“Deather” conspiracy theory claims bin Laden not dead, or was never alive to begin with, or something

Via Brian Smith and Byron Tau in Politico:

[W]hile [a] watery grave may help diminish bin Laden’s status as a martyr to his followers, it was already fueling conspiracy theories; as the administration resisted releasing even photographs of the slain terrorist leader on Monday, a predictable haze of myth and rumor had already, inevitably, begun to rise around him.

No political leader of any weight has doubted the American story, though some Muslim leaders have criticized the action and there will be a delicate political calculation to be made by bin Laden’s presumed successor, Ayman Al Zawahiri, as to whether he confirms or denies the death.

…

But in an age of mistrust for authority, and when the mainstream media has lost its ability to damp down discredited theories, bin Laden’s death is already in dispute.

An arm of a Pakistani Taliban group led the charge Monday, according to Pakistan’s GEO TV, insisting that Bin Laden is still alive. Supporters rallied around a new Facebook group called, “Osama bin Laden NOT DEAD.” Meanwhile, the Pakistani and British media Monday fell prey to a recycled and faked photograph of a dead Bin Laden.

In the United States, suspicious voices rose across the political spectrum. Radio host Alex Jones, a powerful hub of anti-government sentiment and leader of those who believe the American government was behind the September 11 attacks, instantly floated his own theory: “[Inside Sources:] Government had Osama bin Laden frozen [Nearly a Decade].”

Anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan wrote her supporters [on her Facebook page] “I am sorry, but if you believe the newest death of OBL, you’re stupid. Just think to yourself—they paraded Saddam’s dead sons around to prove they were dead—why do you suppose they hastily buried this version of OBL at sea? This lying, murderous Empire can only exist with your brainwashed consent—just put your flags away and THINK!”

And on the conservative site Big Peace, J. Michael Waller demanded that Obama lay the corpse out in lower Manhattan. “I’ll believe it when I see it,” he wrote.

A fuller quotation from Waller:

The free world, particularly the United States, has a right to make sure Osama bin Laden is really dead. Every American has a right to walk right up to bin Laden’s corpse and view it. We are entitled to know for a fact that the witch is dead. No shroud for dignity’s sake, please – bin Laden’s naked, bullet-riddled corpse should be put on display in lower Manhattan for all the world to see. The entire body should be digitally scanned, inside and out – and made available for everyone to take his or her own picture.

Politico again:

Others speculated that perhaps bin Laden had never existed at all. And throughout a Muslim world in which bin Laden’s guilt in the 9/11 attacks remains, according to polls, widely doubted, the stealthy American incursion could only stir more conspiracy theorizing.

Since the Politico article ran, Glenn Beck has also floated the possibility bin Laden was spirited out of his Abbottabad compound:

There is something bothering me and it has to do with the helicopter crash. Getting Osama Bin Laden out, and the fact that we know that Wikleaks says that al-Qaeda has nukes. And here we have the head of al-Qaeda and we shoot him. Reports coming from the Pentagon, he was unarmed. Now why would we shoot a guy? Did we get the information? Could we have done anything with that? Were poll numbers involved, or are we seeing a show? Is it possible that Osama Bin Laden has been ghosted out of his compound, and we’re seeing a show at this point? Watch the other hand. Watch the other hand.

WH press secretary confirms OBL was unarmed

Via NY Times via Jerry Coyne (from here on in, whenever discussing NY Times stories, I’ll link to non-NY Timse blogs as often as possible so as not to burn through your 20 free monthly stories):

Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, read the narrative in an attempt to correct statements by administration officials who had suggested that Bin Laden was armed during the raid.

Under questioning, Mr. Carney said that the White House stood by its claim on Monday that Bin Laden had resisted capture, but said that “resistance does not require a firearm.” Mr. Carney said that the new narrative was the result of “fresh” information.

I imagine critics of the “kill not capture” mission will widely circulate the “resistance does not require a firearm” line. It’s just so…quintessentially political.

