Vengeance is counterproductive, always. Not to mention the fact it gets your soul all sticky.
— Spider Robinson (b. 1948) American-Canadian author
Callahan’s Con, ch. 2 [Lady Sally] (2003)
I cannot find it in myself to mourn the passing of Osama Bin Ladin. He was a vile zealot who self-righteously delighted in sowing fear and death among innocents, and I am quite satisfied that he will not longer be able to do so.
But I worry a bit over all the jovial, gleeful, jingoistic celebration going on about his fittingly violent passing. It just feels … sticky, to use Lady Sally’s terms. OBL’s passing isn’t the end of a war. It may or may not be a strategic victory in the War on Terror, depending on how much you think OBL was still calling the shots. Certainly there’s a visceral feeling of justice and closure …
When the Egyptians were drowning in the Red Sea, the angels in heaven began to break forth in songs of jubilation, but the Holy One, blessed be He, silenced them: “My creatures are perishing — and ye are ready to sing!”
— The Talmud (AD 200-500)
… but I worry a bit when it all turns into spontaneous jubilation and shouts of “USA! USA!” It’s not the angels of our better natures talking (or chanting) there, nor is it a celebration of any special virtue that distinguishes our nation from others. Anyone can shoot a bullet through an enemy’s head.
What it is is tribalism, plain and simple. It’s vengeance. He hit us, we hit him back. He killed our people, we killed him. It’s seductive, because it feels so good, so certain, so hot and bloody and plain and simple and we won and he’s dead.
Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.
— J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973) English writer, fabulist, philologist, academic [John Ronald Reuel Tolkien]
The Fellowship of the Ring, Book 1, ch. 2 “The Shadow of the Past” [Gandalf] (1954)
I don’t expect that OBL would ever have taken up knitting and philanthropy, but I don’t know that, nor do I know what else he might have done with his life, or what good might possibly have come of it. On the other hand, he reaped as he sowed, and there’s a satisfaction there, too.
But let’s not go overboard. This guy wasn’t Hitler, or Stalin, or even Mussolini. He was responsible for the deaths of thousands, but killing him doesn’t kill his cause, or mean that no more will die at the hands of al Qa’eda’s butchers. This isn’t V-E Day. It isn’t an occasion for a huge sigh of giddy national relief that the conflict is done.
Bottom line, while I’m not unhappy he’s been killed (heck, even Gandalf was known to slay enemies in battle, right?), it just doesn’t feel right to be celebrating by waving a flag and chanting about how it proves that “We’re Number One! We’re Number One!”
That Talmud passage keeps coming back to me.
Or, as David Sirota put it today (h/t Stan):
For decades, we have held in contempt those who actively celebrate death. When we’ve seen video footage of foreigners cheering terrorist attacks against America, we have ignored their insistence that they are celebrating merely because we have occupied their nations and killed their people. Instead, we have been rightly disgusted — not only because they are lauding the death of our innocents, but because, more fundamentally, they are celebrating death itself. That latter part had been anathema to a nation built on the presumption that life is an “unalienable right.”
But in the years since 9/11, we have begun vaguely mimicking those we say we despise, sometimes celebrating bloodshed against those we see as Bad Guys just as vigorously as our enemies celebrate bloodshed against innocent Americans they (wrongly) deem as Bad Guys. Indeed, an America that once carefully refrained from flaunting gruesome pictures of our victims for fear of engaging in ugly death euphoria now ogles pictures of Uday and Qusay’s corpses, rejoices over images of Saddam Hussein’s hanging and throws a party at news that bin Laden was shot in the head.
To paraphrase Nietzsche, when you party it up in the abyss, the abyss parties it up in you.
That’s not what we’re fighting for, is it?
Well said! I, too, find the celebrations somewhat “sticky.” I have no doubt the man was evil, but the “Rot in Hell!” taunts make it all highly personal and make it highly likely Bin Laden’s cohorts will demand retaliation.
@DebS – Actually, I submit that wishing someone to rot in hell is a good way to end up there oneself.
He hit us, we hit him back. He killed our people, we killed him.
I would rather he had been captured. I worry that there will now be a “need” to hit us back for hitting them back. “I hit Krako, Krako hits Jojo…” Perpetuating a circle of violence seems counter-productive.
Heh. I had been thinking a bit of “The Chicago Way” in The Untouchables, but “A Piece of the Action” works, too.
I don’t worry too much about the cycle of violence, to be honest. It’s not like these yahoos were likely to take up stamp collecting if we didn’t kill OBL, or if we didn’t kill him that he was planning on opening a network of soup kitchens. While the kind of dancing in the aisles we saw last night might encourage more counter-violence (cf. US reactions to Arabs who were similarly dancing in the aisles after 9/11), I don’t think we were going out of our way to take down a dangerous war criminal when we could have simply forgone the effort.
Yet another quote for consideration.
I thought that was Mark Twain.
😉