Gaddafi: The Arab Madman Cometh
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Amen. Guess what movie I saw last night? Which one? The new Top Gun movie, Top Gun Maverick. It was so awesome. I hate you.

I really want to watch it. You've got to see it, man. And also, you know, it really put me in the right mindset for today's episode, which is about Colonel Gaddafi. It put me right back in the mid 80s when, you know, America's neoconservative, muscular sort of confidence was was at its at its peak. And Gaddafi was the great enemy of the world. What did Reagan call him again?

The mad dog of the Middle East. Except this is a problem with Reagan. He never knew his geography. Actually, he was supposed to be technically the mad dog of North Africa. That's true. That's true. You know, poor North Africans, they're always being lumped in as Middle Easterners. They must think, we're not Middle Easterners. We're not Middle Easterners. We're North Africans. Although, frankly, given the history we're going to talk about today, I don't know which I'd rather be. Indeed. Right. Let's get into it.

Eamon, I've got to be more careful about what I say during these recordings. In our last episode, I just casually announced that we'd be discussing the notorious 1973 oil embargo today.

But in fact, we're actually not going to discuss the oil embargo. So for any dear listeners who have tuned in hoping for our take on the oil embargo, you're out of luck. Maybe another time. No, we are talking about something far more interesting than the oil embargo. We are talking about the...

King of Kings of Africa, the Dean of the Arab Presidents, what he called himself also the Imam of all Muslims, the Colonel, the leader of the great glorious revolution of the conqueror. Yeah, that's the name of the official revolution in Libya, Muammar Gaddafi. - Yes, today we're focusing on Libya.

a country that we've rather ignored over these three seasons, but not today. Before we go back in time, Eamon, tell us, what's the situation like in Libya at the moment? It's a scrambled egg of politics. Let's put it this way. I mean, you have former Libyan regime, you know, military figures like Khalifa Haftar, you know, the field marshal Khalifa Haftar, as he called himself,

in the east of Libya, and you have remnants of the jihadist LIFG, the Libyan Islamic Fighter Group, led by Abdelhakim Belhaj, based out of Tripoli, and then you have the Turkish and Muslim Brotherhood-backed Pasha Agha, the former prime minister, and you have Dubeybeh, who is kind of the prime minister who is...

you know, agreed upon by everyone because he is quite weak. And still there is no end in sight for, you know, the current chaotic scene of Libyan politics. It really needs a strong man again.

Oh, man, so much unrest, so much disquiet, so much chaos. It's all largely fallout from the 42 year rule of Libya's handsome, charismatic and pretty batshit crazy dictator, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. You know, he was my favorite. He was my favorite dictator of all time.

Well, because he made you laugh more than any dictator. We have a saying in Arabic, خُذُ الْحِكْمَ مِنْ أَفْوَاهِ الْمَجَانِينَ which means that you should collect wisdom from the mouths of the insane. So for me, he really personified that proverb.

Well, dear listeners, now that we've told the story of the rise and fall of Nasserism, we turn to Gaddafi and other madmen like him who believe themselves to have inherited Nasser's mantle of Arab leadership. Gaddafi's brazen, narcissistic insanity is the stuff of legend. And Eamon, you've got a caravan load of funny anecdotes to illustrate just how nuts he was.

But more seriously, Gaddafi symbolizes the tragic turn towards unhinged dictatorship, which much of the Arab world underwent in the second half of the Cold War. Gaddafi, Assad, Saleh, Mubarak, Ben Ali, and of course Saddam Hussein, they all stalked the Middle East like undead zombies of Nasser, a nightmare from which the Arab world is still recovering.

Dude, Ayman Gaddafi, he was nuts. Well, I mean, can you imagine being 27 year old and you become the undisputed leader of a large country like Libya, 1.7 million square kilometers? Well, mostly desert and underpopulated, but still, I mean, with oil. Yeah.

Well, it certainly went to his head. I don't know what was inside that head of his, but there was a lot of crazy stuff. During the reading I've been doing, preparing for this episode, I kept thinking over and over, wow, I mean, how in God's name could a man like this maintain rule over a whole country for 42 years? I mean, he...

How is this possible, Ayman? You know what? Actually, I looked at this throughout history that insane and unhinged rulers tend actually to last longer. And there are good examples throughout history, including in North Africa, al-Hakim bi-Amrullah, the Fatimid caliph. He was insane. And one of his anecdotes is that he ordered all of the people of Egypt to shave one eyebrow and keep the other one. So, I mean...

I mean, and people complied. And he lasted long because just like every insane and unhinged ruler, people are always afraid. They are so unpredictable. People don't know how. You see, you know, if you have the classical ruler, the classical leader, you know how to maneuver around them. You know how to outmaneuver them. But when you have an insane person who could just, you know, turn the entire table with the chessboard on it,

you don't know how to deal with them. So this is why they last longer. People don't know how to deal with them. They are so unpredictable. Well, certainly that was true of Colonel Gaddafi. And this is how I want to frame the episode, really. I mean, in our last episode, we covered the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War. And we said that those wars marked the demolition of Nasserism.

the demolition of the dream of pan-Arabism, and that the first generation of post-colonial Arab Republicans were thoroughly discredited.

