“I chose [the title] “Red Enemy” because of its reference to communism.

I think Mao is very interesting. I think that because of Andy Warhol, Mao became a pop icon. His face is identifiable to people that know nothing about him or what he stood for.  It is interesting that in the US we have consumed the image of Mao in a capitalist fashion (t-shirts, mugs, etc), when Mao was originally seen as an enemy of capitalism.

I have a very odd relationship with communism. My extended family was split: some were pro communist, while some were not. My parents were not pro-communist. But I’m not sure that this is because of the ideology itself, but because of the methods the Soviets used to infiltrate Afghanistan. No one likes being forced to believe anything. The Soviets tortured family members because they were not communist, and that is why my family had to leave. It was literally a life vs. death kind of situation.

By the time I was a senior in high school, I started to look at communism in a different way. I saw that being in the US education system I had been brainwashed to believe that communism was evil and capitalism was great. During college, I studied the world, and saw how capitalism isn’t so great either, as it currently stands.  Given that I was constantly told communism is bad as an American, I started to question how bad it really was. I read the Communist Manifesto, and a book by either Lenin or Trotsky, two “evil” leaders. I don’t deny the harm they did to people, but what shocked me was their prediction of capitalism. The book was written in the early 1900s but it could have been written today - because all the ills of capitalism (exploitation, small group in power, etc) were outlined very succinctly in one paragraph in the first chapter of the book.

I think that communism sounded good on paper, but just as the US is forcing countries to adopt their version of democracy (i.e. capitalism), the soviets did more harm than good trying to force communism on various countries.

I have mixed feelings about the US in Afghanistan. I am happy that the US “ousted” the Taliban, because the Taliban was an oppressive regime. But I am not happy about the reasons why we went in there. We would have never gone in there if it weren’t for 9/11. So Bush’s statements that we are going there to create democracy are hollow to me because, if the US really cared about democracy in Afghanistan, we would have done something before 9/11. I also don’t believe in violence.  And I don’t like the “othering” of the Taliban either. I don’t agree with the Taliban’s ideology, but I didn’t like how all of a sudden it was acceptable for the US-backed Northern Alliance to trap Taliban members in metal containers until they suffocated.  Taliban are people too and who are we to judge who should die and who should live?”