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May 6, 2011
The American reaction at Ground Zero to Osama Bin Laden's assassination. The ever changing White House account of the shooting of Bin Laden.
Steve Bell
The Republicans are attempting to rehabilitate the Bush torture regime by claiming that "enhanced interrogation" did indeed play a "critically important role" in the U.S.'s ability to find bin Laden. The wingnuts love torture (waterboarding) as permanent policy.
Looking to 9/11 9/11we can see that 9/11 fortuitously provided the American right with the external enemy that allowed it to go back into business demonizing the internal enemy, liberalism. And the idea of endless war war on global terrorism enabled the right once again to smear American liberals as defeatists or appeasers, if not traitors, in a struggle on the scale of the world wars and the Cold War.
Symbols matter and bin Laden's death is the most important symbol since the Twin Towers fell. It is a big deal and it matters for the Americans--- he represented ten years of unfinished business---even if strategically it changes very little. The never ending war will continue, even if If the so-called Arab spring suggests that the momentum is with reform and modernity, not the backward-looking polity offered by the fundamentalists.
The first decade of the 21st century era is probably going to be remembered as the beginning of a long era of American decline.
Update
I have just read Osama bin Laden raped our souls by Melody Ayres-Griffith at the ABC's Unleashed a reaction to Osama bin Laden death. She says it is a response to an article by Bob Ellis.
Ayres-Griffith, who did not own a mobile phone because she saw them as an expensive, unnecessary intrusion into my personal space, says that after 9/11:
I acquired a mobile phone. For the sake of my family. Because of Osama bin Laden.This man raped our souls, and when he did so he was no longer a man, but an enemy. THE enemy.A long campaign followed, during which bin Laden was the primary target - but the might of the greatest military in the world could not find him. It was as if he was a ghost, and that only cemented his bogeyman status even more. He could be anywhere, anytime. He could bomb your shopping centre, he could take down your flight, he could send a suicide bomber to blow up your train - he was the bogeyman. Even adults feared the mere thought of him. Do you give justice to the bogeyman? Do you put the bogeyman on trial?
She adds that you don't you don't take demons alive, do you?
She adds that you don't debate whether or not the owner of a rabid dog will object to you putting that dog down after it bit you, you just take the first opportunity to put that dog down, and you worry about the rest later.
The ABC took a lot of flak in the comments to the article for publishing this piece. I interpret it as an expression of the paranoid style of thinking in American politics. Here politics is cast in apocalyptic terms as a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil. Consequently, the enemy must be sinister, ubiquitous, cruel…seeking to deflect the normal course of history in an evil way. The latest manifestation of American paranoia is the phenomenon of Islamophobia.
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That shows the increasing flagrance of the ABC; they have pushed right wing politics hard the last five or six months and it reflects the extent to which the right has captured public broadcasting.
If you wanted to put a rabid dog down, wouldn't a sensible person be more interested in putting down people like Cheney?
The victimhood of Ayres Griffith is not unlike that of some of the Bali bombing rellies, but also demonstrates a disturbing lack, as to historical awareness and comprehension.
It's the madness of 2001, all over again.
That so many people unquestioningly and unthinkingly beleive the phoney narratives, does not augur well for the future.