Source: The Australian, February 23, 2011
"In the past 10 years it has been the buffoon aspect of Gaddafi that has claimed most attention. Any dictator who assembles a personal bodyguard of 40 female virgins, some of them from Ethiopia, chosen personally by Gaddafi, is going to attract attention."
COLONEL Muammar Gaddafi is the most flamboyantly weird dictator in the modern world, not as ruthlessly sadistic as North Korea's Kim Jong-il, not quite as nuttily paranoid as Burma's Than Shwe, nor indeed as dedicated a mass murderer as was Iraq's Saddam Hussein, but beyond measure the fruitiest nut case on top of any national government anywhere.
It is perhaps wrong to joke about Gaddafi when the convulsive death throes of his regime are resulting in hundreds of lives lost. And in his long, tumultuous and at times terrible rule Gaddafi has confronted Western policy-makers with dilemmas over the most deadly serious of issues: nuclear proliferation, state-sponsored global terrorism, the widespread suppression of human rights, the diplomacy and raw power of oil.
Yet the man is a buffoon, a preening, ludicrous, Evelyn Waugh caricature of an African dictator, not only a scourge but an embarrassment to all Libyans and to the wider Arab culture. Finally, it seems, his countrymen are fed up.
The dictator can no longer keep them isolated from the currents flowing through the outside world. They know it doesn't have to be like this.
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It is not as if Gaddafi has become more eccentric as he has grown older. He seems to have sprung fully formed from the womb as a narcissistic dictator, with a heavy dash of Walter Mitty dreamer. The son of a modestly affluent Bedouin family, Gaddafi was by all accounts a talented young military officer, sent for training in Greece. He always had the will to power and began plotting coups while still studying.
He was 27 in 1969 when Libya's King Idris made the mistake of going overseas. Gaddafi, a mere captain at the time, led a bloodless coup. For a time he called himself prime minister. But right from the start his rule was personal, capricious and often deadly. He was popular early because he deployed the rhetoric of anti-colonialism. Libya is a classically artificial state born of colonialism and decolonisation. Much of it was under Ottoman rule from the 16th century. Then it suffered Italian colonial rule. But it was never really a nation; rather a collection of fractious tribes and clans. As in much of the Middle East, the clan is more important in Libya than the nation.
But Libyans were united in their resentment of Italian rule. Gaddafi expelled Italians living in Libya in 1970. Power went to Gaddafi's head quickly. Libya is a small country; even today its population is little over six million. But it has the largest oil and gas reserves in North Africa. It was a deadly combination: an immature, impetuous, ego-maniacal and slightly mad dictator and lots and lots and lots of money.
In 1972 Gaddafi gave up the title of prime minister and instead adopted, Idi Amin-like, a bewildering array of honorifics and ceremonial titles, chief among them the Brother Leader and Guide of the Revolution.
He was drawn both to socialism and pan-Arab nationalism. He styled himself the new Che Guevara. Throughout the 1970s and 80s Gaddafi tried to have a global geo-strategic impact. His weapons were money, terrorism and ideology.
Though claiming to be a socialist, Gaddafi was not a Marxist. At times he talked of Islamic socialism. Like so many other ego-driven revolutionary leaders, he authored his own manifesto, the incoherent Green Book. He subsidised extreme left-wing, mainly Trotskyite, grouplets in the West, including Australia, in exchange for their paying homage to the Green Book and his ideas.
He styled himself a revolutionary. The normal mechanisms of a modern state were suspended in Libya, which under Gaddafi claimed to have implemented a direct people's rule. This was given life through various local people's committees. Though Libya was under Gaddafi's absolute rule, and these committees were chosen and shaped by him, they nonetheless provided a method of consulting and co-opting the tribal and clan leaders who remained important figures in Libyan life.
Gaddafi tried to export this farrago of fraudulent direct participation into Libya's international dealings. For a time Libya's embassies were re-styled as People's Bureaus. There was a touch of Mao's Cultural Revolution in Gaddafi's approach and a touch, too, of the ideas of permanent revolution. But it was all really a sham, a pretext for Gaddafi's assumption of absolute power and a stage set for the endless psycho-drama of his outsize ego.
In the past 10 years it has been the buffoon aspect of Gaddafi that has claimed most attention. Any dictator who assembles a personal bodyguard of 40 female virgins, some of them from Ethiopia, chosen personally by Gaddafi, is going to attract attention. In 2009 he paid a reconciliation visit to Rome and assembled 500 Italian prostitutes, all of them above a minimum height, so he could give them a lecture and personally distribute to them copies of the Koran. More reading...
