The Outsider

 

Gaddafi the scapegoat may not just be seen as a fellow traveler of existentialism, but as a late emanation of European Romanticism.

 

Gaddafi, Existentialist by Charlie Nash (Independent: 2021), 100 pages.

 

On October 20, 2011, the four-decade rule of Muammar Gaddafi came to a brutal end when Libyan rebels, supported by NATO bombers and Predator drones, captured, tortured, and killed the fugitive leader. A few days later, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took credit for his downfall with an infamous boast: “We came, we saw, he died.” But instead of the new democratic dawn envisioned by Western governments, Libya descended into prolonged, bloody civil war. Amidst the chaos, human trafficking and even open-air slave markets flourished. There’s a case to be made that the dream of liberal internationalism perished along with Gaddafi that day.

 

Gaddafi’s ignominious demise abruptly erased him from Western consciousness, where he had been a spectral presence for decades. The media alternated between presenting him as a buffoonish megalomaniac and as a dangerous madman. Under the Reagan administration, he took the blame for a series of terrorist attacks against the West, culminating in the 1988 Lockerbie bombing. In his 2016 documentary HyperNormalisation, filmmaker Adam Curtis argued that U.S. propaganda had exaggerated Gaddafi’s role for strategic reasons: Libya’s relative isolation and distance from Western allies, especially Israel, made it a more convenient target for reprisals than other state sponsors of terror like Syria’s Hafez al-Assad. In the context of Cold War geopolitics, the man known as “The Colonel” took on the mythic role of the scapegoat king: the powerful insider who was at the same time an eccentric and despised outsider, and could therefore assume culpability for all manner of iniquities.

In his brief new biographical study, Gaddafi, Existentialist, journalist Charlie Nash offers an intriguing new perspective on his subject’s perpetual outsider status. At minimum, Nash demonstrates, Gaddafi was aware of existentialist philosophy and alluded to it in his writings and speeches. But perhaps, he speculates, Gaddafi was also a crypto-existentialist whose sensibility and governing philosophy was shaped by this intellectual tradition. Nash might have rendered the stakes of this line of inquiry more explicit—that is, why it would matter if Gaddafi was an existentialist. Instead, he frames the matter more as a personal obsession. The appeal of the book may therefore depend on the reader’s degree of curiosity about Gaddafi, existentialism, or both.

 

As Nash acknowledges, some will find the Gaddafi, Existentialist hypothesis implausible. Indeed, the Colonel himself preemptively rejected it, stating in one speech that existentialism “looks for the secret of existence, while we understand this secret and we do so through religion.” Gaddafi’s best-known articulation of his broader political philosophy was his “Green Book” (the title a nod to Mao’s “Little Red Book”). The “Third International Theory” he elaborated there was a variety of “third positionism” that claimed to use Islam to transcend the limitations of capitalism and communism. As Nash concedes, Gaddafi repeatedly insisted that the influences on his thought were not Western thinkers, but Islamic philosophy and the homespun wisdom of his native Bedouin culture. Nash’s inquiry into Gaddafi’s existentialism therefore runs up against his subject’s own denials of any debt to this (or any other) decadent Western philosophy.

Nevertheless, Nash reveals several elements of Gaddafi’s career that point to a relationship with existentialist thought. First, he examines several journalists’ and observers’ reports that the Libyan leader’s favorite book was Colin Wilson’s 1956 bestseller The Outsider, a primer on existentialism that rooted this philosophical tendency in the experience of social alienation. It’s plausible, Nash suggests, that he encountered Wilson’s book during his time studying in England in the mid-1960s, a stay in which he reportedly experienced the predicament examined by Wilson: the isolation and anomie of the inhabitant of the modern urban metropolis. But Gaddafi might just as easily have encountered the book before that. The Outsider was translated into Arabic soon after its publication. Its success made Wilson a cult figure in the Middle East, and toured Lebanon and Syria. According to a friend of Wilson’s interviewed by Nash, Gaddafi also invited the cult author to Libya, but he turned down the invitation.

