I don’t read works of fiction by modern authors. In fact, I avoid them like the plague. I have nothing but contempt for people who read junk novels from the pens of Clancy, Mitchum, King, Morrison, and the rest of these half-baked, churners of the ultramundane. Good literature – and indeed, fine literature – are dead. The epoch of epics is over. Actually, the period of Culture is dead. All the West has now is glorification of the Ugly, the Botched, the Rancid, and the Sinful. Such filth as Cage, Pollack, Angelou, and Mailer are considered High Art, while the Commoners rely on, and revel in, Negritude, in all its dark manifestations. Only a minority of a minority seeks the Art of the Past. Unfortunately, even these acolytes of past glories are a dying breed.
Yet, when all is said and done, I am an inveterate optimist of sorts. When it comes to Culture, I rigorously attempt to discover silent voices or beacons (if you will) of light within the darkness. Joyfully, I have discovered anachronisms in the twenthieth and twenty-first centuries. In music, certain pieces by Bartok and Shostakovich have carried on the torch. In art, book illustrators and comic book artists have shined. In literature, Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, and others have stridently proclaimed great works, veritable masterpieces. However, these individuals have been remnants of a previous era, living fossils, if you will, of better times.
With the above in mind, I hoped against hope that a book recommended by five people within the span of a month would not be a waste of time. Naturally, I hoped foolishly. The work I’m referring to is Dr. Khaled Hosseini’s “The Kite Runner”. It has been a contemporary bestseller of sorts. Usually, I don’t pay any attention to the moniker “bestseller”, but this time, I received such high praise from various sources that I built up a certain degree of impatience to read said work.
Well, I finally got it from the library (usually, I purchase books that are worth buying only after reading them) and read it in one day. My opinion on the book, you might ask? Well, I consider its “greatness” to be a most extreme form of hyperbole, its inventiveness to be non-existent. It’s characters and themes are hackneyed to the core, a la Jewish movie scripts.
I should admit that I was expecting not only novelty, but just plain something from the pen of an Afghani. As little as Iranians have done, Afghans have done even less; if that is imaginable! As far as my ideas are concerned, Afghans are still what they have always been: no sound, not even a fury, only signifying a really gigantic nothing.
Be that as it may, the plot has to do with redemption via the sickeningly and annoyingly trite theme of racism. The story’s central character is Amir, a Kabuli, Sunni Pashtun who is of the upper crust. He has Shia, Hazara servants, a father and son, Ali and Hassan, respectively. The former was Amir’s father’s servant during his childhood and the latter was Amir’s. The author of this impoverished yarn, who is a medical doctor (always the amaneunsis, never the originator), harps on the horrid situation of the Hazaras, a very-Mongoloid Shia minority group, predominately residing in central Afghanistan. Interestingly, their extreme Mongoloid features served to invoke the wrath of the more Caucasoid Afghans. Also, the author is very specific in describing the eye color of the natives. As in all non-White countries, blue and green eyes are enviously prized in persons.
Anyway, the author goes on to discuss the racism against the poor minority Hazaras. (Uh-oh, you know it’s coming!) Of course, the majority group maltreats them and later massacres them. All the meanwhile, the Hazaras, as melodramatically portrayed by Hassan, are shown to be self-sacrificing, self-effacing, Christ-like figures who take – smilingly and willingly – the sins of their oppressors unto themselves, while always forgiving their malfactors. Perhaps Hassan’s most Christ-like act was when he turned the other cheek; literally, in the most graphic sense! As the neighborhood “sociopath” was calling Hassan “racial slurs” and committing a “hate-crime” against him, Ali, the spoiled, racial-oppressor, did nothing as the evil-doer sodomized the ever-suffering Hassan, who, like a Paschal lamb, turned his doe-like eyes to look at Ali, quietly asking for succour. And would it come as any surprise that the sodomizer, the “sociopath”, the steel-knuckle wielder, the racist, the hate-criminal…had blue eyes and blonde hair?!? And as night follows day, the racist was a Hitler-worshipping racial-supremacist! He was practically frothing at the mouth about cleansing Afghanistan of the racially-undesirable Hazaras so that the pure Pasthun could raise themselves to proper glory. Could anything be more ridiculous and improbable? Yes, there can. Get this: his mother was German to boot (no pun intended)! Isn’t this further calumny against Germans? Essentially, this is a blood libel on the German people.
