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- [00:00]
Podcast Host/Announcer
This is an iHeart podcast, guaranteed human media.
- [00:11]
Andrew Sage
Hello and welcome to It Could Happen Here I am Andrew sage andrewism on YouTube and joined again by.
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James
It's James again.
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Andrew Sage
Yes, I've noticed a phenomenon, I'm not sure if you've noticed it too, where I anti imperialist solidarity somehow goes a step beyond opposing imperialist aggression itself and crosses into lionizing or whitewashing the targets of that aggression, or rather the sensible leaders of the target to that aggression.
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James
Yeah, I have noticed this too. It's one of the things that makes me most angry in the world. What's been referred to as the anti imperialism of idiots.
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Andrew Sage
Yes.
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James
Not so relevant now, but I used to like to apply the Assad test to anybody who claimed to be interested in the politics of liberation. Right. If you, if you think Bashar Al Assad is a based anti imperialist people socialist hero, then your politics are shit. I have nothing good to say about that. Like you're an idiot.
- [01:14]
Andrew Sage
Yeah, yeah. It should be a fringe phenomenon. Right. But I haven't seen it getting increasing traction.
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James
Yeah. Even in like relatively, you know, like I won't start a war with various US leftist publications. But I went to pitch some people this, this last week thinking like, there is speculation that the United States will once again ally itself with Kurdish groups who I'm sure it had then planned to once again abandon when that became politically more expedient. But I happened to have some insight into these various Kurdish groups having spent some time there and having contacts there. And so I went to the websites of these various, you know, big publications which are left or left leaning or even sort of liberal. And I saw these borderline campus takes on what's happening in Iran. And it's just so, so frustrating to me. Like it makes me so angry that people continue to view the world through this binary Marvel movie lens which sees it as impossible that two things could be bad at the same time. Yeah, it's infuriating to me.
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Andrew Sage
Yeah. And if I was more inclined to conspiracy, I might say that this binary is intentionally constructed. You know, that it's, it's by design that the most vocal anti imperialist voices also just so happen to align themselves with state power.
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James
Yeah.
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Andrew Sage
And camp is on. But I'm not, I'm not inclined to conspiracy. So.
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James
Yeah. Yeah. One could make a pretty reasonable argument for that. Right?
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Andrew Sage
One could make that argument.
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James
Yeah.
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Andrew Sage
I won't, but one could.
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James
I might.
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Andrew Sage
I think one of the best examples of this is the sort of odd obsession that some people have with Colonel Uammar Al Gaddafi. Now, last episode we spoke about the long term consequences of Western intervention in Libya, beginning with the 2011 uprising during the Arab Spring against the 42 year Rul Muammar Gaddafi. What began as a broad, largely leaderless protest movement was quickly shaped by foreign intervention. In March of 2011, the US, the UK and France launched a military campaign through NATO under a UN mandate to protect civilians. The war toppled Gaddafi but killed tens of thousands and devastated infrastructure. In the aftermath, Libya fractured into rival governments, militias and foreign backed factions, triggering yet another civil war in 2014. And despite a ceasefire in 2020, the country remains divided between competing administrations. While ordinary Libyans face instability, human rights abuses and economic hardship, I think it's fair to say that the NATO intervention was a net negative for the country. But in the same breath I cannot agree with those who seem to believe that Qaddafi's rule could have continued either that he was some force for good in the country. And in this episode I really want to get into the why to identify and dissect the actions of the man Gaddafi. According to his biography in Encyclopedia Britannica, Muammar Al Gaddafi was born in 1942 near Sirte, Libya. 69 years later he would be captured and killed in Syrte, Libya. After spending his early years in a tent, he graduated from the University of Libya in 1963 and then graduated from a military academy in 1965. In 1969, at the age of 27, Gaddafi pulled off a bloodless coup to seize power from King Idris I of Libya. For the next four decades plus, he would be the de facto ruler of Libya. Gaddafi was both a passionate Arab nationalist and and a Muslim in power. He tried to push both of his ideologies. He expelled Western military forces, expelled remaining Italian settlers and Jewish communities in Libya, nationalized the country's oil industry, banned alcohol and gambling, tried to unify with his Arab neighbours occasionally by attempting coups in their countries and stood against normalisation with Israel. A very mixed bag so far.
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James
Yeah.
