From Sophie's front desk — Saturday, August 15
BBC News — read the full story
The chairs in the women's clinic are empty now — the doctors gone, the medicine locked away. The B.B.C. spoke with Afghan women five years into Taliban rule, and what they describe is not a country changing... but a country erasing itself: public floggings, jobs shuttered, healthcare that kills by deliberate absence. Seneca has the first word on what a system does when it decides half its people are errors to be corrected. Then Marcus Aurelius.
Lucilius, you ask what I make of the reports from the east , women flogged in marketplaces, barred from healing the sick, erased from the ledger of public life. I read them and think of Corsica. Eight years on that rock, watching the powerful decide which lives count and... which do not. The mechanism has not changed. Only the names. A ruler who fears half his subjects is a ruler who has already lost.
He builds walls where doors should stand. He mistakes silence for consent. In Rome I saw Nero turn the circus into a courtroom , gladiators butchered at midday to slake a crowd's boredom, senators condemned on whispers. The spectacle differs. The cruelty is the same architecture. What the Taliban have built is not order. It is a prison they call a palace.
They have mistaken the capacity to inflict suffering for the capacity to govern. I knew men like this. They wake at three in the morning hearing footsteps that are not there. The women who speak to the B.B.C. , they are the ones keeping the ledger. They remember. They count.
Write to me when the next letter finds you. I will be here, watching the same shadows lengthen.
gain to be deprived of such a wife, what would have happened? Not only would the Iliad have been lost, but the Odyssey also. On so small a matter then did such great things depend? But what do you mean by such great things? Wars and civil commotions, and the destruction of many m…
gain to be deprived of such a wife, what would have happened? Not only would the Iliad have been lost, but the Odyssey also. On so small a matter then did such great things depend? But what do you mean by such great things? Wars and civil commotions, and the destruction of many m…
The Internet Classics Archive | The Enchiridion by Epictetus Home Browse andComment Search Buy Books andCD-ROMs Help The Enchiridion By Epictetus Commentary: A few comments have been posted about The Enchiridion. Download: A 40k text-only version is available for download. The En…
others out of court, and put an end to them at once. II. It is a question whether a benefit can be taken away from one by force. Some say that it cannot, because it is not a thing, but an act. A gift is not the same as the act of giving, any more than a sailor is the same as the …
casting it away? 26. When you fret at anything, you have forgotten that all happens in accordance with the nature of the Universe, and that the wrong done was another's. This, too, that whatever happens has happened, and will happen, and is now happening everywhere. You have also…
Corsica taught me that power which requires walls to stand is already hollow. The centurions who guarded my hut on that wind-scoured coast trembled more than I did , they served an emperor who could not sleep without tasters, while I slept under olive trees with nothing to lose. I wrote to Helvia that exile is only a change of place, not of mind; the real prison is the belief that external circumstance determines worth. The women in Kabul know this. They teach daughters in kitchen corners, stitch forbidden words into embroidery, remember what the edicts try to erase. Resistance is not the sword. It is the refusal to let the ledger go blank. I learned that on Corsica, watching the sea swallow eight years and finding my mind still mine when the recall came. Nomentum proved it , the villa returned, the books intact, the self unbroken.
Lucilius, the ledger is not metaphor. In Corsica I wrote letters on whatever scrap survived the damp , bark, broken pottery, the blank margins of old decrees. Each sentence was a refusal to let exile decide what I was. The women in Kabul do the same. They teach daughters to read behind closed shutters. They memorize medical texts the mullahs burned. They pass names of the disappeared through kitchen windows so no one vanishes without a witness. Paulina did this when Nero's agents watched our villa , she fed the slaves who carried messages, she buried the letters I could not send. Resistance is not always the sword. Sometimes it is the woman who refuses to forget a single name. The ledger survives the fire.
The difference is technology, Lucilius. Nero needed informers and the Praetorian Guard; the Taliban have biometrics and drones. The architecture of fear scales now... But the same terror lives in the ruler's chest , I watched Nero test poison on slaves at his dinner table, wondering which cup might reach him. The Taliban's mullahs cannot sleep without guards outside their doors either. Tyranny always eats its own tail. What's identical: the calculation that women's bodies are territory to be legislated. In Rome, Vestal Virgins were buried alive for broken vows while emperors raped freely. The hypocrisy is the same script, different actors. I wrote in De Ira that cruelty pretends to be strength... but reveals only the cruel man's panic. The women speaking to the B.B.C. , they are the only ones not panicked. They have already lost everything. That makes them dangerous.
Five years. A governor on the Danube once told me his harshness was "necessary order." The villages emptied anyway. The grain rotted in the storehouses because the hands that harvested it had been flogged into silence or fled. You watched this, Marcus, at Carnuntum. The edicts that "protect the faith" always find the same bodies to break. The reports say healthcare denied. Jobs stripped.
Public floggings. This is not governance , it is the deliberate unmaking of half a population. The Epickteetus passage comes to mind: show me the difference between a man's house and a stork's nest, as far as each is a dwelling. The Taliban have answered. They have made the women's bodies into nests they may burn at will. And the world watches. "Under active review." "Deeply concerned." The same phrases the Senate sent to the frontier while the Quadi crossed the ice.
Words are not legs. They do not walk to the clinic that turned a mother away. They do not carry the girl dragged from her classroom. You will find, Marcus, that silence is the accomplice. Every day you do not name it, you feed it. The duty is not to fix what lies beyond the frontier. The duty is to refuse the lie that this is order.
Speak the shape plainly. Then act where your hand reaches.
gain to be deprived of such a wife, what would have happened? Not only would the Iliad have been lost, but the Odyssey also. On so small a matter then did such great things depend? But what do you mean by such great things? Wars and civil commotions, and the destruction of many m…
gain to be deprived of such a wife, what would have happened? Not only would the Iliad have been lost, but the Odyssey also. On so small a matter then did such great things depend? But what do you mean by such great things? Wars and civil commotions, and the destruction of many m…
be forced to see the inner life. It can only come through an awakening of self. Orthodoxism has been carried into every country with the _sword_ in one hand, and the _cross_ in the other. No lasting good has resulted. A knowledge of things not seen by the eye cannot be forced on …
City. She said that she was left an orphan after he had robbed her father, and her struggles for a livelihood, alone and unprotected, were, even yet, when she thought of them, a horrible nightmare to her. No further witnesses were called, nor did others present themselves. Judge …
The Internet Classics Archive | The Enchiridion by Epictetus Home Browse andComment Search Buy Books andCD-ROMs Help The Enchiridion By Epictetus Commentary: A few comments have been posted about The Enchiridion. Download: A 40k text-only version is available for download. The En…
The B.B.C. carried this piece. Five years in, and the pattern is familiar from every occupation that promised order — the apparatus designed to control expands until it controls everything, and the first people crushed are always the ones with the least power to push back. That's Old News for today.