The killing of Gaddafi 10 years ago has resulted in the death of the nation of Libya and the destruction of its people

 
The Real Reason Why Gaddafi Was Killed

                                                                                               The killing of Gaddafi 10 years ago has resulted in the death of the nation of Libya and the destruction of its people

Richard Medhurst:  Muammar Gaddafi led his nation to become the wealthiest in all of Africa. A decade after his demise, it is riven by tribalism, terrorism and slavery, all because the West could not allow an Arab leader to succeed.

There was never really an ‘Arab Spring’ in Libya the way there was in Egypt or Tunisia. Protests were much smaller, and as time went on to show, the biggest players turned out to be extremist groups and foreign actors, each trying to get a slice of the country.

NATO’s bombing of Libya and support for rebels seeking to overthrow Gaddafi had little to do with wanting the country to prosper. Under the guise of ‘human rights’ and ‘democracy’, the Western military alliance helped murder one of the Arab world’s most prominent leaders in order to steal Libya’s resources and protect Western hegemony. Later on, as part of Operation Timber Sycamore, the CIA would find additional utility in Gaddafi’s ousting: funnelling Libya’s stockpiles of weapons and ammunition over to Syria to arm Al-Qaeda and other jihadist groups.

Seldom discussed in the news anymore, Libya has become a shadow of its former self, ravaged by 10 years of war and chaos. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and the other war criminals who orchestrated its destruction don’t want you to know how badly it’s doing.

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From thriving nation to ‘failed state’

Known for his extravagance, Gaddafi boasted a security detail of female bodyguards, lavish outfits, and long, dramatic speeches. He also transformed Libya from one of the poorest countries on Earth into a

What They Don't Want You To Know About MUAMMAR GADDAFI
rich, self-sufficient state, all while managing a tribal society in a country home to the largest oil reserves in Africa.

During his 42 years in power, he increased the country’s literacy rate from 25% to 88%. Libyans enjoyed free healthcare, free education, and a high standard of living. Basic necessities such as electricity and gas were cheap, and the country was guaranteed a strong social safety net and welfare programs.

Libya is 90% desert. Gaddafi sought to provide fresh water to all Libyans for consumption and agriculture – an endeavor in which he succeeded. He built the world’s largest irrigation project, the ‘Great Man-Made River’ in the 1980s. Boasting the world’s largest pipe network, it provides 70% of all the fresh water in Libya. Gaddafi called it the “Eighth Wonder of the World”. Costing over $25 billion, the project was entirely self-financed, without any loans or credits from foreign banks. Libya had grown to be a very wealthy country and had no external debt.

NATO bombed the Great Man-Made River in July 2011, destroying key civilian infrastructure: a war crime.

The United Nations’ Human Development Index provides a summary measure of health, education and income. In 2010, Libya was ranked number one in Africa, and 53rd out of 189 countries and territories. Today, its ranking has sunk from 53rd to 105th worldwide.

After the NATO-backed ‘revolution’, Libya has none of these nice things anymore. There are constant power cuts. The healthcare system has collapsed. There is no infrastructure. The standard of living has plummeted, and after 10 years, Libya doesn’t even have a functioning central government.

In March this year, a government of national unity was formed, after a ceasefire brokered in October 2020. While it has largely held until now, and elections are scheduled for December, infighting persists, and whether anything comes of this process remains to be seen.

Instead of an abundance of water, gold and oil in a thriving country with great infrastructure, Libya now has open slave-trade markets. Smugglers and human traffickers take advantage of migrants and refugees passing through to Europe, selling them off into bondage. Rival tribes and political factions fight over oil and other precious resources, determined to seize power for themselves. Meanwhile, pockets of Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS), Al-Qaeda and other jihadist fighters lurk in the shadows, plaguing the war-torn country and its neighbors – groups who wouldn’t have dared establish a presence in Gaddafi’s Libya.

Once a prosperous nation, since his fall, it has been taken over by terrorists, opportunists and thieves, and has plunged into chaos. This is what has become of Libya these last 10 years. This is what NATO created.

One of Gaddafi’s best speeches was in 2008 in Damascus, at a meeting of the Arab League. Rebuking the violent invasion of Iraq, he offered Arab leaders a stark reminder of what befell Saddam Hussein, whom the US once considered an ally against Iran.

“An entire Arab leadership was executed by hanging, yet we sit on the sidelines. Why? Any one of you might be next.”

