The exit; just as controversial

Gaddafi is gone, but not before leaving a trail of events that often speaks for themselves in Arab renaissance, dynastic rule, religious invasion and most of all in global hegemony. Just as he lived in controversy, he died, or rather offered himself to be murdered, marking a controversial exit. If it was in the name of ‘humanity’ that he was removed as some would claim the event eventually turned out to be watershed in gothic extravaganza of inhumanity. The remedy, so called, is increasingly proving to be worse than the disease.

Gaddafi came to power when his country was reduced to a battlefield between French and Italian forces with the biggest foreign exchange earner that time being the export of used iron. King Idris, who stood for everything in a conflict zone effectively stood for nothing, creating a vacuum in leadership inviting somebody stronger. Gaddafi took the reigns of the country as a 27 year colonel and if not for the quaint circumstances that prevailed that time ushering Gaddafi in to power would not have taken place. People lived with bear minimum with 90 percent wanting decent accommodation and the oil income was only a pittance doled out mercifully by multinationals.

Western nations

Gaddafi nationalized the oil wealth earning the wrath of the multinationals and infused a sense of dynamism into the activities of OPEC. Then in 1973 he catapulted himself into the focus of Western nations by championing a near embargo of oil against the West.

What was meant to be a move against support for Israel eventually proved an unimaginable bounty across Middle East and the Sub-Saharan desert and it also meant the end of cheap oil that fuelled the Western economic domination. Within a generation the Arabs graduated from Camels to Cadillacs!

Gaddafi housed the nation, improved literacy from around 10 percent to 90 percent, provided free health care and a host of other benefits to facilitate Arab/African religious and traditional life styles. Gaddafi’s popularity peaked through the 80’s and even in the 90’s and thus his detractors, mainly in international politics, could do nothing but wait. But after 42 years, having lost that youthful exuberance and charisma, Gaddafi evinced intentions of establishing a dynasty.

Arab world

Forty two years is too long a period that could make any ruler ‘stale’ and in Libya it was a new generation of people whose basics have been taken for granted.

Having graduated from needs to rights the people now wanted that intellectualism and freedom to be part of governance. There was authoritarianism in Gaddafi, no doubt, and his ways have stood still over the years while country and people have changed. The fact that he could not come to terms with this reality, placed so vulnerably as he was with the ‘international’, finally proved his undoing.

Gaddafi was a great believer in Africanism and Islam. He believed in the edict that ‘Right or wrong, my Muslim brother.’ He championed the cause of Arab and Islamic unity but knowing the radical he was the mainly despotic Arab world was weary of his overtures.

“God has given us the plan to conquer the West and America without pulling a single sword,” Gaddafi said referring to the Arab and Muslim infiltration of Western society and he was very much a part and parcel of that grand design. The tragedy however is that in the end the man who believed so much in Islam and his own tribe had to die flogged by his own men without even a decent burial in keeping with Islamic rights. ‘Right or wrong’ will always be right and wrong whether it is Islamic, Christian or any other religion and Gaddafi would have been wiser in his death to realize this fact.

Human rights

Gaddafi was dubbed a dictator, a tyrant, a terrorist and what have you by the Western media. Yet whatever he was his tantrums were confined to his country and the region but on the other hand it is becoming increasingly clear that those who ordered his destruction have their own agenda in subduing the rest of the world. It was a case of a mandate to ensure a ‘no fly zone’ that descended down to take over the country. Generally when the West desired a dissenting leader destroyed the first part of this destruction assignment is taken over by the media in the West that prepare the target for destruction.

Western propaganda that often operates in subtle ways than one could discern make the target a ‘dictator’, a ‘tyrant’, ‘a sex maniac’ and even a ‘crazy dog’ thus conjuring up world opinion to prepare the target for destruction. First it was Saddam Hussein and now it is Gaddafi. The trend would take over Syria, Egypt and even Iran. The Arab spring is proving to be quite a summer for the West.

If World War I is for colonial domination and World War II is for democracy, could World War III be for ‘human rights’? Such is the hype created by the Western propaganda channels that they could even justify killing millions just to enforce their own standards of human rights. Colonial intentions haven’t changed, only the means have.

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