I must admit that I have not thought much about Libya since the 1980s when two U.S. Navy F-14s downed two Soviet-built Libyan jets over the Gulf of Sidra. Muammar Qaddafi figured out that it is better to scream at the Americans than to actually provoke us into a fight. Since then he appears to be in his own totalitarian world. I have been told that he is a serious drug user. He certainly is one of the sorriest human beings to rule any country in the world today, and more than 5 million unfortunate people have to endure a totalitarian cult for a narcissist.
Michael Totten visited Libya a few years ago and republished this piece he wrote for the LA Times on his blog. It is a great story of endurance.
An excerpt:
'The few men I did see walked or huddled together. They looked sullen, heavy, severe. I felt raw and exposed, wondering what on earth they must have thought when they saw an obvious foreigner wandering around the desolate streets.
'So I did what I could to find out. I smiled at everyone who walked past. You can learn a lot about a people and a place by trying this out. In New York, people ignore you. In Guatemala City, people will stare. In Libya, they all smiled back, every last one of them, no matter how grumpy or self-absorbed they looked two seconds before.
'I never detected even a whiff of hostility, not from one single person. Libyans seemed a decent, gentle, welcoming people with terrible luck. It wasn't their fault the neighborhood stank of oppression.
'Most apartment buildings were more or less equally dreary, but one did stand out. Architecturally it was just another modernist horror. But a 6-by-8-foot portrait of Qaddafi was bolted to the façade three stories up. It partially blocked the view from two of the balconies. The bastard couldn't even leave people alone when they were home.
'The posters weren't funny anymore. There were too damn many of them, for one thing. And, besides, Qaddafi is ugly. He may earn a few charisma points for traveling to Brussels and pitching his Bedouin tent on the Parliament lawn, but he's no Che Guevara in the guapo department.'
Totten describes the Stalinist conditions in Tripoli, and they sound like Pyongyang. Imagination in architecture, art, commerce, technology, literature, politics, economics, and education has been banned so long that boredom has surpassed suicide as the number one cause of death. Even the national flag is a plain green ensign without stripes, borders, or insignia. It has less imagination than the graffiti in a vacant lot, and it reflects sickly the tastes and limitations of the local despot.
Totten describes the Stalinist conditions in Tripoli, and they sound like Pyongyang. Imagination in architecture, art, commerce, technology, literature, politics, economics, and education has been banned so long that boredom has surpassed suicide as the number one cause of death. Even the national flag is a plain green ensign without stripes, borders, or insignia. It has less imagination than the graffiti in a vacant lot, and it reflects sickly the tastes and limitations of the local despot.
1 comments:
Libya's regime is a hodge-podge of socialism, radical Islamicist ideology, and the normal kleptocracy that grows up around a totalitarian regime. A sad state of affairs, no question, and an object lesson for those in the West who are intent on having an ideologically-oriented government run all the major sectors of human endeavor.
I remember reading awhile back that the major road system in Libya hasn't been upgraded since the Italians were occupying the country. Since the Italians were expelled during World War II, that is a sad commentary indeed.
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