Content Warning: Discussions of rather extreme violence, sexual abuse included.
“I have also invited Brother Leader Gaddafi to this country [South Africa]. And I do that because our moral authority dictates that we should not abandon those who helped us in the darkest hour in the history of this country. Not only did they [Libya] support us in return, they gave us the resources for us to conduct our struggle, and to win. And those South Africans who have berated me, for being loyal to our friends, literally they can go and throw themselves into a pool.” — Nelson Mandela (3)
“Liberator of Libya, He will be remembered as a great fighter, a revolutionary and martyr.” — Hugo Chavez (4)
“We came, we saw, he died. [Laughter]” — Hillary Clinton (5)
Though this essay will be covering the history and political situation of Libya, it cannot even hope to be a through or comprehensive history of the country. Rather, this serves to highlight a few important facts about Libya before, during and after Gaddafi’s leadership, as well as what lessons can be learned here.
A New Hope:
On 1st September 1969, Captain Muammar al-Gaddafi led a group of his fellow officers in revolt against the monarchy of Idris I of Libya, who was in Turkey for medical treatment at the time. After a successful and bloodless coup, the monarchy was abolished and the Libyan Arab Republic was established (6). So what kind of country had Gaddafi and his men inherited?
After the end of WWII, Libya had been ceded to France and Britain by a defeated Italy, both victors administratively linking it to their own colonies in Algeria and Tunisia. However, Britain’s empire had been dealt a crippling blow by the war and it was becoming harder and harder to directly lord over its increasingly unruly overseas domains. As a means of ensuring continued imperial dominance over it’s newly won lands, Libya was put under the monarchical control of the Senussi dynasty, with King Idris keeping “Libya in total obscurantism while promoting British economic and military interests” (7).
Even after the discovery of vast Libyan oil reserves in 1959, the country’s standard of living (for the masses, not Idris and his ilk) was shockingly low. “[T]he nation was mired in backwardness in education, health, housing, social security” and a mere 250,000 members of a citizenry of four million could even read (8).
These were the concerns Gaddafi was faced with upon coming to power. The following is a general summary of the various programs put in place by his government that (whilst not detailing the various changes in the policies of an administration that was never static in how it dealt with the social questions of its time) acts as a broad overview of the state of the Libyan people under the Colonel:
· The oil reserves previously made use of by imperialists and parasites were used to fund social programs and development for Libyan citizens, with Western oil companies (such as British Petroleum) being nationalised and the National Oil Corporation being created to facilitate the use of oil for the good of the nation (9).
· The Great Man Made River Project (GMMRP) was established as a means of distributing water to every citizen of a country that was primarily a desert region, this being the largest river project on the planet (10).
· Aided in large part by the now-improved irrigation that came with the aforementioned GMMRP, Libya’s problems of subsistence could be dealt with. Undernourishment was reduced to “less than 5% with a daily calorie intake of 3144” (11) and bread prices were kept so low that one dinar “bought 40 loaves” (12).
· The World Health Organisation wrote of Libya (which had suffered from utterly deplorable illiteracy rates and dreadful lack of education under the Senussi government); “The country boasts the highest literacy and educational enrolment rates in North Africa. Literacy among the population over 15 years is 88.5% (males 93.7%, females 83.2%), which is well above that in neighbouring countries. The substantial improvements in education in the past two decades have reduced illiteracy among females from 39% in 1980 to less than 16 % in 2006. Meanwhile, the overall combined primary, secondary and tertiary enrolment rate in 2006 was 88%, higher than in any of the neighbouring countries. Education is compulsory between the ages of 6 and 15 years. Secondary education starts at age 15 and lasts for three years. Unusually for the Region, female students tend to have more schooling than their male peers. (13)”
· Carrying on from that final line, gender relations under Gaddafi’s secular administration were vastly equalised, for whilst his own views on the matter were strange and contradictory (mixing sexist comments about women’s supposed lack of resilience with attacks on the patriarchal structures that keep women in domestic servitude (14)), the country was a great deal more progressive than many of its neighbours and “Women in Libya were free to work and dress as they liked (15)”.
· The government did a great deal to take care of the living costs of the Libyan people. The price of petrol was a mere $0.14 USD per litre (16), “Newlyweds received U.S $50,000 from the government (17)”, housing was made a human right — as stated in the Green Book (18), loans from the state bank were provided “at zero percent interest by law (19)”, medical treatment (albeit of limited quality) was made free (20) and a portion of the profits from every oil sale was credited to the bank accounts of all Libyan citizens (21).
· Even in spite of government corruption and Gaddafi’s own profiteering (22), Libya had the highest standards of living on the continent (23) and The African Exponent wrote; “The Human Development Report has been published since 1990 and it is in the report that the HDI is found. The last time the report was released with Gaddafi in power, Libya was ranked 53 of 163 countries with comparable data. The HDI of Arab states was 0,641 while Libya’s was 0,760. Libya was therefore better off than most Arab States. The HDI provides a composite measure of health, education and income. Does being placed above the Arab States average mean all was rosy? By no means! It simply means there were worse countries that the Western “whistle-blowers” did not “rescue”. In 2009, Libya was reported to be on track to achieve the Millennium Development Goals by 2015. (24)”
· And the tribal tensions that had rocked Libya for so long were soothed. “[H]is greatest feat, after the coup d’état, was absolutely remarkable: he succeeded in bringing together the intensely opposed ethnic groups of the north and south, who had always despised one another. Gaddafi was successful in sewing the fabric of society back together. (25)”
This was a far cry from actually being the socialist state that Gaddafi claimed Libya was (at least, if we’re going by any proper Marxist definition of socialism). Just like in Egypt when Nasser came to power, the Libyan proletariat was too underdeveloped to rule as a class in and for itself, meaning that the only truly revolutionary classes in the country were the nationalist petty bourgeoise and the peasantry, the interests and power of especially the former class being represented in the military generally and Gaddafi’s officer corps particularly. But the revolutionary process which began in 1969 was a hugely progressive development for the region and this new republic was miles ahead of what had come before and what would come after.
Muammar al-Gaddafi vs the World:
So what about foreign policy? How did Gaddafi’s Libya interact with the rest of the world?
Gaddafi was a man who — when sent for England for training as an officer in the Libyan army — had personally experienced the “patronising racism (26)” of British society. He had seen his country exploited and despoiled by imperial powers for years. He saw outside his country’s borders, the continuation of the worst sort of colonial barbarities, in West Asia and Africa both. So it’s hardly surprising that when he came to power he was a fierce anti-colonialist (whether it came as British, French, Zionist or any form), a supporter of pan-Islamism, pan-Arabism and pan-Africanism, and a supporter of anti-imperialist insurgencies the world over (27). Whilst a discussion of Gaddafi’s international diplomatic relations could be vast indeed, stretching from his relationship with Nasser to his freeing Libya of all foreign debt (28), the focus of this section will be on Gaddafi’s relationship with the imperial core, the US in particular.