 

This brings us to another piece of evidence for Gaddafi’s possible existentialism: the pervasive influence of this school of philosophy across the Arab world by the 1960s. Not only Wilson’s Outsider, but works by Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and others were bestsellers in Arabic translation, and Sartre cultivated ties with radical Arab intellectuals. On this subject, Nash quotes Yoav Di-Capua’s book No Exit: Arab Existentialism, Jean Paul Sartre and Decolonization: “by the 1950s the Arab world boasted of having the largest existentialist scene outside of Europe.” If the Arab nationalist milieu that incubated Gaddafi was teeming with existentialists, that suggests he may have been affected by their ideas. On the other hand, if he was as much of an outsider as Nash suggests, he might also have been aloof to this trend. Regardless, the existentialist themes of freedom and authenticity resonated with the concerns Gaddafi shared with the Arab nationalists of the immediate post-colonial era.

The principal non-circumstantial evidence Nash offers for Gaddafi’s existentialist leanings is the latter’s single published literary work: a collection of short stories published in English translation under the title Escape to Hell (surprisingly, with a complimentary foreword by the JFK confidant and California Senator Pierre Salinger). The stories in Escape to Hell, Nash demonstrates, express an alienated sensibility of the sort we might associate with existentialist texts like Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, Camus’s The Stranger, and Sartre’s Nausea. Islam and the traditional lifestyle of the Bedouin people, which Gaddafi claimed were the source of his values, appear in these stores as the only means of escape from the hell of the modern world.

 

The ethos conveyed in Gaddafi’s foray into literature suggests we might see him not just as a fellow traveler of existentialism, as Nash argues, but as a late emanation of European Romanticism, which idealized the uncontaminated rural life of the authentic Volk as a counterweight to a corrupt civilization. Ironically, like all modern nationalisms, Gaddafi’s was at its most Western precisely in the moments when it rejected the West in favor of the autochthonous. We might add that his “socialist Jamahiriya” was bankrolled by the export of petroleum to the industrial economies he detested. A surreal late illustration of his contradictory relation to the West came during a 2009 visit to the U.N. General Assembly in New York, when Gaddafi paid a hefty fee to pitch his Bedouin tent on a suburban estate. The man who rented him the land was Donald Trump.

One broader implication of Nash’s analysis of Gaddafi, as I suggested previously, is that in the course of his career he attained a status comparable to that of the scapegoat kings of myth and legend. That is, he became the latest in the long line of alienated outsiders who managed to ascend to a position of power, only to be made to function as scapegoats. In Gaddafi’s case, both by the Western powers who bombed and sanctioned him and later, by his own people, who killed him in a sort of spontaneous sacrificial act that aimed to regenerate the nation, but led to the opposite result. As Nash notes, Gaddafi foresaw his fate in the title story in Escape to Hell, which reflects on the fate of leaders who fall victim to the populace that once adored them.

While Gaddafi was never taken seriously by most intellectuals, Nash’s book shows that his political philosophy was one of a variety of efforts to forge an ideological basis for a modern nation state by fusing Islamic and local traditions with European intellectual frameworks. From this perspective, his dabbling in existentialism was not entirely out of place, as Nash demonstrates. Gaddafi’s nation-building enterprise provoked fear and hostility from Western governments in its heyday, but it looks far more benign now that Libya and other states in the region have descended into civil war, helping give rise to the nihilistic death cult of ISIS. Like Gaddafi, the ideologues of ISIS claim to be returning to an authentic Islamic politics. But their reactionary fantasies, like his, are crucially shaped by European Romanticism’s rejection of a corrupt modernity. In Gaddafi’s time as much as now, the spectral terrors the West projects onto the exotic Middle East are a denial of the extent to which the region’s political history is intertwined with our own.

 

 

Geoff Shullenberger is a senior lecturer at NYU. His writing has appeared most recently in the Washington Examiner, the Chronicle of Higher Education, American Affairs, and the New Atlantis. His blog and podcast is Outsider Theory (outsidertheory.com). 

 

 

Read more:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-outsider/

 

 

 

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The son of former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi is reportedly eyeing his country’s highest office a decade after his father was overthrown and murdered by NATO-backed rebels, triggering years of civil unrest.  

