Is Osama Bin Laden the new Emmanuel Goldstein?

Does anyone even know who I am talking about?

Goldstein's face was "a lean Jewish face, with a great fuzzy aureole of white hair and a small goattee beard -- a clever face, and yet somehow inherently despicable, with a kind of senile silliness in the long thin nose, near the end of which a pair of spectacles was perched."

Not too far from Osama's face. Osama's face is a lean, middle eastern face, always turbaned with graying hair trailing down his face to becom a pair of sideburns, and a full beard and mustache in accordance with the customs of his religon. I think Osama's face looks more grandfatherly, with a hint of menace to it, which may be more about his mystique than anything innate in his looks. Few images of Bin Laden show any spectacles, although for some reason I think there are one or two floating out there.

Okay, now I'm going to give the game away with the next description. If you don't recognize where Emmanuel Goldstein was described, if you've read the book at all, this passage will give it away.

"Goldstein was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago (how long ago, nobody quite remembered), had been one of the leading figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big Brother himself, and then had engaged in counter-revolutionary activities, had been condemned to death, and had mysteriously escaped and disappeared. The programmes of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure. He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party's purity. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching. Somewhere or other he was still alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea, under the protection of his foreign paymasters, perhapse even -- so it was occasionally rumoured -- in some hiding-place in Oceania itself."


So, how close is Osama to Emmanuel in this? Well, Osama was once a heroic fighter against the evil empire. An idealistic young mujahedeen who struggled to free Afghanistan from the oppression of Soviet Tyranny. The mujahedeen were supported by American/British bankrolling and weaponry [http://www.larouchepub.com/other/1995/2241_mujahideen_control.html] (rather in the tradition of proxy wars going back hundreds if not thousands of years, a classic one Americans should recognize would be French support of American rebels against their British sovereigns). Osama is the son of one of the wealthiest men in the Middle East, and of course, the Bin Laden Family is on good terms with our own modern political dynasty, the Bush family. But as for what Osama is doing, he is out there, somewhere or other, hatching more plots against the civilized world. I don't think that there are many people claiming that Osama is hiding out in the United States though.

Now honestly, I don't think we quite fit into the "Orwellian" fascist state, which is more reminiscent of Stalins' Russia. But given that the U.S., at least in theory, can't manage to bring in public enemy number one for the last nearly 4 years, I kind of question how serious the effort has been. On the other hand, I do admit that such a state of affairs is at least feasible given that we don't use "any means" necessary, U.S. compassion probably hampers our hunt.

Still, does seem to me that Osama is cut of the same cloth as Emmanuel.