Trying to Close the Chapter

Last night I came across the snippet of an AP news article which announced that President Obama had called a press conference in the evening and that, unprecedentedly, he had not mentioned what it would be about. I was guessing that it would be about Libya, the budget or (in the wildest conjecture) his resignation.

Then the first reports came that, according to an anonymous American government official, Osama bin Laden had been killed and his body captured, and that the press conference was related. About an hour after the announced time of 10:30 Eastern time, in which I had the White House livestream open but nothing happened, that turned out to be the case.

Though I would have expected that the death of Osama bin Laden would leave me indifferent, it hasn't. It brought back my memories of Sept. 11th and made me feel (illogically or not) that it was finally resolved and put in the past.

The fact that he had been purposely assassinated didn't bother me either. I preferred it to torture, an unjust trial, secret jailing, humiliation, institutional execution, desecration of the body, or any of the other methods which disgrace us and our governments more than the people who suffer them, and which I would have expected. If he was really shot through the head he hopefully died right away.

If the attacks had not happened on Sept. 11th, several thousand people would still be alive and (as Obama pointed out) parents would have been able to raise their children, etc.; besides the press would have remained objective, no one would especially notice if people are Muslim or Arabic, and there wouldn't have been the pressure to go to war in Afghanistan.

On a personal level it also had a bad psychological effect on everyone who cared, also on me, and dragged us down into a weltschmerzy depression which had a deadening effect on anything artistic and intellectual. Though that was important to us of course it was insignificant in the grand scheme of things.

It also seemed to damage the relatively pacific and open inner life of America itself. Though it bothered me that no one made the connection between the suffering of Sept. 11th and the suffering of people abroad who live with war daily, there is really something vile in bringing violence into a country which (regardless of what its government wreaks abroad) has managed to forge a reasonable level of inoffensive comfort and harmony, and to gain a sort of innocence, and to share this peace and some goodwill (naïve or otherwise) with those who enter it. I don't think immigrants had an easy time, but unfortunately, no matter what the country, they rarely do.

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On the other hand, we are responsible for the hundreds of thousands of deaths, torture, illegality, and so on that came afterwards.

We used indiscriminate weapons in Afghanistan and killed entire families, we supported any force whose opponents are Arabic or Muslim and armed no matter how they treated civilians, we killed Sikhs and Muslims and didn't report the deaths properly, we were suspicious of anyone who was or looked Muslim and made them feel it, we pretended that torture wasn't torture and handed off men to dictatorships to force confessions, we imprisoned over seven hundred people in Guantánamo Bay without investigating their situations properly and let them rot there, we invaded Iraq, we undermined the case for respecting human rights by demonstrating that we did not feel bound by them, we hired contractors who shot people for no reason, we put hundreds of thousands of soldiers into situations where they had to fire on civilians or terrorize people by invading their homes at night and where they were at risk of being wounded or killed or emotionally damaged, we arbitrarily arrested people and held them over the twenty-four-hour limit under the Magna Carta, we approved the Patriot Act and its ideology that an American life is worth more than the life of an individual of any other nationality, we intimidated and harassed and isolated people who were against the Bush administration's policies for being unpatriotic, we flew over and dropped bombs into Pakistan and didn't particularly care whether people who had nothing to do with the matter died, and so on and so forth. Some of these things are continuing.

And I think that we are solely responsible for all of that.

So it is time now, since not only the hijackers but also the person who apparently stood behind them are gone, to begin to really look at and address the abuses and murder that followed Sept. 11th.

As a side note, I don't think that Osama bin Laden's death should be celebrated as an achievement of America as a country, either, since killing a man is the kind of, er, feat which knows no national limitations. But I admit that it's bringing out weird jingoistic feelings in me too, the kind I hated ten years ago, and of course I'm not American.

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As a detail, I was wondering why the CIA director, Leon Panetta, was so moved and close to tears during the press conference about the shuffled positions in the Department of Defence, etc., last week. I think this may be the reason.