Western media began to make up Afghan stories Western media began to make up Afghan stories

< h1 toutiao-origin="h2" > Western media began to make up Afghan stories</h1>

Zhang Yiwu

While the United States and the West have declared the failure of their 20-year efforts in Afghanistan with a hasty withdrawal, the Western media is also launching to the public a series of "stories" about Afghanistan told by ordinary people kissing, highlighting their strong attempt to not accept defeat and are determined to give some "noble" meaning to the Afghan people through storytelling.

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For example, CNN recently told the story of a female painter who immigrated to the United States from Afghanistan 4 years ago, and Rahmani was educated in the United States to express his anger against the Taliban and his reverence for the gospel brought by the United States through painting. She painted a young girl with a scarf on her head that was green, and for Afghans, green was the color of peace, joy and happiness. "It's a blue sky full of peace and sunshine, and birds flying, not military planes." The right side depicts a chaotic evacuation at Kabul airport, where desperate people fall from U.S. military planes. Below them were "people waiting at the airport gate with documents ... Someone tried to send his children out of the fence to make sure the next generation could get peace."

Rachmani said it felt better in the U.S., but at the same time it wasn't her country, and she wanted the world to know... Innocent people are being killed... When will it all end?

We can often see such stories in the Western media throughout the War in Afghanistan, but this is actually the story of one American after another, and it is not directly related to what the Afghan people really feel in Afghanistan. Such a story mode, we can see from Husseini's popular novel about Afghanistan, "The Kite Chaser", and from the narration of Malala, who won the Nobel Peace Prize, the core of which is the opposition between the "civilization" brought by the West and the "ignorance" of Afghanistan itself, and the intervention of the West is a fundamental "salvation" of the Afghan people. The narrator of the story is in the West condescending to "look down" on his miserable homeland. The Afghan people have no autonomy, and they can only rely on the salvation of the West in the future.

The Western perspective in Rahmani's story is too clear. By confusing the nature of the problem, she brings a distorted narrative to the world: the occupying forces have brought peace and civilization to Afghanistan. Yet the occupying forces brought precisely the war itself. No one thinks that Afghan society is perfect in itself, assuming no foreign invaders, but relying on the OCCUPATION of the US military to "save" the Afghan people is simply a false statement. The progress of Afghan society cannot be achieved by external aggression, and the settlement of the Afghan problem can only be the result of the efforts and choices of the Afghan people themselves.

The Western media disguised the invasion as a "gospel" to the Afghan people, but such a story could not be clarified and tried to hide that once the US troops withdrew, the Afghan government collapsed in an instant, and the contradictions with Afghan society were immediately exposed. If the United States is committed to "saving" the Afghan people, why can't it be recognized by Afghan society? How can an incompetent government, which even the Americans themselves admit to being full of corruption, give the Afghan people a blessing? This is why stories from the Western perspective cannot explain the real reasons for the "great rout", nor can they bring the real situation of Afghanistan to the outside world through emotional narratives, and can only use the mouth of immigrants to cover up the responsibility for policy setbacks.

This example deserves our attention in the usual Western way of expression and storytelling. What was clearly a major rout was described as a personal encounter of a sentimental Afghan immigrant. There is clearly no Afghan living in Afghanistan, but the characters are abstracted as symbols of their tragic fate under the Taliban. This method of distorting, confusing and obscuring the real problem is essentially a smear on the idea of colonialism. The widespread use of this technique is part of the West's "soft power." The problems that exist in the reality of a nation have become the "original sin" of this nation, and the failure of the West to save is the misfortune of this nation. The story is about the illusory "truth," and the real problem is reduced to the contradiction between the superiority and goodwill of the West and the suffering of other countries. This technique, which has been used repeatedly in the West in its targeted descriptions of other third world countries, deserves our attention. (The author is a professor at Peking University)