And when I'm thinking about Gaddafi, I'm thinking, you know, the Arab world in a way, following its defeats to Israel and the smashing of its prevailing ideological framework. After this, the Arab world kind of went nuts. Indeed. And Gaddafi symbolizes it perfectly. It's almost like Gaddafi personified the mental breakdown that the Arab world was undergoing. Indeed. Oh, my God. When you say he went nuts...

He went nuts in terms of every variety, pistachios, almonds, cashews, everything you can imagine.

Also, it's interesting that this whole series we've been talking about a period of Arab and Middle Eastern history through which Gaddafi grew up. He is really the product of everything that we've discussed. He grew up after the Ottoman Empire had collapsed, after the First World War changed the map of the Middle East, after all of these trends became firmly established. So Gaddafi is the result of all of this history in a way. Indeed. Indeed.

And this is why I think he is the product, to an extent, he is the product of the overhyped rhetoric of Nazism and of Arab nationalism. You told me that you think he sort of symbolizes a continuation of Nazism in a more radical mode. Indeed. The problem with Gaddafi was his, apart from his insanity, was his excessive narcissism. That is for sure. The man was...

I think he was certifiable. I mean, honestly, you've got so many great stories in our conversation leading up to this episode, man. I just laughed so much. The problem is that we have to also understand that the story of how he became the leader of Libya is as interesting, actually, as how he was able to continue to rule Libya for 42 years. Yes. But before we get to the story of Gaddafi, let's talk about

Libya, as we are wont to do this series. By going far back into history, Libya, you know, the question is, of course, what is Libya? The word Libya for the ancients was really the word they used for all of Africa outside of Egypt. So it was an extremely broad term, Libya. Ancient Libya appears in Herodotus, the father of history, the ancient, well, you call him the father of lies. Yeah, I call him the father of lies. Yeah.

He mentions Libya. He says, quote,

and the Ethiopians who live in the south are both indigenous, while the Phoenicians and the Greeks are immigrants. So this shows very clearly that Libya meant much more than what it means to us today, all of Africa outside Egypt. So when Herodotus talks about Libyans, he's referring to the people we know as the Berbers. We haven't talked much about the Berbers, Eamon, in Conflicted, but they are a very important people, especially in the history of the Islamic world.

I mean, yeah, when we talk about the Berbers, we talk about a variety of tribes, stretching from Egypt, from the oasis of Siwa, all the way to Mauritania. And it encompassed so many of them. There are the Berbers of the mountains of the north in Algeria and in Morocco. And there are the Tuaregs who straddled the Great Sahara.

to the south of the coast. And then you have the coastal Berbers, you know, like the people of Tobruk, you know, which is known as Taranaika, I mean, and the people of Tripoli. And then you have, you know, the Berbers who were

the Numidians, you know, going around, you know, in Tunisia. So there are so many of these tribes, you know, Zenata, Sanhaja, you know, Kutama. We could go on and on and on about like, you know, how many Berbers and Tmazig as they are known. You know, they don't call themselves Berbers, by the way. They call themselves the Tmazig people. The free people. It means the free people. Exactly. They refused, you know, the word Berber because this is what the Romans give them.

Well, in fact, the Greeks called them Berber, and it's the same word as barbarian. Exactly. They just called them the barbarians. It's not very flattering. Because for the Greeks, anyone outside of Greece is barbaric. That's how they saw it.

Berber tribes have inhabited the land that we now call Libya for at least 12,000 years. And they're mentioned in Egyptian records as cavalry officers in the Egyptian army for some period. And even at one point, they conquered Egypt and became pharaohs for about 200 years. There was a Berber dynasty overseeing Egypt. So there are very ancient people.

Herodotus specifically talks about a tribe known as the Garamantes, a large Berber tribal confederation based in what is now the Fasan in southwestern Libya. They had cities, they had advanced irrigation, and they formed extensive trade networks across the Sahara to the south. So we're talking about a serious people really that have played a big role in history.

The next category that Herodotus mentions, Ethiopians, was his word for black Africans in general. They don't really fall into this podcast because, you know, Libya is mainly Berber and Arab. However, Colonel Gaddafi did fancy himself to be the leader of all Africa and formed close ties with a lot of African countries. Ah, yeah. He called himself the king of kings of Africa. Typical narcissism, honestly. Yeah.

Finally, the two non-indigenous peoples, Greeks and Phoenicians. So the Greeks founded the city of Cyrene in eastern Libya, and that city gave its name to the whole region, which was known in classical antiquity as Cyrenaica. And this was a major urban center of the eastern Mediterranean, and it particularly had a huge Jewish population. Cyrene had tens of thousands or even a couple

hundred thousand Jews at the time of Christ. I mean, really quite a remarkable fact. Back then, Jews were widespread across the Mediterranean world.

