Without question, Moammar Gaddafi is a relic of a different age, in this case the immediate post-colonial world. One cannot understand his career without bearing this context in mind. One also needs to understand whom Gaddafi overthrew in a coup d’etat in 1969:
Idris, GBE (Arabic: إدريس الأول), born Sayyid Muhammad Idris bin Sayyid Muhammad al-Mahdi al-Senussi (12 March 1889 – 25 May 1983) [1]</sup>, was the first and only king of Libya, reigning from 1951 to 1969, and the Chief of the Senussi Muslim order.
He was born at Al-Jaghbub, the headquarters of the Senussi movement, the son of Sayyid Muhammad al-Mahdi bin Sayyid Muhammad al-Senussi and his fifth wife Aisha bint Ahmad al-Syrte. Idris was a grandson of Sayyid Muhammad bin ‘Ali as-Senussi, the founder of the Senussi Muslim sufi order. He became Chief of the Senussi order in 1916 following the abdication of his cousin Sayyid Ahmed Sharif es Senussi. He was recognized by the British under the new title Emir of the territory of Cyrenaica, a position also confirmed by the Italians in 1920.
That is to say, Idris was one of the artificial monarchs created by the British after the First World War. Most famous of these types, still with us, is the house of Saud. Colonizing powers did not deal with the peoples they conquered as peoples, but rather created “strong men” of varying strength with whom to carry on negotiations to make the extraction of material wealth from the colony more easy. Interestingly, Vine Deloria noted a similar process in North America:
In treating for lands, rights of way, and minerals, commissioners negotiating for the government insisted on applying foreign political concepts to the tribes they were confronting. Used to dealing with kings, queens, and royalty, the early white men insisted on meeting the supreme political head of each tribe. When they found none, they created one and called the man they had chosen the Chief.
Finding a chief at treaty-signing time was no problem. The most pliable man who could be easily bribed was named chief and the treaty was signed (Custer Died for Your Sins 204).
It’s worth remembering Franz Fanon on violence, as well.
The violence which has ruled over the ordering of the colonial world, which has ceaselessly drummed the rhythm for the destruction of native social forms and broken up without reserve the systems of reference of the economy, the customs of dress and external life, that same violence will be claimed and taken over by the native at the moment when, deciding to embody history in his own person, he surges into the forbidden quarters…
When the native is confronted with the colonial order of things, he finds he is in a state of permanent tension. The settler’s world is a hostile world, which spurns the native, but at the same time it is a world of which he is envious. We have seen that the native never ceases to dream of putting himself in the place of the settler–not of becoming the settler but of substituting himself for the settler. This hostile world, ponderous and aggressive because it fends off the colonized masses with all the harshness it is capable of, represents not merely a hell from which the swiftest flight possible is desirable, but also a paradise close at hand which is guarded by terrible watchdogs.
The native is always on the alert, for since he can only make out with difficulty the many symbols of the colonial world, he is never sure whether or not he has crossed the frontier. Confronted with a world ruled by the settler, the native is always presumed guilty. But the native’s guilt is never a guilt which he accepts; it is rather a kind of curse, a sort of sword of Damocles, for, in his innermost spirit, the native admits no accusation. He is overpowered but not tamed; he is treated as an inferior but he is not convinced of his inferiority. He is patiently waiting until the settler is off his guard to fly at him. The native’s muscles are always tensed. You can’t say that he is terrorized, or even apprehensive. He is in fact ready at a moment’s notice to exchange the role of the quarry for that of the hunter. The native is an oppressed person whose permanent dream is to become the persecutor.
Gaddafi was in Fanon’s sense this native. The colonial system organically offered a limited range of possibilities for liberation. We imagine our future based on the conditions of our present. The future as we dream it is the same as the present but with certain conditions changed to either our liking or disliking. “The native is an oppressed person whose permanent dream is to become the persecutor.” Why? Because persecution is the present condition of the native in the colonial system. Imagining a system without persecution was if not impossible then certainly not encouraged by the colonial system. And, not at all by magic but by the structure of historical relations, post-colonial regimes tended overwhelmingly to be authoritarian, with political violence as the norm. Marx, famously:
Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. Thus Luther put on the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789-1814 draped itself alternately in the guise of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793-95. In like manner, the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses himself freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling the old and when he forgets his native tongue.