Anyone familiar with how the story told here will end might be surprised to learn that, even after Gaddafi’s closing of a US air base the year after he came to power, America was actually quite friendly with the Colonel at first. As a matter of fact, Uncle Sam thwarted “three serious plots against his rule during his first two years — because of his fierce anti-communism, which stemmed basically from his taking Marxism’s implicit atheism at face value and viewing it as irreconcilably at odds with his Islamic faith. (29)”
This brief romance was obviously a doomed one, the sweeping changes Gaddafi brought about to improve the lives of his people quickly drew Washington’s ire, his entry into oil development and arms agreements with the Soviets (even as he aided the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan) didn’t help either and his support of ‘terrorism’ was a serious irritant to Uncle Sam (30).
“During the 1970s and ’80s, [Gaddafi] was accused of using his large oil revenues to support — with funds, arms, training, offices, havens, diplomacy and/or general subversion — a wide array of radical/insurgent/terrorist organizations, particularly certain Palestinian factions and Muslim dissident and minority movements in various parts of the Middle East, Africa, and Asia; as well as the IRA and Basque and Corsican separatists in Europe; several groups engaged in struggle against the apartheid regime in South Africa; Noriega in Panama, opposition groups and politicians in Costa Rica, St Lucia, Jamaica, Dominica, and France’s Caribbean colonies of Guadeloupe, French Guiana, and Martinique; the Japanese Red Army, the Italian Red Brigades, Germany’s Baader-Meinhof gang … the list is without end. (31)”
“[Gaddafi’s] principal crime… was not that he supported terrorist groups, but that he supported the wrong terrorist groups; i.e., Qaddafi was not supporting the same terrorists that Washington was, such as the Nicaraguan Contras, UNITA in Angola, Cuban exiles in Miami, the governments of El Salvador and Guatemala, and the US military in Grenada. (32)”
So, in part to provide an excuse to pour more funding into the US military for the sake of assisting the neoliberal transfer of wealth from poor to rich that Carter started and Reagan cranked up to full volume (33), and in part to deal with the terrifying spectre of self-determination for the third world, the great crusade against Tripoli began. Gaddafi’s actual support of ‘terrorism’ was vastly inflated (even in regards to the insurgencies he was in support of his promises weren’t always fulfilled, the IRA for example once complained that they hadn’t received any funding from Libya at all (34)). Now the US National Security State and it’s loyal media worked tirelessly to pin all manner of conspiracies and unrelated violence on the Colonel, from brutal attacks on the airports of Rome and Vienna in ’85 (which European security services blamed on Syria instead (35)) to the bombing of a West Berlin nightclub in ’86 (again, incredibly questionable (36)), to the downing of PanAm flight 103 over Lockerbie in Scotland (which even the CIA themselves were linking to the Iranian-backed PFLP-GC just months before they accused Libya (37)). And Hollywood was every bit as key in contributing to the anti-Gaddafi hysteria as the news media, pumping out a slew of chauvinist propaganda of which probably the most famous example these days is the Rob Zemeckis classic Back to the Future, with its virulently racist portrayal of bloodthirsty Libyan ‘terrorists’ (38).
Along with all this came accusations that were truly absurd:
“It was claimed as well that Libya was behind, or at least somehow linked to, the attempt on Pope John Paul’s life, the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, mining the Suez Canal, attempting to blow up the US Embassy in Cairo, various plane hijackings, a bomb explosion on an American airliner over Greece, blowing up a synagogue in Istanbul, and seeking to destabilize the governments of Chad, Liberia, the Sudan, and other African countries … and … [Gaddafi] took drugs, was an extreme womanizer, was bisexual, dressed in women’s clothing, wore makeup, carried a teddy bear, had epileptic fits … (39)”
Gaddafi, for his part, actually played along with this. He took the opportunity to position himself as a key leader of anti-American struggles the world over and managed to increase his international prestige (outside the imperial core anyway). He became more belligerent in his threats against the US and its allies, formed ties between himself and the Nation of Islam inside America itself and stepped up his nuclear program (40).
On April 14, 1986, a diplomatically isolated (at least, from other regional powers) and viciously sanctioned Libya was subjected to a bombing attack courtesy of Ronald Reagan. The excuse given for this was that it was in ‘retaliation’ for the aforementioned bombing in West Germany, two American servicemen being counted in the death toll (41).
“The bombs dropped on Libya took the lives of a reported 40 to 100 people, all civilians but one, and wounded another hundred or so. The French Embassy, located in a residential district, was destroyed. The dead included [Gaddafi’s] young adopted daughter and a teenage girl visiting from London; all of [Gaddafi’s] other seven children as well as his wife were hospitalized, suffering from shock and various injuries.
“It was not claimed by the United States that any of the people killed or wounded had any connection to the Berlin bombing. Like the mid-east terrorists who threw hand grenades at an El Al ticket counter to kill Israelis simply because they were Israelis, and those who planted a bomb on PanAm flight 103 in order to kill Americans simply because they were Americans, the bombing of Libya was an attempt to kill Libyans simply because they were Libyans. After the air attack, White House spokesman Larry Speakes announced that “It is our hope this action will preempt and discourage Libyan attacks against innocent civilians in the future.”
“The Libyan the United States most wanted to kill of course was [Gaddafi]. The bombing had been an assassination attempt. Said a “well-informed Air Force intelligence officer” cited by the New York Times, “There’s no question they were looking for [Gaddafi]. It was briefed that way. They were going to kill him.” Which is what you have to do with a mad dog.
“Subsequently, two of [Gaddafi’s] children filed suit in the United States to stop President Reagan from launching more “assassination attempts” on their family. The suit, which was rejected in court, alleged that Reagan and other top officials, in ordering the raids, had violated an executive order that bars attempted assassinations of foreign government leaders. Another suit filed in Washington was in behalf of 65 people killed or injured by the bombing. Meanwhile, the US Navy was awarding 158 medals to the pilots who dropped 500-pound and 2,000-pound bombs in the dark of night upon sleeping people.
“The notion of targeting [Gaddafi’s] family originated with the CIA, which claimed that in Bedouin culture [Gaddafi] would be diminished as a leader if he could not protect his home: “If you really get at [Gaddafi’s] house — and by extension his family — you’ve destroyed an important connection for the people in terms of loyalty.”
“To make sure the Libyan people got the message, the Voice of America repeatedly told them, following the bombing, things like “Colonel [Gaddafi] is your tragic burden” and that as long you obey his orders you must “accept the consequences”. (42)”
The US was condemned internationally for this, Reagan got a popularity boost at home and Gaddafi’s own reputation as a hero of the anti-imperialist cause was further strengthened.