                                                                                                 UN calls for international investigation into Gaddafi death                                                                                                                

Chuckling at his words, other Arab leaders would have done well to take heed of Gaddafi’s warning, for, indeed, the US would come for Syria and Libya next. And just three years later, Gaddafi himself would be brutally killed at the hands of NATO-backed rebels.

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Anti-imperialist, pan-Arabist and pan-African: Why Gaddafi had to fall

The late Libyan leader supported independence and national liberation movements right across the world, including groups such as the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Irish Republican Army, the Black Panther Party, and many more. In the 1970s, he tried to merge Libya with Egypt and Syria to form a unified Arab state. In 2009, he proposed that African nations adopt a single currency: the gold dinar. The Libyan Central Bank, which was 100% state-owned, had reserves of 144 tons of gold that he intended to use for this purpose. Gaddafi proposed that African countries buy and sell their resources exclusively in this new pan-African currency. This would enable them to transition away from the US dollar and the Central Africa (CFA) franc – a colonial currency used in 14 countries and controlled entirely by France.

This was Gaddafi’s biggest sin. In wanting African nations to adopt a single currency, to control their own resources and have true independence, he posed a threat to Western monetary hegemony, so he had to go.

Western governments were well aware of this plan. A look at the emails of then-US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, show discussions around Gaddafi’s gold reserves and his plans for a single currency. It became clear to the West that African countries switching away from the US dollar or CFA franc, and controlling their own currency and monetary policy, would undermine American and French influence over Africa. It would weaken the Western monopoly over African resources and the international banking system, rendering neo-colonial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund less effective in manipulating developing nations.

                                                                                          23 Sep 2009 Muammar Gaddafi speech at United Nations General Assembly

 Not that we needed further confirmation; but written clearly in those emails was evidence that this plan to provide an alternative to the CFA franc “was one of the factors that influenced President Nicolas Sarkozy’s decision to commit France to the attack on Libya.”

Sarkozy decided to bomb Libya because he knew full well that West African and Central African countries abandoning the CFA franc would minimise France’s sphere of influence over its ‘former’ African colonies and fulfil its “desire to gain a greater share of Libya oil production” – that is, plunder Libya’s wealth.

Gaddafi foresaw this in 2011, when he said, “There is a conspiracy to control Libyan oil and to control Libyan land, to colonize Libya once again.”

All this is a stark reminder that NATO couldn’t care less about protestors and the ‘Arab Spring’. Claims of “respect for democracy” were merely a cover story to protect Western interests and steal Libya’s resources, leaving the country in chaos and crawling with terrorists, just like Iraq and Syria.

Nothing could be more emblematic of how evil the entire affair is, than Hillary Clinton literally jumping for joy on hearing of Gaddafi’s demise, after he was brutally sodomized, lynched and executed by NATO-backed rebels. “We came, we saw, he died,” she said.

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Killed for his success

Gaddafi was always a thorn in the side of Western colonial interests. His greatest ‘crime’ was wanting real independence, threatening US and French monetary hegemony, and the international banking system.

Now people look at Libya and label it a ‘failed state’, but Gaddafi’s Libya was not a failed state. It was Africa’s wealthiest and most prosperous nation – a thriving, flourishing state until the West deliberately destroyed it in 2011.

Apologists for Western imperialism love dismissing the achievements of other countries and labelling their leaders dictators, but the truth is, Libya was much better off under Gaddafi. It had oil, gold, water and resource independence.

History is littered with African, Arab and Latin leaders, killed by the United States, for daring to make their countries better and seeking to challenge Western hegemony. Gaddafi is no exception.

There is nothing the West hates more than an Arab leader who opposes imperialism, Zionism and wants his country, and other Arab and African countries, to be self-sufficient. That is why NATO murdered Gaddafi.

Richard Medhurst

Richard Medhurst is a British journalist born in Damascus. Owing to his coverage of international relations, US politics, the Middle East and Julian Assange extradition he has built a successful YouTube channel and hosts a program on Press TV. Follow him on Twitter @richimedhurst

The ghost of fear - The ghost of fear...

                                               Police Brutality in Canada

By Marcelo Colussi: Fear paralyzes. That is not new at all. We have all known it since time immemorial, and those who exercise some quota of power, in addition to knowing it, use it. Fear involves something irrational, primary; the "well-thinking" logic loses its supremacy there. Because it is a primary feeling, almost on the order of the unconditioned (instinctive) reflex, it brings us closer to the biological world..

