Muammar Gaddafi

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Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi, (Arabic: معمر محمد ابومنيار القذافي‎) , alleged "druggie drag queen",^[2] Brotherly Leader and Guide of the Revolution, King of the Kings of Africa, May His Spellings Be Many,^[3] aka The Mad Dog of the Middle-East (1942–2011) was the dictator of Libya from 1969 until his death. Interestingly, even after taking control of Libya Gaddhafi never upped his military rank past colonel, apparently out of a desire to avoid taking any grandiose titles.^[4] This did nothing to stop him from becoming a horrible authoritarian.^{[citation NOT needed]}

His domestic policy was characterized by Islamic socialist economics and welfare statism, funded by having lots of petroleum. In foreign policy, he was an Arab nationalist. He held the creepy title of "Brotherly Leader and Guide of the Revolution," had pictures of himself all over the country and tolerated no criticism of himself, in true Kim Jong Il style. In February 2011, civil disobedience started in Benghazi before turning into an all-out civil war; by August 2011 he had been officially deposed by the National Transitional Council, and he was killed by rebels on October 20.^[5] At the time of his death, he was wanted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity due to ordering attacks on civilians; the case was dismissed due to his passing.^[6]

Cult of personality[edit]

In 1979, journalist Oriana Fallaci interviewed Khadaffy, and among other things exposed his personality cult to his face.^[7][8]:91-92

Gathafi: … And the same was done by the students. In fact, only the people count in Libya today.

Fallaci: Really? Then how come everywhere I go I see only your image, your picture? Even on the facade of the Catholic church, which is now a storage depot, there is an enormous picture of you in a military uniform. And the same on the streets, in the shops, in offices. At my hotel they even sell pure silver plates with your picture in the middle.

Ghadaffi: What have I got to do with that? The people wanted it this way. What am I supposed to do to stop them? Can I prohibit it?

Fallaci: Oh, yes, you can. You prohibit so many things, all you do is prohibit; just imagine if you cannot stop this personality cult of yours.

Gathafi: What can I do?

Fallaci: As a child I saw the same thing with Mussolini.

Ghadaffi: You said the same thing to Khomeini.

Fallaci: True. I always make that comparison when I interview someone who reminds me of Mussolini.

Transliterations[edit]

If you've read anything about Khadaffy already, you may have noticed that his name ends up spelled at least a few different ways — there are at least 648 ways to spell Ghadafi's name in English. No, really. That's the actual number cited by a 1982 edition of Libya: A Modern History.^[9] Why the problem? There is no standardised transliteration of Arabic into English. Journalists and authors in the western world traditionally spells his name "Muammar al-Gaddafi" while his passport gives his name as "Moamar al Gathaffi." To add to the confusion, the tyrant himself is alleged to have spelt his name "Moammar al Qadaffi" while his playboy son, Saif al-Islam spelt it "Muammar al Kaddaffi."

The Green Book[edit]

Poster for the 1979 International Seminar of The Green Book

Khadaffy called his political views the "Third International Theory." Those political and economic ideas are spelled out in the Green Book (no relationship to the crappy Oscar-bait melodrama of the same name), which is split into three sections. Reading the book's contents, one has to wonder what kind of political ideology (if any) he had in mind when writing it, considering how many of the book's odd ideas seemingly contradict each other as well as his rather interesting take on left-wing governance.

For example, the first section deals with his proposal for a radically decentralized participatory democracy, in which voting, political parties, and representative government do not exist, and in their place are local popular committees that send representatives to a national assembly (in effect, a representative government, even if he wants to pretend otherwise). This is claimed to be a direct democracy, though by nature it is literally representative. The second section espouses socialism as his favored economic system, albeit a decentralized form led by a form of workers' councils. The wage system would be abolished and goods produced would belong to the producers. Production for profit would be banned. The views in the first two sections of the Green Book are superficially similar to council communism, except that Gadafy opposes Marxism and espouses Islam.

