Afghan War
Article
Afghan War is a recurring event in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between July 15, 2021 and September 13, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “it would surprise me if eg antebellum slaves had classic PTSD symptoms at the same rate as Afghan War veterans”; “before that in the Afghan war against the Soviet occupation”. It most often appears alongside America, Britain, 1902.
Metadata
- Category: Events
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: July 15, 2021
- Last seen: September 13, 2024
Appears In
Related Pages
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- America (2 shared issues)
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- Britain (2 shared issues)
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- 1902 (1 shared issues)
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- 1903 (1 shared issues)
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- 1906 Japanese neurology journal (1 shared issues)
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- 1970s feminists (1 shared issues)
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- 1999 apartment bombings (1 shared issues)
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- 11 (1 shared issues)
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- Abbasid (1 shared issues)
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- Abkhazia (1 shared issues)
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- Abu Hafs (1 shared issues)
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- Abu Hamza al-Ghamdi (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
As before, the part I found most enlightening was the history of trauma. Although cultures throughout history have included some people with bad reactions to traumatic events, it’s controversial whether this has happened at anywhere near the levels of today. Historians can hunt down some things Romans said that sounded vaguely PTSD-like, but the fact is that a very large segment of their society was going into a bunch of pitched sword battles and/or crucifying people for fun and profit, and mostly pretty blase about it. We don’t have great records for historical traumatized populations, but it would surprise me if eg antebellum slaves had classic PTSD symptoms at the same rate as Afghan War veterans.
Second, some people really want to be heroes. Dean first joined the jihad because he wanted to defend his Muslim brothers in Bosnia against the Serbian oppression and genocidal atrocities. Many others joined for similar reasons: to help the oppressed in Bosnia, or before that in the Afghan war against the Soviet occupation. But there aren’t that many “just wars” going on in the modern world. So these aspiring heroes convince themselves that one side of a horrible-against-horrible civil war is actually the just cause, and join that. Or they just find Islamic Accelerationism, which very conveniently claims that all kinds of new wars are just and heroic, as the instability brings forward the final victory of the Faithful. There is something tragic about the mis-directed energies of all these would-be heroes, and I sometimes wonder if we should stage fake alien invasions to keep these people occupied.
Evidence emerges that MI6 was funneling money to terrorists! Yeah, they did that. They needed a cover story for why Dean is traveling back and forth between Britain and Afghanistan, something that puts him in good standing in al-Qaeda and also prevents them from conscripting him to dangerous local battles against other Afghan warlords. So they invented a honey exporting business where Dean brought honey from Afghanistan to Britain (Afghan honey is allegedly really good, and honey exports were legitimately a major source of al-Qaeda’s funding), and MI6 gave him money that he could return to the camps. It was a few thousand dollars at a time, which was good money for the cash-strapped terrorists, but I trust MI6’s judgment that keeping a spy inside al-Qaeda’s inner circles was well worth this price.