I’m surprised we haven’t heard more about the Hitler-Osama connection. Only a couple of the pundits I’ve read have remarked that the announcements of their deaths both came on May 1. When Hitler died, there was a little less evil in the world. The same is true for Osama. But the parallels don’t stretch much further. With Hitler’s death came the end of Nazism and unconditional surrender. People who celebrated weren’t cheering Hitler’s death so much as the end of a long, brutal war.
In the War on Terror, though, no end appears to be in sight. And how could it be? The “enemy” remains amorphous and hydra-headed. Its leader is now dead, and it’s not clear who would capitulate in his absence. More to the point, we don’t have well-defined war aims, and we never did. Nabbing Osama was as close to a clear goal as Bush or Obama ever articulated. Even with him dead, the WoT grinds on. As my students wondered last quarter: How will we know when we’re done? How can we know if the WoT has been “won” or “lost”?
Well, let’s examine the balance, so far. On one side of the ledger: Thousands of soldiers and hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians dead. Rampant Islamophobia. Over a trillion dollars spent while children go hungry, here in the U.S. and globally. Strained relations with our allies. Fertile ground for demagogues like Palin, Beck, Limbaugh, and now Trump. Spies screening our emails and investigating our library records. Naked body scanners and grope-downs in our airports. The demolition of habeas corpus. The triumph of the “unitary executive” over checks and balances. Contempt for the rule of law. Abu Ghraib. Guantanamo. Extraordinary rendition. Torture in our name.
On the other side: One dead fanatic who threatened the world at large. One dead dictator who posed no danger whatsoever to anyone except his own subject. And as a special bonus: Uday and Qusay! (Maybe they knew where the yellowcake was hidden?)
I’m not sad Osama is dead, but I am ashamed that my fellow Americans are treating this like we just won the World Cup. “We Are the Champions?” Really? If you lost loved ones on 9/11 or in the WoT – if your life has been on the line – then you can celebrate any damn way you choose. In this college town, Osama’s death brought people out to the bars on a Sunday night, wrapped in flags and drenched in beer. That’s not to denigrate the real joy or relief people may have felt, but somehow those feelings merged seamlessly with the student drinking culture. Even cutting the kids some slack (they were pre-teens on 9/11), it feels like celebrating an execution with only a glancing thought for the dead man’s victims. Which, you know, people used to do all the time with hangings in the public square; it’s just that we pretend we’re more civilized than that now.
I put my husband on a bus today. From there, he’s boarding a plane to Germany. While I’m pretty confident he’ll be fine, this is not a week I would have chosen to fly, had we known what was coming down the pike. Obama Osama is a martyr now. The months ahead will likely bring retribution.
How about you? Are you feeling safer yet?
(Thanks to Evil Fizz and Hugo for the correction of the typo – which originally appeared in the headline, too! Geez, I’m as bad as Fox News! Teach me to hit “publish” while I’m flying out the door for school pickup. Sincere apologies for the screw-up.)
Update, 5:45 p.m., May 13, 2011: Throughout last Saturday, I heard repeated drunken chants from a nearby street party that college students throw annually. “U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!” Tim Wise has, well, wise words of warning to those partiers, unheeded though they may be:
So yes, we can argue that bin Laden deserved to die. But that’s the easy part. Beyond what onedeserves, whether they be terrorists or just street criminals, there is the matter of what society needs. And it may be that what a healthy society needs is less bombastic rhetoric, less celebratory embrace of violence, and less jingoistic nationalism, even if that means that we have to respond to the news of bin Laden’s death with a more muted tone, perhaps being thankful in private, or even drinking a toast with friends in our own homes, but not turning the matter into public spectacle, the likes of which cheapens matters of life and death to little more than a contest whose results can be tallied on a scoreboard.
It may prove cathartic that one the likes of bin Laden is dead. His death may provide an opportunity for a much-needed exhaling; but that doesn’t render it the proper subject of a pep rally. And given the larger need to challenge the mentality of disposability that is at the root of all murderous violence, it may be that in such moments we would be far better off to solemnly commemorate the death of the monster than to cheer it openly, when the latter is so likely to inflame passions on the part of those whose allegiance to the monster remained unsullied right to the end.