The city of Cyrene is perhaps best known because it's the place where Simon of Cyrene came from. This is the man who, according to the Gospel accounts, carried Christ's cross for him on his way to Golgotha before the crucifixion. Now this, Eamon, bear with me, this is a random but I think quite a fun digression.

So, Simon of Cyrene became a very important figure in what's called Gnosticism, right? An early form of Christianity considered heretical by the Orthodox churches, which

which among other things denied the materiality of Christ's body. Now stay with me here. So Saint Irenaeus of Lyon, who compiled a compendium of heresies in the late second century AD, so about 150 years after Christ, he described the beliefs of one of these Gnostic groups, the Basilides. He said, this is what they believed, Christ himself did not suffer. Rather, a certain Simon of Cyrene was compelled to carry his cross for him.

It was he who was ignorantly and erroneously crucified, being transfigured by God so that he might be thought to be Jesus.

Amen. Why do I find that so interesting? Because that's what the Islamic belief is. I know, isn't that? That's how the majority interpretation of the Quranic verses about the crucifixion go, that Jesus wasn't crucified, that someone was transformed to look like Jesus, and he was crucified instead. So this belief, this idea,

may have originated amongst Gnostic Christians in Cyrene. I just think that's amazing. Interesting. Anyway, so eventually Cyrenaica, this is eastern Libya, was conquered by the Persians, incorporated into their empire, and ruled as a part of Egypt, and then as a part of Alexander's empire and so on. So it was basically for many, many centuries a faraway outpost of Egypt. This is eastern Libya.

The Carthaginians, these are people who originated in modern Lebanon, they founded three cities in what is now western Libya. And because there were three of them, the Greeks called the area Tripolitania, i.e. the land of three cities. Though the cities were not Greek, they were Carthaginian. Modern-day Tripoli is one of those cities.

The Carthaginians were an extremely powerful imperial power. They subjugated the Berbers who sometimes revolted. It was quite a chaotic time, I think. Eventually the Romans crushed the Carthaginians. They incorporated Tripolitania into their empire, which became part of a province of Africa, as they called this province, based in modern-day Tunisia. So from that point on, western Libya was basically always in the orbit of Tunis. What's the main point here?

What we think of as Libya was never a single unified political entity until the 20th century. Indeed. Modern Libya is the cobbling together of three regions that were always marginal parts of other larger polities, Tunis and Egypt, basically.

Actually, everything you said, Thomas, is absolutely accurate to this day. To this day, you can tell that Eastern Libyans and Western Libyans don't see eye to eye, whether regarding politics, regarding traditions, even dishes and culture and cuisine and all of that. I mean, both sides of Libya are not only just separated by a massive desert between them and the long coast, but also by...

centuries of being attached to two different political entities. Right, okay, so much for ancient history. Let's talk about Islamic Libya. The Arab conquest came to Libya as it came to all of North Africa shortly after the death of the Prophet, but the

the Berbers, they strongly resisted the Arabs, didn't they? You know, Thomas, the story of the Muslim conquest of North Africa is so fascinating. It took 50 years, actually 55 years, and it is the story of conquest, reconquest, re-reconquest, and re-re-reconquest, because the Berbers kept pushing the Arabs back and kept defeating them and kept pushing them back, but the Arabs were so persistent. No, we're coming back. So in the end,

And the Berbers just got sick of it and they said to the Arabs, "What would it take for you to just get lost?" So they said, "Well, I mean, convert to Islam. Here, that's it. We convert to Islam. We're all changing our names. That's it. We're all Muhammad and Abdullah and Abdulaziz and everything. That's it. Leave us alone now." So this is the story of how Islam came to North Africa.

Does that mean that to this day, Berbers have a reputation, maybe a bit like the Pashtuns, actually, of being Muslims, of being pious Muslims, but in a way being Berber first? Oh, yeah. I mean, there is no question that the Berber identity was so strong and it will actually carry on in later years into Andalusia and the conquest of the Iberian Peninsula, Spain and Portugal. You know, the armies that went to conquer were two separate armies, one

is a Berber Muslim and one is an Arab Muslim. From the beginning they had their separate armies, their separate entities, their separate identity, and they remained like this for a very long time. We're spending all this time talking about Berbers, but in a way we shouldn't be because Libya, amongst all those North African places, was the most Arabized. Though this happened later than the conquests themselves. In the 11th century, two notoriously riotous

Arabian tribes, one of them from the Nejd, you know, from the heartland of Saudi Arabia. They came to the land that is now Libya and they didn't really make themselves so welcome, did they? Indeed, the Banu Hilal and the Banu Salim.

the Beni Halal and the Beni Salim. So who are the Beni Halal and Beni Salim? I mean, they are Najdi tribes from Arabia, and they were actually contracted by the Fatimid Caliph at that time in order to use them as mercenaries against rebels in Tunisia, in modern-day Tunisia. And...