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Andrew Sage
Until 1977 Gaddafi ruled the Libyan Arab Republic. But the culmination of his Cultural revolution period from 1973 to 1977 would sideline his political and religious opponents who were beginning to see him as unstable, hubristic and authoritarian. That period would instead cement Gaddafi as the sole ruler of of what he would rename the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya. As recounted in the History of Gaddafi's Pariah State by John Oakes, Jamahiriya was a term he coined in his green book, likely inspired by Mao's Little Red Book, published during the Libyan Cultural Revolution period. Jamahiriya, was his idea of a state of the masses, governed by people's congresses and popular assemblies. And if it's one thing that makes a political movement, it's empowering. It's slapping the people's and popular label on everything, regardless of any additional context. Yeah, so they had these democratic local assemblies called basic People's congresses that met three times a year, and those congresses appointed executive people's committees which did most of the day to day stuff. And above it all was the General People's Congress. This period was simultaneously an effort to encourage popular participation through these congresses while suppressing dissent through his control over the secret services. It was clear that Gaddafi was still in charge even after he stepped down from his formal position as secretary general in 1979 and simply and humbly dubbed himself the brotherly leader and guide of the revolution.
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James
Yeah, some of his, like, hubristic stuff, like his rhetoric, his outfits, his reference to himself, it's like you couldn't parody some of it. It is where the parodies of dictators in this part of the world come from is Gaddafi's kind of effect, I guess.
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Andrew Sage
Yeah, he was a character.
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James
Yes, that he was.
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Andrew Sage
Yeah, he was definitely a character.
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James
Yeah.
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Andrew Sage
So, I mean, anarchist critiques of democracy are easy to find. And although Gaddafi's Libya was never solely directly democratic, even in his project, you could see some of the flaws, some of the issues that anarchists have identified in this approach to popular power. As the congresses and the people's congresses were poorly attended and easily manipulated, issues were often raised and were rarely resolved. And of course, compounding those flaws was the fact that these people's congresses had no actual power over the things that mattered in Libya. Yeah, the oil industry, the armed forces, the security services and foreign policy, where Gaddafi and his compatriots still ruled. Gaddafi decided where the oil money went and he directed some of it to a great man made river project that would extract from the ancient and non renewable aquifer under the Libyan desert to supply the coast with a more stable water supply. Frustratingly for him, I could assume. Gaddafi did not get what he wanted out of the revolutionary people's congresses. So he created revolutionary committees to mobilise the people and safeguard their rule through commandos that answered to Gaddafi directly. These revolutionary committees could arrest counter revolutionaries, establish revolutionary courts and eliminate enemies of the revolution at home and abroad. The people he called stray dogs. All of this for the people, of course, and for the revolution.
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Andrew Sage
So on people. His system had some degree of people power and people voice, but in practice he exercised near total control and suppression of opposition both within the country and outside the country. The same went for work leases. Of course, he spoke about worker partnership and power in the Green Book, but it was a state controlled and state distributed economy in Libya run by oil money with very few worker run enterprises. There was also no real freedom of organisation or strike in Libya as independent unions were banned. And Gaddafi explicitly rejected class struggle despite claiming to be a socialist. So in the Return of Muammar Gaddafi by Tunisian academic Haitham Ghassemi, he highlights the cult of personality that was forged over the years of Gaddafi's rule that has resurfaced up to today. His proponents often point to the good that he did for the country, establishing basic social services, free healthcare and education, housing and land distribution, accessible loan programs, women's rights and so on. And with that welfare state came naturally some base of popular support for a people who had little to nothing before. Other fans of Gaddafi point to what I like to call hype moments and aura. So there was a time when he was in the UN General assembly and he had what was supposed to be a short time to speak and he just went on and on and on and on and on and on and he tore up the UN Charter hype moments in aura. Right. And that's like something a lot of people point to. He was also, at one point in time, the chairman of the African Union and he wanted to keep that position permanently. And he was proposing a whole United States of Africa. Like he had a whole period of African solidarity, which we'll get to.
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James
Yeah, okay, good. Yeah. His Pan Africanist arc is fascinating.
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Andrew Sage
Yeah. So none of this, however, erases his dark, dark side. For one, for all the women's rights that he put forward in Libya, he was not that great to women. The Green Book presents Gaddafi as someone who cared about women's dignity and rights. But even in that book, you see a very complementarist take on women's place in society. It's like, yeah, they're equal to men, but also their role is in the household. They're supposed to be mothers above everything else.
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James
Yeah.
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Andrew Sage
He was like, they need to be mothers, but they shouldn't be treated as property or objects.
