Killing Africa’s Best Hope for Independence
by Jason Hirthler / March 24th, 2016
Recently the New York Times produced another propaganda gem. This article, entitled “A New Libya, With Very Little Time Left,” led with the “grisly” description of the death of “dictator” Muammar Gaddafi. Interesting that there was no condemnation of the grisly anal rape and gangland execution of the former president. I suppose this is the vaunted objectivity of the Times rearing its own “pock-marked head.” The article also noted Hillary Clinton’s vulgar moment of levity after receiving word of Gaddafi’s death on her mobile (“We came, we saw, he died.”) But in the spirit of journalistic impartiality the paper of record declined to record disgust—or would it have been delight—at the former Secretary of State’s effusive taunt.
Of course, to imply that the brutal assassination of the leader of a sovereign state by foreign-backed terrorists was a criminal act would be to implicate Hillary Clinton in a war crime. And that, we all know, is off the table. But that is the first point to make in an honest discussion of Clinton’s involvement in Libya. It was a war crime, violating the U.N. Charter and the Nuremburg principals. Wars of aggression, as Nuremberg judge Robert Jackson limned, “are the supreme international crime, because they contain within them the evil of the whole.” Precisely the story of Libya, a country with the highest standard of living in Africa, destroyed by Western NATO aerial forces backing terrorist jihadists on the ground. The once proud nation is now a festering swamp of extremism and an escape valve for ISIS fighters being routed in Syria.
The Missing Narrative
Over the course of his career, Gaddafi implemented a huge raft of social and economic programs that were highly popular with the people. It seems hard to reconcile the notion of a populace living in perpetual fear with one that receives free education, healthcare, housing, and a novel system of direct democracy—born in an Islamic state.
Basically an admirer of Gamal Nasser’s theories of economic nationalism as a path between Cold War polarities, Gaddafi was an independent-minded, anti-imperialist Muslim radical. He dramatically altered the shape of the state several times, lastly by creating something called the Jamahiriya, which was a radical form of direct democracy, or at least an attempt at it. In short, small communities would meet, debate issues, and send off representatives to a people’s congress to shape laws based on community decisions. Then this legislation would be sent to revolutionary committees for implementation. Observers have noted instances in which Gaddafi, in a nominal role of avuncular overseer, was rebuffed by the Jamahiriya system and times where he rejected its demands. As head of the armed forces, he never really relinquished the power that would have made the Jamahiriya all the more empowering to the population. But this is not to say it does not include elements that American democracy could not profit by, notably the Jeffersonian and anarchic notion of delegating decision-making to the most grassroots level.
It was Gaddafi who supported the African National Congress (ANC) at a time when Washington considered it a brutal terrorist organization, and Nelson Mandela as its sinister cohort. It was Gaddafi who put $300 million dollars up to start a fund that created Africa’s first satellite communications system called RASCOM (Regional African Satellite Communication Organization). (It would no longer have to rent American satellites at exorbitant rates.) In that regard, Gaddafi was a driving force in building pan-African institutions. The goal was his long-stated aim to reduce the influence of imperial power on Libya and the continent at large. Doing his best Hugo Chavez impersonation, he used oil wealth to lessen dependency on the exploitative International Monetary Fund and to attempt to de-dollarize the African continent. At the time of his assassination, he was busily creating an African Investment Bank that would provide interest-free development loans to other African nations. He proposed an African Central Bank to be based in Nigeria. He was working on a Cameroon-based African Monetary Fund. He was sketching a blueprint for a gold-backed African currency. He also played a role in the continental rejection of AFRICOM, the imperial headquarters Washington wanted to install to better exploit and police the continent.
For Africans, these were monumental undertakings and offered the hope of independence from Western militaries, multinationals, and creditors. For the West, Gaddafi’s actions were the ultimate crime. He was essentially trying to block the IMF from furthering shackling Africa in suffocating debt that, to be sure, would provide a steady flow of interest payments back to Western banks. He also effectively proposed a de-dollarized African economic block free of both the dollar reserve currency and Western lending institutions. He understood that both were tools of oppression and enslavement. He wanted to replace these extractive tools with continental development funds beneficial to Africans.
For all of this he was murdered and his country reduced to ruin.
As part of the run up to war, Barack Obama froze some $30 billion belonging to the Libyan Central Bank. This money was going to fund the above developments. How convenient that the money was frozen, which derailed the projects, and that a no-fly zone was implemented, which immediately led to the illegal war that overthrew the Gaddafi government.
Ulterior Motives
It’s obvious that the United States sought to unseat Gaddafi because he threatened the global superstructure of U.S. power. As Noam Chomsky has pointed out, Washington isn’t afraid of Islam but independence. This tragic spectacle has played out
ad nauseum across the history of the American empire. In North America itself, in Central and South America, in Africa, in Eastern Europe, and throughout Asia. Anywhere freethinkers rear their un-indoctrinated heads, they are swiftly cut down. Rulers like Gaddafi, Vladimir Putin, and Hugo Chavez are demonized not for their flaws as governors but for their virtues as nationalists. Independent domestic economics, independent foreign policies–these are the bête noir of Washington’s imperial plan.
