Devil's Advocate

DEVILS ADVOCATE

Could Major (?) Aiken, who (unsuccessfully) defended Mary Surratt against charges of plotting to kill Abraham Lincoln (in R. Redford's superb movie The Conspirators), be persuaded to defend Osama Laden, if he had been arrested and put on trial for the list of atrocities he is alleged to have committed?

I'll accept the challenge to play Aiken's role, even as in days of yore, as member of President Dearing's blue-ribbon panel that led to blocking military recruitment for the Vietnam war on Harpur College campus, 1968. We were the True American heroes then. Now, the same inner strain of staying True to America flows through and motivates defending Bin Laden, in a Square* Trial format: setting his message, now sealed by his mythic death, alongside now known facts. To do this is already very much, intellectually.

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Bin Laden protested military arms in the Saudi Arabia (in Gulf War I) on religious grounds, as I recall, as constituting desecration of it's sacred desert sands. His aura of holiness, a clearly distinctive, highly evolved bloodline Archetype of The Sheik, is grounded in this soil (as Germany grounds Hitler's, and Italy Mussolini's). How did U.S. officials respond to this demand? Did rancor from this degradation partly fuel his hatred of the West? - complimenting anger in response to how the CIA had encouraged, then turned against, his militant pursuit of mujahadeen goals.

A cleavage between two being-positions in re *OBL


"He is the embodiment of evil" => being-position #1.
"He gave them what they had coming...landmark for landmark, eye-for-an-eye" => being-position #2

*1 and *2 contrast as metaphysical alternatives, decided (voluntary, if conscious) by sign-use for/in self-reference. "What we are for ourselves," as Barack Obama proclaimed in (corrrectly, I think) refusing to release the gory pictures ("Not what we are.")

This is what can never be openly stated, as his message. "He has nothing to offer beyond hatred of the West," Giles Kepel decreed ("Bin Laden Was Dead Already" NYTimes, 5.8. week10) Tout Court. What cannot be pursued by "the West"'s MSM is the tale he could tell; to justify that hate. However, "the East", if that is the contrast, has its own media, now, and intra-Muslim, intra-Arab differences can come together around OBL's *Idea. If a * can be celebrated by allegedly civilized people, theArab/Muslim world -- those billions on that part of the planet whose bloodlines aligns with either -- will find unity at that very point of Bin Laden's message. It's as if the Navy SEALS were sent to confirn it. That is how "the West's" unconscious sees it; and how "the anti-West's" consciousness sees it. Through his systematic, unyielding confrontation -- morally, philosophically, theologically -- the message communicated by his very existence was not just exact existential repudiation of "the West"'s way-of-being ("existenz"); it's psychodynamic effect on that way of being was to make it expose itself by attacking him. He calls them snake brains (speaking figuratively); they respond as snake brains do, proving he was right. Such is the power of an *Idea reflecting the reverse, unconscious side of an involuted, self-defined group-totality. It was The *Idea in their own minds, judging them from within (as a Freudian super-ego), which they projectively personify as "Bin Laden" and attempt not just to kill but obliterate what he "stands for": the unconscious side of themselves.

Further: the act of killing Bin Laden was not only, psychodynamically, an attempt to obliterate a projection of their own unconscious as "enemy", but an attack on their own religious ideal, itself. There is, undoubtedly (I should say; each may judge for themself), a "Christic" aura in his visual presence. He IS his "message"; an embodied Word; a Christ, shedding his planetary body in death, but lifted to another plane of existence by it. There, it stands along side of Christ resurrected from Jesus' death; Easter Sunday just preceded. What they did unto Bin Laden they did also unto Christ, by the spirit they share in the unconscious. With OBL's body 'buried at sea" (symbol of the Unconscious, itself), the "Christic" return of his/their Spirit supplies higher Oxygen for the Arab Spring.