cancel2 2022
Canceled
The US embarked on a vast project in the 1950s to transform Helmand Province and turn it into an Afghan version of the Tennessee Valley Authority. The dam raised the water table and the soil turned saline as a result. Eventually the only thing that would grow was opium poppies. Here is an extract from Adam Curtis's excellent article about these events.
It was at this very moment that a world famous historian called Arnold Toynbee visited Helmand. Toynbee had spent his life studying the giant sweep of History to find out what made different civilizations rise and fall. Toynbee drove from Kandahar to Lashkar Gah past all the giant canals and dams. He was shocked. What he was seeing, he said, was not a new civilization but "a piece of America inserted into the Afghan landscape. The new world they are conjuring up at the Helmand river's expense is to be an America-in-Asia"
Toynbee quoted Sophocles' warning: "The craft of his engines surpasseth his dreams" What he meant was that you couldn't change history with just machines and science. Toynbee believed that what led to civilisations rise and fall was culture and religion.
A year after he returned Toynbee gave a series of lectures called "America and World Revolution" which was published as a book . In an interview with the BBC in 1962 he warns of the neglect of religion and religious values in this rush to modernity. It was the beginning of the conservative reaction to the techno-utopian dreams of progress of the 50s and 60's.
What is fascinating is that his argument - that religion is the only real force in the west that can give meaning and purpose in life - is exactly the same as the new political Islamist ideas that were beginning to emerge on the campuses of Cairo, Kabul and Islamabad.
Toynbee was an atheist, but he believed that without such meaning social structures in western society will corrode. It is the same conservative argument that you find in the writings of Sayyid Qutb in Egypt and Mawdudi in Pakistan.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2009/10/kabul_city_number_one_part_3.html
It was at this very moment that a world famous historian called Arnold Toynbee visited Helmand. Toynbee had spent his life studying the giant sweep of History to find out what made different civilizations rise and fall. Toynbee drove from Kandahar to Lashkar Gah past all the giant canals and dams. He was shocked. What he was seeing, he said, was not a new civilization but "a piece of America inserted into the Afghan landscape. The new world they are conjuring up at the Helmand river's expense is to be an America-in-Asia"
Toynbee quoted Sophocles' warning: "The craft of his engines surpasseth his dreams" What he meant was that you couldn't change history with just machines and science. Toynbee believed that what led to civilisations rise and fall was culture and religion.
A year after he returned Toynbee gave a series of lectures called "America and World Revolution" which was published as a book . In an interview with the BBC in 1962 he warns of the neglect of religion and religious values in this rush to modernity. It was the beginning of the conservative reaction to the techno-utopian dreams of progress of the 50s and 60's.
What is fascinating is that his argument - that religion is the only real force in the west that can give meaning and purpose in life - is exactly the same as the new political Islamist ideas that were beginning to emerge on the campuses of Cairo, Kabul and Islamabad.
Toynbee was an atheist, but he believed that without such meaning social structures in western society will corrode. It is the same conservative argument that you find in the writings of Sayyid Qutb in Egypt and Mawdudi in Pakistan.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2009/10/kabul_city_number_one_part_3.html
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