Why a Dead bin Laden is Bad

Wednesday 4 May 2011 - Filed under Uncategorized

I have no particular moral qualms with a dead Osama bin Laden, nor with how our government simply decided to kill him rather than try and capture him. He’s scum. A monster who only experienced joy at the expense of killing those, en masse, with whom he disagreed. He was a fucking barbarian who is one of the few who simply deserved to die.

But his death now presents us, the American people, with a conundrum. We’ve gone about celebrating his demise in grand fashion. President Obama went on TV after 11pm to announce to the world that ObL was dead, followed by celebrations from coast to coast as if his death will matter one iota. Sure, ObL’s death is a symbol, but unfortunately it doesn’t symbolize anything of particular import.

Terror will still happen, and our rights will continue to erode in a misguided effort to “protect” us from it, and, at least for now, we’re celebrating that. “Hooray for waterboarding!” come cries from the right who feel that compromising any principles we might have had is worth killing just one man. All of the usurpation of our rights, TSA molestations, black sites, torture, the Patriot Act, warrantless wiretaps and secret searches are now being justified as fruitful and necessary because they may have helped lead to finding ObL. They forget that many have speculated for years that he may be dead, and that he has been anything but a leader in terror attacks in recent years. All they see is the man responsible for 9/11 dead, however irrelevant he may have been since, and celebrate our victory. I would submit that although this world is a better one without him, that the only victory we have won in killing ObL is a victory over ourselves and the freedoms we still claim to cherish.

2011-05-04  »  madlibertarianguy