Published 5 September 201126 March 2012 · Main Posts ‘No nation can liberate another nation’ Jeff Sparrow Malalai Joya’s talks at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival presented the war in Afghanistan quite differently to how it’s normally discussed here. Whereas Australians are told that, without NATO, Afghanistan would descend into civil war, Joya explained that civil war is already raging; where we’re assured that foreign intervention protects Afghans from the Taliban, Joya says that the Taliban are, in essence, already in power, since the warlords and fundamentalists aligned with the Karzai regime share all the Taliban’s most reactionary attitudes. She explains more in her interview with Overland, which is now online. But, in the context of a writers festival (and, for that matter, a literary journal), it’s worth noting that Joya’s activism was inspired, in part, by the books she read when she was young. In her memoir Raising my voice, she mentions, in particular, the impact of E L Voynich’s novel The Gadfly. After one of her sessions, she told me she’d read The Gadfly many times and it had greatly impacted both on her and other activists she knew. I thought many of the writers who read Overland might want to know that novels do still have, on occasion, that kind of power. Jeff Sparrow Jeff Sparrow is a Walkley Award-winning writer, broadcaster and former editor of Overland. More by Jeff Sparrow › Overland is a not-for-profit magazine with a proud history of supporting writers, and publishing ideas and voices often excluded from other places. If you like this piece, or support Overland’s work in general, please subscribe or donate. Related articles & Essays 28 March 20249 April 2024 · Main Posts Why we should value not only lived experience, but also lived expertise Sukhmani Khorana In the wake of this year’s International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, I want to extend the central idea of El Gibbs’s 2022 essay on 'lived expertise' and argue that in media accounts of racism, analytical expertise and lived experience ought to be valued together and even in the same body. 5 March 2024 · Main Posts Andrew Charlton’s school assignment Alex McKinnon Australia's Pivot to India exists for three reasons: so that when Andrew Charlton is interviewed on the radio or introduced on Q+A, his bio includes the phrase "he has written a book about Indian-Australian relations"; to fend off accusations that he is another Kristina Keneally engaging in electoral colonialism in western Sydney; and to help the Albanese government strengthen economic and military ties with Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party.