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James
Yeah, I think he based a lot of this in like his interpretation of Hadith or Quran. Like his, his idea that like there was some kind of divine guidance on, on gender roles. Right. I've actually seen this in recent days. Like you can go and find Hamani's tweets, right? Like, like Ayatollah son and like you can see his stuff where he's like, you should not mistreat your wife. You can literally find those in his, in his timeline on Twitter. Right. He was a big poster and people have somehow attempted to like construe this as like he was the leader of enlightened feminist regime in Iran, which, I
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Andrew Sage
don't know, it's benevolent patriarchy all over again.
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James
Yeah. Like you, you have to be really on a special fucking truth trajectory to convince yourself that that is the case. It takes remarkable capacity for self delusion to, rather than listening to women in Iran, women from Iran, many of whom I have spoken to, to look at the evidence of the killing, for example, with Jina Amini, right. To be like, I know I found this tweet from 2013, so we're good here. This is, this is fine. It's just remarkable, people's tendency to do that.
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Andrew Sage
Yeah, it's remarkable. And stupid.
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James
Yeah, yeah. Stupid is a good word.
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Andrew Sage
Yeah. And going back to Gaddafi, aside from that sort of benevolent patriarchy take on women's equality. Investigative reporting by Anna Kudene also gathered testimony since his fall, but alleged his procurement, coercion and sexual abuse of women inside his compound, aided by a network of officials. Unfortunately, many of these women are far too afraid to come forward, even all these years after his death due to the persistence of pro Gaddafi sentiment in the country up to today. So not the best for women. What about for Africa? Right. His whole Pan Africanist arc. He styled himself as a Pan African who would support the struggles of people like Mandela and would fund infrastructure projects around the continent. But he had a history of attempting to overthrow governments in Africa and support oppressive ones, including IDI Amin of Uganda and Charles Taylor of Liberia. Since Pan Africanism was never concerned with the freedom or well being of African people, it was I think, very much according to his own self aggrandizement.
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James
Yeah, like he didn't he propose like a African Union, which was more akin to like, like a United States, like
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Andrew Sage
a federal Africa, United States of Africa. That was his proposal.
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James
Fantastic there.
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Andrew Sage
Yeah. Great. And as he's proposing this Pan African vision within Libya itself, he was pushing for an Arab Libya, the Amazigh and other non Arab Africans in Libya were mistreated. You know, his vision of an Arab Libya led to the suppression of the Tuaregs, the Tebus and the Amazigh. He had policies as reported in the BBC, in New Internationalist Al Jazeera and elsewhere. He had policies that included the banning of minority languages, the banning of minority names, the discouraging of cultural expression, and sometimes denying citizenship to groups outside the Arab identity. So naturally many of these minorities took part in the 2011 movement. And after Gaddafi's fall there was a revival of language, cultural institutions and publications. However, the NTC and those that followed have continued to ignore the minority plight. Minority groups are still struggling for constitutional recognition, representation and equal rights in a country that is of course still divided. And some minorities have chosen to boycott the national political process entirely in favour of pursuing local self governance. Also, minorities were not the only people being persecuted in Gaddafi's Libya. On the political front, despite calling himself a socialist, Gaddafi was really all over the place ideologically. Now, internationally. He may have backed the Palestinian struggle, the Irish struggle, the African American struggle, but he was consistent in suppressing actual leftists in Libya. Marxist.com identified some of these repressive efforts in their article on Gaddafi. Gaddafi was very clear in expressing his anti communism. In 1971 he sent a plane full of Sudanese communists back to Sudan where they were executed by Nimeiri. In 1973, the regime published an official document to commemorate the fourth anniversary of Gaddafi's rise to power under the title Holy War Against Communism. End quote. Quite eccentric. Later on, however, he would get more chummy with ussr. But Gaddafi was no Marxist Leninist and communists and leftists and workers were not legally capable of organizing independently in Libya. Aside from them, you also have the murder and torture of civilians and journalists, the assassinations of rivals in Libya and around the world. It was not the free speech utopia that Gaddafi tried to paint it as. Instead of emboldening the leftist elements, he emboldened these tribal groups and set the foundation for the Libya that we see today.
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James
His consistent throughline is that he, he likes strong men and sees himself among them and wants to associate himself with them. At some point in the early 2000s, he was supporting Jorg Heide, a neo fascist in Austria and telling Europeans they needed to get past their obsession with the second World War. He had no like consistent politics.