You know, oh boy, what did they do to North Africa? I mean, they laid waste not only to the rebels, but to Carthage and to Tunis and Cairo and all of these cities that were rebelling. And then they settled in Libya.

and they're settling in Libya, although some of them, when they wanted to go back to Nejd, actually they settled in Sinai. And actually the Bedouins of Sinai and the Bedouins of Libya were always known to be notorious. Sometimes they were pirates or brigands or highway gangs. I mean, they were not exactly exemplary citizens, let's put it this way. And funny enough, our subject for this episode today, Colonel Gaddafi himself, is from Ben-Hilal. Ben-Hilal.

Yes, indeed. The Qadhafa tribe, from which he gets his surname, were among the Bani Halal. And a few hundred years after the Bani Halal and Bani Sulaim came and conquered Libya, the famous North African polymath Ibn Khaldun was

in his potted history of the region, still recalled their arrival with great sadness. He said, it was at this point that our civilization, that our irrigation, that our great wealth, it was undermined. Agriculture declined and we became a more sort of backwards, rather chaotic collection of city-states always warring with each other. He blamed the Beni Halal, i.e., in a way, Colonel Gaddafi's grandfathers. So,

So from that point on, Libya is something of a backwater to history. Obviously, it fell within the Ottoman Empire to some extent, although it was sort of marginal. A dynasty of Turkic leaders called the Karamanli ruled it when it became infamously piratical. In fact, the first ever foreign war that the United States won.

fought very early on in its history, what were called the Barbary Wars, basically against Libyan city-states who were harassing shipping in the Mediterranean. So we just want to skip ahead really to when Libya enters the modern period, and that's in October 1912 when the Ottomans signed a treaty with

Italy, inaugurating really what is the most, in my view, the most horrendous period of European colonization in any Middle Eastern or Arab country. You know what, Thomas, our image of Italy and the Italians always that they are the easygoing people, you know, they're just busy drinking, eating, having a good time, dancing, concerts,

You know, I'm just falling in love. You know, amore. You know, that's what the Italians are. But that's not the Italy or the Italians that the Libyans experienced in 1912 and beyond. Oh, my God. When the Libyans saw the troops landing in Tobruk, in Zouara, in Tripoli, in Misrata. I mean, that was like the gates of hell opening.

especially from the 1920s when Mussolini came to power and he decided to make an example really of Libya. Libya became his sort of petri dish of Italian fascist imperial power. Indeed. I mean,

You know, in Benghazi and Tripoli and other places, there was this Italian fascist tradition of hanging people, just as an example. So they will hang them in the public squares and the streets, and then they will take photos and make these photos the postcards. So if an Italian immigrants in Libya, settlers, they call them the Italian settlers who settled there, if they want to send the postcard back to their family in Italy, it will be actually the picture of hanged Bedouins.

And Mussolini in particular loved to collect these postcards and he used to love looking at them basically. It just

Wow. The fascist rule in Libya was ruthless. It was brutal. No Libyan, for example, was allowed any education beyond primary school. And the education that they did receive was explicitly Italian-icizing. I mean, they were trying to turn them into Italians if possible. Also, as you told me, Eamon, they had a network of concentration camps in Libya. General Rodolfo Graziani, who was one of the most brutal and bloody fascists

generals of the fascist war machine in Italy, he started the process of what he called "concentrating the Bedouins". So he took roughly about 700,000 Bedouins and he put them behind barbed wire. I mean, he actually started the first concentration camps built by fascists in the African continent. So from 1929 onward,

700,000 Bedouins were concentrated. And then when he wanted to cut off the Libyan resistance, led by the Senussis, which we'll talk about later, and by Omar al-Muqtar, who is the national hero of Libya, he wanted to cut off their support from Egypt because the British as well as Egyptian Muslims were supporting the resistance against the Italians and the Mussolini fascists. So

He used 100,000 Bedouins to build a massive barbed wire wall from the Mediterranean all the way to the desert. And tens of thousands of people died during the construction of that barbed wire across the sand.

It was a tragedy beyond belief. When the Italians came to Libya, there were one and a half million Libyans living in Libya. When, you know, by the end of World War II and the fall of Mussolini in 1943, there were only 800,000 left. Half the population died at the hands of the Italians. That's amazing. Unbelievable. You mentioned this man, Omar al-Muqtar, the Libyan national hero, someone who Gaddafi felt particularly inspired by. Tell us about him and the Battle of Jabal al-Akhtar.

Indeed. I mean, Omar al-Muqtar is one of the followers of the Sunni Sufi Tariqa. And the Sunnis were the descendants of the Prophet Muhammad. They are Ashraf. You know, we talked about the Hashemites before. They were Hashemites of Libya. And they were leading the resistance against the Italians. And so he was the military commander of that movement.

