A video of Afghans clinging to a departing American military aircraft at Kabul’s international airport has gone viral. In one visual account, two stowaways fall to their deaths as the aircraft takes to the skies.
That video has an iconic lineage.
The photograph of a child running naked from a napalm bombing in 1972 is one of the most enduring images of the Vietnam War. A photograph from 1968 captures the terrifying moment before a general fires his pistol into the head of a communist suspect. If photographs have a destiny, it is revealed in America’s frantic departure by helicopter as the communists close in on Saigon in 1975.
Photographs, like words, create meanings. In semiotics, or the study of how meaning is generated, signs are a form of communication. That communication has two aspects. A sign is composed of a signifier, the form which the sign takes; and the signified, the concept that it represents. In the case of Kabul, the military aircraft is the sign of imperial American power. The signifier is the chaos amidst which the aircraft takes off. Afghanistan’s abandonment is the signified.
Afghans on the tarmac watch in astonished disappointment as the aircraft rises over and away from them. Then they break out in collective disbelief as the bodies of the stowaways fall back on Afghan soil from the American skies.
That is the semiotic fate of the Third World in general. The Third World can be the signifier or the signified but never the sign. Its reality is refracted, even back to its own people, through foreign lenses such as the global media. It cannot create global meaning but is made meaningful by the agency and actions of others whose power enjoys global reach.
As an object of history and not its subject (a theme explored masterfully by Edward Said in his book, Orientalism), today’s Third World continues to exist at the economic and strategic pleasure of others who are free to make it or unmake it, invade it or leave it.
Writing during the Cold War, the philosopher Herbert Marcuse denounced the scientific prowess of affluent civilisations for having unleashed the ferocity of bombers, chemicals and special forces on the shacks, hospitals and rice fields of the earth’s poorest inhabitants. His chief target was the American invasion of Vietnam, which many see as a classic case of First World violence on the Third.
The Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 visited the wrath of the Second World on another nation of the Third World. The Taliban emerged in response. Once the Soviets had left, the Taliban turned against the Americans, who invaded Afghanistan after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and stayed for two decades till they, too, left.
America’s longest war has ended, but only to reconfirm the Third World’s fears of its dispensability in the imperial scheme of things.
True, the beneficiaries of the American or the Soviet retreat from the contemporary Third World have been and are brutal. The Maoist Khmer Rouge turned Cambodia into a national killing field after the American withdrawal from Indochina. The Taliban, which essentially is an insurrectionary force elevated again to statehood, will pursue its religious agenda no matter what.
However, the location of Vietnam then and Afghanistan now in the Third World attests to their precarious relevance to the Western world today, which includes the United States and Russia (part of the former Soviet Union).
It is inconceivable that either Washington or Moscow would have allowed their common European sphere to have fallen to the depredations that have visited Indochina or are revisiting South or Central Asia. Indeed, America pacified the Balkans following the break-up of Yugoslavia after the Cold War. Although at odds with the United States, Russia stabilises the same region today through a balance of power with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization so that fragile civil polities are not overwhelmed by military or insurgent takeovers.
Unfortunately, Afghanistan enjoys no such luck. Unlike the Balkans, which straddled the First and Second Worlds of the United States and the Soviet Union, Afghanistan cannot escape its provenance in the Third World.
That sad sphere continues to exist in spite of the extensive spatial integration wrought by economic globalisation and secured by the military might of the great powers.
There is no semiotic turn in world affairs when, in a sign of the changing times, no one would need to fall off departing aircraft.
The author is co-general editor of the Singapore Chronicles series published by IPS and The Straits Times Press.
Top photo from Unsplash.