As the 80s wore on and the US only seemed to grow in power, Gaddafi moved to modernise a bloodied and bruised Libya, “freeing up civil liberties, releasing hundreds of political prisoners, removing restrictions on travel abroad, loosening up the economy (“All Libyans are called upon to become bourgeois”); at the same time, making peace or improving relations with a number of African neighbors”, with the intent of calming down the Americans (43). It didn’t work. Reagan was swapped out for the elder Bush in 1989 but as faces changed, the aggression carried on, with more military exercises being carried out “in Libya’s back yard (44)” and two more Libyan planes being shot down by US forces. Even after Libya began cutting off funding for those infamous ‘terrorist’ groups, Gaddafi himself stating that he considered those organisations as having caused “more harm than benefit” to the Arab cause and claiming that he wanted no more confrontation between Libya and America (45).
It fell on deaf ears. The sanctions, fear-mongering over nuclear weapons and terrorism, condemnations, harassment and persecution continued.
But then the Iraq War broke out and quickly — inevitably — turned into an unholy horror, one of the worst crimes of the new century in fact, and the leaders of America and Britain needed someone to turn to, someone to hold up as an example that the deaths of what would become more than a million people and the complete destruction of one of the few secular governments left in West Asia had actually brought about at least some positive effects in the ‘Middle East’. That someone was Muammar al-Gaddafi (46).
Tony Blair and W. Bush began cozying up to Gaddafi, offering co-operation and the lifting of the sanctions that had strangled Libya’s economy in return for Gaddafi ending his nuclear program and admittance of responsibility over the Lockerbie bombing (among other things). He proved to be a decent ally in their fight against (certain) militant Islamist groups (though he never did co-operate with Western financial interests anywhere near as much as the imperialists wanted him to) and was genuinely dedicated fighting the Islamist far-right — after all, Libya had been the first country to issue an Interpol arrest warrant for notorious Saudi millionaire Osama bin Laden — which at the time had been “studiously ignored by American and British intelligence. (47)”
Gaddafi was given interviews on the BBC, a massive PR campaign of support and even an opportunity to address the United Nations where he got to promote his “Third Universal Way” (48) and call for investigations into the assassinations of John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr (49). Libyan troops were given training by the UK and US, Gaddafi’s son could be seen at the White House itself and Gaddafi acquired a good deal of arms and equipment from the West.
And Gaddafi shouldn’t have trusted them for a goddamn second.
The Empire Strikes Back:
So why did the imperialists turn on the Colonel? At the time, William Blum drew up a list of just a few possible reasons:
· “Gaddafi’s plans to conduct Libya’s trading in Africa in raw materials and oil in a new currency — the gold African dinar, a change that could have delivered a serious blow to the US’s dominant position in the world economy. (In 2000, Saddam Hussein announced Iraqi oil would be traded in euros, not dollars; sanctions and an invasion followed.) (50)”
· “A host-country site for Africom, the US Africa Command, one of six regional commands the Pentagon has divided the world into. Many African countries approached to be the host have declined, at times in relatively strong terms. Africom at present is headquartered in Stuttgart, Germany. According to a State Department official: “We’ve got a big image problem down there. … Public opinion is really against getting into bed with the US. They just don’t trust the US.” (51)”
· “An American military base to replace the one closed down by Gaddafi after he took power in 1969. There’s only one such base in Africa, in Djibouti. Watch for one in Libya sometime after the dust has settled. It’ll perhaps be situated close to the American oil wells. Or perhaps the people of Libya will be given a choice — an American base or a NATO base. (52)”
· “Another example of NATO desperate to find a raison d’être for its existence since the end of the Cold War and the Warsaw Pact. (53)”
· “Gaddafi’s role in creating the African Union. The corporate bosses never like it when their wage slaves set up a union. The Libyan leader has also supported a United States of Africa for he knows that an Africa of 54 independent states will continue to be picked off one by one and abused and exploited by the members of the [imperial core]. Gaddafi has moreover demanded greater power for smaller countries in the United Nations. (54)”
· “The claim by Gaddafi’s son, Saif el Islam, that Libya had helped to fund Nicolas Sarkozy’s election campaign could have humiliated the French president and explain his obsessiveness and haste in wanting to be seen as playing the major role in implementing the “no fly zone” and other measures against Gaddafi. A contributing factor may have been the fact that France has been weakened in its former colonies and neo-colonies in Africa and the Middle East, due in part to Gaddafi’s influence. (55)”
· “Gaddafi has been an outstanding supporter of the Palestinian cause and critic of Israeli policies; and on occasion has taken other African and Arab countries, as well as the West, to task for their not matching his policies or rhetoric; one more reason for his lack of popularity amongst world leaders of all stripes. (56)”
· “In January, 2009, Gaddafi made known that he was considering nationalizing the foreign oil companies in Libya. He also has another bargaining chip: the prospect of utilizing Russian, Chinese and Indian oil companies. During the current period of hostilities, he invited these countries to make up for lost production. But such scenarios will now not take place. [NATO] will instead seek to privatize the National Oil Corporation, transferring Libya’s oil wealth into foreign hands. (57)”
· “The American Empire is troubled by any threat to its hegemony. In the present historical period the empire is concerned mainly with Russia and China. China has extensive energy investments and construction investments in Libya and elsewhere in Africa. The average American neither knows nor cares about this. The average American imperialist cares greatly, if for no other reason than in this time of rising demands for cuts to the military budget it’s vital that powerful “enemies” be named and maintained. (58)”
Regardless of the reasons, what happened next is well known (or at least the surface elements are well known). A month after the Arab Spring broke out in Tunisia, an anti-Gaddafi protest movement erupted in Benghazi. But there were some pretty clear and obvious warning signs of a NATO-backed colour revolution in the making here. It didn’t really resemble most of the other uprisings that had sprung up in North Africa and West Asia, it had a great concentration of rather extreme Jihadists amongst it and there wasn’t nearly as much mass support behind the uprising (59). There was also something ominous about the fact that they were flying the flag of the old Senussi monarchy, there was no peaceful phase of the rebellion but rather an immediate eruption of violent resistance on the part of suspiciously well-armed protesters, the uprising had started off at the heart of the country’s oil region, one of the first moves the rebels made was setting up a central bank, “International support came quickly, even beforehand, from Qatar and al Jazeera to the CIA and French intelligence (60)” and a good deal of anti-Gaddafi graffiti from rebels and rebel sympathisers depicted the man as a “demonic Jew (61)”. This is not to say that everyone involved in the anti-Gaddafi resistance was a reactionary scumbag working for the imperialists, there certainly were people who wanted a more democratic Libyan state and greater political freedoms for ordinary Libyans. And Gaddafi had certainly hurt his popularity amongst certain sectors of the country’s people through letting his security services make use of torture to stabilize the regime, working with the imperialist Western powers (even if it he never co-operated anywhere near enough with them to please the plutocrats in Washington, London, Paris and so on) and killing 11 civilians in Benghazi who were protesting against a visit from a bigoted Italian minister wearing a t-shirt displaying a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad (62). But the fact is that the rebel forces were swarming with far-right elements from day one. Overblown stories of atrocities on the side of government forces and the furious ravings of Gaddafi were used to justify NATO action against Tripoli (63).