And, you know, even when he advanced in age, even at the age of 71, in 1929, he scored one of his greatest achievements. It is a military history, really, and it's still reverberated to this day. The reason for that, why? Because in the Battle of Jabal al-Akhdar and the Battle of the Bridge in Jabal al-Akhdar, or the Green Mountain, as it's known in Arabic,

Omar al-Muqtar and his people did the first thing, you know, that in terms of jihadi tactic that is still being used to this day. First of all, it was the last battle in, you know, history where a cavalry charge was sent

successful against a mechanized army. So these are warriors on horses against tanks, basically. And they succeeded. They won. They won because it was an ambush. But they won because, thank God for the IEDs they used. It was the first time ever

that IEDs were used against tanks. So where they planted many dynamite charges in that killing field, and when they lured the tanks and the armored personnel carrier into that field, the Italian ones,

The Libyans then set off all of these dynamite charges and that destroyed a few of the tanks and the armored personnel carriers, confused the defenders. And of course, with the cavalry charge, you know, closing on them from four sides, it was a massacre.

So that was the last time in modern history, in modern warfare history, that cavalry was able to overrun a mechanized division. A little sliver of Libyan history there. That resonates to the present because jihadists have taken that position.

that strategy on board ever since. Oh yeah, IEDs everywhere. From Afghanistan against the Soviets, from Chechnya against the Russians, from Iraq against the Americans, in Syria against Assad, and so on and so on. The use of IEDs now was pioneered

by a Libyan leader of the jihad at that time, a 71-year-old Omar al-Muqtad. Well, as you said, eventually Italian rule came to an end in Libya at the hands of the British, who conquered the country during the Second World War. Well, with the help of the French, they conquered a part of it too. But it really fell within the British sphere of influence.

And after the war, the question arose, what sort of country would Libya become? As we've said, it had never been unified. It had always been split between different competing political centers in West and in East. In the end, the British, through a very confused and confusing sequence of events, decided

oversaw the coming to power of a king of Libya, Idris al-Sinoussi. King Idris, as you said, Eamon, was a Hashemite, just like his distant, distant quadruple cousins who were ruling in Jordan and in Iraq. He was a Hashemite.

As Sharif, he was a British client. He had been in Egypt, which Britain oversaw from 1922 onwards as a Libyan freedom fighter. So he had very close ties with the British Empire and the British politicians in the Middle East. And on the 24th of December 1951, the United Kingdom of Libya was established, a federal constitutional monarchy.

Now, at the time, Libya was literally the poorest country in the world. Its illiteracy rate was 90%. And in the whole country, Eamon, in the whole country, there were only 16 university graduates. This did not augur well for King Idris's new state. Indeed. I mean, this is the legacy of the Italian colonization.

And it shows basically that no matter how much the Italians tried, they are not as organized as the British. Because if you look at Egypt next door, the education was far, far better thanks to the British rule there. But the reality here is that

You know, this is the hand that in Libya was dealt You know King Idris comes to power after many years of fighting against the Italians and then trying to convince the British that it's time for Libya to become independent and he realized that Libya is in dire state but

Thank God. I mean, at the end of the day, the king was praying and praying. And by the way, that king was a saint. I mean, you know, we have to say from the beginning that king was truly a saint. Yeah, let's talk about that. Let's talk about King Idris as a personality because he is very different from the other leaders of the Arab world at the time, including other monarchs like King Hussein in Jordan or as we know, King Faisal in Iraq. He was a very traditional ruler.

in the mode of a holy man, which is an archetype throughout Muslim history, especially North Africa. A holy man, a holy warrior, essentially, who becomes king and rules very religiously, very ascetically. He was a great ascetic. He had a very austere, rather sort of unadorned style of governance.

He was very traditional in that sense. Let's put it this way. He was frugal also. I mean, the man was frugal on himself. I mean, he was generous with the Libyan people, but he was frugal on himself and the family and the royal family. And the reason is because basically he really believed that he should not live, you know, in great extravagance while the Libyan people are, you know, living in poverty. And as I said, the man, you know, was more concerned with the

afterlife than this life. And he had a certain humility. For example, he refused to have his face on the currency. Indeed. He refused to have any monument in the country named after him. This is not typical of Arab leaders at the time.

King Idris, even though there were other Hashemite kings across the Arab world, not only in the Middle East itself, but also in North Africa. Don't forget that the royal family of Morocco are also Hashemites. Absolutely. Who's been ruling the kingdom of Morocco since the 1700s. But in the case of King Idris,

Being a saint doesn't mean, unfortunately, being a capable ruler because sainthood could be mistaken for weakness.

And unfortunately, while he commanded the respect of the country, the country needed a firmer grip. However, he was lucky also. And he always believed that it was his prayers, you know, that God will send some providence and deliverance to Libya, that oil was discovered during his time. That's right. In 1959, oil was discovered in Libya. And this meant...

