Immortal Technique - "The Legacy Of Bin Laden" Essay For XXL Mag

Few emcees of today are able to truly grasp geo-political events the way that Felipe Coronel can and does...As the news broke late yesterday about the killing of Osama Bin Laden, one of Hip-Hop's most politically contrite and consciously minded minds went to work writing a comment, that to me, pretty much encapsulates some of the best commentary on the matter I've seen or heard anywhere, on the web, radio or TV broadcast. Here it is....

-BIG D O

In a world that has been flooded by news, there is usually nothing that rises far above the smoldering lava of sensation—that which consumes all truth and absorbs all lies mixing them into a fiery lake or stew of bubbling nonsense. So much so, that to discover glanced over facts, to question people of importance within government or the machine itself leads to the branding of one as a “conspiracy theorist.”' 

Truthfully, there are many people who lived life with doubt over the facts surrounding 9/11, who felt afraid to express it, probably because they feared being accused of “hating America,” of being “with the terrorists,” hence sympathizing with the people who were responsible for killing all of those who died on 9/11. You talk to people like this at work, you see them walking by you everyday, you can read their rants on message boards or in chat rooms around the world, insulting people who present their doubts. Some choose to not question anything to fit in, others just figure their opinion is irrelevant and doesn’t change anything. After all, there is such thing as human error and no matter how much the government or people in it stand to gain, they could have a made a mistake, by mistake, and not on purpose. Some secrets are best kept secrets in the interest of national security. However, if national security means protecting the abuse of power and the negligence of authority, then it is not the security of a nation that is being protected, but the indulgences of the corrupt. 

Of course, the counterpart to this position, which creates the fervor of hatred and disrespectful debate, is the believer of all conspiracy theories and repeater of random information with only websites as sources. The angry person who blows up a postal truck because they think that their tax dollars shouldn’t go to excessive spending, or things like bombing people or paying mercenaries triple for what soldiers should be doing. This person is sometimes purposefully placed in that position and given a platform as a deterrent for the people who actually have a truth to be heard and taken seriously. This is what we term an agent provocateur, a mole planted to make the real issues lose credibility mixed in with insanity.

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