“The Libyan people are being saved from a “massacre”, both actual and potential. This massacre, however, seems to have been grossly exaggerated by [NATO], al Jazeera TV, and that station’s owner, the government of Qatar; and nothing approaching reputable evidence of a massacre has been offered, neither a mass grave or anything else; the massacre stories appear to be on a par with the Viagra-rape stories spread by al Jazeera (the Fox News of the Libyan uprising). (64)”
Throughout 2011 the media were key in upholding the state department narrative and deterring anti-war activism, with both liberal and conservative commentators cheerleading for a return to the sort of ‘humanitarian’ interventionism that had been thought discredited after the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan (65) alongside the already mentioned avalanche of propaganda (with mainstream media outlets in the imperial core even reporting the claim made baselessly by the rebels that “Gaddafi was carrying out a ‘genocide’, and that should he take Benghazi he would kill up to half a million people (66)”). It should also be noted that the response of a good deal of the Western left to the Libya crisis quite frankly ranged from despicable and chauvinistic collaboration with the imperialists to utterly pathetic handwringing and false equivocations. Many social democrats and ‘democratic socialists’ like Bernie Sanders (of the US Democratic Party) and Jack Layton (of Canada’s New Democratic Party/NDP) actively supported what was to be the imperial gang rape of Libya. Sanders publicly joined in the smear campaign against Gaddafi in a Fox News interview and co-sponsored both the Senate resolution and subsequent US resolutions that paved the way for a NATO assault (67). The NDP as a whole tirelessly peddled regime change propaganda and invoked the “liberal imperialist “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) doctrine — which Canada and then Liberal leader and prominent Iraq war enthusiast Michel Ignatieff had played a major role in formulating in the early 2000s” (68), repeatedly backing the Harper government in its aggression against Libya (69). Jeremy Corbyn was one of the few major left reformist leaders in the imperial core (and he wasn’t even Britain’s Labour Party leader yet) who genuinely and actively opposed the attack on Libya, organising a dozen MPs to vote against involving the UK in the conflict (70). Yet even this valuable opposition was hurt by their perception of a need to look more ‘reasonable’ by condemning Gaddafi’s government (and sometimes even buying into absurd NATO propaganda about Gaddafi) while condemning the imperialists for their neocolonial warmongering. This severely weakened the left case against war, gave the interventionist narrative more of a sense of imagined moral purity, presented the case against intervention in exactly the terms set up by the interventionists allowed the Western propagandists even more free reign to slander the Libyan government without serious pushback and gave the impression that Libyans (and indeed the wider global community) had nothing to lose by letting Gaddafi fall from power. Even the legendary socialist George Galloway could be seen falling into this trap, railing against his country’s meddling in the region whilst attacking Gaddafi as a “criminal” and failing to push back properly against the propaganda about the supposed ‘massacre’ at Benghazi (71). Elsewhere on the left (or in some cases the “left”) Owen Jones was slandering those who didn’t buy into the NATO-approved narrative and rightfully defended Gaddafi as “a few nutters” (72), the Trotskyists of the International Marxist Tendency declared their wholehearted support for the Libyan ‘revolution’ but just not the Western intervention (73) and Gilbert Achar virulently defended the rebel groups against (accurate) accusations that they were crawling with racist Islamic extremists (74). They were using all the same working out as the warmongers but desperately trying to slap a different answer on the end of the equation.
The UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1973 and the NATO countries (America, Canada, Britain, France, Turkey, etc), aided by Jordan, Qatar, Sweden and the United Arab Emirates, established a No-Fly Zone over Libya and launched a bombing campaign between March and October of 2011 (75)
. They also proceeded to start openly working with the various Jihadist rebels (in spite of the horrific atrocities those rebels were responsible for, making use of torture, executing black people en masse and whatnot (76)), with Canadian military personnel even joking amongst themselves about how they had essentially become “Al-Qaeda’s air force (77)”.
Blum’s sources paint a fine picture of the character of the insurgency, which — to reiterate — had a great many members of Al-Qaeda among its number:
“Adding to the list of the rebels’ charming qualities we have the Amnesty International report that the rebels have been conducting mass arrests of black people across the nation, terming all of them “foreign mercenaries” but with growing evidence that a large number were simply migrant workers. Reported Reuters (August 29): “On Saturday, reporters saw the putrefying bodies of 22 men of African origin on a Tripoli beach. Volunteers who had come to bury them said they were mercenaries whom rebels had shot dead.” To complete this portrait of the West’s newest darlings we have this report from The Independent of London (August 27): “The killings were pitiless. They had taken place at a makeshift hospital, in a tent marked clearly with the symbols of the Islamic crescent. Some of the dead were on stretchers, attached to intravenous drips. Some were on the back of an ambulance that had been shot at. A few were on the ground, seemingly attempting to crawl to safety when the bullets came.” (78)”
America and its allies were perfectly happy to work with the same kind of people who had brought down the Twin Towers and brought about a wave of bloodshed in West Asia that was almost as bad as what Bush and Blair had carried out there, so they could bring down a secular government that was empowering women and providing for its people far more than most countries in the region, because doing so was in the interests of the US ruling class and the ruling classes of its allies.
Barack Obama was willing to work with militias that were exterminating black people by the score.
David Cameron was willing to work with some of the most profoundly anti-democratic groups in Libya and call them freedom fighters.
Stephen Harper was willing to work with Islamic extremists of the vilest and most utterly depraved kind.
Nicolas Sarkozy was willing to work with people whose values were antithetical to liberté and égalité, whose fraternité was of the most repressive sort.
Saif al-Islam Gaddafi said “The way these people are disowning me and my father is disgusting. Just a few months ago, we were being treated as honored friends. Now that rebels are threatening our country, these cowards are turning on us. (79)” ‘Cowards’ probably wasn’t the right term to use. ‘Snakes’, ‘devils’, ‘backstabbers’, ‘fascist collaborators’ or ‘fucking cunts’ might have been more accurate.
During the bombing campaign NATO forces “blanketed the county with more than 7,700 missiles (80)” resulting in an incredibly high number of civilian casualties (81). Patrick Cockburn, reporting in Libya, compared the conduct of the Western powers to that of the Italian colonialists in their initial invasion of the country, highlighting how even the bombing of “Ain Zara south of Tripoli… came almost exactly 100 years after the very same target had been hit by two small bombs dropped by an Italian plane in 1911. (82)”
The bombing wore on, Libya bled and the government crumbled. On October 20th, Gaddafi and his comrades broke out of his besieged hometown of Sirte, heading West in a convoy of six dozen vehicles. NATO forces struck the loyalist forces and watched as the rebel vultures began to circle (83).
