cancel2 2022
Canceled
Well done quoting Putin's mouthpiece, RT is the Russian version of Fox News. For a more balanced view from the left.
While no one deserves to die in a war, of the estimated 30,000 Libyans to die in the struggle to overthrow Mummar Ghadafi, no one else can be said to have had it coming more than Mummar Ghadafi. Not only did he rule for more than 40 years by using terror (he had tens of thousands murdered), he conducted his 10-month campaign to stay in power with the utmost brutality. Most of those 30,000 souls were Libyan civilians killed by Ghadafi with artillery, tanks, snipers and cluster bombs. He targeted civilians to the end and so made the U.N. mission to protect them synonymous with ending his rule. So I find it odd that many on the left single out the killing of Mummar Ghadafi to demand investigation and justice for.
During the 10-month revolutionary struggle the goal of the vast majority of Libyans was to overthrow Ghadafi but the cynical left developed its own narrative for what they referred to as “regime change,” a regime change they opposed. They had no opinion on the struggle in Libya until NATO got involved, then “as they saw it” it was just another “War for Oil”, just another Iraq. As spectators to history, they declared “we’ve been through this movie before.” Usually that meant the rebels and the National Transitional Council (NTC) were seen as agents of imperialism, and the depth and breath of the Libyan opposition was denied. This was all done in the name of “opposing our own bourgeois” but its central foundation has been a cynical appreciation of the revolutionary movement of the Libyan people.
A year ago, this whole crowd was sure that NATO intervention would lead to a NATO occupation of Libya a la Iraq or Afghanistan. Clearly that hasn’t happened. Those that predicted such NATO “boots on the ground” – and that’s what they meant at the time – were wrong. That did not happen.
That is just one thing, on top of many, many things they got wrong about the Libyan revolution, but rather that admit they were wrong about that and maybe some other things and being so bold as to make a reappraisal of their views on Libya, they cling to those views.
They welcome any bad news from Libya and use it to support their view that the revolution in Libya is a bad thing and shouldn’t have happened. They find themselves quoting favorably from the mainstream media that has it’s own reasons for pouring cold water on post-Ghadafi Libya. They take every outbreak of violence and every injustice still happening in revolutionary Libya, blow it all out of proportion, and talk of “chaos” in Libya.
The post war violence in Libya is nothing like it was in Iraq, and for that matter still is eight years latter. The electricity is still on in Libya. Schools are back in session, mail is being delivered, oil production is back up, Internet is back up, and people are getting back to work. But these anti-interventionists-turned-counter-revolutionaries only look for signs of “chaos.”
Over 2.7 million people have registered all over Libya for national elections on June 19th or early July [there is talk of a short delay as I write this]. Misrata and Benghazi already had local elections. Libyans all over the world are registering at their still functioning embassies and all these people can talk about is “no functioning government” in Libya.
They still promote the view that the Libyan Revolution is a fake one ginned up by western imperialism and the NTC NATO puppets. I have some questions for these folks. If the Libyan revolution was orchestrated by U.S. imperialism and the NTC, a NATO “puppet regime”:
1.) Why are there no NATO bases in Libya?
2.) Why are there no NATO troops in Libya?
3.) Why did they refuse to turn over the so-called Lockerbie Bomber as demanded by the West?
4.) Why did they stop and expose the CIA’s special rendition program in Libya?
5.) Why is the revolutionary commander of Tripoli Head of the Military Council of Tripoli, Abdel Hakim Belhaj suing former British foreign minister Jack Straw?
During the Libyan Revolution, the pro-Ghadafi forces, with help from Russia and Iran, developed this fantastic network of Internet websites and blogs that spread Ghadafi’s war stories far and wide so that they would be replicated so many times that they would be the first thing found by the search engines. Now that the real facts of the situation in Libya last year are coming to light, we are in a position to compare the Ghadafi lies, and those of his parrots with the reality on the ground. Let’s take just one example – the March 19 NATO bombing of Libya. From the AJE tapes released last month of phone calls between Qaddafi and his cronies we have this.
A crowd of hundreds, many wearing green to show their support for Muammar Gaddafi, gathered in Tripoli on March 20 for a mass funeral. They were burying dozens of civilians – some of them children – killed overnight in NATO airstrikes.
Or so they were told. Among the thousands of wiretapped conversations obtained by Al Jazeera are several which show this “funeral” was actually a bit of stage-managed propaganda, organized by Tayeb El Safi, one of Gaddafi’s most trusted henchmen.
The day before the funeral, El Safi and an unknown caller can be heard joking about a NATO airstrike which destroyed an office used by Gaddafi’s aides.
El Safi: They hit our location [laughter].
Caller: The office?
El Safi: Yes, the office. The office where we used to meet, the High Commission for Children.
Caller: No! [laughter] When?
El Safi: We need to put children there and take the media there in the evening. Tomorrow, let’s organize a huge funeral in Green Square [Martyrs’ Square]. We need to get some coffins. From here and there, you know what I mean. We need revolutionary youth with green flags and pictures of the leader.
El Safi and his aides moved ahead with the plan, but they encountered a problem: The cemetery they planned to use couldn’t accommodate the huge number of “martyrs” the government planned to bury.
Caller: The cemetery of Al Hani only has three available places.
El Safi: Okay, move them to Al Hansheer [cemetery]. Get ready, I’ll tell you now.
Caller: How many?
El Safi: 48 martyrs.
Witnesses would recall later that the funeral did seem a bit odd – that no family members showed up to mourn their dead relatives. “We didn’t know who they were. There were no death certificates. There were no relatives who later came for them,” Faraj Al Ghyriani, a Tripoli resident who attended the funeral, told Al Jazeera. “I know that inside the coffins were just people who died of old age, or mercenaries. They were so stupid that they had the same name on two different coffins.”
Or so they were told. Among the thousands of wiretapped conversations obtained by Al Jazeera are several which show this “funeral” was actually a bit of stage-managed propaganda, organized by Tayeb El Safi, one of Gaddafi’s most trusted henchmen.
The day before the funeral, El Safi and an unknown caller can be heard joking about a NATO airstrike which destroyed an office used by Gaddafi’s aides.
El Safi: They hit our location [laughter].
Caller: The office?
El Safi: Yes, the office. The office where we used to meet, the High Commission for Children.
Caller: No! [laughter] When?
El Safi: We need to put children there and take the media there in the evening. Tomorrow, let’s organize a huge funeral in Green Square [Martyrs’ Square]. We need to get some coffins. From here and there, you know what I mean. We need revolutionary youth with green flags and pictures of the leader.
El Safi and his aides moved ahead with the plan, but they encountered a problem: The cemetery they planned to use couldn’t accommodate the huge number of “martyrs” the government planned to bury.
Caller: The cemetery of Al Hani only has three available places.
El Safi: Okay, move them to Al Hansheer [cemetery]. Get ready, I’ll tell you now.
Caller: How many?
El Safi: 48 martyrs.
Witnesses would recall later that the funeral did seem a bit odd – that no family members showed up to mourn their dead relatives. “We didn’t know who they were. There were no death certificates. There were no relatives who later came for them,” Faraj Al Ghyriani, a Tripoli resident who attended the funeral, told Al Jazeera. “I know that inside the coffins were just people who died of old age, or mercenaries. They were so stupid that they had the same name on two different coffins.”
Read more: http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=851
