Immortal Technique "The Legacy of Bin Laden"

Remember when Chuck D called rap music the black CNN?

"It’s easy to blame Hitler for killing 6 million Jews. He’s the figurehead. He was a megalomaniac, an iron fisted dictator and a wild anti-Semite. It’s harder to take a look, though, at the society in Germany that turned everyday human beings, like the people you see walking around in America, into raving nationalists capable of anything. It’s easy to blame Stalin for his purges and millions of lives he destroyed. There are even people in this country ignorant enough to say that it is the inherent evil of Socialism and Godlessness that causes these things. However, it’s harder to pin point the person that is responsible for the African slave trade that cost hundreds of million of lives. There is no one person responsible for covered up massacre of Armenians or the mass genocide of Native American Indigenous people on this side of the world. You cannot hold Europeans collectively responsible, but most certainly those who were “escaping religious persecution” are dwarfed (again) by the hundreds of millions of lives that were lost as a direct result of their migration/invasion.

Bin Laden may be the face of radical Islam, but he was not its only leader. His death leaves a vacuum, a place for others that may wish to find fame and at the same time satisfy their supposedly pious Muslim ego in “accepting their duty” to engage in a Jihad against someone who is occupying their country. This person who wishes to be a singular entity must remember, only a few of those have ever held true power.

Bin Laden was not a devil. He was a regular person who was created by his circumstance, and by his many supporters including this government, but had he been born in Florida he could have owned a business renting boats or cars or running a restaurant. In the end, he chose his own fate, but I believe the radicalization of Islam, brought about by colonialism and harnessed by the Cold War was a factor.

The real question is, though, what do you believe?"

Read the whole thing here.

Epic, essential reading form one of few the outspoken political MCs left.