Letter to Young Americans

Looking for existential crises in all the wrong places

Photo by Scott Graham on Unsplash

Dear young Americans,

Over the past several weeks, Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America”, penned 21 years ago today, has gone viral online. As with everything awful, it originated on TikTok, racking up tens of millions of views and nearly three-quarters of a billion impressions before the platform disabled the hashtag and began removing posts. In the time since, the letter has reached virtually every corner of the web.

Young Americans posted videos by the hundreds and comments by the millions expressing shock at Bin Laden’s missive justifying the September 11th, 2001 attacks which brought the Twin Towers crashing down on 3,000 civilians. Shock not at the depravity of rationalizing flying jetliners into skyscrapers, or at the letter’s disgusting conspiracism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, and jihadism — but shock at the realization of how right Bin Laden was. Many of you found it “mind-blowing” to hear that the Jews control the world. You considered Islamist denunciations of LGBT and women’s rights a “revelation.” When Bin Laden wrote that no Americans are innocent and therefore all are fair game to be slaughtered, you said that “he was right” and that it caused you to have an “existential crisis.”

These reactions tie into broader attitudes held by young Americans. Only 42 percent of people 18 to 34 say they are “extremely proud” or “very proud” to be an American, compared to 85 percent in 2013. Just 16 percent of Gen Z are proud to live in the United States. Less than half of 18 to 29-year-olds think voting makes a difference, and 67 percent think the US’s system of government needs a major overhaul (11 percent saying it should be replaced entirely). Young people are also the least supportive of Israel, the most isolationist, and the least confident that America can be a force for good.

You are disillusioned and cynical about the West in general and the US in particular, but your jadedness is unearned. You act as though you are the first generation to face challenges, the first to be lied to by your government, and the first to experience the collision between the horseshit you were fed as children and the hard knocks of real life. Despite having more knowledge at your fingertips than any other generation, you choose to remain ignorant of history and of the world. You persist in the belief that the flaws of modernity mean that we are living in the worst of times, and that the flaws of the West mean that it is irredeemably worthless. You meet the progress of the past several centuries with the sneer of an ingrate. You narcissistically place yourself at the center of the universe, declaring that America’s problems are not only the worst in the world, but also the cause of most of the world’s problems.

These attitudes stem from and culminate in a school of thought known as “postcolonialism.” This, along with the other tenets of critical social justice, purports in theory to oppose racism, imperialism, and the subjugation of native peoples, but justifies in practice collectivized guilt, racial essentialism, and the hatred of white people and the West. Worse still, it justifies violence and even murder against any group of people deemed to be “oppressors” — a designation one can hold simply by being born. You imagine, in your limitless conceit, that Europeans are the only group of people to ever practice imperialism, slavery, or racism. You ignore incredible swaths of human history to justify the warped view that white Westerners are uniquely evil. You ignore the fact that the Arab-Muslim slave trade lasted more than 13 centuries and affected more than 17 million people, most of them African. You ignore the countless examples of conquest, empire, and mass murder that have occurred the world over. You ignore the estimated 50 million people who live in slavery today, the vast majority of which are enslaved in non-Western countries.

When you chant “resistance by any means necessary” and “decolonization is not a metaphor”; when you nod along as Bin Laden writes that the Americans in the World Trade Center were not innocent; when you profess that the Israeli children tied to their parents and set ablaze by Hamas were in fact “colonizers” being held to account for their crimes; when you bite the bullet and say that everyday Americans deserve to be killed for sitting on stolen land, you are telling us what postcolonialism is at its core: left-wing fascism masquerading as social justice. You say that microaggressions are violence, that words are violence, indeed even that “silence is violence.” But actual violence is fine, as long as you call the victims colonizers.

I take a perverse solace in the fact that your generation is so coddled, misparented, ill-educated, psychologically fragile, developmentally arrested, and financially screwed that you may never be competent enough in large numbers to take the reins of power in society. Many are quick to attribute the wayward attitudes of youth culture to economic frustration in particular. This is the same thinking that leads people to the misapprehension that jihadists are driven to suicide bombings over material concerns, despite the fact that suicide bombings are extraordinarily rare among the world’s billions of non-Muslim downtrodden. There is more at play here than a lack of funds. The Greatest Generation was raised through the Great Depression, and they went on to defeat the Nazis. You grew up during the Great Recession, and you are well on your way to becoming Nazis.

There is nothing anyone could ever write in an open letter that is going to change your minds en masse. In time, I hope that many of you will grow out of this sophomoric, Chomsky-esque view of the United States. A political worldview that amounts to “America bad” is a reductive, ignorant, and painfully imbecilic way to go through life. But too many of you will, I fear, carry a large portion of these attitudes for many years yet. You will be free to voice these opinions. You won’t be hauled off to prison, or stripped of your citizenship, or deported, as some foolish authoritarians have called for. Unlike the countries and cultures you unthinkingly champion in your blind hatred of your own, America is a free country, with freedom of speech, due process, human rights, and democracy.

Try voicing murderous dissent — or just plain old dissent — anywhere in the Muslim world, or the non-Western world, and see where that gets you. You’ll be rotting in a prison cell if you’re lucky, and shot by the authorities or torn limb from limb by a lynch mob if you’re not. Here, we proudly tolerate your dissent, not because we are weak, but because we are strong. The fact that you can express solidarity with terrorists, butchers, and rapists, freely and without fear of bodily harm, is proof that America is, in fact, better than these other places. We will not behead you, stone you, hang you from a crane, or burn you alive. We will counter your speech with our speech. We will defeat your venomous ideas with better ones. And in the fullness of time, your defeat will bring you deep shame. If being “on the right side of history” is something you truly care about, now is the time to change course, before you become a byword for what happens when an entire generation loses their way.

Sincerely,

Jamie Paul

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See also: Raging for the Machine

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