Newsletter #10: Free Speech in Scotland, Resisting the Taliban, Salman does Substack, and the Failure of Faith Confirmed Yet Again
It’s been another quiet week for me. Last Sunday I was in Edinburgh for a graduation celebration, which I’ll be writing more about later. There are a few things in the big bad world that have caught my attention lately, though.
Free speech and civil liberties in Scotland. This year, Holyrood passed a Hate Crime Bill that threatens the very idea of free speech and Nicola Sturgeon has just announced that “vaccine passports” will be implemented. This week, a gender-critical feminist campaigner named Marion Millar was hauled into court to answer for her Twitter crimes. What the hell is happening to my country? A government that claims to stand for independence and freedom is also the UK’s most illiberal government: freedom from Westminster clearly does not mean freedom in any other, let alone meaningful, sense. I’ve mentioned that I’m involved with the Free Speech Champions project, and I hope that the work I do there will help in some small way to counter the sinister idiocy that has overtaken my nation.
The Panjshir resistance on the brink. Ahmad Massoud, son of the late anti-Soviet and anti-Taliban warrior Ahmad Shah Massoud, has mounted a resistance to Taliban rule in the never-conquered Panjshir valley. Unlike the presidential poltroon Ashraf Ghani, Vice President Amrullah Saleh has remained in Afghanistan to fight the Taliban alongside Massoud. But it seems that the Panjshir resistance is on the brink. If Joe Biden had any wits about him, he would be mustering all available resources to assist Massoud and his fighters, but I doubt that will happen. I can only hope that the resistance puts up a hell of a fight and succeeds in showing the Taliban that they will never have full control of the country. I recommend a read of Saleh’s moving despatch from Panjshir, published in the Daily Mail, in which he demonstrates the courage his former boss should have shown and the good sense the west should have had. It is a blistering attack on the west’s cravenness and the Americans’ betrayals—and an affirmation of Afghan dignity. A few choice excerpts:
This is not only shameful for President Biden, it is shameful for the whole of Western civilisation.
Your politicians know that Pakistan is running the show.
They know al Qaeda is back in the streets of Kabul. And they know the Taliban have not reformed. They have been displaying their suicide vests in Kabul. …
Morally, the West owes [help] to every Afghan. I'm not begging them to save me. I am asking them to save their face, to save their dignity, to save their reputation and credibility. …
I wanted to follow in the footsteps of my late leader, Ahmad Shah Massoud, known as the Lion of Panjshir, who fought the Soviets and the Taliban and prevented them from ever gaining control of the region.
He endured pain, frustration, and crises and yet he remained, with meagre resources, with his people.
Just days before 9/11 he was assassinated by Al Qaeda operatives masquerading as journalists. For me to flee would have amounted to a betrayal of his soul and his legacy. …
How could I see my people suffering, dying from hunger and thirst, walking barefoot, from a palace of safety and then sit behind a laptop screen and write about it?
Shall I expect the poorest of the poor people in the margins to be more strategic than I am, to be braver than I can demonstrate myself to be, to expect them to rescue the country while I just drop them a note on Facebook or Twitter?
Should I give a radio interview and then hope that these people will decode my messages and revolt? This is what some other leaders are hoping. They have gone.
They stay in these hotels and villas abroad. And then they call on the poorest Afghans to revolt. That's craven. If we want a revolt, the revolt has to be led.
I was deluged with emotional messages inviting me to flee, to be a coward for a while and then jump back into the fray if things stabilised.
That would have been shameful. Not a vein in my body was prepared to accept such a future.
Instead I sent a message to Ahmad Massoud, son of my mentor, the late Massoud. 'My brother, where are you?' He said: 'I'm in Kabul and planning my next move'. I told him I was also in Kabul and offered to join forces. …
Has it been easy to take up resistance? Absolutely not. I'm in a difficult situation, no doubt. I'm not made of steel I'm a human being. I have emotions. I'm aware that the Taliban want my head. But this is history. And we are in the centre of the history.
Panjshir is where the future of Afghanistan will be decided, so good luck, Mr Saleh—and all those refusing to surrender. (I also recommend this interview by Peter Bergen of Massoud.) Meanwhile, western countries should do as much as possible for the fleeing Afghans, particularly the women and girls and those who helped international forces, thus putting their and their families’ lives in great danger.
Salman on Substack. One of my very favourite writers, Salman Rushdie, has joined Substack and plans to release his new full-length fiction in instalments on the platform. I’m currently on a binge of his works and am reading his first novel, Grimus, which isn’t well regarded by the critics or its author, but which I’m finding quite enjoyable, so it was pleasant to find out that Rushdie is leaping on the Substack bandwagon. I look forward to reading his stuff on here and I find it quite delightful that even as a great man of literature embraces the new media, he is also paying homage to the historical giants (publishing in instalments is a sadly forgotten tradition in English literature).
Religion proved to be unnecessary for healthy societies yet again. Some more good news: Jerry Coyne writes about the late political scientist Ronald F. Inglehart’s 2020 Foreign Affairs report, which shows that religion is on the decline worldwide, while secularisation is on the increase. The best part? Secular societies are better societies by almost every metric: they are happier and freer and wealthier. This doesn’t mean that religion causes societies to be hellholes, of course, but the correlation is real. No, it means that, as societies progress, the need for religion becomes less, and it declines. Thus the complaints of the religious and their friends that civilisation can’t function without faith are once more shown up as the self-serving falsehoods they always were. It is, then, an empirical fact that we don’t need religion. It is also a fact that religion, while not necessarily the cause of backwardness, feeds off of poverty and ignorance. (In some ways, of course, religion does transform societies into hellholes, as when Sharia is imposed or sectarian violence is encouraged by the faithful.) A minister in the Church of Scotland who is a friendly acquaintance of mine has admitted these connections before, joking (I hope he was joking, anyway) that we need a catastrophe to befall us so that the flock returns. If people need to be desperate and poor for faith to appeal, that says much more about religion than it does about the people who abjure it.
I admit, though, that these facts are beside a certain point. The really important issue for believers is whether or not religion is true and defensiveness about its role in society is an insult to their deepest concerns. But let me tie these two things together: if your deity wanted to convince unbelievers, would it not have created a state of affairs wherein moral and material progress were congruent with religious belief rather than the opposite? Why would your god make it so that, invariably, belief in him is correlated with poverty, corruption, and intellectual (and literal) illiteracy? If god wants all of us to believe in him, but in his world societal benightedness is correlated with that belief, then is it not more rational to assume that the god in which you believe does not exist? What more parsimonious explanation than a godless cosmos, for is it not the case that the universe and humanity look exactly as you’d expect if there were no god? This doesn’t rule out a bad god, of course, but then the fact of our continued progress against natural and human evil does. And in any case the god most people believe in is meant to be a good one who has our best interests at heart and who wants us to believe in him; this god, given the facts, is empirically impossible. Thus: Christianity and its brethren are false.
In short: religion, whether Christianity or Islam or any other, is not only unnecessary for civilisation but actually correlated with (and very often the direct cause of) barbarism. This is not a polemical sally but an empirical fact, one that yet again discredits both the truth and the morality of faith.
I’ll end with another recommendation of Jerry Coyne’s post, which contains more compelling data on this subject. As Coyne says:
Given all the data, and the existence of happy, well-functioning societies that are both moral and highly atheistic, there’s simply no reason to claim that society “needs” religion to function properly. When you get your society functioning properly, in fact, religion goes away. And it will continue to go away as the world improves, barring a disaster like nuclear war or global climate change that devastates the planet.
Amen until next week, then,
DJS