History books will ignore Bush, Clinton, Bush Jr., Reagan, Carter, and Ford. Bin Laden will be in the history books 100 years from now, and not just the American ones, history books in every country will talk about him. He’s like Spartacus or Napoleon. No one has gathered more followers and has had more of an impact on the world since Kennedy and the missile crisis.
Disclaimer: I judge the leader without regard to his/her philosophy. A great leader is one who gathers followers, inspires, and makes change.
You’re probably right. More people can tell you that Hitler was involved in WW2 than can name the US president was the time (I say that because I had to look it up just now. . .).
Perhaps, but Fallwell was mortal. Bin Laden will live on forever, because even when he does die he will do so from a cave or other underground lair, and he’ll become an Elvis/Tupac/Jimmy Hoffa-like character, sighted everywhere and with a huge cult following.
I heard that Timothy McVeigh was actually working for ELF and that the OK City building was blown up because they refused to ban SUVs and hunting. It’s all a big terrorist conspiracy! Where’s Gobbo on this one?
He used a personal fortune that he largely inherited, by my understanding. He was also aided by the CIA. Not to mention MI6 and the SAS. Hardly ‘out of nothing’.
Bin Laden didn’t sell them, he bought them. If you catch my drift.
I heard he earned the respect of a lot of Mujahadeen in the war in Afghanistan. They thought he was just a rich boy, but then he went out on the front lines and fought with them. There is one particular story that is told where he was riding one of his father’s bulldozers digging trenches while the area around him was being shelled. This impressed. He was putting his life on the line. He wasn’t sitting on the sidelines.
If your interested for the sake of argument, propose a superior modern leader to Bin Laden.
No. Paris will make it alright. She seems to have a decent head on her shoulders. I don’t see her finding religion or anything. She’ll probably do as her parents did, who were probably also useless playboys and girls, get married and have kids. Then the cycle will begin again.
Off topic, but I think deep down Paris, maybe not Paris but people like Paris, wish they were poor or had average wealth. People that rich take a lot of shit. It’s bound to make them insecure. HBO did a good documentary on the subject called Born Rich.
Rich people, like any minority, are often powerless. It’s a strange dichotomy since in some realms they posses infinite power, then in another, little to none, though I suppose we all have realms where we rule: our jobs, our friends, our hobbies, then we have ones where we don’t: our jobs, our family, other people’s jobs (like the president’s, a CEO’s, television executive’s).
Probably propaganda. More seriously, I’m sure Bin Laden did his share of fighting, but I simply don’t credit him with being as important as you do. I for one don’t buy into this notion of Bin Laden being the head of an elaborate network. The ideology of militant Islam is what is widespread, not the network of related terrorists. Bin Laden is a populariser of some of these ideas, sure, but the ideas are what are most important. Destroy them and you cut off the motivation at source. Even if we credit the ideology with some great significance (which I both do and don’t, depending on the conversation) then the ideologist rather than some richboy terrorist is the leader.