Gaddafi is nearly always in the United States press painted as a buffoon, to avoid dealing with the things he actually talked about: anti-imperialism and pan-Africanism. I am not trying to elide his crimes, and I’ll note that I know someone fairly well who lost a father in the Lockerbie bombing, and I know how deeply she and her mother suffered as a result. I point it out because this precisely is the problem with Gaddafi, in the title of the post. He spoke the imperialist language of violence, so to speak, in the anti-imperialist cause. This was never a good thing, just as Fanon never suggests that violence is a good thing. It is, however, a historically conditioned thing.
It seems clear to me that Gaddafi’s days are numbered.
Soldiers in the cities controlled by the protesters have switched sides, filling the void and no longer supporting Gaddafi’s government. In a statement posted on the internet, army officers stationed in Misurata pledged their “total support” for the protesters.
Major-General Suleiman Mahmoud, the commander of the armed forces in Tobruk, earlier told Al Jazeera that the troops led by him had switched loyalties.
“We are on the side of the people,” he said. “I was with him [Gaddafi] in the past but the situation has changed – he’s a tyrant.”
“I was with him in the past…” That’s the key quote. Leaders like Gaddafi, in the post-colonial world, represented to vast numbers of people, an acceptable alternative to on the one hand, the continuation of colonial oppression, and on the other the continuation of colonial economy through neo-colonialism. All three, a Gaddafi, colonialism, or neo-colonialism, are predicated on systemic violence. The first, given certain historical conditions, is for Fanon’s native the best of the options. I stress, given certain historical conditions.
This was for two very obvious reasons never a part of mainstream discourse about Gaddafi in the United States. Above all, this was because Gaddafi represented a systemic challenge to US hegemony. The critique of either his use of violence or his personality was the pretext for vilifying him in the press. Don’t misunderstand me: the man is awful and needs to go. That said, no government that nukes civilians and napalms villagers–Gaddafi came to power in 1969, while this last was happening–has a problem with violence as a means of policy. The problem to the US government is that of who uses violence and to what end.
2011 is not 1969, though, and therein lies the problem. Gaddafi’s methods were not as any level OK in 1969, or 1979, but historical conditions have changed and now people in Libya have a broader range of options from which to choose. Clearly, events in Tunisia and Egypt brought these options into material existence, and the possibility of a different Libya becomes much easier for Libyan people to imagine and make real.
The problem is this: Gaddafi is to anti-imperialism what the Soviet Union was to socialism. The Soviet critique of the United States in its propaganda was nearly always spot-on, in direct proportion to how spot-off Soviet propaganda about its own society was, and vice versa, excepting some of the more hysterical ramblings in the American media.
The Soviet Union gave Marx a bad name among many on the political left, which is problematic because he formulated what is still the most important critical analysis of capitalism we have and developed a methodological approach to historical change–for the better–that however one might add to or modify it, is essential if one wants to see more than cosmetic changes to the world system. Gaddafi through his violence and personal corruption gave anti-imperialism a bad name, from the start in the capitalist media, and over time in the developing world.
The revolution in Egypt at this point is about being open to the world, but with Egypt as an actor rather than a subordinate. This presents a contradiction. Much is made about the use of media developed in the United States–Facebook, Twitter, etc.–and focus is placed on people like Wael Ghonim who, because they appear to be living a more “Western” lifestyle than the working classes of Egypt, and who are deeply concerned with civil rights on the liberal model (e.g., freedom of speech) elicit a great deal of sympathy in this country. For good reason, too: the Wael Ghonims are amazing and strong people creating a better world, and they give people in the United States hope for their own future. That said, there was a reason that the United States supported and continues to support dictators in Africa, Southwest Asia, and elsewhere. They want a chief with whom to negotiate.
At some point, the affinity of Wael Ghonims for various aspects of “Western” societies must come in to open conflict with the material interest of capitalist elites for pliable collaborators in the extraction of profit from the region. When this happens, there is a danger that the crimes of Gaddafi will be the example of anti-imperialism, and that enough people in places like Egypt will look at their options and, given a limited range of historical possibilities, let go anti-imperialism for the fear that it would bring corruption and political violence, that Fanon will be abandoned because of Gaddafi much like, for many leftists Marx was abandoned because of Stalin.