Well, many things. First of all, it meant that Libya was no longer as dependent as before on foreign aid. It had been receiving a lot of money from both the British and the Americans who had a big air base in Libya, and Libya had become an important node in the American Cold War military world.

Libya no longer needed to rely so much on foreign aid, but it also, sadly, as it does pretty much everywhere, oil money led to increasing corruption throughout the country. And this became endemic towards the end of King Idris's period. Indeed, because while he commanded respect, he did not command authority, unfortunately. He couldn't keep an eye on everything. And he started to become, in the later years, distant and distant and distant, as if he doesn't want to rule.

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Oil really was the watershed moment. So before the discovery of oil, the governance in Libya was very traditional. King Idris had a very hands-off approach. He based his rule on the principle of shura, on consensus amongst elites, amongst nobles. It was very patriarchal rule, and it

and it was focused on the palace, just like a kind of traditional, even medieval kind of state. The administration was basically subjected to tribal structures. Power was very diffuse. Political parties were banned. King Idris wanted nothing to do with that sort of modern style of politicking. He distrusted democracy immensely. So this is before oil. It was traditional. It was old school.

After the discovery of oil, in order to manage the industry that built up around it, Libya was forced to become more centralized and was forced to build more modern state institutions. This, in the end, would play into Colonel Gaddafi's hands when he decided to launch a revolution there. So King Idris, in a way against his will, in order to build up the oil industry, created or allowed to be created a state apparatus that then could be turned against him.

Indeed. Well, King Idris was lucky, by the way, in regard to the discovery of oil. He wasn't lucky with his neighbors, especially his neighbors to the east, Egypt, because the Nasserism was in its prime. I mean, the Libyan people were listening to Nasser and thinking,

thinking oh look at this dynamic figure that is standing up against America against France against Britain against Israel while our king is just meek and weak and doesn't want to get involved in all of this war rhetoric that is going on unfortunately

And that played into the group of officers led by Gaddafi, the young, you know, captain in the military and the military communication and intelligence that, you know, in the end decided to overthrow him. And so we have reached...

Colonel Gaddafi. According to my reading, Eamon, his birthday is unknown. I mean, at times he said it was 1943, 1941. You say it was 1942 for sure. I think, though, as a Bedouin, it's possible that his birthday wasn't really recorded. Isn't that right?

Yeah, might not have been recorded, but actually, when he launched the coup in 1969, he was described as a 27-year-old.

And these were the official records of the Libyan military. So, you know, 1942 is possible. But also, because one of Gaddafi's Egyptian biographers said that Gaddafi was born one year before the fall of Mussolini, you know, the fall of Mussolini from power. So,

He fell from power and fled Rome, I think, in 1943. So it is safe to assume that Gaddafi was born in 1942. And that corresponds with him being 27 years old when he led the coup in 1969. So basically, he was born at the very end of the Italian period, at the very beginning of the modern period of Libyan independence under King Idris. So Gaddafi was a thoroughly modern Arab man.

He was born a Bedouin to a family in the Qadhaf tribe, born in a small desert village south of Sirte, which is in the western half of Libya along the coast.

His father was a goat herder and Gaddafi grew up in a tent. So he was the real deal. And when he ended up going to primary school in Sirte, he had to walk there and sleep the nights during the school week in a mosque because his family remained in the desert. And at school, he was bullied for being a Bedouin. And this rather scarred Gaddafi, I think, and may be the roots of the narcissistic shaming

shell of grandiosity that he began to build up around himself. Family eventually moved to Sebha in the Fasan in the south of Libya, and this is where Gaddafi went to secondary school, and it's at this time that Nasser becomes his idol. He claimed later on that he would memorize Nasser's speeches because he loved him so much.

Inspired by Nasser, he began railing against the British and the Americans at school. He sounds like a major pain in the neck, really. And he was expelled and so went to Misrata, where he went to school there.

In the end he landed up in a military college in Benghazi where a British officer, this is very interesting, described him as quote "inherently cruel". At one point Gaddafi hogtied and murdered a young cadet who was accused of homosexual acts for example. So not a nice guy. This is absolutely like I mean the same with Saddam Hussein and his childhood, you know, and the same with Stalin and his childhood.

It's just mirror, mirror image of all of these famous tyrants. Traumatized children growing up to inflict trauma on others. It's a classic dynamic. So Gaddafi was insolent. He was opinionated and he was cruel. But, and this cannot be denied, he was also charismatic in

inspiring, and intellectual, though idiotic. But he was intellectual. He believed himself to be a man of ideas. And he did write books, and he wrote poetry. He had intellectual ambitions. And we'll discuss some of his ideas in a little bit there, particularly ridiculous. You know, Hitler thought of himself as an artist, you know? Well, I mean, the trouble with artists and intellectuals is when they get power, you've got to go far away. Indeed.

Absolutely. So Gaddafi had long dreamt of emulating his idol Nasser and launching a revolution in Libya as long ago as when he was in secondary school. And when he finally became a military officer, he created what was called the Revolutionary Command Council. And they began the process of building up a network of officers to overthrow the government. Though, you

you know, unlike Nasser's similar movement, the Gaddafi version was almost farcical. Absolutely. It was...