Why there is no great National Socialist novel

Kanan Makiya, reviewing Igor Golomstock’s Totalitarian Art, reflects on the aesthetic sterility of absolutist movements:

[Totalitarian art] is often indistinguishable from propaganda. Consider the amateurish poster of Saddam on a white horse (à la Vasily Yaklovev’s portrait of the Soviet marshal Georgy Zhukov) that was plastered all over Baghdad in 1989 — the year he rode under his Victory Arch on that very horse. Because they are so bound up with the state and its politics, the works of totalitarian art rarely outlast the regimes that produced them; they are quickly consigned to oblivion or destroyed outright by enraged populations. After the U.S. invasion of Iraq, for example, jubilant Baghdadis clambered on top of the toppled bronze statue of Saddam in Firdos Square and dragged the severed head through the streets. Totalitarian art, in other words, seems to be rejected once the political conditions that led to its creation are lifted. The art that has survived in Germany and the former Soviet Union has only recently begun to be pulled out of museum basements, largely for the purpose of study, not admiration.

More important, totalitarian art has not yet produced masterpieces that, irrespective of the odious systems that birthed them, could be said to have made permanent contributions to human culture. Perhaps this is because, unlike Islamic art, for example, totalitarian art’s production has everything to do with a top-down, state-driven project to bring about an aesthetic and spiritual union of government and people according to a prefixed dogma. 

Benito Mussolini was the first political leader to propagate the idea that art should serve the revolution and the state. But Italian fascism was never quite able to realize this vision. It was never able to fully fuse ideology, organization, and terror into the kind of state-run cultural machine that Mussolini’s own fascist doctrine called for. Whereas Hitler and Stalin used both threats and rewards to co-opt artists, Mussolini used only the latter, and so pre-Fascist Italian culture was never laid to waste the way German and Russian culture were. The concrete implementation of the concept of total realism — in paint, marble, and building materials — was left to Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, and Mao’s China. Italy’s inability to realize the totalitarian cultural project highlights how unimaginable such a project would have been in the formative centuries of Islam, when no state or empire had the resources, repressive agencies, or organizational wherewithal to bring about the necessary fusion that Mussolini called for and that Hitler and Stalin put into effect. Totalitarianism is a twentieth-century enterprise that would have been impossible to realize in premodern, nonindustrialized societies.

Someone could name a few counterexamples to Makiya’s claim that no totalitarian artist “could be said to have made permanent contributions to human culture,”  but not enough to undercut the thesis. For example, even modern critics consider Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will and Sergei Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin–movies stumping for National Socialism and Bolshevism, respectively–to be among the most important films ever made. However, only the latter is appreciated in-of-itself as a cinematic narrative with accessible emotional resonance, whereas Triumph is considered significant for its technical contributions to cinematography.

Not a few “great” authors penned apologies for total regimes. The Austrian philosopher Martin Heidegger enthusiastically supported Hitler and the National Socialist project, even going so far as to denounce his mentor, Edmund Husserl, a Jewish convert to Protestantism. However, though Nazism is not irrelevant to Heidegger’s thought (he believed the movement to be a potential vessel for “authenticity,” the ruling virtue of his system), it is also not essential to it. The first edition of his magnum, Being and Time, was published seven years before Hitler was elected, and even the Heideggerian formulation of “authenticity” does not hinge on the success of any one political project.

Then, of course, countless Western authors stumped for the Soviet Union at various points in its history–including at least three Nobel Prize winners, George Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell*, and Jean Paul Sartre. But again, their support for it was only indirect; none actually lived under it, or participated in its daily administration. Should they have, their work would never have had the room to grow and become what it did. Stalin would have no use for Shaw’s pacifism, and Sartre’s ontology of intersubjectivity would outrage the party line of materialism.

So in the end, the glib romanticism of the useful idiots only supports Makiya’s point. No one with a truly adequate grasp of what totalitarianism real entails and promises will be inspired to produce a positive, unironic paeon to it that would be comprehensible to the non-fanaticized.

*Though to his credit, Russell recanted his support for Bolshevism after actually visiting the Soviet Union in 1920, and went on to become a staunch left-wing critic of Communism.