The old man hid himself in a drainpipe. They dragged him out, heavily bleeding, confused, defenseless (84).
His supposed last words were “What did I do to you? (85)”
The rebels anally raped him with a bayonet and shot him (86).
Around the body the rebels screamed, weapons in the air, “Allahu Akbar (87)”.
–
Maximillian C. Forte had this to say of Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi:
“Gaddafi was a remarkable and unique exception among the whole range of modern Arab leaders, for being doggedly altruistic, for funding development programs in dozens of needy nations, for supporting national liberation struggles that had nothing to do with Islam or the Arab world, for pursuing an ideology that was original and not simply the product of received tradition or mimesis of exogenous sources, and for making Libya a presence on the world stage in a way that was completely out of proportion with its population size. (88)”
Libya — Beyond Thunderdome:
What came next was fairly predictable. As the butchery of Gaddafi was celebrated in the West and the war-hawks responsible for pushing for the intervention the most cackled over their victory (quite literally (89)), Libya descended into hell. The civil war that NATO and co started is still going on, leaving the country devastated and without any unifying government (90), the Green Movement (the political legacy of Gaddafi’s ideology and government) being just one of the many factions vying for power in a country that has been laid to waste by the NATO powers and their puppet government (91). The faction established by the US outright rejected the results of the first election by order of Hillary Clinton et al (92), proceeded to crack down on women’s rights (93), imprisoned huge swathes of Gaddafi loyalists (94) and allowed the US to construct military bases in the region (95). On July 7th 2012, whilst discussing how committed the new government was to protecting the freedom and human rights that their imperial masters supposedly cherished so much, Patrick Cockburn brought up the case of “Hasna Shaeeb, a 31 year-old woman abducted from her Tripoli home last October by men in military dress and taken to the former Islamic Endowment Office in the capital. She was accused of being a pro-Gaddafi loyalist and a sniper. She was forced to sit in a chair with her hands handcuffed behind her back and was given electric shocks to her right leg, private parts and head. Guards threatened to bring her mother to the cell and rape her, and urine was poured over her. After she was freed from the chair, her torturers could not open her handcuffs with a key, so they shot them off her, fragments of metal cutting into her flesh. On being released after three days, Shaeeb had a doctor confirm her injuries and complained to the authorities about what had happened to her. They did nothing, but she did receive a threatening phone call from the militiaman who first arrested her and shots were fired at her house.
“Shaeeb’s story is uncommon only in that she made an official complaint which many others are too frightened to do. They have reasons for their fear. The government estimates that it holds 3,000 detainees and the militias a further 4,000. The latter prisoners are almost invariably tortured to extract confessions. The Amnesty report says ‘common methods of torture reported to the organisation include suspension in contorted positions and prolonged beatings with various objects, including metal bars and chains, electric cables, wooden sticks, plastic hoses, water pipes, rifle butts and electric shocks. Burning with cigarettes and hot metal is also used. (96)”
In 2013 country’s instability became more apparent than ever before, as Prime Minister Ali Zeidan was “kidnapped at gunpoint by hundreds of people and had to be rescued by hundreds of other people — at gunpoint — and taken to one of their houses, and interrogated. (97)”
Just a few short months after Gaddafi was overthrown, the CIA began funnelling weapons and ammunition from Libya, through southern Turkey and into Syria, where they entered into the hands of anti-Assad rebels, many of whom (especially those who would come to form the leadership of the Syrian insurgency) were extreme right-wing Jihadists (98) (there’s a ‘circle of life’ joke in here somewhere). As the Russian government had been influenced by what had happened in Libya (according to Seymour Hersh, Putin blamed himself for not standing up for Gaddafi behind the scenes and had watched the footage of the colonel’s brutal lynching three times in horror (99)) it intervened on Assad’s side and went on to veto eleven UNSC resolutions relating to Syria between October 2011 and April 2018 (100), which helped to ensure that Assad remained in power (thank goodness). While this essay won’t be discussing the Syrian conflict much further, it’s worth noting how Louis Allday described the media landscape in 2016:
“In the current environment, to express even a mildly dissenting opinion, point out basic but unwelcome facts such as the presence of significant public support for the government in Syria, or highlight the frequently brutal acts of rebel groups, has seen many people ridiculed and attacked on social media. These attacks are rarely, if ever, reasoned critiques of opposing views; instead they frequently descend into personal, often hysterical, insults and baseless, vitriolic allegations. Generally, a set of core arguments are used to denounce those who question the dominant narrative: they include the notion that it is somehow Islamophobic to criticise the actions of rebel groups or to label them as extremists, and that to highlight the central role of US imperialism in the conflict is Orientalist as it denies Syrians their ‘agency’. Often, legitimate criticism is simply dismissed outright as ‘fascist’, ‘Stalinist’, ‘Putinist’ or all three. The policing of acceptable opinion in this way has a simple and practical function: to foster a climate in which people feel too intimidated to speak out, thus allowing the dominant narrative to remain unquestioned so that, crucially, it can continue to be utilised to generate public support for further Western intervention in Syria.
“Of course, this is a strategy with a well-established precedent; the treatment given to many opponents of NATO’s assault on Libya in 2011 and the US/UK invasion of Iraq in 2003 are obvious recent examples. Unfortunately, it remains an effective means to stifle dissent and establish the acceptable parameters of mainstream debate. Its success has meant that those in favour of greater Western intervention in Syria have virtually monopolised the popular debate and control the narrative. I know several people who have admitted to me that they are too intimidated to write or speak honestly about Syria in public and so either limit what they say or, if possible, do not broach the topic at all. I am certain that many reading this will have noticed a glaring difference between private conservations they have with friends and acquaintances that work on Syria in some capacity, and the statements that they make in public.
