America, good or evil?

You’d have to be a robot to not feel anything after reading some of the chapters of John Pilger’s informative text, Freedom Next Time. “Liberating Afghanistan” for example, simultaneously evokes feelings of anger, disgust, outrage and sympathy. I have nothing but respect for John Pilger for having the guts to tell us the other side of the story, and for not making the Americans seem like the big heroes as they stereotypically would be. “Liberating Afghanistan” reinforced my disdain towards the behaviour of America and particular Americans. A lot of the time America is presented as the beacon of the world where dreams come true and where life is wonderful but Pilger shows us that the reality is, America is nothing but a greedy, capitalist, selfish, bully. America would have us believe that all their decisions have been made to help other countries but the truth is they just help themselves. The heartfelt story of one Afghan person shows us just how un-caring the Americans are, for example;

“’Did you get any compensation?’ I asked.

‘I got [about $400] which has all gone on medical care for Jawad.’

‘The Americans gave you that?’ I asked.

‘No, the Taliban. They came and offered prayers and gave me the money in a cloth bag...Later, eleven Americans came and surveyed the crater where my home had stood. They wrote down the number of pieces of shrapnel and each one spoke to me and took notes. As they were leaving, their translator gave me an envelope with fifteen dollars. That’s less than two dollars for each of my family killed.’”

This story shows us that the Americans are more interested in methods of war than they are with the effects of war. It’s easy to see why the Afghan people would trust the Taliban more than the Americans, when the Americans treat life with so little respect. It just makes me even more disgusted when I hear that most of the people killed in the war were innocents, not the Taliban and that Americans provided no compensation, to them.

“’Nothing. No-one came. No-one sent anything. My friend, the police chief, even went to the American Embassy. They didn’t understand him, and shut the door.’”

Examples like this show that the Americans were more interested in payback, just as a bully would be, then they were in actually making a change to the Afghani way of life. From these examples, it’s easy to feel sympathy towards the Afghan people. I’m not saying what happened to the Americans during September 11 was not a tragedy, it was huge tragedy, but Pilger shows us that two wrongs don’t make a right. How is killing innocent Afghan people helping stop terrorism? I don’t think it does stop terrorism, but merely perpetuates hatred towards America.

The most challenging thing about Pilger’s Freedom Next Time is that it provokes readers to want to make a change, but it also shows how hard it would be to try and make a change. Both countries have committed many atrocities towards each other and it’s hard to imagine a time that they’ll both forgive and forget. Maybe if more people did what Pilger is doing, telling the un-told stories, eventually a day will come when peace is restored.