America, as a country, claims itself as a nation founded on a religion that commands “thou shall not kill”. And yet, America sure excels at killing people. This is what I learned watching the new Netflix documentary The Hunt for Osama bin Laden.
Honestly, it’s one of the better-told documentaries I’ve watched. The film drew me in, with highly charismatic US government leaders who pulled no punches about their intentions to put bin Laden in the ground.
That candor surprised me. I didn’t realize people like that really exist. For example, one CIA officer, while attending a post-9/11 presidential briefing, promised the president he’d have “flies crawling on [bin Laden’s] eyes in six weeks” with the president’s go-ahead. That kind of talk existed only in movies, I thought.
Nope. It exists in the White House, CIA headquarters and the DoD too. Apparently, our nation is full of people that talk that way. Having served in the Marines for nine years, this shouldn’t have been a surprise.
It was though.
What else I learned
The three part series, obviously, tells the story of how the US went about finding and killing masterminds behind the World Trade Center attacks. It chronicles the bungles, but also the bravado-ladened determination and success of those involved.
It also covered, fairly and comprehensively, how the US lost its moral compass resorting to torture and its own brand of terror, thereby becoming the very thing they planned on bringing to justice.
And like one CIA analyst admitted during the documentary, “killing your way out of problems” doesn’t work. It’s never worked. It will never work. Nor does it bring “justice”.
Is it “just” to kill someone who has killed another? Understanding what happens after death, we must answer that question with a resounding “no”.
All killing a person does is make new enemies of those who loved that person. Furthermore, killing perpetuates killing. Maybe that’s why Christianity forbids it. Besides, even though we think we brought 9/11 perpetrators to “justice”, whatever we think that means, what happened to those people after dying is anything but that.
You reap what you sow
Justice is a human convention. It doesn’t exist as a staple of All That Is. So when someone dies, even if through murder, the dead person re-emerges into nonphysical. All their resistance – to humanity, to other religions, to their enemies – all that goes away. What remains is their eternal state of pure, positive energy. And from there, they see the benefits their actions created on Earth. Even those who murder people. Even the most heinous murderers. Including those who planned and executed the 9/11 event.
So no. There’s no justice in killing another, not in the way humans think of that term. Well there is, actually. It’s encapsulated in the phrase “You reap what you sow”: The more people America keeps killing, the more people will want to kill Americans and America.
What I learned from watching The Hunt For Osama bin Laden was some Americans are deeply deluded about what’s happening on Earth. And from that state, they perpetuate the very things they think they’re fighting against.
Maybe it’s more than “some” Americans.
Perhaps it’s a large majority of Americans. Given the fervor and jubilation Americans showed after learning their Navy Seals killed bin Laden, the religion Americans claim America is founded on must not be Christianity. In my mind, Christians would not have celebrated that killing. Nor any other for that matter.