What a strange mob we’ve become, we in the ‘Western world’. On holidays in Europe the past few weeks I found I myself with a few days to fill in and began to watch a bit too much Western TV coverage of the biggest story in roughly nine and a half years - the death of bin Laden.
It got me down more with each passing hour. If the USA and its President thought to earn the world’s gratitude and praise for this astonishing operation, they must have been scratching their heads.
Let’s see, the cave dwelling, messianic mass murderer and his animal cronies declared war on America (and the rest of us in the ‘West’ while they were at it). They did it formally, with an announcement on TV - and a press release for all I know.
They backed up the declaration, lest anyone think they were all talk, with ghastly, large scale, massacres of innocent men, women and children - in New York, Washington, London, Madrid, Bali and other populations in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Those they didn’t strike, they successfully convinced that they might, so even in a backwater like Sydney we got to share in the paralysing fear for our skins and the safety of our own loved ones, going about their lives.
So they weren’t kidding. They were waging war. It’s like we’ve all enjoyed the luxury of forgetting what that is. It’s war - bloody, brutal, killing and maiming war. If someone declares and commences to practise that on you, you can stand by and conduct a moral philosophy hypothetical about it on the BBC, or you can engage.
If you choose the former, you can be certain only that your people are going to receive 100 per cent of the brutality and that nothing will be done to inhibit much less disable those waging the war. So the war on your innocent people, will proceed apace indefinitely because there’s no rationality or real objective governing the attackers, just fathomless hatred.
There’s no logical end point bar universal adoption of Sharia law, the utter destruction of every human advance of the past 1,000 years and the deaths of most of us - along with our kids.
Yet in the wake of this astonishing defensive strike, it seems President Obama, far from deserving our thanks or admiration, has a great many questions to answer. I’ve had the benefit of a great deal of the hand-wringing, questioning and moral high-ground occupation by everyone from a pompous formerly Australian London legal shill called Geoffrey Robertson, to the Archbishop of Canterbury (who, to be fair, may have been speaking mainly out of solidarity with religious zealots and bearded fools worldwide) to pretty much everyone on the BBC. It all made the Bishop ‘uncomfortable’. Conceivably less so than the feeling President Obama experienced and certainly less so than the target.
Fortunately all this holiday time has not been entirely wasted, for I have condensed all the breast-beating and mindlessly anti-American hectoring into a handy all-purpose response which I am happy to offer the President, his spokespeople or really any citizen or, in this particular scrap, friend of the USA.
“Just f*** right off. All of you. And shut up too.”
It seems to me that when you have facilities to hand such as Navy Seal Battalion 6 or whatever it is they are not officially acknowledged as being called, this response is completely open to you in reply to each and every idiot who demands more answers, more photos, more video, more evidence of what was obviously the most high-security, top secret operation undertaken in most our life-times.
And to those questioning whether you shouldn’t, really, have gone the ‘read him his rights’, legal representation, counselling, multimillion dollar, five year celebrity trial and a jury of his sickening, murderous peers route.
People over here - at least those on TV - have lost all perspective. A BBC report I watched showed video ‘purported’ or ‘rumoured’ to be of the room in which old ObL has been sleeping, praying, impregnating his 20 something 7th wife he got as a gift from an admirer, like a lucky meat raffle prize, and planning his next bloodbath of our innocents for the past five or six years. The reporter called it “his bedroom, or perhaps, his prison cell”.
I am not making this up. I haven’t taken a hallucinogenic drug since the 1980s, yet the Devil himself is coming through very much like a figure of sympathy in much of this reporting and commentary.
You have to conclude that these people would have raised the same concerns if there had been a fatal shooting at the arrest of Adolf Hitler. Or Hannibal Lecter. How much of a global, hate-driven murder cult do you need to establish before the Western ‘intelligentsia’ acknowledges that all the normal rules of engagement have been suspended? You know, until we make things safe again.
