To anyone who has celebrated the death of Muammar Gaddafi as some kind of humanitarian victory — say, with a cheery Facebook post — well, you should be kind of ashamed. In your defense, reveling in death at mere hearsay, as if we had some sort of national death religion with a barbaric god that called for blood to be spilled for his glory, seems to have become something of a tradition. Ignorance is a great source of national pride.
How are we supposed to believe that Gaddafi’s government was suddenly committing systematic violence against its own people? Because it fits into our neat cultural equation about independent governments in parts of the world where human life doesn’t mean crap. Gaddafi’s government has no history of attacking its own people in its 41 years of existence. They don’t treat prisoners especially well, but neither do we.
But investigation is no longer a part of journalism, and one-sided news feeds are not evidence. Why is it still not evident that NATO never initiates or coercively participates in the regime changes of countries that are not self-sufficient, rich in resources and experiencing regional political difficulties?
Libya has been a self-sufficient, independent, resource rich country for 41 years. It has the highest standard of living in Africa and is (was) getting better. Gaddafi didn’t attack his own people with aircraft — America did. Using the Middle East protests earlier this Spring as an excuse for indirect NATO occupation, America employed the exact same formula of destabilization and demoralization it used during the first half of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Powerful video evidence and reports coming out of the region show overwhelmingly that the rebels we’ve been hearing about for months at the center of fighting Gaddafi forces mostly consist of paramilitary Islamic fundamentalist groups whose national origin is in question. The videos also prove that NATO and American forces are covertly on the ground in Libya fighting in conjunction with the rebels despite claims of drone-only involvement.
The Gaddafi regime was far from perfect. But in January, only a few months before NATO decided to fill the sovereign nation with the highest overall standard of living in Africa with armed religious sadists, the U.N. Human Rights Council had issued a report praising Colonel Gaddafi and Libya for an overall great human rights record.
Forty-six delegations made positive comments on the state of the government. The report claimed that Libya promoted “not only political rights, but also economic, educational, social and cultural rights.” It praised the nation for “human rights training” received by its security forces. Criticism involved the criminalization of information dissemination and some forms of free speech, detaining prisoners without a legal basis, socio-economic disparity, some issues with education, health-care and over-applying the death penalty.
Libya’s relationship with the West had normalized and was improving. The U.N. Development Program listed Libya as being on track to achieve development goals by 2015, despite crippling U.N. sanctions in the ’90s that slowed development in all previously growing human and economic sectors. Gaddafi did business easily with European leaders. Again, a hundred other countries could be reduced to what the media has reduced Gaddafi to a revolutionary tyrant and not have had half its track record for improvement and relative prosperity. Repression was no more severe in Libya than any other authoritarian country — many NATO allied countries, such as Saudi Arabia, are much worse. Libya was one of the developing countries in the most ill-fated parts of the world closest to breaking the barrier and joining the ranks of the first world, but we’ve plunged it back into stagnancy and chaos ... so France and Britain can play empire? Or are prosperous African nations just inherently offensive?
Libya is a deeply depressing continuation of the coercive, primitive foreign policy that is responsible for a nauseating amount of barely deniable American and NATO war crimes contained in the last decade. Gaddafi’s murder was a sad day for anyone who cares about living in a diplomatic, civilized world. Or country for that matter.
— Wiley Robinson is a junior in ecology and evolutionary biology. He can be reached at rrobin23@utk.edu.