The plot then drags on, describing the passing years in both an unconvincing and maudlin manner. It does contain more trite themes, however, such as the brutality and barbarism of the Taliban, and another encounter with the “ramming-racist”. I wonder if the author took that character out of American History X?
Now, as bad as the Taliban were, the Northern Alliance weren’t angels. At least the former outlawed the growing of opium and promulgated strict Islamic law, so that banditry (common under pre- and post-Taliban rule) became a thing of the past, and Afghanis could travel more safely from one area to another. So, why the emphasis on the brutalities of the Taliban and not their enemies, America’s allies? Might I ask whether Dr. Hosseini’s book would have made it to the bookshelves of America?
As for the “ramming-racist”, he became a brutal Taliban overlord who would pick up young waifs from the orphanage and slake his pedophilic and pederastic lusts (do you mean that Northern Alliance warlords didn’t do such things either?!). Ineluctably, he got his hands (and a third appendage) on (or rather, in) Hassan’s boy (how typical for a cliched plot!). In an overly saccharine fashion, the work finished by the boy regaining his happiness in America.
Indeed! Is it any wonder that this third-rate soap opera was published. Do you think the VP of the publishing firm, Celina Spiegel, would publish a work by Dr. Hosseini that has a Jewish villain sodomizing little boys while fulminating that his tribe is destined to rule the world? Do you think his publishing company’s publicist, Ms. Schwartz, or Arlynn Greenbaum, would agree to represent him if he wrote a work attacking Israel and Jews? Come to think of it, this work has Amir’s father verbalizing against Arabs for their constant inability to overcome their Israeli foe. Never is there an attack against Jewish bellicosity and barbarism. Moreover, why wasn’t the “sociopath” made to be a half-Jew? After all, as a grown man, besides sodomizing urchins, didn’t he stone people to death in a stadium? Isn’t stoning an Old Testament (i.e., Jewish) thing, foreign to the pre-Christian, Teutonic tradition?
I think that Dr. Hosseini is too much a product of American “ejewcation”.
One last thing deserves remark. I’ve noticed that in the recent past, works of fiction by “ethnic” authors use “ethnic” terms in place of their English equivalents. An example would be using “chai” instead of “tea”. I find this irritating and another form of flexing one’s ethnic muscles in contradistinction to White collective impotence and supineness. Incidentally, being “ethnic” carries pride with it nowadays. Ergo, does this mean that Whites cannot have pride because they are not described as “ethnic”?
Furthermore, I took umbrage against another issue; namely, that of Afghanistan having a purported “rich culture”. Liberals – actually, their Masters – have taught us “helots” that multiculturalism, multiracialism, and divers(h)i(t)ty are strengths and boons of the highest magnitude. Well, if they are blessings, then why haven’t they helped Afghanistan out any? Afghanistan is one of the most balkanized “nations” on the face of the earth. It’s history is a history of tribes filled with enmity against one another.
Notwithstanding, I will give credit where credit is due. Sodomy, and its special subclass, pederasty, are true signs of Afghan richness and history, just like in Iran and Pakistan. Sodomy is quite prevalent in all three nations. My uncle told me tales of pederasty that blew my head (no pun intended). To quote Sir Burton’s Terminal Essay in his translation of the Thousand and One Arabian Tales:
“Qadr-i-kos Afghan daanad, qadr-i-kunraa Kabuli/…”
I’ll leave this translation to Dr. Hosseini!
That this work made it to bestseller status shows how low American taste has devolved.
(iranianforaryans.blogspot.com)