"In the past 10 years it has been the buffoon aspect of Gaddafi that has claimed most attention. Any dictator who assembles a personal bodyguard of 40 female virgins, some of them from Ethiopia, chosen personally by Gaddafi, is going to attract attention."
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| File Photo: Muammar Qaddafi |
COLONEL Muammar Gaddafi is the most flamboyantly weird dictator in the modern world, not as ruthlessly sadistic as North Korea's Kim Jong-il, not quite as nuttily paranoid as Burma's Than Shwe, nor indeed as dedicated a mass murderer as was Iraq's Saddam Hussein, but beyond measure the fruitiest nut case on top of any national government anywhere.
It is perhaps wrong to joke about Gaddafi when the convulsive death throes of his regime are resulting in hundreds of lives lost. And in his long, tumultuous and at times terrible rule Gaddafi has confronted Western policy-makers with dilemmas over the most deadly serious of issues: nuclear proliferation, state-sponsored global terrorism, the widespread suppression of human rights, the diplomacy and raw power of oil.
Yet the man is a buffoon, a preening, ludicrous, Evelyn Waugh caricature of an African dictator, not only a scourge but an embarrassment to all Libyans and to the wider Arab culture. Finally, it seems, his countrymen are fed up.
The dictator can no longer keep them isolated from the currents flowing through the outside world. They know it doesn't have to be like this.
Start of sidebar. Skip to end of sidebar.
.End of sidebar. Return to start of sidebar.
It is not as if Gaddafi has become more eccentric as he has grown older. He seems to have sprung fully formed from the womb as a narcissistic dictator, with a heavy dash of Walter Mitty dreamer. The son of a modestly affluent Bedouin family, Gaddafi was by all accounts a talented young military officer, sent for training in Greece. He always had the will to power and began plotting coups while still studying.
He was 27 in 1969 when Libya's King Idris made the mistake of going overseas. Gaddafi, a mere captain at the time, led a bloodless coup. For a time he called himself prime minister. But right from the start his rule was personal, capricious and often deadly. He was popular early because he deployed the rhetoric of anti-colonialism. Libya is a classically artificial state born of colonialism and decolonisation. Much of it was under Ottoman rule from the 16th century. Then it suffered Italian colonial rule. But it was never really a nation; rather a collection of fractious tribes and clans. As in much of the Middle East, the clan is more important in Libya than the nation.
But Libyans were united in their resentment of Italian rule. Gaddafi expelled Italians living in Libya in 1970. Power went to Gaddafi's head quickly. Libya is a small country; even today its population is little over six million. But it has the largest oil and gas reserves in North Africa. It was a deadly combination: an immature, impetuous, ego-maniacal and slightly mad dictator and lots and lots and lots of money.
In 1972 Gaddafi gave up the title of prime minister and instead adopted, Idi Amin-like, a bewildering array of honorifics and ceremonial titles, chief among them the Brother Leader and Guide of the Revolution.
He was drawn both to socialism and pan-Arab nationalism. He styled himself the new Che Guevara. Throughout the 1970s and 80s Gaddafi tried to have a global geo-strategic impact. His weapons were money, terrorism and ideology.
Though claiming to be a socialist, Gaddafi was not a Marxist. At times he talked of Islamic socialism. Like so many other ego-driven revolutionary leaders, he authored his own manifesto, the incoherent Green Book. He subsidised extreme left-wing, mainly Trotskyite, grouplets in the West, including Australia, in exchange for their paying homage to the Green Book and his ideas.
He styled himself a revolutionary. The normal mechanisms of a modern state were suspended in Libya, which under Gaddafi claimed to have implemented a direct people's rule. This was given life through various local people's committees. Though Libya was under Gaddafi's absolute rule, and these committees were chosen and shaped by him, they nonetheless provided a method of consulting and co-opting the tribal and clan leaders who remained important figures in Libyan life.
Gaddafi tried to export this farrago of fraudulent direct participation into Libya's international dealings. For a time Libya's embassies were re-styled as People's Bureaus. There was a touch of Mao's Cultural Revolution in Gaddafi's approach and a touch, too, of the ideas of permanent revolution. But it was all really a sham, a pretext for Gaddafi's assumption of absolute power and a stage set for the endless psycho-drama of his outsize ego.
In the past 10 years it has been the buffoon aspect of Gaddafi that has claimed most attention. Any dictator who assembles a personal bodyguard of 40 female virgins, some of them from Ethiopia, chosen personally by Gaddafi, is going to attract attention. In 2009 he paid a reconciliation visit to Rome and assembled 500 Italian prostitutes, all of them above a minimum height, so he could give them a lecture and personally distribute to them copies of the Koran. More reading...
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