The economic and political ideas in the first two sections are thus divorced from their left-libertarian origins and instead given a context of social conservatism and pan-Arab nationalism, which are the subject of the third section of the Green Book. That section contains Qathafi's views on social and moral issues, and it is the sort of cranky stuff of which Jerry Falwell would be proud: women should bear children and stay in the kitchen, black people are more sexually active because they have little to do in the hot sun, and more similar batshittery.

The extent to which the Green Book has ever served as a real blueprint for Libya's governance is questionable at best. In practice, Kadaffi was an autocratic military dictator who let Libya's popular committees and workers' councils have their say but then did whatever he wanted to anyway, with the popular democracy serving as a sort of steam valve for popular discontent and opinion but not exercising any actual governance over the country. If the committees decided something he didn't like, Khadaffy simply overrode it. Key to how this worked was the Green Book's proposal that there should be no written constitution or body of law, but that society should operate on the basis of tradition — in theory, organically emerging from a monolithic society sharing a single culture; in practice, whatever Kazzafi said went. In reality, Libya did have laws and a written body of same, but they originated in decrees from Gheddafi and the revolutionary council. Those laws include the banning of political parties, imprisonment of anyone criticizing the government, and imprisonment of anyone discussing any heresies that depart from the One True Green Book. For a country supposedly based on the idea that there should be no "law", Libya sure did have a lot of political prisoners.

Females[edit]

Despite Ghadaffi's regressive pronouncements about women in The Green Book, Kazzafi's coup granted women far more rights and legal protections than before the coup.^[10]:132 However, Qadhafi was far from being a feminist. He kept a private harem of rotating sex slaves within his personal Bab al-Aziza compound that he raped and tortured. He even selected girls and women to be enslaved when he visited the schools and universities.^[10]:131-134

Relationship with the world[edit]

Gaddafi's first move after the 1969 revolution was to kick U.S. and British military bases off Libyan soil.

During the mid-1980s, Gaddafi made his presence known by supporting several high-profile terrorist groups. His support of terrorism earned him the ire of the Ronald Reagan administration, who dubbed him "the Mad Dog of the Middle East".

Ten days after a discotheque bombing in West Berlin in 1986 which killed three and injured 230 including 79 American nationals, Reagan, suspecting Libya was behind the attack, unleashed a bombing raid on Libya, which Gathafi claimed killed his 15-month-old adopted daughter (evidence for this is lacking). Subsequently, evidence has shown that Libya was indeed behind the Berlin bombing.^[11]

Having laid low for a couple of decades and made a few showy moves of dismantling his nuclear program, Kadhafi was once again being trotted out as an example of a (reformed) moderate Arab leader (with some basis in fact, but avoid not as bad as please). China and Russia were two of the most valuable traders in Libyan oil up until the civil war in 2011.

Military blunders[edit]

Despite his background as a military figure Gaddafi had an impressively bad record of leading Libya into wars, losing, but somehow retaining his power. In 1977 Ghadaffi tried to stop Egypt and Israel from making a peace agreement that would later be known as the Camp David Accords. A planned "march on Cairo" to protest the treaty involved several Libyan tank divisions. The Egyptians easily repelled this invasion and Anwar Sadat was planning a campaign to push to Tripoli before other Arab states intervened.^[12]

Afterward, Khadafy turned his attention south to Chad, which had been fighting a civil war. Kadhafi was hoping to seize some of the northern portions of that nation and began backing some of the factions in the civil war. France, however, was concerned about Ghaddafy extending his influence south out of North Africa and into Central Africa. The French (with American, Sudanese, and Egyptian assistance) began funding and organizing the Chadians, eventually reaching the point where Gaddafy had no allies left in Chad. In 1987 his army was defeated in what is known as the "Toyota War," where Chadian fighters literally piled into the back of modified Toyota pickup trucks and pursued his forces across the border.^[13] This taught the world that a pickup truck with either a gun or anti-tank missile attached makes a really effective support vehicle.