Sadly, the rest of the world has been slow to learn the hard lesson that the United States can’t be trusted. This should have been obvious to the world during the Native American genocide. But each new generation of leaders forget their history and repeat the gullibility of their forbears. Yet it is also every new generation of American leaders that somehow ingest the vices of their antecedents.
As time was running out, Gaddafi
fielded several peace proposals to the West, ignored by Hillary Clinton as she made an impassioned push for war. He tried vainly to deny the lies promoted incessantly by the Western media: that he was minutes away from committing genocide on his own population. He never had a chance. Media is the spearhead of American foreign policy. Controlling the narrative is the fight that must be won before the war is fought. There is no better practitioner of this shadowy art than Washington.
As with the Gaddafi article, propaganda succeeds by what it leaves out. The corporate media leaves out American aggression, whether through the cynical manipulation of institutions like the UN and the IAEA, which provide nominal legitimacy for state violence, or through the clandestine use of proxy armies, which provide plausible deniability for Washington kingmakers. We are portrayed as an innocent bystander who simply responds, like a dutiful father saddened by the cruel playground behavior of a child. The ensuing discipline is therefore entirely justified, just another form of hard love from the patriarch that wants the best for everyone. This is the worldwide myth of American exceptionalism. It must be universally discredited before it is universally defeated. In a grim sort of consolation, Hillary Clinton will doubtless give us many new opportunities to make the case.
Full article:
http://dissidentvoice.org/2016/03/hillarys-hate-crime/
http://www.democraticunderground.com/12511647122
Mandela praised Qaddafi for fully supporting ending apherteid.
This question becomes even more valid in light of what the mainstream media, in the wake of the former South African president’s death, have been anxiously hiding from the public: the actual close and crucial alliance between Mandela and Gaddafi. Back in the 70s and 80s,
when the West refused to allow sanctions against Apartheid in South Africa and used to call Mandela a terrorist, it was none other than Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi who kept supporting him. Gaddafi funded Mandela’s fight against Apartheid by training ANC fighters and by paying for their education abroad, and their bond only became stronger after Mandela’s release from prison on February 11, 1990.
When Mandela was taken to the ruins of Gaddafi’s compound in Tripoli, which was bombed by the Reagan administration in 1986 in an attempt to murder the entire Gaddafi family, he said:
“No country can claim to be the policeman of the world and no state can dictate to another what it should do. Those that yesterday were friends of our enemies have the gall today to tell me not to visit my brother Gaddafi. They are advising us to be ungrateful and forget our friends of the past.”
In response, Gaddafi thanked Mandela for his friendship, saying: “Who would ever have said that one day the opportunity for us to meet would become reality. We would like you to know that we are constantly celebrating your fight and that of the South African people, and that we salute your courage during all of those long years you spent in detention in the prison of Apartheid. Not a single day has passed without us having thought of you and your sufferings.”
Eight years later, when then U.S. president Bill Clinton visited Mandela in March 1998, Clinton criticized the South African president’s meeting with Muammar Gaddafi. In reaction to that criticism, Mandela straightforwardly replied:
“I have also invited Brother Leader Gaddafi to this country. And I do that because our moral authority dictates that we should not abandon those who helped us in the darkest hour in the history of this country. Not only did the Libyans support us in return, they gave us the resources for us to conduct our struggle, and to win. And those South Africans who have berated me for being loyal to our friends, can literally go and jump into a pool.”
On the eve of the NATO-led war against Libya, Gaddafi’s booming country largely co-funded three projects that would rid Africa from its financial dependence on the West once and for all: the African Investment Bank in the Libyan city of Sirte, the African Monetary Fund (AFM), to be based in the capital of Cameroon, Yaounde, in 2011, and the African Central Bank to be based in the capital of Nigeria, Abuja. Especially the latter angered France – not coincidentally also the main orchestrator of the war on Libya – because it would mean the end of the West African CFA franc and the Central African CFA franc, through which France kept a hold on as much as thirteen African countries. Only two months after Africa said no to Western attempts to join the AFM, Western organized “protests” against the AFM’s benefactor, Muammar Gaddafi, started to erupt in Libya… ultimately resulting in the freezing of $30 billion by the West, which money mostly was intended for the above mentioned financial projects.
But Gaddafi helped the African continent in more than just material ways. More than any other African leader, he supported Mandela’s ANC’s struggle against the racist regime in South Africa. Above that, many Black Africans, especially sub-Saharan African migrants and refugees, found a new home in Gaddafi’s prosperous Libya.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article37301.htm
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1251&pid=1164288
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