60% is certainly better than 87%, but it doesn’t change the fundamental argument. Go to it.
Click on the image for full size and more legible.
60% is certainly better than 87%, but it doesn’t change the fundamental argument. Go to it.
Click on the image for full size and more legible.
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BDBlue
The interesting thing to me is the 54% that say the US is safe after Osama’s death. This would seem to 1) explain at least somewhat why people approve of his death and think it was important (which is not to approve of such things) and 2) provide an opening to antiwar forces.
anon2525
None of the discussion of bin Laden brings up the more important issues. The discussion, in fact, is a distraction from them.
1) Hundreds of thousands of innocent people (children, women, and men) have been killed as a consequence of u.s. military actions. No one has been held accountable for these killings. Nothing appears to have been learned by the u.s. population as a result of the Vietnam war or the Korean war.
2) An enormous amount of debt has been accumulated by the u.s. as a result of these decisions (more debt than was accumulated during the second world war). And there are no indications, yet, that there will be anything done to stop the spending on these military actions. Large private profits have been made by private companies to provide weapons and other material and services. This is the primary reason that the actions have gone on as long as they have and why there appears to be no end to these military actions.
The poll, above, reminds me of the way teachers and principals would talk to us students when I was in elementary school. That is the level of debate at which gallup and others want us to stay.
“Children, were you scared of the bad man?” “Yes!”
“Children, the bad man is gone thanks to the police. Are you happy?” “Yes!”
“Do you like the police, kids?” “Yes!”
“Do you feel safe now, kids?” “Yes!”
Morocco Bama
True enough, anon2525. The alleged murdering of the alleged OBL is one hell of a distraction from so many more important matters. I see this media event as irrelevant in the scheme of things. Empire continues to trample its way to the Abyss…with Carnivals and Circuses along the way to keep the Masses thoroughly confused. Honestly, I don’t think people know what to think. They need to be told what to think and feel
The only interest I have in it is the psychology of it all. It’s the epitome of Schadenfreude, capturing the essence of that wonderful German word. The Germans have such wonderful words like Schadenfreud and Zeitgeist and Fahrvergnügen.
Anyway, for a country that claims to be “under God,” it sure has a peculiar way of showing it.
“Rejoice not when thine enemy falleth, and let not thine heart be glad when he stumbleth: Lest the LORD see it, and it displease him, and he turn away his wrath from him.” (Proverbs 24:17–18, King James Version).
For those of you who don’t know how to discuss with the kiddies, Matt Lauer has you covered. Isn’t it grand that there are so mnay experts to help with these tedious issues in these trying times?
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/hl-50145912/nbc_today_show_talking_to_your_kids_about_osama_bin_laden/
Celsius 233
This is all so Fahrenheit 451! Remember how they got the whole populace involved, through interactive TV, with the pursuit and elimination of whomever was the arch enemy of the moment?
This only works with a population purposefully and willfully/willingly ignorant of the world about them. If I weren’t a witness to this; I would scarcely be capable of believing my own eyes and ears.
Greg L
>>>This only works with a population purposefully and willfully/willingly ignorant of the world about them. If I weren’t a witness to this; I would scarcely be capable of believing my own eyes and ears.<<<
I don't disagree with this, but I question the whole thing of everyone being willfully/willingly ignorant. To be sure, that applies to some people, but others are too busy trying to eke out a living that they basically accept whatever is being put out there as the gospel truth as they lack the time or inclination to seek alternative sources of information. That sets up the whole scenario reflected in the poll that's been referenced. It's more a measure of the effectiveness with which ideas have been shaped to the created reality than it is anything else. A poll nowadays is really never an opinion poll so much as a measure of how effective the propaganda was and judging from it, they've been very effective.
The gutting of the educational and economic systems go hand in hand with this sort of thing. IMO, that's the whole purpose of arresting the economic/educational development of any group of people. You can't exploit situations where people are informed and intelligent and that's why the books get burned first. In America, the books have effectively been burned long ago.
madamab
Greg L,
Very well-said. The news has been canceled; we’re supposed to be satisfied with elitist propaganda mouthed by pundits who stopped relating to everyday American lives long ago.
Hercules Rockefeller
You do realize that those 33% include people who think he should have been captured for the purposes of torture, whether interrogation torture or revenge torture, right?
Greg L
>>>The news has been canceled<<<
This is absolutely true madamb, but even more disturbing than that are two very small but significant measures; the very small number of the elites who seek to control the globe and the very small number of people who are aware that the news has been cancelled. Those on this blog and others like this one are among that latter number. If the books have been burned, it won't be too long before they come looking for those who could author new ones. Quite frankly, when I think about this, it gives me pause.
