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October 2011 This Is What U.S.
Imperialist-Sponsored “Democracy” Looks Like
The Assassination of Muammar
Qaddafi
Serial Killer in the White House Carves Another Notch in His Gun Imperialist
media groove on lynching of Qaddafi. On
the morning of October 20, former Libyan leader
Muammar Qaddafi was captured, brutally beaten
and executed in cold blood by the victorious
imperialist-sponsored “rebels” who have taken
over the North African country. The murder was
quickly celebrated by To all those who asked for U.S./NATO intervention in the name of “humanitarian” concerns, including many liberals and some ostensible leftists, and to the bulk of the left that hailed the reactionary rebel thugs and thereby helped pave the way for the imperialist war on Libya, we say: you asked for it, you got it. May you choke on your “victory.” In
the voluminous coverage by the imperialist
media, the bloody crime which is the birth
certificate of the “new Yes,
Muammar Qaddafi was a dictator and a tyrant. We
Trotskyists fought against illusions in the
Libyan strongman even as he was lionized by much
of the left as a symbol of anti-imperialism. We
have spelled out in detail how along with his
nationalist posturing Qaddafi repeatedly sought
a modus
vivendi, an arrangement to get along with
the imperialists – and not just in recent years
when he joined Washington’s “war on terror” (see
“Qaddafi and the Imperialists: On and Off,” in The
Internationalist No. 33, Summer 2011). But
once the U.S./NATO bombing began, the League for
the Fourth International defended As
the North African and Arab masses rose up
against U.S.-backed dictators early this year,
Qaddafi became a liability, and provided an
opportunity for Western intervention. As the We now are treated to an orgy of self-congratulation in the imperialist media. We’re told that “thousands celebrate” the overthrow of Qaddafi in Tripoli, or at least 100 who can be seen in a Reuters photo, showing what skillful use of tight cropping can do to create the impression of massive numbers, as in the famous toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad on 9 April 2003. What they don’t talk about is how NATO terror-bombed Surt, where pro-Qaddafi fighters fought a tenacious resistance, utterly destroying the city. Nor do they mention how a week ago, militias shot up a peaceful demonstration of Qaddafi supporters in Abu Salim, a poor neighborhood of the Libyan capital. We
get psychobabble about achieving “closure” in Qaddafi
was long demonized in the Western media. His
claim that the rebels who rose against him were
Islamists and monarchists was ridiculed, but
turned out to be quite true. He was certainly
capricious, erratic, repressive, with famously
wild hair in his later years. His heavily
brocaded uniforms cut the figure of a Gilbert
and Sullivan comic opera general. But when
Ronald Reagan labeled the Libyan leader the “mad
dog of the Middle East,” it was not a
description, it was a program, that Qaddafi
should be “put down” – which Reagan tried to do
by bombing his compound in 1986 after earlier
shooting down Libyan planes in the If there were any mad dogs in Libya yesterday it was the NATO-assisted “freedom fighters” who shot Qaddafi in cold blood, with two bullets to the head and one to the chest – an execution, not a “crossfire” – then splayed his body on the hood of a car, pulling his hair and banging his head, then dragged his body into the street, kicking it like a football, and now displaying it in a shopping center meat locker. This is the indelible image of the “New Libya” under the U.S./NATO-sponsored “rebels.” It’s hardly the picture of democracy and the rule of law Obama and the other imperialist butchers claimed to be fighting for. The
Some
liberals are lamenting that Qaddafi was not
captured so that he could be put on trial for
his crimes. Western rulers, of course, hardly
wished for even a pretense of a trial where the
Libyan strongman could detail how he cooperated
with the imperialists. But who would try him?
The International Criminal Court in Obama’s
“assisting rebels” in Proletarian
revolutionaries defended We
warned in several articles (“Imperialist
Marauders in the Quicksands of North Africa,”
“Libyan Showdown” and “Defeat U.S./U.N./NATO
Assault” in The
Internationalist No. 33) that the Libyan
insurgents were quite different from the masses
of unemployed workers and youth who touched off
the overthrow of Mohammed Ben Ali in And
we denounced as lap dogs of imperialism the left
which fulsomely praised the (pro-imperialist)
Libyan rebels and thereby helped prepare the way
for bloody U.S./NATO intervention (see “Libya
and the Opportunist Left,” also in The
Internationalist No. 33). Now they are
reaping the fruits of their opportunism. Barack
Obama, who was elected with the tacit or open
support of many of these same pseudo-leftists,
is not only a mass murderer, presiding over the
slaughter of thousands of innocent civilians in
As
Trotskyists and opponents of imperialist
domination, from To contact the Internationalist Group and the League for the Fourth International, send e-mail to: internationalistgroup@msn.com |