Saif al-Islam Gaddafi has begun to reach out to Western and other diplomats as he seeks to re-enter public life, the Times reported. Once viewed as his father’s successor, he is preparing to stand in Libya’s December 24 presidential contest. Speaking to the paper via telephone, he said he was in good health, and confirmed his relationship with a team of advisers acting on his behalf. Gaddafi is expected to publicly announce his political ambitions in the near future. However, it is still unclear whether he will be allowed to run, as a new election law currently being drafted could potentially exclude him from participating. 

The 48-year-old was captured and imprisoned by militants in 2011. He was freed by his captors six years later under an amnesty agreement. Since then, he has remained in hiding. He still faces an arrest warrant in Libya, and, according to the Times, is also wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC). Several of his siblings remain in prison either in Libya and abroad.

Sources who spoke with the Times said the ICC warrant could be withdrawn, but that Gaddafi would likely run for office even if it were not. The paper speculated that US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who was a vocal proponent of the NATO campaign in Libya, would likely oppose the idea of Gaddafi’s son running for office. 

Saif al-Islam Gaddafi made headlines in 2018, after Bloomberg reported that Russian diplomats had spoken to him via a video link shortly after he was released from prison. A family spokesperson said around that time that Gaddafi wanted to run for president. 

 Moscow responded to the Bloomberg report by stating that no one should be excluded from Libya’s political process, adding that it kept in touch with various groups in the country in an effort to help facilitate peace negotiations. Libya has seen years of civil war and political turbulence following the NATO-backed intervention. It is inching towards a settlement between the Tripoli-based Government of National Accord and a separate governing body supported by military commander Khalifa Haftar, which controls the country’s east.

Both the GNA and the Haftar-backed administration have agreed to back a central government. In March, Libya’s parliament appointed Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibeh to lead an interim government until December’s election.

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/526290-gaddafi-son-election-libya/

 

Note: Blinken is a mad psychopath/sociopath who is employed by the Empire because he appears sane enough. Blinken is somewhat worse than mad (John?) Bolton who wants to declare war on everything that moves...

 

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Hugo Chávez, the Love That Can Only Be Repaid With Love

 

By Oleg Yasinsky  –  Mar 4, 2024

Perhaps one of the best portraits of Chávez is contained in this phrase by Fidel, spoken 11 years ago, a few hours after the painful news: “Do you want to know who Hugo Chávez was? Look who mourns him and who celebrates his death…”

At a press conference in May 2002 in Madrid, after the meeting of heads of state between the European Union and Latin America, tired and somewhat annoyed, Chávez uttered a phrase that bothered more than one authority: “Governments go from summit to summit, while people go from abyss to abyss.”

He was never what they wanted him to be, perhaps because he never fit within the protocol function that he formally represented. Being the first president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, like Fidel or Allende, he is a character of more than a regional, planetary dimension, and his humanist thought transcends all the borders of his time and of the times in the borders that still divide us.

In this short and intense historical time that passed after his departure, the figure of Chávez is already a heroic part of the pantheon of giants of the Latin American continent, and there is no way to oust him from there.

One of the most incredible things about him, in my opinion, was his incredible ability to remain a totally normal person on the highest platform of State power and persist in his stubborn and almost child-like dream to, together with his beloved people and millions from all over, giving all his body and soul in the fight for human beings.

Thus, he earned the hatred of several Chilean and European so-called ‘socialists.’ While they, from their armchair positions as managers of the capitalist system, lied to their people, saying that they “do what they can” and “nothing else that can be done,” Chávez demonstrated daily that, from a reality much harsher and more complex than theirs, having a true intention means you can always do much more. Even when something is not possible yet, there is always the freedom to call things by their name. The freedom that others did not have. Unlike most rulers, Chávez was much stronger and more solid than the power that so easily changes others.

The enemy media did not spare qualifiers against him, doing masterful exercises in something in which they are insurmountable: manipulation and disqualification. Words, phrases, gestures, real and invented, always decontextualized, always in bad faith, and with a total irresponsibility towards any consequence, that only this kind of mainstream so-called ‘democratic’ press can have.

The media war against Chávez in times of relative international calm, more than a decade ago, seems to have been the general rehearsal before launching this onslaught of global ‘fake news’ that the major international media have become today.

