” Riff-raff and thugs in the lands of digital capitalism are the true holders of power and dominance. In the “periphery,” beyond a faith in continued domestic domination, self-destruction, the erasure of empathy, and the manufacture of enemies, particularly enmity towards fellow human beings and those who share the same fate, occupy the central stage. Ultimately, however, this “peripheral” irrationality reinforces the same global geopolitics and geoeconomics and forms an inseparable structural part of it.
Neoliberal tendencies in the “centre” likewise regard the existing domination in their own countries as a haven for human beings, to be defended against right-wing populism. In reality, however, it is this very ground that continually reproduces and sustains destructive authoritarianism. In the dependent “peripheral” lands, the forms of its manifestation differ. One example is Afghanistan, where the traditional primitivism inherited from past centuries, equipped with modern instruments and physical and verbal violence, is placed at the service of the “centre” and in pursuit of its goals. What occurred in Doha in 2020 in the name of a peace agreement, together with the continued financing of the present anti-civilisation and ruinous rule, stands as a witness to this claim. Similarly, the hopeful gaze towards the capitals of global capitalism and their offshoots in the global South, such as the militarism of Pakistan or “Hindu nationalism,” is not the beginning of the end of primitive despotism in our country. It is, rather, its structural and ideological continuation.
From the standpoint of civilisational evolution and continuity, our homeland has been undergoing ruin for many years. The trajectory of regression, civilisational rupture, and cultural and structural dislocation, however, has entered a particularly distinctive phase under the current culture-hostile rule. It is a phase in which cultural devastation must itself be regarded as another and unparalleled chapter in the history of contemporary humanity. The present cultural ruin and bad culture did not descend upon us overnight. Nearly three generations of our children have grown up in the embrace of violence, suicide bombing,s and war. We suffer from collective trauma, with no doctors having come to our aid. Ruin upon ruin and our social uprootedness have become our most deeply rooted and terrifying trauma. Populations continually subjected to severe trauma across several generations can turn to physical violence. If they cannot resort to armed fury, they can develop antisocial traits. They may breed enemies and continually battle imaginary foes. They become emptied of love and afflicted by emotional barrenness, taking refuge in conspiracy theories. The terrible experiences return to them again and again, in sleep and in waking hours, and rob them of the ability to forge social ties grounded in warmth, kindness, and good humour. This trait is widespread among migrants in unfamiliar lands. Such chronic torment diminishes hope for tomorrow and for life itself, since continuous trauma gives rise to anguished psychosis.
In a world in which rootlessness and self-alienation, in the sense Marx used the term, have become inseparable manifestations, the migrant most often lives between a lost past and a rejected present. To the racist majority, the migrant is no more than an unknown stranger who arouses fear. They therefore remain strangers and easily turn to violence. The sense of not belonging to “natives” and to their culture never lets go of them. Their wandering identity, suspended between past and present, becomes a kind of enduring and complex statelessness of identity, in which hatred and distance towards others are constant elements. Such a person is in constant search of the causes of their own misery. In negating others, including fellow human beings, those who share their language and those from their homeland, they more readily turn to physical and verbal violence. Instead of seeking causes, they turn against those who share their fate, against their fellow victims. The first victims of this verbal violence are the family members of the perceived enemy, who in this person’s eyes are everywhere and ever-present, particularly female members of the family, such as wives, mothers,s and daughters. The seasoning of such individuals’ conversations and “discourses” is precisely this most vulnerable section of society, who are continually subjected to slander, gossip, and sexual abuse. Because cyberspace places an extremely wide arena at the disposal of such people, gossip becomes the dominant attitude of this space. On Facebook and Twitter, the sharing of information and the offering of ideas are very limited, while vulgar talk and obscenities can be found in abundance.
As noted above, the trait of regarding everyone as an enemy and being emptied of compassion and affection ultimately provokes others to react against the positions of those who behave in this way. Estrangement and distance thus deepen day by day, and the public atmosphere on the other side, too, easily extends bad traits to those it deems “outsiders.”
During my student years in Turkey, I never once witnessed ordinary people of that country reject foreign students, particularly those from Afghanistan, or push them aside. I constantly experienced the opposite in daily life. In the first years, when several million Syrian refugees came to Turkey, they were welcomed extraordinarily by the people of that country. I recall that a reporter for the German weekly Die Zeit had written that he was astonished at the absence of any sign of xenophobia or racism towards this enormous influx of migrants. I had the same favourable experience with students and migrants from Afghanistan and other foreign students. But three years ago, when I went to Turkey, the first warning I received from a Turkish friend was not to stay in restaurants or other places where I was from Afghanistan, because the risk of violent reactions had become considerable. This fundamental shift in the behaviour of the Turkish people towards migrants from Afghanistan is, on the one hand, a product of the general global atmosphere and the xenophobic policies of certain political parties in that country. On the other hand, the violent conduct of traumatised people from our own country has also contributed to this change. Similar experiences can be observed in other countries. Criticism of dominant racism is justified, but addressing one’s own collective trauma and the reactions arising from it is equally justified.
Some of the words used in this note may strike certain readers as unpleasant or may be perceived as carrying a generalising approach. Given the aims of this note, however, which centre on identifying some of the causes of violence and cultural bewilderment among certain migrants and displaced citizens of Afghanistan, this is not the case. Many of our displaced citizens are themselves victims of the horrifying course of events that has unfolded in our homeland over nearly half a century. My main intention has been to identify the causes of this painful reality and of the social affliction that has befallen us, and nothing more.
Pointing to opportunities, such as engaging in study and education, working in new environments and benefiting from them, and learning from the civilisations and cultures of host countries, is another dimension of the migrant and displaced experience. This not only contributes to the progress and advancement of migrants but also has a meaningful effect on the economy of the original homeland, through the transfer of money, knowledge, and experience, and on the current homeland as well. It is a matter that deserves evaluation but has not been addressed here.
Years ago, I watched a Lebanese film whose name, sadly, I cannot recall. The film was built around the dialogue of two main characters, one a Sunni Muslim and the other a Lebanese Christian. The two had grown up in the same neighbourhood, one on this side of the street and the other on that side. After the end of the Lebanese Civil War (1975 to 1990), one of them sat in the ruins of his father’s house, while the other sat across the street in another ruin. Through two terrifying holes left by artillery shells, the two conversed. They spoke of their childhood, of shared games of football, of family visits, of birthday celebrations, and of shared national festivals, until the conversation reached the sectarian and ethnic wars that Israel had played a fundamental role in igniting, the massacres, the displacements, the ruin, and all that remained: destruction, hostility, and bitterness that had not ended. As the two spoke of their lives, scenes of joy and togetherness alternated with scenes of war, killing,g and bloodshed in continuous flashback. The film ended with the two sitting opposite one another, unable to understand why all of this had come to pass, why members of their families had been killed, and why that childhood and youth full of happiness, intimate conversations, and tales of love had all been lost to the wind. We, too, sit upon the ruins of a country and on the historic defeat of a people. Instead of thinking, for once, with empathy and with the bonds of brotherhood and sisterhood, of how together, through a just struggle, we might leave a better land to our children, we are busy manufacturing enemies and have forgotten the causes of our misfortunes.
Until the dawn of freedom!
[1] Habermas, Jürgen: Überlegungen und Hypothesen zu einem erneuten Strukturwandel der politischen Öffentlichkeit, in: Seeliger, M. und Seviganani, S., Ein Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit?, Leviathan Sonderheft 37/2021, pp. 470 to 499.
You can read the Persian version of this analysis here:
