Gaddafi's Death: The Killing Joke of the Arab Spring

The following is my second article for The Rabbit, the school paper of Essex U. This is the unedited version of it; for the paper I squeezed it down from 1000 words to about 600. I have chosen to post the unaltered version here. Also, at some point I refer to his death happening three or four weeks ago. This is because the school paper comes out every two weeks, so I was writing for future audiences in mind.

Alterations aside, this article is still property of The Rabbit, the school paper of Essex University.

***

Gaddafi's Death: The Killing Joke of the Arab Spring

R.H. Langan

Three weeks ago on the northern coast of war ravaged Libya, usurped dictator Muammar Gaddafi was pulled out from the crevices of a drainpipe, his last, futile point of refuge before begging for his life to be spared. The defamed leader, yet another icon in a long string of insidious personalities packaged from the Middle-East, ultimately met his demise shortly thereafter. His battered, bloodied carcass was put on display for the Libyan people to see, so that they could confirm with their own eyes that the tyrant had been toppled, that at last they were free, and- to quote that All-American phrase: justice had been done.

Gaddafi's death: An exclamation point on the Arab Spring. A complete and utter triumph for democracy.

I've heard this joke before.

My dismay has little to do with the barbaric way in which the rebels killed Gaddafi after capturing him; although to be sure, to be shot multiple times and sodomized with a lead pipe before being dragged through the streets are all acts that safely qualify as human rights violations. We can declare this murder to be savage- and it is- but to those who had suffered under Gaddafi's rein for decades, this could only have been seen as fitting. As justice. We in the west can fancy ourselves to be above such primal outbursts, but did not thousands in America scramble to the streets the night Obama announced bin Laden had allegedly been disposed of, all so these patriotic denizens could frantically clamor “USA! USA! USA!” Was not George W. Bush talking for all Americans when he asked for bin Laden's head on a platter following 9-11? Or what about the high demand for the viral video featuring the hanging of Saddam Hussein?

We as a species aren't yet above revenge. We still want to place the heads of our enemies on the spikes overlooking our town gates for all to see. This is a universal human condition; we all need to project what we don't like onto someone we can hate, whether it be one man or an entire race. And for those in Libya, Gaddafi wasn't just an effigy- he was a true monster for decades. A monster that the UN accepted for a long time, a despot warmly embraced this past decade as a friend of your leaders here in Britain or Europe, who endorsed and shook hands with Obama last year.

This is where the fraudulence of the Arab Spring comes into view. It isn't that the people of the Middle-East don't desperately want liberation from the plutocracy secretly running them (i.e. Saudi Arabia), but changes in leadership in the Middle-East have historically only happened when the west allows it. It is rarely an inspired rise of the serfs, but rather a manufactured production from the powers that be. The west backs the movements when the time is right, irrespective of the quality of people on board. The chosen successor for Gaddafi is Abdelhakim Belhadj, former head of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, a known terrorist organization that was listed as such following 9/11.

Wiping off the chessboard. History makes this claim not controversial, but academic.

This was the same case with disposed Egyptian president Mubarak, a former friend to western powers who was called 'family' by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton before she and the rest of world condemned his leadership just a year later when the revolts in Egypt began. Or perhaps a more telling example would be the president installed in Iraq by the CIA in 1963, a man who was a friend to the west for nearly three decades, who shook hands with US Official Donald Rumsfeld in 1983, just months after murdering thousands of his own people, the very same crime he was executed for in 2006. Pray tell, when exactly did Saddam Hussein became an unwanted piece on the Central Asian chessboard, the popular board game that the US, Britain, and Europe continue to enjoy for their own gain? Did Washington and London wake up one morning in 1991 and abruptly realize that one of their allies was actually a rather evil dude? Or maybe it just made sense for certain interests involved- military, energy, etc- to slowly phase Hussein out and begin wiping the board clean for the new millennium? Is this the case with every so-called 'freedom' movement we seem so eager to be involved with nowadays, under this phony pretense of spreading our esteemed values? Is this not the same fraudulent policy that we all so eagerly- and rightfully- slammed Dubya Bush for? Are we so quick to forget the recent lessons learned from Bush and Blair that we now overlook the fact that the tongues of Obama and Cameron are just as forked?

Gaddafi: overnight from friend to foe. Just another name on a long line of puppets we've decided are no longer satisfactory. The BBC, Sky and the big US Networks make it appear as if we treated Gaddafi as a baddie all along; how many times now are we going to hear about Reagan disliking him? Moreover, the media and our politicians carefully repaint the picture to make it seem like the images of Gaddafi's bashed-in skull are icons for all us freedom-loving folk, rather than the truth for what they really are: The culmination of a pawn being discarded, so the harnessing of oil and power in the Middle-East can be renewed by the west in full.

This has been the entire operation in the Middle-East for the past year. Facebook didn't make the fall of Egypt or Libya happen, the people didn't will the demise of Gaddafi or Osama bin Laden. It wasn't a zeitgeist effort. It was all decreed in boardrooms somewhere in Washington and Westminster, all so these massive, volatile shakeups could occur in less than a year in order to aid our troubling economies, and all the while it was innocuously sold as liberty for the people, by the people.

Bashed-in skulls. Hangings. We love to showcase the grizzly demise of our phantoms. Makes you wonder what happened to those bin Laden photos. Obama said America was too noble of a nation to show them off.

I've heard this one before...