We're in a very difficult spot. If you believe you know the truth, it's hard not to speak to it, but at the same time it can be perilous. I think we've seen a number of things that support that.
anon2525
Some others have commented on the killing:
My Reaction to Osama bin Laden’s Death, by Noam Chomsky
The Targeted Assassination of Osama bin Laden, by Marjorie Cohn
Justice or Vengeance?, by Phyllis Bennis
anon2525
Fixed second article linked to:
The Targeted Assassination of Osama bin Laden, by Marjorie Cohn
JustPlainDave
The most directly analogous circumstance that I’ve been able to find from American WWII era public opinion is Gallup polling from late May 1945 (i.e., about 10 days after his capture) on what should be done with Goering. In response to the open-ended question “What punishment, if any do you think we should give Goering?” fully 67% are said to have responded that he should be killed, while only 4% said that he should be tried (source for results: Gary Bass’ Stay the Hand of Vengance: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals). There’s a consistent enough pattern of this type of response, even given the open-ended nature of the questions, that I’m not sure I would characterize WWII public opinion as particularly enlightened in comparison to today or – particularly – as the key driver towards Nuremberg. The crucial difference appears largely to be based on the victory of a particular strain of elite opinion within the Roosevelt administration.
JustPlainDave
Oops. Forgot to mention that the source for the question text is Gallup Poll 1945-0347 at The Roper Center Public Opinion Archive. (Sorry, don’t have access to the dataset.)
scoutt
Ummmm….. the poll sampling is 2:1 D’s to R’s. Not sure how reliable it is.
Ghostwheel
Of course, skepticism—even in the absence of independently corroborated evidence—is not a proffered choice.
Don’t think outside the box. Don’t provide any openings for people to doubt the official story, riddled with contradictions and foolery (like they threw the body into the sea to honor Muslim custom).
That’s the media for you. A rigged game all around.
Hey, you! See that fenced-off area? That’s your free speech zone.
Ian Welsh
I have a hard time imaging that D’s aren’t more likely to want him captured, so 2:1 D’s to R’s means the number is almost certainly understated.
Morocco Bama
This all reminds me, in a way, of the Rosenberg executions. They were executed as symbolic sacrifices on the altar of Anti-Communism. It had nothing to with Justice, and everyhting to do with Totalitarian Tyranny. 70% of the U.S. public, when polled, believed they should be executed.
Here is an excellent documentary about the Rosenbergs and their executions created by their granddaughter.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0388996/
JustPlainDave
Crosstabs are 36% of Democrats would have preferred capture vs. 22% of Republicans. Oddly I can’t find any summary of the total breakdown of response numbers for Democrat vs. Republicans on the Gallup page (i.e., can’t determine if a 2:1 D:R is correct – intuitively seems quite high).
madamab
Can people differentiate between their own desires, and what a country of laws should do?
I’m not sure this type of simplistic polling answers that question.
Personally, I wouldn’t care if bin Laden were chopped into bits and fed to dogs afterwards..he was a horrible man. But for the sake of America’s soul, I would have preferred he be captured and brought to trial, like other terrorists before him (Timothy McVeigh, the Unabomber, the blind sheikh, etc. etc.). That is how our legal system is supposed to work: innocent until proven guilty. What a quaint notion.
scruff
If anything is going to make US citizens any safer, it is that people are said to be driving less as gas near $4/gallon. Since 9/11 something like 300,000 people have died in car crashes. Note the difference between what we are willing to do to prevent one crazy Arab from a few thousand vs what we’re apparently not willing to do to actually save large numbers of lives.
anon2525
Note the difference between what we are willing to do to prevent one crazy Arab from a few thousand…
“We” were doing that because 1) taxes were not raised on the wealthy and corporations to pay for it (to the contrary, taxes were cut) and 2) private companies are making private profits selling to the gov’t.
If taxes had been raised on the corporations and the wealthy to pay for it, and if gov’t. employees manufactured all of the weapons used by the military and performed all of the services used in the military actions (that is, no private profits went to private companies), then bin Laden likely would have been captured at Bora Bora (Koch bros. to cheney: “Dick, you and George have to get this over with–it’s costing us a fortune!”) in 2001, and there would not have been an invasion of Iraq.
The u.s. has had in place economic incentives for the military to maintain a large standing army since 1945, in war or peace, because there are lots of private companies that make lots of money off of this arrangement. And this arrangement employs lots of people who vote for right-wing politicians.
anon2525
Personally, I wouldn’t care if bin Laden were chopped into bits and fed to dogs afterwards..he was a horrible man.
