Oh the irony: mixed martial arts are too violent for the Taliban

It’s just an ever-expanding feast of ridiculousness and hypocrisy – with millions of lives as the punchline

In the year I spent in Berlin long ago, I became fascinated with the relative recentness of the East German regime, and couldn’t get enough of that history, ogling artefacts like Marxist-Leninist scout pamphlets, school books and bits of children’s uniform, all deifying the dire philosophy of state-mandated socialism.
In the end, I grew bored. It was an empty vessel. I learnt that the worst regimes can also be the most banal. Evil can be fascinating – Nazism still entrances many – but eventually it shows itself to be vacuous, and even absurd.
This absurdism is manifest in the Taliban. The sadists running Afghanistan know no end of brutality, violence and murder. Their laws force women to totally cover in public, including eyes and mouth. Violations result in severe punishment. “Honour” killings, stonings and beheadings are the norm in Taliban-run Afghanistan.
But apparently mixed martial arts (MMA) is simply “too violent” and so has been outlawed. “It was found that the sport is problematic with respect to sharia and it has many aspects that are contradictory to the teachings of Islam,” said the Taliban’s general directorate on physical education and sport in a statement last week.
This isn’t ironic – that would require more sophistication. It is laughable, absurd, banal and just so stupid, the outcome of a regime run by people who are both extremely thick and extremely horrible.
Looking for profundity or even coherence in people like the Taliban is pointless. They aren’t interesting. They aren’t clever enough to be interesting. It’s just an ever-expanding feast of ridiculousness and hypocrisy – with millions of lives as the punchline. The only profundity one can find in their sick rule is the abject, inexcusable and lethal betrayal of Afghan women by the Americans, who allowed the Taliban to slink back into power.