As the traditional parties, totally discredited and obsolete, could not compete against Chavismo, the role of the opposition party was assigned to the private Venezuelan press, which, little by little, became a true political agent of the northern empire. Defying the local, regional, and global media war, Chávez fought against it with the mechanisms of the only true democracy possible: participation. This is how Eduardo Galeano described it:

 

This Hugo Chávez is a strange dictator. Masochistic and suicidal: he created a Constitution that allows the people to throw him out, and he risked that happening in a recall referendum that Venezuela has held for the first time in universal history. There was no punishment. This turned out to be the eighth election that Chávez has won in five years, with a transparency that Bush would have wanted for a holiday. Obedient to his own Constitution, Chávez accepted the referendum, promoted by the opposition, and made his position available to the people: “You decide.” Until now, presidents interrupted their administration only due to death, barracks, population, or parliamentary decisions. The referendum has inaugurated an unprecedented form of direct democracy. An extraordinary event: How many presidents, from any country of the world would dare to do it? And how many would still be presidents after doing it?

This tyrant invented by the major media, this fearsome demon, has just given a tremendous injection of vitamins to democracy, which in Latin America, and not only in Latin America, is weak and in need of energy…

 

What could have happened to Lieutenant Colonel Hugo Chávez Frías, then 38 years old, so that he first led Operation Zamora, on February 4, 1992, and then, after his military defeat, called on the rebel military to depose weapons, personally taking responsibility of everything in a country where none of the politicians at that time were assuming responsibility for anything? The debut of neoliberalism in his country, which suddenly woke up from the dream of a prosperous Venezuela passing into the nightmare of the Caracazo, while the government forced the Army to repress its hungry people? Any memories of his grandmother, the Savanna Pumé indigenous woman Rosa Inés, ‘Mama Rosa,’ who raised him, giving him the most valuable thing in the world, a tremendous sense of belonging and duty to the humble people that marked all of his political work?

Among the countless stories of the failed April 2002 coup against Chávez, I was very impressed by one of those tales that cannot be made up, told by two of its protagonists in a humble neighborhood of Puerto Ordaz.

Two poor women, both grandmothers for a long time, laughingly told me how, upon finding out about the kidnapping of their president, they stole a truck that was parked in front of their houses and headed to Caracas to save Chávez. Luckily, halfway along the bumpy path, the president had already been freed by the people. The grandmothers celebrated in one of the squares and the truck was safely returned to its owner, who at first got angry, but then also became friends with them.

The defeat of the 2002 coup of a people united with the Army has been a very important continental example of a new and powerful political protagonist: an Army that comes out to defend its people, something that surely exacerbated much more the imperial hatred against the Bolivarian Revolution.

Beyond the several or many possible errors and undoubted successes of Hugo Chávez in charge of the Presidency, which can be topics of long and complex discussions, I believe that there is something very evident. His first government, since the first days in power, for the first time in the history of the country, made millions of humble Venezuelans, always marginalized and neglected by elites of any political color, feel that this was their country too, and that if they wanted to improve it for their children, they had to participate, demand, defend, give their opinion, discuss and, above all, organize. Accused by the mercenary press of being ‘populist,’ Chávez did the complete opposite of the well-known practices of the regional populist leaders, he demanded that his people read, educate themselves, learn, not be afraid of ideas, opening the doors for new opportunities for the education of people of all ages and from all social strata, who for centuries had been excluded from citizen life. He understood that this was the only way that his people would not be manipulated by the media or by politicians and thus he would be able to build a society different from the capitalist one.

I was impressed by his bravery and honesty when, already very ill, he spoke openly in an interview about his fear of dying. You have to be really very big to face life without false superhero masks.

Today, 11 years after his physical departure, at this time of the worst global crisis in several decades, we will keep our eyes and hearts wide open, we will feel how from the darkness of the skies of Latin America and the world the light of his legacy continues to reach us, which is, as he would say, “the love that can only be repaid with love.”

 

(RT)

Translation: Orinoco Tribune

https://orinocotribune.com/hugo-chavez-about-the-love-that-can-only-be-repaid-with-love/

 

 

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