How about caring because of self preservation? According to the Obama Doctrine, the u.s. may shoot anyone in the head regardless of whether they are unarmed and not a threat to anyone. Since that’s the doctrine, there is no reason for non-americans not to adopt it with american captives in the future.
Chomsky’s hypothetical scenario from the link, above:
We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s, and he is not a “suspect” but uncontroversially the “decider” who gave the orders to commit the “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country, the bitter sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region.
David
Speaking of Chomsky’s hypothetical scenario,
here is related “thought experiment” that makes the point:
Full article at:
http://www.galacticempiretimes.com/2011/05/09/galaxy/outer-rim/obi-wan-kenobi-is-killed.html
Morocco Bama
But for the sake of America’s soul
Huh? First off, you mention “America” as though it is something more than the mere Myth it has always been purported to be, and secondly, what soul? Surely you jest. Even if such a thing were possible, and even metaphorically speaking, this thing here, this System, has no “soul.” It’s a Beastly System of wanton destruction, transforming this once upon a time North American paradise into a veritable denuded, toxic wasteland.
John J Sears
I’m not surprised by the sentiment expressed by the majority, but by their willingness to state it so openly. There’s no shame in displaying bloodlust and the desire for carnage, so long as the target is deemed societally appropriate. You don’t even have to pretend to prefer a hypothetical peaceful scenario while actually being perfectly happy with the bloody way things transpire; people just let their freak flag fly now.
Morocco Bama
There’s no shame in displaying bloodlust and the desire for carnage, so long as the target is deemed societally appropriate.
I don’t think “shame” is the appropriate word there. I would say “inconsistency” would be a better word. Shame doesn’t even enter the equation. The System is designed to remove empathy, consideration and compassion at a very early age, or better yet, it is designed to prevent those character traits from ever developing. What you get is a collective of morally bereft zombies bouncing from one purchase to the next absent the nuisance of critical thought and inquiry.
madamab
anon525 said,
“How about caring because of self preservation?”
How about reading the rest of my comment?
But for the sake of America’s soul, I would have preferred he be captured and brought to trial, like other terrorists before him (Timothy McVeigh, the Unabomber, the blind sheikh, etc. etc.). That is how our legal system is supposed to work: innocent until proven guilty. What a quaint notion.
madamab
Morocco Bama says,
Huh? First off, you mention “America” as though it is something more than the mere Myth it has always been purported to be, and secondly, what soul?
America’s soul is the Constitution of the United States. It is the law of the land, which Bush/Obama have shredded to bits.
The Constitution is far from perfect (it needs to include the ERA), but if we followed the laws and concepts therein, we’d have a lot better System than we do now.
Formerly T-Bear
The overwhelming mass of blatant lying concerning the operation to find and kill Usama Bin Laden was purposely done to infect the public memory with false narrative at every turn. What has been produced is a massive carnival house of distorting mirrors in-which up becomes down, right is produced by wrong, fiction makes for fact, and crime passes as law. There is certainly no evidence that capture was the desired outcome; nor were there traces of adherence to law and bringing the man to justice, no such facts are in evidence, their absence is replaced by an obscuring jungle of lying, misrepresentations, and falsehoods. Another crime against humanity by the administration is now on record; whilst receiving the accolades of approval from an ignorant, misinformed and gullible public; another witness to ongoing crimes has been liquidated, knowledgeable testimony forever silenced. The administration is not a government, it’s a RICO operation.
anon2525
How about reading the rest of my comment?
Yes, I read it (of course). You appear to be wanting to have your cake and eat it, too. Which do you want, a country that is governed by laws (your second part) or a country that can shoot unarmed and un-threatening (a the time) people in the head (your second part)? If you say that you want the former, then you cannot say that the latter is fine with you (“Personally, I wouldn’t care…”).
Either you care that the country is governed by laws or you don’t care if it is not.
Jonathan Versen
JustPlainDave
May 11, 2011
Crosstabs are 36% of Democrats would have preferred capture vs. 22% of Republicans. Oddly I can’t find any summary of the total breakdown of response numbers for Democrat vs. Republicans on the Gallup page (i.e., can’t determine if a 2:1 D:R is correct – intuitively seems quite high).
I don’t agree, 2:1 may well be about right for a representative sample in ’45. The public re-elected FDR by hugely lop-sided majorities in ’36, ’40 and ’44, and the congress was majority dem throughout his years in office. It’s easy, post Reagan, to forget the US was majority dem country from the 30s through the 60s, when the civil rights movement fractured the democratic southern base.
JustPlainDave
The crosstabs I mentioned refer to contemporary Gallup polling regarding ObL not the historical polling (also Gallup as it happens) referring to Goering.