Yesterday yet another person died in the middle east. Someone the news and the American people, presumably, cared about. No, it wasn't an American, nor a white person at all. Shocking, I know, but this person was, to many Americans, the sole perpetrator of the September 11th attacks. Of course, the idea that without Osama Bin Laden something like that couldn't have happened is pretty stupid, but it is an example of the way we think about these kinds of things.
Just like with Adolf Hitler, we allow one man to take the blame for the acts of many, as a way to think that evil does exist, but it is such a small subsection of society that one man can usually be the blame for awful things happened. Just like a majority of the world can blame most of the good things happening on one man.
However, in any case, it wasn't just the one man, it was everything else in the environment that led up to it. In reality, there isn't such a thing as evil, just different view points. In reality there is no black and white because we all perceive those colors differently. It is all based on environment, the way one was raised. There is no objective morality, nor an objective good or evil. Doesn't mean it isn't useful to talk about things in those terms, but when one wants to celebrate the death of a 'political figure' one must realize how little that death will actually mean. Saddam died and we are still fighting in Iraq. Osama died and we will still fight in Afghanistan.
If someone killed the President, we wouldn't just pack up and call it a day, nor will anyone sympathetic to anyone we kill that we deem important.
And if one thinks that the death of one man avenges the thing that happened almost ten years ago, well, I'm not so sure what to think. Perhaps the 100,000 plus dead bodies created in the middle east since wasn't enough to satiate the American need for vengeance for the death of 4,000 people no one in the red states even knew.
I don't mean to get red v. blue, because really, it doesn't matter and I know some liberals are happy today too. My dad called me and I couldn't help but mock the fact that he even cared. "And nothing bad will ever happen to America again" I said. But who could help being moved that an evil face from so long ago is dead? Who could help but be swept up after 9/11 in a torrent of anger against a man no one met nor listened too? And perhaps I am being to harsh to those in which the anger lay latent for so many years, and the death released those old feelings. Kind of like this:
If you want to make Osama a Goldstein like figure, fine. But unlike Goldstein, Osama won.
He changed America for the worse. He scared us, made us more racist, made us give up freedoms, and gave the rich a reason to wage unnecessary wars. And he lived 10 years after this victory, much longer than I suspect he expected. Much longer than he was relevant anymore. He stopped being relevant as soon as Bush made his speech that night. As soon as the group consciousness of America changed, his work was done.
No death can undo that. And no death, or 4,00 deaths, is worth the death of hundreds of thousands.
But global capitalism is.
I couldn't help but feel a morbid curiosity to all those that rejoiced through the interwebs that he was dead, but then I realized that, as you say, the war was based solely on this figure and one action, and many believe that it's all over. Of course that is a false assumption, and there will be someone else's head on the chopping block before it's all over with.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I did have to delete my uncle's wife (I refuse to call her my aunt) on facebook because she called Bush a "great president" and that he was the one who actually "did all the work". Can't stand that shit.
Absolutely. Now that he is dead, many people will be lost as to the reason the war continues. However, the war was never about one man. The war was about money/resources (oil, predominately) not about the man who "masterminded" the attack on 9/11. As if one man could be responsible for something of that magnitude. As if Hitler caused the holocaust by himself.
ReplyDeleteThis situations cause themselves in a much larger context than one man can control.
Bush's family was friends with the bin Laden family (as the bin Laden family is close to the Saudi Arabian royal family) and had them flown out of the country shortly after the attacks. Clearly, justice is not at hand, but only the price and control of oil, no matter the subterfuge of the political and media systems.