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Posted on 10/08/2001 11:56:33 PM PDT by MadIvan

IF you want to understand Osama bin Laden and his al-Qa'eda organisation, my advice is to put the newspapers aside for a while and get hold of a novel published in 1907. The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad describes the activities of a small group of state-sponsored terrorists, plotting an atrocity against a world-famous building - in this case, the Greenwich Observatory.

Instead of Osama, Conrad gives us the terrorist leader Ossipon, alias "The Professor". Ossipon is a walking suicide bomb. He has explosives strapped to his body, concealed beneath an overcoat, which he can detonate at any time by releasing an india-rubber ball that he grasps lightly in a pocket. This astonishingly prescient novel ends with one of the most brilliant final paragraphs in English literature, as Ossipon walks alone along a London street:

"And the incorruptible Professor walked, too, averting his eyes from the odious multitude of mankind. He had no future. He disdained it. He was a force. His thoughts caressed the images of ruin and destruction. He walked frail, insignificant, shabby, miserable - and terrible in the simplicity of his idea, calling madness and despair to the regeneration of the world. Nobody looked at him. He passed on, unsuspected and deadly, like a pest in the street full of men."

Ossipon is a 20th-century anarchist; Osama a 21st-century religious fanatic. But essentially, these philosophical trappings are only useful drapery - like the professor's overcoat - designed to conceal what really motivates both men: a vast rage against the all-powerful Western world. When Conrad describes Ossipon as having "a frenzied puritanism of ambition: he nursed it as something secularly holy", he might be writing of Osama.

Violence is their instrument. Ossipon broods on it: "Next time, or the time after next, a telling stroke would be delivered - something really startling - a blow fit to open the first crack in the imposing front of the great edifice of legal conceptions sheltering the atrocious injustice of society." It has taken 93 years, but what Ossipon dreamt of, his soul-mate Osama has made reality.

Watching bin Laden's video statement on Sunday night - the self-assured fanatic, calmly sipping tea in an Afghan ravine - it was hard not to think of the cafes of Zurich and Geneva before 1914, where one could have seen similar characters lingering over their coffee and cream buns, plotting the destruction of authority. Like bin Laden, the violent anarchists and the extreme Marxist revolutionaries of a century ago were usually well-to-do, exiled opponents of autocratic regimes: men whose private incomes financed a lifetime indulgence in political struggle.

The photograph of bin Laden that still seems to me to sum him up best is that family group-shot taken in Sweden in 1971. There is the 14-year-old bin Laden, near the fringe of the picture - a fashion disaster in a lime-green top and blue flares - yet immediately recognisable as the bearded, gun-toting revolutionary in embryo. "We're all a bit worried about Osama," a friend of the family told a friend of mine a few years later. "He's socially rather awkward." They might have been describing Hitler in Vienna in 1908.

And so they grow up, these socially awkward, intelligent misfits, looking for an outlet for their frustrations and, in 999,999 cases in a million, they somehow settle uneasily into ordinary life: the ill-tempered loner in the bedsit, the crank who writes green-inked letters to television celebrities, the theorist who reduces life to a single conspiracy theory (the Jews run the world, the blacks are undermining the white race, there are alien bodies in cold storage in New Mexico). And then, very, very occasionally, the crank finds the right cause at the right moment, and the consequences are disastrous.

Conrad describes Ossipon's mental process acutely: "The extreme, almost ascetic purity of his thought, combined with an astounding ignorance of worldly conditions." Bin Laden, by all accounts, is the same, projecting a world-view of absolute certainty, buttressed by startling naivety. According to the journalist Robert Fisk, who interviewed him four years ago, "his understanding of foreign affairs is decidedly eccentric. At one point, he even suggested to me that individual US states might secede from the Union because of Washington's support for Israel." One is reminded of Hitler's invincible, lunatic prejudice that the Americans, as "a mongrel race", would never pose a serious threat to Germany in the Second World War.

What is to be done with such people? The first point, surely, is to recognise that there can be no negotiation with them. When bin Laden, in his videotaped statement, gives thanks for the death of 5,000 civilians in New York, then, in a sense, he does us all a favour: no one can seriously argue any more that he wasn't behind the atrocity, or that he wouldn't arrange something even worse if he could.

Which leads to the second point: that we are dealing here with a phenomenon quite separate from Islam, or the Arab world in general. Set aside his religion and his race. Bin Laden is a recognisable type in history, made untypically monstrous by the technological sophistication and openness of the modern world he so despises. The fictional Ossipon had to be content with a botched assault on the Greenwich Observatory, but only because there were no aeroplanes, and no 100-storey skyscrapers he could crash them into.

The final and abiding impression left by that James Bond-villain videotape was of egomania. "He beheld all his enemies," wrote Conrad of Ossipon, "and fearlessly confronted them all in a supreme satisfaction of his vanity. They stood perplexed before him as if before a dreadful portent." That, I'm sure, is what bin Laden would like us to do: to take him on his own terms, as the just instrument of divine wrath, instead of seeing him for what he really is - a spoilt rich kid, a social misfit, a vainglorious crank, a bigot, a pest in a street full of men.

Robert Harris, the British author of "Fatherland" and "Enigma" nails it again. Just another British contribution to the war effort. ;)

Perhaps we ought to send this article to Osama and tell him - "we know what you are".

Regards, Ivan

But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, "This was their finest hour."

Today is Trinity Sunday. Centuries ago words were written to be a call and a spur to the faithful servants of Truth and Justice: "Arm yourselves, and be ye men of valour, and be in readiness for the conflict; for it is better for us to perish in battle than to look upon the outrage of our nation and our altar. As the Will of God is in Heaven, even so let it be." - Winston Churchill, 1940

This then, my lords and gentlemen, is the message which we send forth today to all states and nations, bound or free, to all the men in all the lands who care for freedom's cause. To our Allies and well-wishers in Europe, to our American friends and helpers drawing ever closer in their might across the ocean, this is the message-lift up your hearts, all will come right. Out of depths of sorrow and sacrifice will be born again the glory of mankind. - Winston Churchill, 1941


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