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.
Of course...the grotesque family album; the rich brat; the vacations in Sweden; the little brother trying to outdo his older siblings for fame and attention. It was inevitable.
It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. When one contemplates a creature like this, the truth of this statement is overwhelming.
Perhaps what the author says about Osama's mental state is true. But to try to pin all of this on one man is dangerous and stupid. Their are 1.3 billion of the Islamic believers in the world and a larger number than we think read the Koran the same way he does.
I personally don't care if a person worships turnip greens, that's their right. But any belief system that spreads by the use of terror and force, celebrates the use of it's children for cannon fodder, teaches then to hate others to the point that they will commit suicide to kill non-members of that faith and treats their women like cattle, is evil personified and needs to be condemed.
Look around the world and see what they have done and are doing. Maybe people like him are a minority of that system, but a minority of 1.3 billion can be a hell of a lot of fanatics.
Like a number of losers in Western countries, these would-be fanatics need something to keep them going. Your own country and personal life are both extremely substandard, so why not latch on to something you can get excited about and release all your pent-up frustrations at your nothing existence. Hate is just as big of a motivational factor as love. These people have plenty of hate and they probably hate themselves most of all. Many are easily led by pied pipers of murder like Bin Laden. But when and if push comes to shove, doubtless many of the fervent will shrink back into their previous states of smoldering inaction. That is if they are not dead from the actions of the real but much-smaller percentage-wise hardcore fanatics who will get thousands if not millions killed from their rebellion against the West and civilization.
Their has to be more than a few to cause the kind of trouble and fighting that is taking place. Their's been more than a million christians killed in the last five years in the Sudan alone.Their are over 30 different radical groups in the city of Damascus. All of these are using the cause of advancing Islam as their battle cry. Their leaders may be few but the follwers are many.
How many of them are democracies? This is why we fought communisum nazi's etc. because they enslave people.The people they rule under Theocracy are just as bad or worse off. Every aspect of their daily lives are controlled by one or a group of group religous leaders that keep them in the poverty of the six century world.
Once Islam gains control in a country, even so called moderate Islam, tolerance goes out the window. You have three choices convert, or if you are a "people of the book" ie: [Jew or christian] live as a dimi [slave], or die.
Similarities between bin Laden and others garbanzo named are striking. But there is one other factor.
When somone of this type is charismatic, they draw hosts of Ossipians to their side, and that is very, very dangerous. Hitler was able to do this, and he nearly destroyed Europe.
And if we did study the pathology of hate, would we come to a different conclusion? Help me here? You do bring up an excellent point.
Oh, I get it! But for a one in a million trick of fate, Osama bin Laden would've grown up to be an ordinary, true-blue American crank. We're just unlucky.
Nothing to do with Islam and the appalling history of the Middle East here, folks. Keep moving.
I think the Menendez brothers were the worst. They killed their parents to get the family money because they didn't want to wait til they died naturally.
Remember, this picture was taken in the 70's when all fashion sense and taste went out the window. I didn't like the "fashions" of the 70's then and I don't like the fairly recent nostalgic look at the 70's fashions.
Life in the middle east is a dead end miserable existance. There is no shortage angry and aimless young men. Osama recognized that with a godly inspired purpose, he could lead these fools to hell itself.
These men are not unlike the people who followed Jim Jones to Guyana. They trade there miserable existance on earth for a harem full of virgins in suicide bomber heaven.
Osama is nothing more than a leader of a cult cloaked in radical Islam. He will die in a bunker, because he does not believe in suicide bomber heaven. As a priveleged Saudi, he has already had his virgins on earth.
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