It’s not just a pep rally. It’s a drunken binge. And while the past week has shown that there will be some tangible, non-psychological benefits from killing bin Laden (in the form of intelligence on future Al Qaeda attacks), the hangover from these shitfaced celebrations is liable to negate those gains.
Patron cat of Kittywampus (1985-2001)
Uh, Sungold, OSAMA is dead, not Obama.
Thanks, Evil Fizz! I fixed it, but I’m as red-faced as a tomato. And evidently about as intelligent, too. Geez.
Please reconsider the title, unless it’s a cleverness I’m not getting. We all make the mistake…
You remember that classic line of Nigel’s in This Is Spinal Tap? “There’s a fine line between stupid and clever”? Well, I tripped over that not-so-fine line. Thanks for catching my heinous typos.
I can stop gloating about Fox News, now.
What a quality movie!
Most of my wisdom can be traced to Nigel. (Uh-oh.)
OK, now for a sweeping generalization. The real end of terrorism is not to kill people, rather its to change the political environment in which the perpetrators are seeking to operate/function. The death and destruction are the means. When the Provos were blowing-up bars and shops they caused a backlash that lead to profiling, victimization, internment, torture, “Diplock Courts”, hunger strikes and (most likely) assassination (see the Stalker Inquiry); sounds awfully like the WoT, eh? State actions totally changed the political environment, over the years the “minority” community shifted to supporting Sinn Féin.
Your “ledger” really says it all, and is mirrored by what I wrote above. The events of 9/11 were designed to provoke a massive backlash. This happened both internally, with the massive growth in the national security state, and overseas with the militaristic adventurism. Easy with a nation of paranoid hysterics. It is just so obvious, too easy to predict. But it is also obvious that people wanted to use 9/11 to their own advantage, too. What is not obvious is what will be the eventual end to all of this.
I don’t think that’s too sweeping a generalization. As we’ve been discussing for awhile, the terrorists have won in that they’ve undermined the rule of law and all of the ideals we supposedly stand for. Of course there has always been this gap – throughout American history – between the ideals and the reality. But the past decade has pretty clearly been a period of regression toward barbarism.
I don’t know where it will lead, either. I just feel like there are grounds for heightened apprehension right now. What will become of our “ally” Pakistan (and its nukes)? How will Al Qaeda retaliate? Hmm – I guess I’m joining the ranks of the fearful!
What Hydraargyrum said.
Oh, and Sungold, I think you meant “thousands of soldiers and hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians,” not “hundreds of innocent civilians.”
As for the ignorant, jingoistic, contextless, sports-reminiscent, drunken triumphalism and cheering in the streets — well, ’nuff said.
That makes four errors on this post! My husband found another – “collection” in the first sentence, where I meant “connection.” I give myself a C on this assignment for pathetic proofreading.
“As for the ignorant, jingoistic, contextless, sports-reminiscent, drunken triumphalism and cheering in the streets — well, ’nuff said.”
It’s a specific and rather narrow demographic that is indulging in that bullshit. Notice that there has been none of that on any military post. The mood at Ft. Lewis down the road from me has been sober and reflective. That’s because people there and at all these other bases have borne the burden of deployments and lost friends, unlike the little frippets on campus who don’t really have anything at risk on a personal level, other than rights and civil liberties that they so take for granted that they cannot see any threat to them. Privilege blinds.
OTOH – reference the strained relations with the allies – that’s a unmixed blessing. The Germans were never really our allies, we were theirs, and that is just a lot clearer now. The alliance with the French is stronger than it has been in decades – they say one thing in public and then in private their equivalent of the FBI is joined at the hip to ours, almost like one agency. As for the British, their whining that their foreign policy has been subsumed to ours is very, very sweet music.
I’m not near a military post, but I’m not at all surprised that the mood is sober. Most of what I’ve read from those who’ve lost loved ones has also been restrained in tone.