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Andrew Sage
Well, I mean that tracks with his expulsion of Jewish communities in Libya. Yeah, he didn't only expel Jewish settlers, he expelled Jewish communities that had arrived prior to Italian colonization that had existed in Libya for Centuries, yeah, that maybe.
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James
I guess anti Semitism can often be the link that brings terrible people together.
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Andrew Sage
He had a lot of other notorious incidents of suppression, but one of the most significant was the Abu Salim massacre. In short, as recounted by John Oakes, Abu Salem was the site of a prisoners protest on 28 June 1996. The prisoners escaped their cells and were protesting their mistreatment as guards shot at them from the roof. Two top security officials came and took command, ordering the shooting to stop and promising to address the prisoners complaints if they returned to their cells and gave up the guards they had hostage. And the following day, shots fired from 11am to 1:35pm a mass slaughter of approximately 1,200 of the 16 to 1700 prisoners in Abu Salhad. The families who suffered that blow were among the first on the streets of Benghazi 2011. But those families were not originally told that their loved ones had been killed. Some of them continued to visit the prison for weeks, months, years after bringing gifts for their relatives who were already long dead. In the twists and turns of Gaddafi's ideological development, or lack thereof, following the fall of the ussr, Gaddafi would also pursue economic liberalization. He started opening up to the west ever so slightly. There was slow progress and a brief hiccup, but by 2003 free market advocate Shukri Ghanim was appointed Prime Minister. Before long, 360 state enterprises were privatized. By 2007, Libya was laying off as many as a third of the government workforce, 400,000 public sector workers. And according to a New York Times article From 2011, the IMF had actually praised Libya's economic reforms. So by 2011, conditions were so unbearable for so many workers, especially young people, there's no wonder that some of them fought with nothing to lose. One of the last aspects of Gaddafi's rule that I want to touch on was his complex relationship with Western powers. Early in his rule in the 70s and 80s, he did style himself an anti imperialist revolutionary and that is the image that our people uphold of him to this day. Libya funded and armed revolutionary and militant movements worldwide, from the African National Congress or the anc, to the Palestine Liberation Organisation or plo, to the Irish Republican army or ira. He aligned himself with the so called radical camp in the Middle east, including baatha, Syria and Iran. And Western governments accused Libya of supporting international terrorism. Libya was considered a rogue state, but as noted by Syrian anarchist Mazen Kamalmaz in an interview with Jose Antonio Gutierrez, even when Gaddafi was declaring himself an anti Imperialist long ago it was just a lip service while he engaged as an authoritarian in trivial terrorist acts that never meant to support the libertarian objectives of the victims of imperialism. Still, Reagan called him a mad dog. And the US bombed Libya in 1986 after attacks in a West Berlin nightclub were attributed to Libyan agents. Those bombings narrowly missed Gaddafi himself, but they killed his adopted baby daughter. Libya was also blamed for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, which led to sanctions by the United nations and the US which isolated Libya economically and diplomatically. In the 90s, however, with the fall of the USSR, Libya began slowly shifting toward cooperation. They handed over the suspects in the Lockerbie bombing and sanctions began to loosen as they attempted to normalise relations. Western intelligence services soon started cooperating with Libyan intelligence against Islamist militant groups, including the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, which is a thorn in Gaddafi's side. The early 2000s had Libya renounce its weapons of mass destruction program following the invasion of Iraq. The US and the UN subsequently lifted sanctions and diplomatic relations were restored fully with Western countries. Gaddafi hosted Tony Blair of the uk, Nicholas Sarkozy of France, and met with Obama as well. And many of these meetings with Western leaders produced multi billion dollar energy and business deals. BP, Royal Dutch Shell, ExxonMobil, Chevron, TotalEnergies, they were all getting pieces of Libya's wealth. As Libya began adopting more neoliberal economic reforms like currency devaluation, trade liberalization and more openness to foreign investment. Libya was also able to cooperate closely with Western intelligence during the war on terror, including assisting the CIA and MI6 in rendition and torture as uncovered by Human Rights Watch. So by the mid 2000s, Libya had mostly reintegrated into the Western led global system. And the west for their part, simply ignored Gaddafi's continued human rights abuses. The Counterterrorism Corporation, the oil and gas contracts, and don't forget the brutal African migrant control were all too valuable for America and Europe.
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James
I remember this period quite well. It was when I was in my undergraduate university and Gaddafi was invited to speak at the Oxford Union. I did my undergraduate there and myself and a number of friends.
