Searching "class revolt" at the New York Times site, the third result is about an assassination attempt against Lenin and from 1918. The second is on Britain and was published 1956. The first result is from today and about the Swat area in Pakistan.
Class is usually not mentioned in U.S. media and conflicts are seldom depicted as class based. So kudos to Jane Perletz and Pir Zubair Shah for this piece even when they miss some important questions.
PESHAWAR, Pakistan — The Taliban have advanced deeper into Pakistan by engineering a class revolt that exploits profound fissures between a small group of wealthy landlords and their landless tenants, according to government officials and analysts here.
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In Swat, accounts from those who have fled now make clear that the Taliban seized control by pushing out about four dozen landlords who held the most power.
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Mahboob Mahmood, a Pakistani-American lawyer and former classmate of President Obama’s, said, “The people of Pakistan are psychologically ready for a revolution.”Sunni militancy is taking advantage of deep class divisions that have long festered in Pakistan, he said. “The militants, for their part, are promising more than just proscriptions on music and schooling,” he said. “They are also promising Islamic justice, effective government and economic redistribution.”
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The insurgents struck at any competing point of power: landlords and elected leaders — who were usually the same people — and an underpaid and unmotivated police force, said Khadim Hussain, a linguistics and communications professor at Bahria University in Islamabad, the capital.At the same time, the Taliban exploited the resentments of the landless tenants, particularly the fact that they had many unresolved cases against their bosses in a slow-moving and corrupt justice system, Mr. Hussain and residents who fled the area said.
The authors and the headline Taliban Exploit Class Rifts to Gain Ground in Pakistan urge the point of exploitation. But is that really the case? Exploit them for what? Are the Neo-Taliban in Swat abusing the poor just as much as the rich landowners they drove away? Where is the proof for that?
Alternatively: Are these Neo-Taliban true revolutionaries who help the poor to stand up and to take their fair share of the economic society? Are the Mullahs who guide them the leaders of an Islamic liberation theology movement?
My hunch is that the real answers to the last two questions are more to the yes-side than to the no-side. The dark picture of gruffly backwoodsmen who want to install a worldwide reactionary caliphate that the 'western' media are usually painting never made much sense. The picture that accompanies the NYT story tells me something different.
What is your take?