As for the Germans, we were their occupiers until very recently! But to the extent they’ve resisted involvement in the WoT, it’s largely because the U.S. so successfully demilitarized the country after 1945. An entire generation grew up in the rubble of war, and that too fostered pacifism. I was in Germany the summer before the invasion of Iraq, and even conservatives were already talking about how the evidence for WMD was trumped up. We might learn a little from their reluctance to go to war.
That’s all true.
There’s more. Most Germans are unaware of how German the US is, and think of us instead as some kind extension of Britain, so there isn’t much fellow feeling.
They do come by their pacifism naturally, but also during the Cold War they and other Europeans had the privilege of being pacifists. I don’t mean just that they had NATO tro shield them form the Soviets, buit also that they had the US and the Soviets to shield them from each other. They brag about their long period of peace, but neglect to mention that we were both holding guns to their heads.
But this is where they were real allies – on some terrorist case, we wanted them to extradite someone, Iforget his exact name. They wanted like actual evidence to back up the request. insisting on the rule of law. Sometimes your real friend is the one who tells you when you’re screwing up.
WMD – that was all trumped up and it’s a classic example of Cheney-Rumsfled incompetence. They couldn’t even be competent, these captains of corporations, about coming up with a plausible excuse for war. There was the saddam’s assassination attempt on Bush I. They could have cited revenge as a pretext and no one in the Muslim world would have batted an eye.
Same same in Afghanistan. If we had just said “Look, you’re harboring our enemy, and we understand why you can’t surrender him to us, as a matter of honor, and you understand how we can’t just let this go, as a matter of honor. So we are going to rip inot you in a way that your women will use our names for generations to frighten children with, and then we’ll leave. All settled.” That woulod have been Pakhtunwali. It would have been a familiar and traditional rationale for a familiar and traditional action, and no one but some witless, babbling Euros would have had any objections. And we’d be out by now, long gone. But no……..
“That’s because people there and at all these other bases have borne the burden of deployments and lost friends, unlike the little frippets on campus who don’t really have anything at risk on a personal level, other than rights and civil liberties that they so take for granted that they cannot see any threat to them. Privilege blinds.”
Indeed.
“Indeed.”
Lisa, I don’t know how much of a devotee of Lord of the Rings you are, but at one point Aragorn muses that he and his men defend people from things that would freeze their blood if they even thought about them, and know nothing at all of the fight, and it’s probably better that way, because that way they are left untroubled.
I’m sure that that is a generous impulse, but in the end it’s patronizing. People should be responsible for defending themselves, whatever form that struggle takes. Because in the end, no one but you can guarantee your rights to you; if anyone else does, they become lords and protectors. It breeds dependence.
I’m afraid I know very little about Lord of the Rings! But I concur that people have to defend themselves or else they become complacent and easy prey for any propagandistic bullshit spewed by their overlords. We’ve seen this over and over again in our history. We’re seeing it now. “The Terrorists!” “The Terrorists!” That’s the bogeyman-du-jour (and for the foreseeable future). Used to get us into two wars, with more on the way, used to cow people into accepting all kinds of debased behavior and abrogations of their rights at home.
The sad fact is that most people don’t appreciate what they have, don’t value their rights, barely recognize them let alone are willing to defend them, and therefore often lose them. And those of us who do speak out about them and are willing to fight are usually ridiculed and ostracized. C’est la vie.
All that and it gets worse. This is what’s worse – it develops into a system of serfdom where an armed elite protects over the rest of society, an unarmed peasantry. And it’s a measure of how blind people are when they say that if they hold the money, that will control this elite. If one person has money and the other has a gun, it’s not the person with the money who’s in control of the situation.
The experts are divided about that question, Jim.
“Power grows from the barrel of a gun.” —Mao Zedong
“Banks are more dangerous than standing armies.” —Thomas Jefferson
Great post, Sungold. I hope you’ve been following Glenn Greenwald’s last couple of posts, as he makes many of the same points.
Even better is yesterday’s Bloggingheads episode featuring Glenn and David Frumm. Sometimes I’m just in awe of Glenn’s brilliance. I thought he had Frumm absolutely nailed on the questionable nature of the bin Laden killing (at least until Glenn succumbed a bit to David’s rhetorical ‘squid ink’ and they moved on to other topics). It’s definitely worth watching if you have the time.