The Morality of Assassination

Um, Osama bin Laden was killed.

So that happened.

I don't feel like getting into the implications and retaliations and other stupid shit that is of absolutely no purpose at all. Terrorism is throwing an idea at someone and making it stick. It doesn't have any real purpose. It's like war, except instead of fighting over something tangible like land or money (not that those are good things to fight over), you're fighting over feelings. Fling hate at one country and receive hatred in return. It's honestly one of the worst ideas humans have ever come up with.

I just want to say, that normally I am 100% against the death penalty. That's mostly because there is almost never any way of being certain that a person is guilty of a crime and it's completely barbaric to kill a person who has any chance of being innocent. Not to mention that it's sickening that we want to exact justice by extinguishing a human life. The death penalty makes me sick. However, I am in no way, shape, or form sorry about bin Laden's death.

He was a murderer. He was a terrorist. He killed, he terrorized, he tortured. He made twin towers crumble and a field burn and a five-sided building fall. He oppressed and he hated. I don't feel sorry for a man like him. Maybe from a religious perspective, people feel obliged to pray for him. But I don't see how anyone could legitimately feel bad about his death. I don't believe in Hell. I don't think he's going to get punished in an afterlife. I think the best anyone can do is eliminate him from this world. To give the order to take another person's life sounds cold-blooded. Maybe it would have been better to capture him (although it sounds like that wasn't really possible). When you're feeling conflicted over his death, remember that literally thousands of people -- Americans, Afghanis, people all the way through the alphabet -- died and suffered because of him and his ideals. I'm sorry, but there are some people in this world who don't deserve to be looked at through a moral conscience because they don't have one of their own. Like, is anyone actually sorry that Hitler shot himself? If you are, how can you live with yourself? Obviously bin Laden and Hitler were completely and totally different, but they both carry something like evil in their hearts. When people say that they don't think he deserved to die, it almost makes me angry. When they say that no matter who he was, he was still a person, it makes me a little angry. How dare you equate him with any human? How dare you equate him with the people he killed? It's like a personal insult, like a do-you-not-understand-who-he-was? Do you not know what he did?

I am in no way supportive of extremist policies. I do not support assassinating opposing political leaders or punishing war criminals without trials. I don't want to shoot every terrorist in existence. I am against violence. But I do not regret his death.