Happy Thanksgiving.
Merry Christmas.
Osama Bin Laden won.
It pains me to say that. I can't get no satisfaction, as the Stones would say.
But I pondered this as I ate my Thanksgiving meal Thursday at a Denny's in Denver, Colorado: A military draft can NEVER happen again in America.
It's impossible.
And you know why, don't you?
Reality.
I don't hear this discussed enough. Reality exists. It's out there. I've seen it once or twice. If you lie to your parents, they will trust you less; if you don't pay your taxes the chances of you getting audited go up; and if you deceive your country into every war stemming back from Vietnam, patriotism dies.
A recent poll released by the Army leaves no room for doubt.
72% of Americans would not fight for their country.
Another 7% were unsure about their willingness to fight for the United States.
It's a long cry from record levels of trust in the government in the 60's and 70's.
For decades, the government has let the specter of military service hang over us like the sword of Damocles, but there's no undoing the lies.
The rub here is that Osama Bin Laden wanted this outcome: dismantling America from within.
He says so in his letters addressed to America and Americans post 9-11:
"The blood pouring out of Palestine must be equally revenge. You must know that the Palestinians do not cry alone; their women are not widowed alone; their sons are not orphaned alone."
He then talks about how American citizens, burdened by apathy, are also to blame for electing these leaders into office:
"The American people are the ones who choose their government by way of their own free will. Thus, the American people have chosen, consented to, and affirmed their support for the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, the occupation and usurpation of their land, and its continuous killing, torture, punishment, and expulsion of the Palestinians."
"It is saddening to tell you that you [America] are the worst civilization witnessed by the history of mankind."
Does this justify anything?
No. But it is the causation.
So many “experts” and political pundits don’t get this.
Just because you explain something doesn't mean you justify it.
In the 2007 Republican Presidential debate, Ron Paul tried to explain this concept. Paul called out Rudy Giuliani and the American public for not understanding how pointless foreign wars were and how they only reinforced the mission of terrorist groups. Instead of being heard, he was slapped with the label of traitor and demanded to apologize on stage.
Giuliani’s the real traitor.
In 2023, if you try to explain the same thing about Isreal-Palestine, you're not a traitor. You’re antisemitic. A claim that has lost all meaning.
It's not that Israel shouldn't be fighting back.
Yet the United States, with the “wisdom” it should've earned after two decades of a war on terror, should be talking them down from the ledge.
We should be telling them how our foreign policy decisions created a power vacuum in which Al-Qaeda and ISIS could flourish.
Or that despite spending $2.313 trillion in Afghanistan, we lost.
Or that occupying the Middle East pushed many into the arms of China.
Anyway, I don't want to be a party pooper.
It's Saturday, and Christmas time is here.
But remember that in a democracy, participation is crucial, and even more salient is education and critical thinking. Circumstances like these only manifest when people cooperate with them. There’s plenty of history to learn from and yet people still repeat it.
So read Bin Laden's letters.
They're already being censored on The Guardian (which has kept them up for 20 years) and TikTok.
I’m not just casually declaring that Osama won.
However, when you aren’t censoring Mein Kampf or the Unambomber’s Manifesto because you know they won’t inspire an uprising, but you are censoring Osama Bin Laden … there’s a big problem.
Once again, this doesn’t justify anything Osama Bin Laden did. But his attitude expressed in these letters is one you can feel growing inside and out of the US.
Maybe we should keep ignoring that reality.
Everything is fine in heaven.
I would say Osama was wrong about one thing. He says the American public bears responsibility because they voted for the governments that did this. That presupposes that it was, in fact, our elected officials who were responsible for all this meddling.
On his way out, Eisenhower warned of both the military-industrial complex, as well as the science-university complex. Both had taken sufficient shape such that an outgoing president could see them even if the general public could not. By the time Kennedy tried to oppose them, they were already powerful enough to kill him and keep it somewhat covered up to this day.
Now, in the past 8 years, the mask is off. All but those in deep denial can see that there's a cabal of elites and unelected bureaucrats running the show. Even the deniers won't claim Biden runs things.
If the American public bears blame, it is that they have been too naive.
If you only read one book, The Perestroika Deception.
America and the West have long ago been invaded. Uncle Joe stumbles, we have fallen over.