“I have not been silent on the issue in the public domain, but frankly I too have occasionally found myself feeling intimidated. Consequently, I have not written as much on this area as I could have. Indeed, it is likely that as a result of writing this article, some of the individuals that I mention will attack me publicly as some kind of combination of crypto-fascist Assadist, stooge of Putin/Iran and deluded white anti-imperialist; many others may silently judge me in much the same way. However, notwithstanding the short-term uncertainty regarding the exact direction of US foreign policy that has been caused by Donald Trump’s recent victory and looming presidency, direct US military intervention in Syria with the aim of regime change or a partition of the country remains a distinct possibility. Therefore, I feel it is incumbent upon me, as well as others, to speak out, if only to disrupt the usual spurious talking points that have been largely unchallenged for too long. Bassam Haddad has recently observed that the debate over Syria has now reached a dead end; in the UK, as in many other cases, the debate still continues, but it is increasingly dominated by a relatively small yet extremely vocal group of activists. The figures of whom I speak — the overwhelming majority of whom are non-Syrian — are not a monolith; but what appears to unite virtually all of them is their full blooded support for the creation of a no-fly zone (which is, to be clear, an intrinsically pro-war stance), unquestioning support for the White Helmets, and utter disdain for any principled anti-imperialist position taken in respect of intervention in Syria. Many also share an inaccurate, and at times dishonest, analysis of NATO’s intervention in Libya in 2011, which is frequently deployed to justify their stance on Syria. (101)”
Libya’s chaotic situation also allowed a group even more extreme than Al-Qaeda — ISIS — to gain a major foothold in the region, one they still haven’t lost, even if it has fluctuated in strength (102). In September 2012, almost a full year after Gaddafi’s overthrow, an incredibly Islamophobic film named The Innocence of Muslims triggered a wave of protest and conflict throughout North Africa and West Asia from Muslims who had already suffered from decades of humiliation at the hands of the Western powers (103). This became a major factor in the US consulate in Benghazi (which had been a key location in providing cover for the CIA as it moved arms into Syria (104)) being attacked by another far-right terrorist group — Ansar al-Sharia — where the American ambassador and three of his comrades, “presumably CIA (105)” were killed. Back in the US, the Republican Party and it’s affiliated outlets and organisations managed to effectively use Hillary Clinton’s association with the disaster as a means of damaging her approval ratings and “undermining her presidential ambitions. (106)”
As the years rolled on, more and more information came out about the intervention that completely undermined the NATO narrative (which was already pretty flimsy from the start). A Harvard report from 2013 found that Gaddafi’s forces had “avoided targeting civilians comes from the Libyan city that was most consumed by the early fighting, Misurata (107)”, “only 257 people were killed among the city’s population of 400,000 — a fraction less than 0.0006 — providing additional proof that the government avoided using force indiscriminately (108)” and Gaddafi “did not perpetrate a “bloodbath” in any of the cities that his forces recaptured from rebels prior to NATO intervention — including Ajdabiya, Bani Walid, Brega, Ras Lanuf, Zawiya, and much of Misurata — so there was virtually no risk of such an outcome if he had been permitted to recapture the last rebel stronghold of Benghazi (109)”. Further, “NATO’s primary aim was to overthrow [Gaddafi’s] regime, even at the expense of increasing the harm to Libyans (110)”, “NATO attacked Libyan forces indiscriminately, including some in retreat and others in [Gaddafi’s] hometown of Sirte, where they posed no threat to civilians (111)” and “NATO continued to aid the rebels even when they repeatedly rejected government cease-fire offers that could have ended the violence and spared civilians. (112)” After the much-discussed leaking of Clinton’s emails it was revealed how just how unfounded the claim that Gaddafi was giving his soldiers Viagra to commit acts of rape was, that Clinton was being personally briefed on the horrific crimes being committed by the insurgents early on and that Sidney Blumenthal — a key advisor to and unofficial intelligence operative for Clinton — had been informed “that “an extremely sensitive source” confirmed that British, French, and Egyptian special operations units were training Libyan militants along the Egyptian-Libyan border, as well as in Benghazi suburbs. (113)” And more and more mass graves have been discovered in the country, with one in Tarhuna containing more than 200 bodies, quite a few of which were the remains of women and children slaughtered by rebel forces (114).
So many of the rights won under Gaddafi have been lost to the Libyan people, with increased Turkish interference in the region now increasing the bloodshed (105). Though perhaps the most stomach-churning aspect of the new Libya is the emergence of a thriving open-air slave trade (many of its victims being desperate migrants — mostly black) in what was once Africa’s most prosperous country (116).
The consequences were felt far outside Libya too. In early 2011 Gaddafi had warned Western leaders of a rise in Islamic extremist attacks throughout both Africa and Europe, and a potential migrant crisis (with people flooding into Europe from both Libya and African countries to its south) if his government fell (117). Writing in 2019, Max Blumenthal reported that “over 180,000 asylum seekers — including at least 25,000 unaccompanied children — have poured into Italy from Libya each year, with thousands perishing along the way in the depths of the Mediterranean. Meanwhile, weapons from Libyan military depots [have] flowed into the hands of Al Qaeda affiliates in other theatres of conflict like Boko Haram in Northern Nigeria, whose brutality [has] deepened the refugee crisis, displacing over 1 million people in regions it has declared an “Islamic caliphate.” (118)” Inside the NATO countries, a new wave of terrorist attacks began, with members and affiliates of ISIS being inspired and galvanised in part by the propaganda their brethren were pumping out in Libya. “The beaches of Sirte were a tableau for one of ISIS’s most shocking execution videos, a high definition snuff film of black-masked terminators decapitating a dozen Egyptian Christian Coptic migrant workers and saturating the incoming waves with their blood. (119)” And in 2017 Salman Abedi — who was one of the many members of the Libyan exile community that had been funnelled into Libya by MI5 during the intervention, given arms and training by French and Qatari operatives, then funnelled back into the UK and removed from MI5’s security service watchlist, presumably so he could be used as an intelligence asset — went to a packed Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, filled mostly with preteen and teenage girls (120). “In the middle of a crowd, Abedi detonated a powerful bomb packed with nails and ball bearings, killing himself and twenty-two others. It was the deadliest terror attack [by a non-state actor] ever carried out on British soil. (121)” These terror attacks by the Islamic far-right further encouraged the growth of the far-right in the imperial core, the most notable case being that of the infamous reactionary billionaire Donald Trump, whose bid for the presidency in 2016 was on a platform of (among other things) virulent Islamophobia and an isolationist foreign policy (122) (and while he never fulfilled the latter promise he has remained incredibly consistent in his bigotry towards Muslims (123)). And he was running against one Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton, whose role in Benghazi (and the Libyan intervention in general, as well as interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, etc) was just one of the many reasons why she was and is (rightfully) thoroughly despised by huge swathes of the American public (124). Needless to say, Trump won, the far-right gained a huge victory and they’ve continued to pick up steam at an alarming rate.
In Conclusion, Libya is a Land of Contrasts:
So, from the ghastly story of this country, what lessons have been learnt and what lessons should be learnt?
· Quite possibly the greatest mistake Gaddafi ever made was giving up his nuclear program. Stephen Gowans’ book on the DPRK describes their view of the matter: “None of this was lost on the North Koreans. A February 21, 2013 commentary by the KCNA noted that, “The tragic consequences in those countries which abandoned halfway their nuclear programs, yielding to the high-handed practices and pressure of the U.S. in recent years, clearly prove that the DPRK was very far-sighted and just when it made the option. They also teach the truth that the U.S. nuclear blackmail should be countered with substantial countermeasures, not with compromise or retreat.” Rodong Sinmun observed that, “Had it not been the nuclear deterrence of our own, the U.S. would have already launched a war on the peninsula as it had done in Iraq and Libya and plunged it into a sorry plight as [it did Yugoslavia] at the end of the last century and Afghanistan early in this century.” (125)” I hold, based on the information discussed throughout this essay, that in the interests of international peace, security and freedom, any country — any country — that is at loggerheads with America or any of its allies has not just a strategic reason but a moral and rational obligation to develop defensive nuclear weapons.
