We've been told to be cautious against the primitive instinct of revenge. People of intellect might extol us--probably rightfully--that we shouldn't give in to our lower instinct. As Jesus said, we shouldn't carry our grudges. We need to forgive and move on. And they're right, on a spiritual level. But that's not what humans do or feel. We emote. We rage. We release pent up emotions. To put it bluntly, it isn't church language that we use to celebrate bin Laden's death.
Humans are given to pettiness, to sin, and to frontier justice, particularly if delivered to us like a dead criminal brought back to town slumped over a horse's saddle on a hot day in West Texas. We only have a choice in whether to acknowledge our inner feelings, whether we admit that feeling is down there.
The people who are right, and serve our better natures, have their time and place. But Osama was not a threat to them, and an insult to their spirituality. He disgraced the exercise of belief as well as Lucifer himself. His victims were not distinguishable by their faith. It mattered not if they lane face-down dead in the stairwell of the the Trade Towers no more than if their African eyes were filled with the glass of an exploding skyscraper. Osama made no effort to separate Jew from gentile, nor pagan from Muslim. To him, spirituality was a tool by which he tapped the mindlessness of religious extremism for his own popularity.
Some might believe nationalism no better, nor the mass sense of closure derived from the Obama killing as simply mass emotion skillfully delivered by mass media and our politicians in order to keep our patriotism blind. In the days and weeks ahead, I'm sure we'll hear about how this that and the other person or thing had known where Osama had been, etc., but in the end our mass psyche has been restored and at this point it doesn't matter how or why.
We have heard about motives to let 9-11 happen, theories about how we created bin Laden. Yes, inconsistencies are there: 9-11 and Osama bin Laden are tied together hand in hand though OBL never claimed to have done 9-11. Curiously the FBI warrant for bin Laden never mentioned 9-11. Some have said OBL had died back in '01 of kidney failure and the US was just waiting to pull him off the ice, and parade him through the public square like 1984.
Who cares? None of this stuff matters anymore. We're finished lopping at the branches. We've pulled the root of some much evil out of the earth. Critical thinking exists on an intellectual level, which is the opposite of gut instinct, and ouyr gut instincts have been telling us Osama bin Evil for a long time.
The conspiracy crowd has good reason to have little faith in government. We may all deep down inside be distrustful of big government, and the War on Terror has generated plenty of reasons to be skeptical: abuses of power, corruption, and a Big Brother-type surveillance state.
The Orwell crowd might remind us of how Emmanuel Goldstein was used by government. Hatred for Goldstein was delivered on a regular schedule, a hate hour. This, some might say, shows us how we come to crave primitive justice for the villain, how we love a witch-burning and invent the witch to fill the thirst.
Americans though, I would venture would rather be at peace. Stoked or not, I don't know if Osama was ever hated in the way a Goldstein might be. It was perhaps the anti-semitism of Orwell's time that made Goldstein such an attractive target. Certainly the Nazis used anti-semitism to whip the German crowds into a frenzy. So isn't the War on Terror the same type of artificial plot device used to solidify power for the militarist and the far Right? Well, sure it probably is. But it works, darn it! Through skillful media mastery--perception management--same anti-semite forces that drew the Germans out cheering was directed towards Osama, a semite. Instead of the Star of David, we have the racist label "rag head" and other hate speech.
Our best effort at ethnic cleansing could never do approach the Germans on their worst day. Our pathetic attempt at roundups for the undocumented Mexicans shows about how much we fear them: not at all. We're Americans and by our nature we're good so we don't do roundups well.
Good people do good things, most of the time, but for Osama things we're different. More than the things he did, Osama symbolized hatred of America, for that which is good in the world: for freedom and the dignity of human life. For that he needed to die, not only the person but the concept of hatred for that which is good.
To kill him, we needed to do some things that weren't so good. And rejoicing in his death might not be so nice but it is necessary.
Perhaps we should have been willing to act sooner. If Osama were as bad as a Hitler, friendly governments would be justified in doing anything to stop him, wouldn't they? If you, like Leo Strauss, had over a dozen members of your family slaughtered in Hitler's death camps, you'd certainly have cause to blame not only Hitler, but the Allies for not doing enough. If you were a student of anti-semitism prevalent around 1940 or so, you'd know that the US State Department turned down an opportunity to perform a Schindler's List on thousands of French Jews but instead denied them visas, resulting in their direct transport to the death camps and subsequent liquidation. An exception to anti-semitism in American diplomatic circles was Harry Bingham, credited with saving thousands of Jews at the cost of his job (see the Smithsonian article by Peter Eisner.)
Strauss was a prominent University of Chicago professor who ended up influencing neoconservatives like Wolfowitz and Pearl, who as neocons went on to positions of great authority with the election of Bush. Strauss' lesson was that democracies must do ANYTHING possible to prevent the rise of a new Hitler. The democracies of Western European, Strauss felt, had been too constricted by their own laws and moral beliefs to intervene in Hitler's ascendancy.
Strauss and his followers would have felt that the imperative to stop Hitler justified the manipulation and even murder, collateral damage. Staussians would advocate for direct cover action, an mission probably similar to that carried out by SEALS in Abbottabad, Pakistan on May 1st, 2011.
Could Osama have been the new Hitler to the neo-conservatives? To protect Israel, the neo-cons were threatened by the threat of pan-Islamic nationalism. Osama had called for a Islamic caliphate to go from West Africa all the way to Indonesia in the east. In popular culture, such a vast region of forces from the east massed against the US and its allies was like the Persian horde versus The 300. That film depicts a great stand of outnumbered Spartans against the Persian king Xerses and his vast legions, including the Immortals.
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