Really, like, you know, young school boys trying to play politics and, you know, and actually like, you know, they were planning. How do we do it? It was farcical. In fact, they had to postpone the coup twice because of hijinks that ensued. The first one, the first date that they'd chosen was the 12th of March, 1969.

But they realized on the day that the famous Egyptian singer, Um Khawthoum, was performing a concert in Libya that day, a benefit concert for the Palestinian cause. So they thought, well, that's not really a good day to launch the coup. So they postponed it. That I consider that...

They postponed it for a couple of weeks at the end of March, but then someone in Libyan intelligence got wind of the plot, and so King Idris was sent to Tobruk for British troops to protect him. So again, Gaddafi canceled. So, so far, they're not having good luck. Indeed. However...

In September, they got their break because the king went for an extensive medical treatment in Turkey. And actually, the king realized that his conditions were, you know, really severe. And so he was going to send his

a telegram and he sent a telegram informing the palace and the government at the time of his abdication in favor of his son, Prince Hassan. However, who received that telegram was the communication intelligence division of the Libyan military. And who was in charge in that day was Gaddafi. So he received that and he was thinking, great, come on guys.

Now is our moment. Mobilize, mobilize. And so they went and they launched their coup. The coup itself was pretty ridiculous. At one point, Gaddafi, who was in a jeep leading the other plotters, he turned left, they turned right, they got separated, they had to come back to each other. It wasn't an auspicious beginning to his 42 years in office. Indeed. And

At the end of the day, many historians in the Arab world, they say, well, look, he was confident enough to launch the coup because he knew the king wasn't going to resist, that the British garrisons in Libya are not going to fight because the king will say, well, look, I don't want to fight. I don't want to be restored to power.

And really, you know, the British actually consulted with King Idris. They said, like, I mean, if you tell us right now that we should, you know, counter the coup, we will counter the coup. King Idris refused. He refused outright to counter the coup. I think that rather suited the British, to be honest, because by 1969, they were no longer able or really willing to employ their military to shore up their Middle Eastern allies. Their empire was on the way out.

but yes indeed on the 1st of September 1969 a bloodless coup unfolded in Libya the king's guard did not intervene there he was Captain Gaddafi soon to be self-designated Colonel Gaddafi uh

in charge of Libya, which at that point had no real sense of unity really or nationhood. As we'd said, King Idris's rule was very traditional, power was very diffuse. The regions largely determined the identity of Libyan citizens. So the country was like a blank canvas for him to paint his weirdest political and economic and even religious ideas upon. Oh dear, and what an affliction. I think...

In hindsight, I think the British, you know, regretted deeply not countering that coup and reinstating King Idris as the king. 15 years later, they would have said, why didn't we do it? Absolutely. You know, for the first year or so after the coup, you

No one knew for sure what was going to happen. There was a brief moment of pure narcissism in 1970. Gaddafi had a jamboree in Tripoli where leaders from around the Arab world gathered to celebrate the evacuation of American troops from Libya. Gaddafi had expelled them.

And during this jamboree, Gaddafi turned to Nasser, who was his idol, remember, and suddenly in anger threatened to expose him as a coward and a hypocrite if he didn't move faster toward Arab unity. In the midst of all of these Arab leaders, he shouted at Nasser.

A sign of things to come, I think. Oh, yeah. Shouting at other leaders is going to be his tradition. And we're going to talk about it, you know, in a few moments. But the man was unhinged and the signs were there from early on. A few months after this jamboree in the desert, Nasser died. And this changed everything. Earlier, Gaddafi had said that Libya's oil wealth could be at Nasser's disposal to help create Arab unity. But after Nasser's death, Gaddafi decided that

He was the guardian of his legacy. And he made it his life's mission to bring the Arabs together, unite Muslims against the West, all sorts of stuff. He became, I don't know, how do we even describe this man? You see, we can't because of his unpredictability, because he was unhinged.

It's very difficult because you see, the mood swings were so frequent and violent that forget a whiplash, you could be decapitated. I mean, this is how violent these mood swings were. You know, the issue here is that he was so narcissistic in his own mind that he...

He didn't believe that there was a greater man ever living at that time. He wanted to be the new Che Guevara. So what did he do? He started, you know, supporting all these revolutionary groups and terrorist groups, the Basque, the ETA, IRA, the Red Brigades, you know,

he left no revolutionary group or terrorist group or inciting group in the world he didn't support with weapons, with money and everything. And then he started engaging in terrorism, bombing nightclubs and bombing airliners and masterminding all these things. And then after that, he started picking a fight with other Arab leaders and especially

Sadat, you know, his own neighbor. President Sadat, the president of Egypt, Anwar Sadat. Which is, by the way, my favorite Egyptian president ever. Yes, as you always remind us. So, you know, my favorite quote from Sadat when he was told about how Gaddafi is spending hours and hours insulting him, you know, during long-winded speeches.

you know, just like Castro and Chavez, like, you know, Gaddafi had the tendency to speak for hours. So, you know, all what Sadat said, you know, while he was smoking his pipe, he said, and why do I care about with this, you know, mad boy of Libya think of me?

