Imagine if Bin Laden’s bookshelf was Classics instead of Propaganda
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has released the contents of Osama Bin Laden’s bookshelf and it appears he didn’t own copies of any of the classics of the Western world. During his multi-year camping trip through the mountains of Afghanistan, how did he miss the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn? While isolated from the world inside his Pakistani compound, he never commiserated with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter or Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein? Bin Laden had multiple wives but never read Shakespeare to keep the romance alive?
It is hard to understand why Bin Laden shunned classic English fiction when he read a wide array of American media reports. His coffee table had numerous copies of Business Week, Foreign Policy, Journal of International Security Affairs, Newsweek, and Popular Science. Bin Laden even read the LA Times while drinking his morning coffee.
Bid Laden was apparently a big fan of American fiction novels which makes his ignorance towards the classics even more puzzling. His pop fiction indulgences included:
Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins: An exposé of international corruption, and an inspired plan to turn the tide for future generations. With a presidential election around the corner, questions of America’s military buildup, environmental impact, and foreign policy are on everyone’s mind. Former Economic Hit Man John Perkins goes behind the scenes of the current geopolitical crisis and offers bold solutions to our most pressing problems. Drawing on interviews with other EHMs, jackals, CIA operatives, reporters, businessmen, and activists, Perkins reveals the secret history of events that have created the current American Empire, including:
Conspirators’ Hierarchy by John Coleman: This book written by a former MI 6 Intelligence agent, rips off the lid of the conspiratorial group that knows no national boundaries, is ABOVE the laws of every aspect of politics, religion, commerce,industry, banking,insurance mining and even the drug trade. Learn how this small ELITE GROUP, which is answerable to no one except its members, has pulled the strings and manipulates the affairs of the entire world.
Crossing the Rubicon by Michael Ruppert: The attacks of September 11, 2001, were accomplished through an amazing orchestration of logistics and personnel. Crossing the Rubicon discovers and identifies key suspects — finding some of them in the highest echelons of American government — by showing how they acted in concert to guarantee that the attacks produced the desired result. Crossing the Rubicon is unique not only for its case-breaking examination of 9/11, but for the breadth and depth of its world picture — an interdisciplinary analysis of petroleum, geopolitics, narcotraffic, intelligence and militarism — without which 9/11 cannot be understood.
Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies by Noam Chomsky: In his 1988 CBC Massey Lecture, Noam Chomsky inquires into the nature of the media in a political system where the population cannot be disciplined by force and thus must be subjected to more subtle forms of ideological control. Specific cases are illustrated in detail, using the U.S. media primarily but also media in other societies. Chomsky considers how the media might be democratized (as part of the general problem of developing more democratic institutions) in order to offer citizens broader and more meaningful participation in social and political life.
Secrets of the Federal Reserve by Eustace Mullins: Mullins presents some bare facts about the Federal Reserve System with subjects on: it IS NOT a U.S. government bank; it IS NOT controlled by Congress; it IS a privately owned Central Bank controlled by the elite financiers in their own interest. The Federal Reserve elite controls excessive interest rates, inflation, the printing of paper money, and have taken control of the depression of prosperity in the United States.
What does this reading list tell us about the most dangerous terrorist in the world? Bid Laden was the authority for directing his extremist army but his base of knowledge about the Western world was very skewed by the radical conspiracy theorists that he was reading. Imagine how different the events of the last 20 years would be if Bin Laden was reading the best that the West had to offer — Ulysses, Don Quixote, Moby Dick, Hamlet, The Odyssey, The Great Gatsby, Crime and Punishment, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Pride and Prejudice, The Catcher in the Rye, and other — instead of the fictitious propaganda that fueled his hatred for America?
