Bin Gone

Maybe the dancing in the streets was a little inappropriate but the death of Osama Bin Laden must be cathartic for most Americans.  He was a bona fide villain for the US, the last foreigner responsible for the deaths of so many Americans in their own country was George III, but I don’t think The Madness of Osama Bin Laden is a likely Oscar contender in two hundred years time.  There are few who’ll mourn his death, those that do have their own corners of the internet to do so.  However there is a significant portion of world opinion which objects to any form of American military action, regardless of who it’s against or what motivates it – one of the long-term consequences I think of Vietnam (not finding weapons of mass destruction doesn’t help).  Disdain at the news seems to have emerged in two forms; first that this action will do nothing to combat the causes of terrorism, or second, that the whole story is a fabrication. The internet is the natural home of the Conspiracy Theorist and insisting that this event didn’t happen is a believable option for many.  Conspiracy Theorists seem to inhabit a Cartesian nightmare where no perceptions can be trusted and reality can only be understood by the stuff that’s in your head.  I was tempted to blog about Descartes but his Meditations cause the same kind of headaches one experiences trying to figure out the sequence of events in the Back to the Future trilogy, so I gave up.  The other issue, that terrorism is caused by injustice and inequality, a point alluded to by our own Taoiseach today, is an easier one to address.  Terror isn’t always caused by injustice.  One of the first modern terrorist campaigns was conducted by the Ku Klux Klan in the 1860s and 1870s as a direct reaction against the imposition of justice, i.e. fair treatment of former slaves.  The men in white hoods fought the US Civil War all over again and this time won, condemning generations of black Americans to a condition not much improved on slavery.  Of course the KKK perceived an injustice, but they were wrong.  It is the ugly truth that sometimes terrorism is a poor man’s way of fighting a war; partisan groups fighting the Nazis were regarded by their enemies as terrorists, the ANC were branded terrorists and not just by white South Africa, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu leads a party founded by Menachem Begin, a man who by modern standards must be regarded as a terrorist.  In fact every guerrilla campaign – including Ireland in the 1920’s - contains elements of terrorism, it is up to supporters to decide if these tactics are justified or not, or if they can ever be justified.  But surely Bin Laden is a much simpler case? Take the regimes which harboured him, Sudan and Afghanistan.  Fighting injustice? Really?  Sudan is one of the few counties in the world which tacitly allows slavery and has spent most of the last twenty years engaged in a racist genocide on its own people.  Taliban Afghanistan we all know about, the treatment of women, the closure of schools, the destruction of culture, the public executions.  I can’t see the concern for the little guy from Bin Laden which naturally comes out of, for example, Che Guevara (who was considered a terrorist by his enemies and was more than capable of a cold-blooded killing or two).  In fact, there were few people murdered on 9/11 who grew up with the level of privilege enjoyed by Osama Bin Laden, certainly none of the muslims his followers killed that day.  The killers themselves were similarly from well-to-do backgrounds.  Now there’s no reason a rich person can’t look at the world and decide to tackle its injustices, and do so effectively. But growing up in a wealthy family and then dedicating your life to increasingly nihilistic killing under the vague cover of some bizarre interpretation of Islam is very hard to fit into a narrative about “injustice”.  Whether it makes the world a safer place remains to be seen, I suspect not, but I also suspect I could be wrong – that’s a journalist for you.  Either way, good riddance.