Hillary’s Hate Crime
Killing Africas Best Hope for Independenceby Jason Hirthler / March 24th, 2016
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 Clintons 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.
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 democracyborn in an Islamic state.
Basically an admirer of Gamal Nassers 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 peoples 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.
For Africans, these were monumental undertakings and offered the hope of independence from Western militaries, multinationals, and creditors. For the West, Gaddafis 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.
Its 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 isnt 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 policiesthese are the bête noir of Washingtons imperial plan.
Sadly, the rest of the world has been slow to learn the hard lesson that the United States cant 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.
Full article: http://dissidentvoice.org/2016/03/hillarys-hate-crime/
marble falls
(57,063 posts)pangaia
(24,324 posts)American Imperialism is one of the worst destructive forces in the world. But we are just so good at hiding it from ignorant Americans...
So "we' keep voting the Imperialists back in. like may happen yet again with HRC.
marble falls
(57,063 posts)results.
Igel
(35,293 posts)He was a tyrant, engaged in torture and manipulation, but he was anti-Western. In his own country he was fiercely imperialist, an supported some very anti-democratic tyrants elsewhere, but we cut tyrants slack when they're our tyrants.
Similarly, progressives had little bad to say about the USSR until Solzhenitsyn became embarrassingly popular, and even then a lot of faculty wanted him to go away. A lot of students even in the late '80s still insisted that the USSR was a good country, prosperous, free, and egalitarian. We like to think otherwise. My mother was one--she was all pro-USSR until she visited it and left the standard tours and went into stores and shops Russians would frequent. Then it was horrible. Didn't take her two months to go from admitting she'd always been pro-USSR to saying that she had always believed, since she was a little girl, that the USSR was a horrible place. The Alzheimers only came along 15 years later, so that's not an excuse.
China had the same cachet in the West for a while. So did N. Vietnam; I've seen arguments between "progressives" who defended all the good things Hanoi did after 1976 and denied that it did anything bad and boat people, who progressives not yet born in 1976 denied had to flee. "They were all criminals and took their loot with them."
Libya was one of the better run totalitarian dictatorships in many ways, right down to the quality of its "Little Green Book" of sayings by the Great Leader. But Qaddhafi really wanted to make sure that he was important among the lesser countries inhabited by lesser peoples. He was clear about that, too. "Black Africa" was his backyard, not the Europeans.
Qaddhafi lost a lot of his support around 2006 or 2007 when he turned traitor to the anti-Western Cause and was approved of by Bush II. Suddenly the torture, ethnic oppression, manipulation, arms trading, etc., etc., became visible as his Progressive Stealth Shield failed. He wasn't sufficiently anti-Western out of principle.
The resistance when his regime was tottering was real. The old slaver capital of Benghazi didn't like him because he treated them like chattel (he treated every one like chattel, of course); the Berbers in the south, whom he insisted were actually "Arab Berbers", resented his Arabization campaigns and his marginalization of non-Arabs.
As for why the allegedly objective news writer didn't make an article about Libya all about Qaddhafi and how horribly he was treated by Libyans who hated him, well, it wasn't an article about Qaddhafi. It was an article about Libya after Qaddhafi; it starts with his death, not where he was born or who the first women were that he raped or ordered raped. It's like asking why the writer of the OP above didn't more properly make the article about Qaddhafi about how much his enemies hated him. "It's a bad article because he didn't make my points for me." Silly objection, bordering on the ego-maniacal. (Which brings us right back to Qaddhafi.)