Someone scared, let alone terrified, falls prey to the most visceral, most unthinkable reactions, leaving aside reasoned, cold and logical decisions totally aside. Making use of these circumstances, based on a hegemonic project, is something that is well known in history: whoever commands takes advantage of the fear of the other to exercise his power. That is, by all accounts, a wicked, Machiavellian mechanism. But who said that perversion is not an inherent part of the human?

 Today, in our hyper-technocratic society, the management of emotions, including fear, is an element of capital importance for the maintenance of the system. Obviously, if someone manages and manipulates that fear, he is not the ordinary citizen, the mass man, as he has been called. It is he who suffers it, the object of manipulation; but the strings of the puppet are not precisely moved by him. For this there is what the American academy calls "human engineering." "We do not want another Venezuela in our country!" Right-wing candidates in any Latin American nation constantly repeat. And, of course, they win the elections. The fear of foreigners "who come to steal our jobs and bring crime" allowed Trump in the United States and many European leaders to win their respective elections, riding on those ghosts. 

                               Caligula remembered as a despotic ruler, full of madness, perversion, and acts of extreme cruelty

 In this logic, the Polish-American Zbigniew Brzezinsky, a member of important tanks of thought in the United States and a professor at Johns Hopkins University, one of the most conspicuous representatives of this imperial right that feels itself owner of the world, could say without ambiguity: «In the technotronic society the course will be set by the sum of individual support of millions of uncoordinated citizens who will easily fall into the range of magnetic and attractive personalities, who will effectively exploit the most efficient techniques to manipulate emotions and control reason ». 

 These techniques - increasingly refined and effective, by the way - respond, for their part, to a project of global domination. They represent what the shaman, the tribal witch or the holy Roman Catholic Apostolic Church may have done before. Religion has existed since "the first hypocrite found the first fool," said Voltaire, scaring him, it should be added: he who misbehaves will burn eternally in hell. People undoubtedly believed it for centuries. But «Hell does not exist; what exists is the disappearance of sinful souls ", clarified the current pontiff Francisco. To frighten with the unknown - the bogeyman or the man with the bag that is going to come, which frightens children - are mechanisms as old as the world. Without a doubt, they give results. "Religions are nothing more than a set of superstitions useful to keep ignorant peoples under control," commented theologian Giordano Bruno. Manipulating the fear of the population gives good results ... for those who manipulate, of course. Today the media industry, our modern "religion", is taking care of it with hyper-sophisticated techniques

. Maintaining terrified populations is good business for those in power, a great invention prepared from a hegemonic project of domination. The terrorizing agent can vary (the devil, communism, evil spirits, Islamic fundamentalism, the man in the bag, the gangs), although the effect achieved is always similar: someone with fear, someone terrified is very easily manipulated, they are paralyzes, becomes tame. But today - and this is what we want to highlight - the management of that fear has taken on tremendous dimensions. Human beings not only live in fear of the natural vicissitudes that we do not handle –as it has always been: death, natural disasters, uncertainty about fate– but today we increasingly suffer from “human catastrophes ». But even more so, which makes the situation more pathetic, that fear is rationally induced from a determined project of domination. "Our ignorance is planned by great wisdom," said Scalabrini Ortiz.

Why do Latin American populations, increasingly, seem to live kidnapped in their own homes, defended with bars and barbed wire, terrified of walking down the street, thinking paranoidly about the next assault? Interesting fact: private security agencies, together with the business of illegal drugs and the sale of cell phones, are the three sectors that have grown the most in the region in recent decades. “You don't have to be a sociologist or political scientist to realize the relationship that exists between the gang boy who is sent to extort a neighborhood and the private security agency, of a deputy or a military man, who the next day comes to offer his services, "said a young man from a Central American gang with crystal clarity. The current fear that exists in the world - whether in the prosperous North or in the famished South - is largely induced. 

Today we are no longer frightened by spirits or demons on the loose (religions, which deal with all of them, are in retreat in an increasingly technocratic world). Today we are not afraid of ghosts. We fear (or are made to fear) terrorism (in the countries of the North) or crime (in the impoverished South).

The Scream - Edvard Munch symbolizes human anxiety. 

 Although the reasons for our terrors, if we analyze them exhaustively, are not precisely those diffuse new terrors, but the perception we have of them. Now, the perception we have of them is what the mass media builds for us. Almost all the perceptions of the world that we are incorporating are given to us - imposed on us, more correctly said - by those media.

