A Lynch-Mob Revolution? (II)

Dmitri Prieto

Gadhafi’s murderers are part of a military movement supported and agreed upon by NATO, despite that backing being counter to the quite controversial provisions of the relevant UN resolution.  NATO — the representative of the cultured, civilized, free and democratic North — preferred to look with undisguised satisfaction at what happened to Gadhafi.

On YouTube it looks like a porn movie.  “But who cares! – they’re Arabs. Those are their customs…” (as was thought in 1994 in Rwanda: “They’re only a few African tribes going at it”).

Part One

Such people see the ethnic Arab world as the homeland of eroticism and fundamentalism, and in the case of the latter word, I’m sure that from now on there will be those who will search for the word “lynching” as having a genealogy based on the Arabic lexeme.

I read one book about the Libyan “green revolution”, and I’m observing the classic pattern of “transdomination.”

A liberation movement (a military one based on junior officers) became the government, and then it turned into an oppressive regime, with the shade of difference being that Gadhafi and his comrades worked to “transfer power to the grassroots,” at least in the Jamahiriya sense of the word.

Apparently there was real improvement in the “quality of life,” the Human Development Index (HDI) and other measurable indicators, though this didn’t stop the protests (“man” does not live on HDI alone).  But rule also included state terrorism in the case of Libya (*).

If that had not been the case, the protests would have been in vain and there wouldn’t have been a second “revolution” in Libya that began with the protests in the Arab Spring.  Those popular protests, which were different from what happened in other Arab countries, were co-opted by militarist forces that created a context of civil war.

The “green revolution” of Gadhafi was born in the barracks…though it then certainly generalized. But the big question is how?  The anti-Gadhafist revolution began in the streets, but the executioners of Gadhafi almost certainly operated out of a barracks concept, one of military rule.

The great revolutionary fear might be that this second “revolution” (whose defenders surely presume themselves to be revolutionary, though they don’t put themselves in the same category as the Gadhafi of 1969) will lead in turn to a new oppressor.  New “freedom fighters” lynching in the name of freedom under NATO air cover would be the leading characters in a transdomination # 2 scenario.

Speaking of “freedom fighters” (**), we should remember that cohorts placed under that title in the past in the Near and Middle East included both Saddam Hussein (against the Islamic Iranian threat) and Bin Laden (against Soviet intervention in Afghanistan). Both “fighters,” incidentally, were also executed — each in their own way — with clear US participation.

It seems that strategic alliances between certain revolutionaries with the “great powers” can in some way be recycled (between “socialism” and “capitalism,” “totalitarianism” and “democracy”), just as self-styled revolutionaries can be recycled – and their modes of action even more so than themselves.

Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Pinochet and many others taught us in the twentieth century that cultural relativism and political pragmatism have limits.  Moral boundaries are not exact, but they have constraints generated by the massive ethical effects of each action.

Sanguinary effects can make any banner or ideal smell putrid, despite how lofty they initially were.

When Gorbachev attempted to restructure such a monstrosity that had already turned pathetic (Castoriadis said “the USSR, four letters, four lies”), I learned one truth during the perestroika reform process that I still consider enormous: That the message of the popular saying, “If you want to eat an omelet you have to break the eggs,” is false.

People like Gandhi, Marti, Tolstoy and many others knew this very well.

A lynching is a lynching, wherever it occurs and under whatever flag.

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(*) What about state terrorism against Libya?  Imperialist aggression and the “revolutionary” rhetoric of national redemption, which gives internal and external violence an anti-imperialist justification, allow for mutual suckling.  Gadhafi was only right in certain theses while cynical on others.  I’m not trying to justify him, but some “less cynical democracies” have supported worse governments.

(**) Like what happened with the two other Muslim leaders mentioned, it’s clear that Gadhafi and his family were significant and desirable trading partners with the “West.”  My question is: Could the same thing ever happen to the current reactionary monarchs of Saudi Arabia?