[lbo-talk] query: Arundhati Roy

[Jim Devine]

On 3/7/06, Wendy Lyon wrote:> I'm reading Robert Fisk's "The Great War
For Civilisation" and just  finished the section that recounts his
experiences in Afghanistan in  the early years of the Soviet
occupation.  At one point, following an incident that seems to have
taken place around 1979, he notes that "for all the government's
brutality and its reliance on foreign  invaders, its functionaries had
been trying to create a secular, equal  society... It was not the
government that was burning the schools and killing the teachers."<

right, all else equal I'd side with the government. But it was using
top-down methods that helped to create such opposition by disrupting
patriarchal relations. The government was largely based on an urban
social movement and then tried to spread to the countryside, where it
had not base.
--
Jim Devine / Bust Big Brother Bush!
[this space for sale: anyone got a good quote?]