· The participation of Canada in the conflict — aligning itself with the region’s worst human rights abusers and extreme Jihadist groups — ought to discredit entirely the notion that the Canadian presence on the world stage is a positive one. Canada is an enthusiastic participant in the rampant imperialist exploitation of Africa and Latin America. Canada is every bit as involved in imperial warmongering as most of the rest of it’s NATO allies. The Canadian state is one of the most important supporters and beneficiaries of America’s empire. The idea that Canada is ‘better than the rest’ or that it’s government is a real force for good on the world stage would be amusing if it wasn’t believed an accepted by so many people (even by some Canadians who consider themselves to be progressive!). Canadian condemnation of the American abuses is a good thing of course, but one should not pretend that Canada is a great deal more righteous or virtuous than the US. Any idiot who sees the country that sticks up for Ukrainian neo-Nazis at the UN (126), supports CIA coups against democratically elected leaders (127) and continues to practice an incredibly abusive colonialism at home (128) as some pinnacle of virtue hasn’t a clue what they’re talking about. The reason why Johnny Canuck isn’t as hated as Uncle Sam isn’t because the former is intrinsically more pleasant or less bloodthirsty than the latter but because the Yankee nation has managed to acquire a greater degree of military strength, plays the historical role of the principal crusader of the imperialist world and become the strongest bodyguard of international capitalism. Canadian exceptionalism is a delusion, a weapon used to justify settler-colonialism at home and participation in imperial war crimes abroad and a stain that should be scrubbed out of the consciousnesses of all progressive-minded people.
· Attempts to analyze the actions of the NATO countries through any moral or ethical lens (I say NATO countries as enlightened benevolence or a concern for human rights are seldom considered by chauvinistic Westerners to be motivating factors for the actions of countries like China, Russia, the DPRK, Iran, Syria or indeed Gaddafi’s Libya) can only lead to conclusions that are pure nonsense. A No-Fly zone was established over Libya over a massacre that never was and not over Saudi Arabia for it’s very real and utterly brutal suppression of the Arab Spring because it was in the material interest of the ruling class of the imperial core to act against Gaddafi and it was in their material interest to defend Saudi Arabia (a country implicated in 9/11 that has a record of funding groups like ISIS). Jihadist insurgencies were supported by NATO in their struggle against Gaddafi and Palestinian insurgents have been attacked for their struggle against Israeli apartheid and colonization because of the material interest of the imperialist bourgeoise. Same goes for Qatar, same goes for Bahrain, same goes for the UAE, etc (129). What happened to Libya wasn’t the result of good people entering a conflict they didn’t fully understand and making some serious mistakes, it was the result of an empire attempting to achieve desired objectives that had no basis in decency or compassion, regardless of the human cost. Same goes for Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yugoslavia, Sudan, Panama, Grenada, Lebanon, Vietnam, Korea and so on, where — regardless of whether they won or lost those particular conflicts — they never went in with ‘good’ or ‘noble’ intentions and wanted above all else to secure profits and increased power for the capitalist class of the imperial core. They will pursue those objectives regardless of any abstract system of morality, regardless of the human cost and even regardless of whether it threatens to lead to the extinction of the human race (the US military is one of the largest polluters in history (130) and most of the greenhouse gas emissions that are laying waste to the environment are coming from the countries of the imperial core). The Western imperialist countries aren’t flawed humanitarians with good intentions and principles, they aren’t equally as craven or destructive as their enemies — they are the fucking bad guys, the entities that are knowingly leading humanity towards total annihilation, the states that have the worst effect on the rest of the world, led by supreme shitheads without equal and they need to be fully, unflinchingly opposed.
· Western imperialist intervention should never be supported, whatever the circumstances. Regardless of how bad the regime of a country in the crosshairs of empire is, what the US and co will replace it with will always, always be worse. Libyans were better off under Gaddafi than they were in the war-stricken hellscape that came after him, just like Iraqis were better off under Saddam Hussein, Syrians are better off under Bashar al-Assad than they would potentially be under the hell the imperialists wanted to unleash, etc. Given the record of the NATO countries (all of them) it’s about as absurd to defend any modern imperialist intervention or an imperialist-backed colour revolution as a means of bringing freedom and democracy to a country as it would be to claim in 1939 that Hitler’s Germany was going to bring freedom and democracy to Eastern Europe! And in the face of the barrage of propaganda and fake news that the countries of the imperial core will routinely use to justify their aggression against any country deemed an enemy of the supposed ‘free world’, your political criticism should be fully directed against the political entities that you can directly affect rather than those the imperialists benefit from being criticized so as not to manufacture consent for regime change and war. As the capitalist media of the imperialist countries routinely pour out all manner of laughably false and often outright racist allegations against the People’s Republic of China to justify their increasingly dangerous aggression (from peddling baseless claims about a ‘Uighur Genocide’ (131) (132) to claiming that the coronavirus pandemic started in a Wuhan laboratory (133), to assorted bullshit about ‘Winnie the Pooh’) it is your responsibility to counter their reactionary nonsense and attack the ruling class of your own country instead. As the empire’s warhawks attack the Islamic Republic of Iran for real and imagined human rights abuses, for the poverty that exists there and for sponsoring ‘terrorism’ it is your responsibility to leave the Iranian people to criticize their own government, attack the lying neocolonialists who would have the country enslaved again by US imperialism, openly point out how so many of that country’s problems are a result of imperialist interference and call for an end to the sanctions that have done so much damage to Iranians (134). The same goes for pretty much every country under assault from the NATO powers. No denunciations of ‘both sides’, no collaboration with the imperial propaganda machine, no false neutrality, just a strong anti-imperialist stance that NATO and it’s fucking little devious minions have no right to interfere in the political affairs of the rest of the world. The best thing those NATO countries could do to ensure peace, democracy and stability in the Third World would be the complete dismantling of all foreign military bases, an end to all their foreign intervention (covert or otherwise) and the severing of all support to the various dictatorships and racist tyrannies that they themselves support. Of course, we all know that they would never do that willingly.
· On that previous note, the mainstream Western media is full of shit. If their capitalist masters want them to get you to hate the official state enemy of the week, they will do anything necessary to demonize that state enemy, from selling absurdly false testimonies (as seen in the lead-up to the Gulf War (135) and the continued aggression against the DPRK (136)), to fearmongering about imagined ‘security threats’ (the bullshit WMD story used to justify the Iraq War (137) and the lies surrounding the Gulf of Tonkin (138) are good examples of this), to accusations of outright genocide (which I’ve already touched on). They will dress up their propaganda in the guise of outwardly reactionary bigotry or ‘woke’ humanitarianism (complimented by heaps of ‘bodies and spaces’ rhetoric) depending on which way the cultural wind is blowing and can transition perfectly comfortably between the two. You have no good reason whatsoever to trust them to be honest with you. Always look for the imperial spin put on even in stories where the raw facts are present, always look at the class and national character of the outlet, always look at who benefits from a certain narrative being pushed. This doesn’t just apply to the news media but to cinema, as Hollywood is another central weapon in the Western propaganda arsenal, US intelligence and military services have taken a guiding, even pivotal role in film and TV pre-production, production and post-production since their early years (139) — this isn’t just in regards war epics or action movies, according to Matthew Alford and Tom Secker they’ve even involved themselves in romantic comedies, pop music videos and so on (140).
