‘Carrying the Future’ in Afghanistan

How sad and tragic that young US foreign service officer, Anne Smedinghoff, just 25 years old, was killed yesterday in Afghanistan. Sad and tragic not because, as the media tells us, she was a brave American hero sacrificing herself for our values, but rather because she no doubt was a victim of our own propagandistic mythology that US occupation of foreign lands is welcomed as a “global force for good.”

“She was doing what she loved,” her grieving parents said of their daughter, who was killed while delivering school textbooks to Afghanistan’s southern Zabul province. It is a safe bet that those textbooks were printed either by or under the close supervision of the US government and included all of the politically correct shibboleths that bright-eyed State Department, USAID, and NGOers are convinced the rest of the world is ravenous to ingest in their never-ending goal to be “just like us.” Is it any wonder that may not be so welcomed? Reality bites hard, in this case it takes the form of a car bomb; last week it was a knife.

Secretary of State John Kerry was purely Soviet in his dialectical reaction to the murder of Miss Smedinghoff. Said Kerry:

“It’s a grim reminder to all of us, though we didn’t need any reminders, of how important and also how risky carrying the future is with people who want to resist.”

Dare not resist our “carrying the future”!

But the rest of the world does resist. It does not want our propagandistic textbooks, it does not want our drones, it does not want our support of radical Islamists, it does not want our soldiers, and it does not want our diplomats or NGOs engaging in all manner of manipulation of domestic affairs overseas. Sadly, until young Americans like this foreign service officer start to question the mythologies spouted by politicians and duly amplified by the corporate media about the indispensability of the US “carrying the future,” there will be many more unnecessary deaths — on all sides.

On Twitter @DanielLMcAdams

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11:48 am on April 7, 2013