I personally abhor capital punishment. The state executing any citizen, no matter how criminal or deranged is, to me, sad, sickening, barbaric. Yet I once watched a grainy film of Red Army soldiers over-running a Nazi concentration camp, shoving those who had run it out in the yard at rifle-point, standing them on a small stool with some fast noose-work and, with palpable disgust, with revulsion, with hatred, kicking the stool away so they dangled twitching just inches from the ground and died badly.
It’s hard to imagine anything more brutal or inhumane and even as I felt like I would throw up watching it, I thought ‘that’s about right’. There’s limited work for barristers in it, I’ll grant you.
The world’s experience of Nazism shows us there is a measure of horror, criminality and sheer scale beyond which the niceties of due process, right to trial and even rule of law cease to be sensible or apt. It’s war, you see.
Bin Laden?
The spoiled, sick, son of a billionaire, who invented a novel, obscene way to squander daddy’s petro-fortune, more shockingly inhuman, degenerate and diseased than anything concocted in the worst excesses of Western mega-wealth turned on itself. Imagine Charles Manson with a heavily armed international army - armed both with modern weaponry and a genuinely held suicide fantasy of pathetic glory, adulation and eternal sexual gratification approved by God himself.
He conceived his very own twisted, murderous interpretation of one of the world’s great religions - a religion grounded in notions of devout observance, self-denial, charity and - here’s the thing - love. Just like the best parts of it’s nursery-mates Christianity and Judaism.
From these same antecedents and essential scripts, our man ObL and his gang construed a licence to murder children. Murder, burn or dismember me, you, anyone going about their business, going to work, taking care of our families.
Their preferred targets of public buildings and public transport say it all. It’s ordinary citizens they seek to slay and maim and terrify, not some imagined Western imperial elite that has gear like Navy Seals to deploy for protection and which would require a soldier’s courage to attack. These gutless vermin much prefer to bomb a bus with your mother on it or attack Afghani school girls who dare to hope for a basic education in 2011.
In announcing this strike back, President Obama told the world this is a death that should be welcomed by everyone who values peace and human dignity. Like pretty much everything I’ve ever heard him say, I couldn’t express it better.
We have witnessed a breathtaking exercise of power - overwhelming, surgical, deadly force, bristling with warrior acumen and technological potency. Compare the available options in cost, risk, ‘co-lateral damage’ and plain old morality. The US gambled the lives of a few score elite troops who blew off a faulty helicopter worth, what?, $50 million?, in minutes when they had to. Close enough to zero innocent bystander harm. The cancer removed by key-hole surgery.
Thirty two 2,000 pound laser guided bombs or a fleet of unmanned drones (on the Pentagon menu put before the President) might have done the trick just as well with none of the risk. How much of this quibbling would we be enduring now, given the context of Iraq and the Afghani killing fields? The BBC would not be interviewing the neighbour over the road or demanding to know if the monster actually had his hand on an assault rifle when the house evaporated.
Compare the sheer courage required, by those abseiling down ropes in the dark and the political variety from those giving the ‘go’ order.
The force we witnessed was deployed - courageously - by a super-power. A super-power at war - under attack for a decade. As it happens it’s also a modern democracy, massively flawed though it may be. Also the source of much of our finest musical, literary, dramatic, visual arts and cinematic culture.
Would these perpetual ‘well, America is, actually, a kind of great Satan’ chattering class moral philosophers have berated the armies liberating Europe in 1945 - Russian or American - with anxieties about their unseemly use of force?
Force will always be used. We can count ourself blessed to live in an age when we got to see it used so potently, precisely and successfully by people so intelligent, educated, humane - and elected. People who somberly weighed their moral imperatives, gave free reign to their consciences and balanced all this with their heavy responsibility to act, to insert a scalpel, to remove a hideous tumour growing around the heart of humankind, nourished by and revelling in its blood.
Just personally, I don’t believe in God. But if I did, I would urge him, just now, to bless America. And a bit extra for President Obama, truly a leader for our times.
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@AndrewCatsaras Agreed. Kills more people than AIDS. Yet tolerated. Meanwhile: Good Insiders piece again Andrew.
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