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Andrew Sage
So you met Gaddafi?
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James
No, he spoke via video conference.
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Andrew Sage
Okay.
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James
Which they paused while they, they removed us for protesting Gaddafi's. Like it just seemed like this decades of abuse of his own people have been completely forgotten. Right. Because he was now prepared to do abuse of other people that was beneficial to the United Kingdom, the United States, and we felt like that was abhorrent and wrong. So we went to make Our feelings known. And the Oxford Union is a very silly institution. Right. Which prides itself on free speech and really it just does kind of class reproduction for the most part.
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Andrew Sage
Right.
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James
And of course there was not freedom of speech for people who were going to be rude to someone who was in charge of a state, even if they were being rude on behalf of the thousands of people he's had murdered and tortured. And yeah, that was my little personal run in with Gaddafi when I was what, like 18? But yeah, I can't remember if we were like not allowed in or we were booted out because I am like two decades and half a dozen traumatic brain injuries since my teenage years. But yeah, I do remember just being like, people are treating this like as some kind of fucking novelty and this person has real blood on his hands. Like real people have suffered tremendously and died because of actions he's taken. Like, it's not funny or cute.
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Andrew Sage
Wow. What year was that?
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James
It would have been in the early 2000s, the Bush era, because that's when I was in my undergraduate second bush term. So it would have been what, in 2006 somewhere there.
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Andrew Sage
Yeah. Thankfully I never had any run ins with Gaddafi.
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James
Yeah. Even at that time I can remember just being sort of somewhat appalled by the Marxist loneliness tendency to excuse crimes against humanity as long as they were done by people who were. Who said the right things, who had the right vibes, who condemned the right people and the liberal tendency to excuse crimes against humanity so long as they were done in service of capitalism and the state.
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Andrew Sage
Yeah, yeah. Shockingly similar tendencies in some ways.
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James
Yeah, right. Like this fundamentally not rooted in the idea that people have a right to dignity. Both of them hold people as less valuable than other things. Right. Be it capital or. I mean the Marxist Leninist tendency. Honestly, like, it's not even the revolution that they believe is more valuable than people, it's the revolutionary rhetoric.
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Andrew Sage
Yeah.
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James
Like with Assad. Right. Like you can murder your own people with chemical weapons so long as you, you pretend to give a single shit about Palestinians, even though you've spent decades using your weapons to kill your own people and never once use them to, to actually help the people of Palestine, to actually protect people.
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Andrew Sage
Exactly, exactly. So at this point now, you know, Gaddafi is trying to be all chummy with the west after he spent some time being chummy with Africa and spend some time being chummy with USSR and with rebel groups around the world. But that was just the thing, Right. He had this track record of flip flopping, you know.
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James
Yeah.
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Andrew Sage
And even Though relations had normalized, these Western powers could not trust him. They still saw him as that mad dog. They still saw him as unpredictable and unreliable. In fact, even while he was cutting deals with these multi billion dollar corporations for the oil contracts and so on, when he wasn't getting what he wanted, he would threaten to nationalize to get what he wanted. And so the west, being opportunistic, were just waiting for an opportunity. They were done with playing his game. And that opportunity came when the people organically rose up against Gaddafi in 2011, not long after NATO intervened. In the years since, Libyans have suffered and died with no end in sight. It shouldn't be uncontroversial to see this Gaddafi was not a true anti imperialist. I don't think it's possible for a statesman or a government to be truly anti imperialist. Government is foundationally exploitative internally and when turned externally, that drive exploitation is what we understand as imperialism. All the markers of imperialism worthy of condemnation, be it economic exploitation, cultural dominance, military violence, etc. Is carried out under the label of governance when done within its own borders, when done against, for example the non Arab minorities in Libya. I think what's missing from now popular anti imperialist narratives is that connection, that analysis. And a gap in the analysis is what's creating this false consciousness that leads people to come to the conclusion that anti imperialism means that XYZ government is anti imperialist and good and and ABC government is imperialist and bad. That's not how the world works. States are never going to be liberatory. They're not able to produce a liberatory framework. At their best they function as a welfare state. At their worst you get mass suppression and cults of personality. Sometimes you get a combination of both, as with Libya under Gaddafi. And that's my message for today. Please stop lionizing leaders. Stay woke. Yeah. And all power to all the people. I've been Andrew Sage this is It Could Happen Here Peace.
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Podcast Host/Announcer
It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts, you can now find sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in Episode Descriptions. Thanks for listening. This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.