· Foreign policy doesn’t just affect the lives of people ‘over there’, it affects people at home too. Just as Gaddafi predicted, the conflict in Libya didn’t just affect Libyans, it affected people in Nigeria, Britain, Syria, America, Italy, etc. Anti-imperialism isn’t just some side-issue and it is never divorced from the class struggle (as well as all the struggles that stem outwards from class conflict — from the fight for the right of African Americans to live to the fight for gender equality) and people’s basic quality of life. If you are affected by terrorism, climate change, migrant crises, the far-right and so on, then no matter how far away the targets of sanctions, coups and invasions are, you are affected.
· Liberal and conservative imperialists are — to use Galloway’s expression — “two cheeks of the same arse (141)”. Obama was no better than Bush or Trump, Cameron was no better than Blair or Johnson and Harper was no better than Chrétien or Trudeau. Both these positions must be rejected, as should any political entity that wishes to maintain capitalism and its imperial extensions.
· Joseph Stalin wrote in his excellent work, The Foundations of Leninism, that the “unquestionably revolutionary character of the vast majority of national movements is as relative and peculiar as is the possible revolutionary character of certain particular national movements. The revolutionary character of a national movement under the conditions of imperialist oppression does not necessarily presuppose the existence of proletarian elements in the movement, the existence of a revolutionary or a republican programme of the movement, the existence of a democratic basis of the movement. The struggle that the Emir of Afghanistan is waging for the independence of Afghanistan is objectively a revolutionary struggle, despite the monarchist views of the Emir and his associates, for it weakens, disintegrates and undermines imperialism; whereas the struggle waged by such “desperate” democrats and “Socialists,” “revolutionaries” and republicans as, for example, Kerensky and Tsereteli, Renaudel and Scheidemann, Chernov and Dan, Henderson and Clynes, during the imperialist war was a reactionary struggle, for its results was the embellishment, the strengthening, the victory, of imperialism. For the same reasons, the struggle that the Egyptians merchants and bourgeois intellectuals are waging for the independence of Egypt is objectively a revolutionary struggle, despite the bourgeois origin and bourgeois title of the leaders of Egyptian national movement, despite the fact that they are opposed to socialism; whereas the struggle that the British “Labour” Government is waging to preserve Egypt’s dependent position is for the same reason a reactionary struggle, despite the proletarian origin and the proletarian title of the members of the government, despite the fact that they are “for” socialism. There is no need to mention the national movement in other, larger, colonial and dependent countries, such as India and China, every step of which along the road to liberation, even if it runs counter to the demands of formal democracy, is a steam-hammer blow at imperialism, i.e., is undoubtedly a revolutionary step. (142)” Those are words that ring just as true today as they did in 1924, as the example of Bernie Sanders and most (though certainly not all) prominent first world social democrats shows. Their work in aiding NATO in North Africa shows just how capable they are in fighting the ruling class that the intervention against Gaddafi strengthened, the climate crisis that their militaries have played a huge role in causing and the capitalist system that — as Lenin described (143) — survives due to and is reliant upon imperialism. The most right-wing anti-imperialist is objectively more progressive and more of a threat to Western hegemony than the most left-wing social democratic imperialist.
· The way most people think about Islamic extremism is completely wrong. Jay Tharappel summed this up incredibly well: “The Islamophobia that has dominated the West ever since 9/11 is premised on a fundamental lie. Which is that the Muslim world created ‘Islamic extremism’ as a weapon against the West, when in fact history is the other way around, the West created Islamic extremism as a weapon against Muslim majority countries with secular governments. What happens in Afghanistan? The CIA and Saudi Arabia created and funded al-Qaeda [or rather, the direct ancestors and future founders of al-Qaeda, the Mujahedeen insurgency] so they could build a global network, which they could use to funnel fighters from all over the world into Afghanistan, to fight against the Afghan government, in order to topple one of the most progressive governments in Afghanistan’s history, a government that was defended by the Soviet Union. In 1988, under President Dr Mohammad Najibullah’s government, 15,000 women served in Afghanistan’s National Army and women were 40% of all doctors, as well as 60% of all teachers at Kabul University. However by the late 1990s [under the Taliban] Afghan women were being filmed dragged kicking and screaming into football stadiums to be shot in the head or stoned to death for adultery… today we can’t even talk about ‘Islamic extremism’ as one thing, it’s a bit too misleading… after the invasion of Iraq in 2003 the big mistake that the Western left made was to assume that the terrorist actions and hateful ideology of al-Qaeda was simply an equal but opposite knee jerk response to the US occupation… this is complete nonsense. (144)” Further, we can look to Samir Amin — “Political Islam is not anti-imperialist, even if its militants think otherwise! It is an invaluable ally for imperialism and the latter knows it. It is easy to understand, then, that political Islam has always counted in its ranks the ruling classes of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Moreover, these classes were among its most active promoters from the very beginning. The local comprador bourgeoisies, the nouveaux riches, beneficiaries of current imperialist globalization, generously support political Islam. The latter has renounced an anti-imperialist perspective and substituted for it an “anti-Western” (almost “anti-Christian”) position, which obviously only leads the societies concerned into an impasse and hence does not form an obstacle to the deployment of imperialist control over the world system. (145)”
· Final lesson (or rather, a summary of the previous lessons) — what happened to Libya must never happen to another country again. And so long as we have a capitalist hegemony and not socialist hegemony, as long as we have an economic system that needs the imperialist exploitation of the third world to keep functioning, it will happen again. Capitalism must die if humanity is to live.
An Epilogue:
“Now, I am under attack by the biggest force in military history, my little African son, Obama wants to kill me, to take away the freedom of our country, to take away our free housing, our free medicine, our free education, our free food, and replace it with American style thievery, called “capitalism,” but all of us in the Third World know what that means, it means corporations run the countries, run the world, and the people suffer, so, there is no alternative for me, I must make my stand, and if Allah wishes, I shall die by following his path, the path that has made our country rich with farmland, with food and health, and even allowed us to help our African and Arab brothers and sisters to work here with us … I do not wish to die, but if it comes to that, to save this land, my people, all the thousands who are all my children, then so be it. … In the West, some have called me “mad”, “crazy”. They know the truth but continue to lie, they know that our land is independent and free, not in the colonial grip. (146)”
