U.S.-Britain gay-bashed Afghanistan

In the months after the autumn 2001 imperialist military invasion, a rash of gay-bashing and gay-baiting articles about Afghanistan appeared in the U.S. and British corporate media.

In some of the coverage, “experts”—who are not Afghan—focused on sexual and social organization in Pashtun culture, the majority culture in Afghanistan, as though it was the only culture. Other non-Afghan “authorities” didn’t differentiate between the diverse cultures in that ancient land, including the Durrani, Ghilzai, Wardak, Jaji, Tani, Jadran, Mangal, Khugiani, Kuchi, Safi, Mohmand and Shinwari; or Uzbek or Arab. Most reports did not differentiate between peoples of the lowlands and those in the mountain ranges. Or between peoples who lead nomadic lives, and those who dwell in crowded cities.

Colonialism and imperialism have always studied the cultures they sought to conquer and destroy. The job of embedded anthropologists is ultimately always to claim cultural superiority—the rotten plank on which white-supremacist ideologues stand.

The organization of the sexes, socially accepted sexualities and gender expressions in Afghanistan are rooted in that country’s ancient history, and are not the same as in the U.S. or Britain.

“Maura Reynolds of The LA Times noted that ‘there is a strong streak of dandyism among Pashtun males. Many line their eyes with kohl, stain their fingernails with henna or walk about town in clumsy, high-heeled sandals.’ But this equation makes sense only if we accept two Western assumptions: that homosexuality and effeminacy are automatically linked; and that the practices described are in fact ‘effeminate.’”

“Despite statistical evidence demonstrating that pedophilia in the West is more common among heterosexual men, the association of homosexuality and the sexual abuse of children remains prominent in Western anti-gay discourse, propelling ‘save our children’ campaigns to restrict their contact with gay adults. By constructing age-stratified homosexual activity in Kandahar as pedophilia, Western journalists provided themselves a link to the ever-popular issue of child abuse—especially hot, what with the unfolding scandal in the Catholic Church.”

The claim that same-sex love arises from hatred of women or that misogyny is rooted in unexpressed homosexual desire pits sexes and sexualities that are both oppressed under patriarchal class rule against each other.

Most of the imperialist war-time media reports claim that many males in Afghanistan have sex with each other because of “extreme segregation of the sexes.” Some of the same journalists did not attempt to reconcile the contradiction to their theory when they quoted Afghan males who are married to women and have sex with other males.

Even after the U.S. and British invaded Afghanistan—dominating the country militarily and crafting a legislative and political façade of independent government and law—the imperialists did not remove the law which they had said in pro-war agitation made same-sex love a capital offense.

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