 Ask the reader what is inside, for example, a submarine. In general everyone will give roughly the same answer: a control panel, levers, dashboards with lights, sailors taking orders, a captain commanding a periscope, etc. Where does this "knowledge" come from? Of the hundreds or thousands of times that we have been bombarded with those images.. 

 Where do our crippling fears of terrorism or rampant crime come from? Of the media matrices that have already been imposed on us. Are all Muslims bloody terrorists ready to pull a bomb out of their clothes? Are all young people from poor neighborhoods criminals ready to threaten us with a knife? Obviously not. But those are the imaginaries that have been imposed on us. "A lie repeated a thousand times ends up becoming a truth," Goebbels said during Nazism. Indeed, it is like this: modern manipulation techniques, increasingly subtle and refined, allow it.

                 America never apologized for destroying Iraqi children

 The panic that was unleashed with the appearance of the coronavirus at the beginning of 2020, without denying that this pathogen is harmful, had a lot to do with the global media management that drove it. Hunger or work accidents cause more deaths than COVID-19, but the techniques of manipulating our fears presented this disease as the worst biblical plague in history, leaving the previous problems out of focus. In short: fear can be induced. The management of emotions, among them fear, is an element of capital importance for the maintenance of the system. Serving this is what the American academy calls "human engineering." The aforementioned Brzezinsky statement allows it to be seen with obvious evidence 

 Undoubtedly the world is not a bed of roses: there are deaths everywhere due to violent actions. Of course bombs explode and there are armed robberies; of course there are suicidal acts, generally called "terrorists", and of course there are also street crime, robberies with violence and "red areas" where not even the police enter. What a novelty! Every minute two people on the planet die from the detonation of a firearm. Obviously we do not live in a paradise. But, according to consistent studies, no less than ten thousand people die every day in the world due to lack of food, and more than two thousand due to lack of drinking water, while the always ill-defined and imprecise «terrorism» adds up on average ... 11 daily deaths

We are afraid of what we are told to be afraid of. And curiously, these fears seem manipulated: in the North of the world people are paranoid about the next terrorist act, which will surely be attributed to some so-called "Islamic fundamentalist group." The death of a person at the hands, for example, of a jealous husband or a delusional paranoid, is already presented as a terrorist attack, giving rise to a hyper-militarization of daily life ... and to preventive wars (which, curiously, are they always do against countries that have oil in their subsoil. What a coincidence, right?).

 

Muslim family killed in ‘premeditated’ terror attack in Ontario, CANADA

 In the South, in impoverished countries and where life is violated daily by bullets, hunger or the lack of drinking water, people live in a paranoid state in the face of the presumption of crime that can appear on every corner. But as a community leader from a poor neighborhood in Guatemala stated: “The whole issue of the gang [youth gangs] has been greatly inflated by the media; they have a lot to do with this matter, because they oversize it. In reality, the situation is not quite as chaotic as it is claimed. You can walk down the street, but the message is that if you walk, you will be assaulted. Therefore: better to stay still in the house ».

As caravans of Central American immigrants heads north

 At one point or another on the planet the slogan is that: from home to work and from work to home. The evil scares that are out there (Muslim terrorists or criminals) stalk us, make our lives impossible, they will devour us. Sadly, human engineering knows what it's doing ... and it manages to keep us quiet! 

 Maintaining terrified populations is good business (for those in power, of course). Never so timely as now the words of the Bolivian leader Domitila Barrios regarding all this: «Our main enemy is not imperialism, nor the bourgeoisie nor the bureaucracy. Our main enemy is fear, and we carry it inside. Someone speculated at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic that after the numerous protest demonstrations that traveled the world in 2019, the confinements, curfews and militarization of public spaces appear with the fabulous panic that was unleashed. The observation cannot be disregarded: the fear that invaded us - fear that was induced, one might say - kept us locked up. The "Stay at home" prevailed ... and the street demonstrations stopped.

 Fear is a psychologically normal reaction in certain situations; it can be pathological in certain cases (phobic neuroses, for example: agoraphobia, claustrophobia, zoophobia, etc.). But the fear we are talking about here (against the "bad Muslim" or the "criminal who stalks us behind every tree") is a pure invention of human engineering, prepared from a project of domination. Is it time to open your eyes?

 Rebelión has published this article with the author's permission under a Creative Commons license, respecting his freedom to publish it in other sources.