Pan Am Flight 103[edit]

It was just a joke, bro!

On December 21, 1988, 270 people were killed when Pan Am Flight 103 exploded mid-air over Lockerbie, Scotland. 15 years later on August 16, 2003, the Libyan government formally admitted responsibility (but did not admit guilt) for the bombing in a letter presented to the president of the United Nations Security Council. How much Qathafi was behind the planning of the bombing is open to conjecture, but it soured relations between Libya and the Western world for many years.

Idi Amin[edit]

When Idi Amin fled Uganda after the fall of his kingdom country, he was offered safe passage to Saudi Arabia via Libya. Qaddafi had long supported the Amin government, including supplying mercenaries to prop up his ailing regime.

War on Terror[edit]

Soon after the 9/11 terror attacks in the United States, British and American intelligence agencies forged a partnership with Qadhdhafi to spy on Libyan dissidents in the Western world, in exchange for permission to use Libya as a base for extraordinary rendition.^{[14][15][16][17][18]} As a relatively secular ruler, Ghaddafi had been battling internally militant jihadists pining for a state fully under Sharia throughout the lifetime of his regime.

Wealth[edit]

By the time of his death, LA Times estimated Qadthafi's fortune in $200 billion (most of it in accounts and investments in countries like the US, France, Germany, and Italy), what would make this life-long socialist in fact, the richest person in the world,^[19] although it actually depends at how you measure wealth. Since much of his assets were (at least in theory) the property of the Libyan government, it might not be technically accurate to say that all that money was his, even though he and his sycophants were to some extent the true "owners" of the entire country.^[20] A considerable part of these assets remained frozen years after his death.^[21]

Antisemitism[edit]

In life, Kaddafi was an antisemite of almost Hitler-level proportions. He attempted to inculcate hatred of Jews among the populace, confiscating all Jewish property upon rising to power and cancelling all debts to Jews. Despite the prohibition of immigration, most Libyan Jews managed a mass Exodus, leaving only twenty Jews remaining in Libya and the last died in 2002. The same year, another woman was discovered to have Jewish ancestry and she wisely fled to Rome upon learning. Gadaffi made a half-hearted attempt to reconcile with powerful Jewish leaders such as Moshe Kahlon but this was only because of an attempt on the part of his son and expected successor, Saif al-Islam, to persuade Libyan Jewish immigrants to Israel to return to Libya and surrender the land to the Palestinians. So fierce was Qaddafi's hatred of the Jews that he's said to have killed anyone who found out that his mother had Jewish ancestry.^[22]

Death[edit]

Following the start of the Arab Spring, an armed insurrection began against the Kadafi government and was later backed by NATO. Following the almost complete defeat of the government forces, Gaddafi went into hiding. He was later captured alive in a sewer,^[23] but severely wounded by bullets during the fall of Sirte on October 20, 2011. Shortly afterward he was confirmed dead, as was his son Motassim, also initially captured alive. The circumstances of their deaths remain unclear, and there has been speculation that they could have been summarily executed by rebel combatants. The UN Human Rights Office and Amnesty International have called for an official investigation. Various eyewitness accounts and cellphone camera footage have emerged since, suggesting that rebels had beaten and killed the wounded Qadthafi, who is also alleged to have been sodomised with what was possibly a knife, a bayonet or a stick. The despot's last words are alleged to have been "What did I ever do to you?" and "What you're doing is wrong, guys — do you understand right and wrong?"^[24]

There is no word on his smoking hot bodyguards, but they were speculated to be residing in the Italian embassy.

External links[edit]

• Brooker, you brilliant man on YouTube (blocked in the UK)
• His equivalent of giving a girl a mixed tape. - She deserves credit for not nuking his house. (She was also hit on by Netanyahu.^{[citation needed]})

References[edit]