Le Monde Publishes a Full Page of Letters on Bin Laden's Death, Most of Which Are of the Typical Smug and Condescending Kind

Les principes

Tout le monde se réjouit de la mort d'Oussama Ben Laden, certains déclarent même que justice est faite. L'atrocité des crimes de ce dernier légitime-t-elle pour autant l'usage de la violence et ici de la mort pour rendre justice ? Que les plus hautes autorités américaines se réjouissent d'un tel événement est intelligible, eu égard au fait qu'elles défendent en politique intérieure la peine de mort comme une réponse pénale.

Mais nous, Français, attachés, je l'espère, à l'abolition de la peine de mort, n'avons-nous pas le droit de signaler que nous aurions préféré que Ben Laden soit traduit devant les tribunaux ? Cette simple remarque doit-elle faire de nous l'allié des terroristes ? Si tel est le procès que l'on prépare à ceux qui oseront élever la voix, nous devrons rappeler qu'il est de notre devoir d'affirmer qu'aucun crime ne peut donner à la société le droit de prendre la vie d'un homme. Si Oussama Ben Laden a été assassiné, et s'il s'agissait par ce truchement de rendre justice, alors nous devrions avoir le courage de ne point accepter les sermons des défenseurs de la realpolitik, ceux-là mêmes qui font primer la force sur le droit, alors que nous savons bien qu'il ne peut y avoir force légitime sans droit établi, un droit que nous pouvons espérer émanciper de nos instincts de vengeance pour s'approcher de nos idéaux de justice.

Romain Cujives, Toulouse

Le Monde has a full page of letters from readers (such as Emmanuel Fruchard, Patrick Haussmann, Jules Guyard, Laurent Opsomer, Charles Rossetti, Romain Cujives, Jean-Marie Parent, Christian Ruelle, Jean-Marc Schuller, Daniel Schettino, Philippe Colmet Daâge, Christian Vezon, Paule Khodabandeh, and André Salinas), many of which are smug and self-important as they express "controversy" over the killing of Osama Bin Laden while "bemoaning" the title chosen for the daily's headline ("Justice est faite" was a quote from Barack Obama's speech announcing the 911 mastermind's death).

This squares totally with reactions from elsewhere inside Europe's pity-for-Osama lobby, with its "uncomfortable" moral handwringers such as those described by David Mills (merci à Instapundit):

They would suggest that the United States acted too quickly, or without enough thought, or without proper consultation, or without thinking of the future, or just in that simple-minded, violent, cowboy way those simple-minded violent American cowboys always act when not restrained by European moral sensitivity. Or, and this image doesn’t contradict that one, in that big, bumbling, clumsy, childish way Americans always act when not restrained by European experience.

And they were going to be ever so disappointed in Barack Obama. Why, he’d been practically European himself, and now they find him almost . . . Texan.

And so it happened. You can find examples everywhere. Most of these examples I’ve taken from Brendan O’Neill’s analysis in Spiked! of the sources of these reactions, which he argues are “fuelled by self-loathing more than justice-loving” and by “a discomfort with decisive action, a fear of what such action might lead to in the future, and a belief that people in the West should douse their emotional zeal and learn to be more meek.” He’s not happy with them, as you might guess.

…The problem, let me be clear, is not their concern for law. The problem is that they turn to the law without taking pleasure in the justice they could see had been done.

For good measure, Le Monde adds a column by Percy Kemp called J'Accuse !, purporting to be the Al Qaeda leader's testimony had he been taken to trial… (Naturally, and to no one's surprise, it transpires that it is all the fault of the United States, which "created" Osama, and then discarded him…)

Esprit texan

Les cow-boys de notre enfance ont peut-être conquis l'Ouest américain en zigouillant les Indiens ; il serait étonnant qu'ils conquièrent le monde, car la force et l'astuce de services " spéciaux " ne sont pas encore ce qui convient. Dans ses Pensées, Blaise Pascal affirme : " La justice sans la force est impuissante : la force sans la justice est tyrannique. La justice sans force est contredite, parce qu'il y a toujours des méchants ; la force sans la justice est accusée. Il faut donc mettre ensemble la justice et la force ; et pour cela faire que ce qui est juste soit fort, ou que ce qui est fort soit juste " (Pensées V).

La méthode cow-boy, aussi habile soit-elle à manier le lasso, n'est guère prometteuse d'avenir, et l'on peut espérer qu'un jour ce soit l'Europe qui réunisse justice et force, ce qui est loin d'être le cas.

Charles Rossetti, Paris

Brendan O’Neill, again:

It is extraordinary, and revealing, how quickly the expression of concern about the use of American force in Pakistan became an expression of values superiority over the American people. The modern chattering classes are so utterly removed from the mass of the population, so profoundly disconnected from ‘ordinary people’ and their ‘ordinary thoughts’, that they effectively see happy Americans as a more alien and unusual thing than Osama bin Laden. Where OBL wins their empathy, American jocks receive only their bile.

There is nothing principled or properly anti-imperialist in the speedily rising critique of the killing of OBL. Indeed, many of those currently attacking Obama would have preferred it if bin Laden had ended up in one of the international courts, which themselves are political theatres for the expression of Western superiority over foreign peoples (usually black ones).

Actually, the international courts that most leftists have in mind — see the Percy Kemp column in Le Monde called J'Accuse !, which imagines Osama Bin Laden's testimony in court — is the sort of political theater that allows for the expression of Western guilt over the innate victimhood of innocent third-world people. Back to Brendan O’Neill:

… the now widespread ‘uncomfortable feeling’ with the shooting of bin Laden is really an expression of moral reluctance, even of moral cowardice, a desire to avoid taking any decisive action or expressing any firm emotion that might have some blowback consequences for us over here. It is the politics of risk aversion rather than the politics of anti-imperialism, the same degraded sentiment that fuelled the narcissistic ‘Not in my name’ response to the Iraq War in 2003.

… The post-OBL ‘uncomfortable feeling’ is really a quite craven sentiment, a fear-fuelled desire for self-preservation over anything else, which is dolled up as a principled critique of American militarism.