On the death of bin Laden and American hypocrisy

Is it relevant that bin Laden repeatedly offered truces, which the United States rejected, or that the FBI said there was no hard evidence connecting bin Laden with 9/11. It's easy to see why you want to move away from the facts and into patriotic slogans.

Followers of bin Laden could say, for example, that he aided in murdering scores of innocent people, but he also had a hand in freeing the Afghan people from Russian imperialism and was attempting to free the world from American imperialism through bankrupting our country. In fact, this is exactly what they say.

If we accept patriotic logic, we should root for bin Laden because he was fighting for "freedom" and ignore his atrocities. Do you accept this premise? Does anybody accept this premise? Why then is it reasonable to apply this sick logic to the United States?

There should be no argument about the validity of supporting genocide. To say there is shows the depths of nationalistic indoctrination. If we are serious about condemning murder and aggression, then we should condemn it regardless of whether the perpetrator is an official enemy or our own government. Similarly, if we are serious about supporting freedom and democracy, we should support it unequivocally. There's no contradiction here: the contradiction is in lauding genocide in the name of peace.

Is there any evidence for the notion that no other nation "has done more for thew [sic] advancement of freedom, peace, and democracy over tyranny in its history" than the United States?

The nation was founded upon the genocide of tens of millions of people, so, despite your support for a genocide worse than any Hitler ever committed, this is peace in the Orwellian sense. I think we should at least agree that genocide should be condemned even when it's carried out by the nation in which we happened to have been born.

The glorious founding was in response to British abolition of slavery in 1772, despite much rhetoric. Of course, slavery is compatible with freedom in children's fairy tales.

Moving to the twentieth century, it is hard to find a country wherein the United States did not subvert democracy. Just to name a few, the United States orchestrated coups, assassinations and invasions in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, Panama, Venezuela, Chile, Brazil, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Libya, East Timor, Korea and the Congo. This is by no means an exhaustive list. Furthermore, the United States has supported authoritarian regimes in every country in the Middle East I can think of, against the will of the people. We may not remember these basic facts but surely the victims do.

As to World War II, there was one country that effectively won the war in Europe: the Soviet Union. Would it be honest to say that because Stalin liberated countries from German genocidal occupation during World War II, that we should ignore all of his other many atrocities? Of course not. Why, then, should we say the same thing about the United States?

So there are plenty of countries that have done more for peace, namely by not murdering millions of people. For example, Malta has done more for peace. Or Botswana. Or India. A more serious question is, if we abhor bin Laden for the death of many innocent American civilians, how many millions of innocent civilians have been killed by American foreign policy? Why should we support one and not the other?

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