Just a few days before his murder Osama Bin Laden recorded a message saying he supports the democratic uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia. Luckily for the Americans they got him before it could be broadcasted. The message would have much complicated the story we are fed with. But hat CNN and other news organisations find this message strange is maybe just as much a symptom of ignorance and stupidity as a conspiracy. Of all the terabytes already written on the Arabic spring I have not yet read one piece of analysis worth the keyboard it was written on.
Nineteenth century analysts would have been much more able to see the dialectics played out in the beginning of our millennium. Bin Laden has been vilified into a monster and in that process robbed of his own history. Was not the rationale behind his turn against the US that he wanted to topple the Saudi dictatorship and understood, correctly, that he first had to chase the Americans away from the Middle East? His terror attack on the Twin Towers had the same effect as the terror attack in Sarajevo 1914, starting a World War. The American drive for, and sudden interest in, democratic change in the Middle East by ways of invading Iraq and Afghanistan was the reaction, or antithesis as Hegel would have put it. The Arab spring, the popular movement for getting rid of Arabic dictators propped up by America and Europe is then the obvious synthesis of the conflict between bin Laden and the USA. Therefore his death came, so to say, after the event. Before he was shot Bin Laden had already played out his role historically, and partly achieved his original goal.
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