The mad boy of Libya. And the way it is said in Arabic is even more. He said, I mean, when you hear it in Arabic, it's even more insulting. So Gaddafi didn't like it. And that's why Gaddafi celebrated the day that Sadat was assassinated by Islamists.

And Gaddafi also wanted to always stay against the Americans. So when the Americans started to support the Afghans against the Soviets, he supported the Soviets against the Afghans and he banned in Libya any mention of jihad or mujahideen or anything. And then when the Arabs, you know, basically like, you know, wanted to have nothing to do in terms of support of the Khomeini in Iran, he actually was supporting Khomeini and

Until he fell out, you know, basically with them again. And then he, in terms of foreign policy, he was always swinging from one end to the other. But it is always seeking that recognition as a revolutionary, as someone who stands against the West.

But he always chose the wrong causes, the wrong time, the wrong place and the wrong players. Always. One way of understanding Gaddafi, I think, which helps helps to sort of make sense of this madness, is that he was at heart a Bedouin.

For example, he styled himself as a modern, hypermodern, radical revolutionary on the one hand, but on the other hand, he also considered himself to be a defender of Islam as he understood it. After he came to power, Sharia law was integrated into the Libyan legal system for the first time. Zakat was made obligatory, you know, the charitable tax that Islam imposes. And so he had, on the one hand, he had this kind of

traditional Islamic piety. I don't even know if that's the right word. But on the other hand, in 1973, he announces a popular revolution. So all existing laws are repealed. All anti-revolutionary, quote, perverts and deviators, as he called them, were weeded out. Bureaucrats and the bourgeoisie in general were targeted for elimination. So this is very sort of Maoist, Chinese-style cultural revolution stuff.

But then at the same time, all foreign ideas contrary to the Quran were to be destroyed. So he said, quote, trample under your feet any bourgeois bureaucrat. Tear up all important books that don't support Arabism, Islam,

socialism and progress burn and destroy all curricula that do not express the truth. So Arabism, Islam, socialism and progress. How are you going to balance these four pillars in a stable structure? And that's why he wrote that ridiculous book of his trying to mimic Mao, which is the green book. The green book, yeah, published in 1975. I have read the green book. Yeah.

How did you go through it without being traumatized? It's a real mind scrambler, I tell you. You see, my favorite quote from there, when he said, it is important for the woman to advance to position of power regardless of her gender. There you go. You see, this is the strange, that strange combination of hyper-modern and hyper-traditional. It's like a modern Bedouin. It's very strange. I mean...

I mean, it was a roller coaster. Let's put it this way. By the way, he wrote a book later called Al-Kitab Al-Abyad, you know, the white book. And I will speak about it later. But

The issue here is that the man started to behave pretty much like the Fatimid Caliph al-Hakim bin Amrullah, who ordered people to shave one eyebrow, as I said before, and leave the other. He started to come up with the weirdest laws. For example, he would come with a decree. He would say that, you know, why do we have shampoo which contains eggs?

Eggs is the food of the masses, and therefore we should get rid of every shampoo that contain egg. So people displaying obedience to him, they will take all of these shampoo containers and they will pour them on the streets, you know, in obedience. And then he said,

in 1986, I remember I saw this on TV when I was young. He said that music is haram and the music is forbidden in Islam. I mean, why do we have music? And so he ordered all the musical instruments in Libya to be destroyed. And the people gathered in the public squares and they were destroying the guitars and the drums and the pianos and everything. But then six months later, he ordered, he said, why there is no music in the country? You know, bring back the concerts again. I mean,

Come on! Okay, I'll give you another one. He really was, you know, he was pretending to be, you know, a pious Muslim. As you know, Islam, you know, in the Sunni sense, which is what followed by the majority of Muslims, is based on

the Quran, you know, which is the equivalent of the Jewish Torah or the Bible, and the Hadith, which is the equivalent maybe of the Talmudic tradition. But it is the statements of the Prophet Muhammad on the Quran. And so, you know, it is accompanying the Quran and, you know, it is understood that it is the two pillars upon which Islamic tradition and faith and creed stands. This is something accepted by all Muslims, you know, under the Sunni umbrella. So he then came up with this

that no, no, no, no, no, only the Quran because Muhammad was just a messenger. He was just like the guy, get the message, he give it to us. So why do we have to reveal what he has to say? I'm a man and he's a man. - That's a real narcissistic gaslighting right there. - Exactly, he couldn't believe. He said, why do we say in the adhan, I bear witness there is no God but God and Muhammad is his messenger. Just keep God there and keep Muhammad out of it.

He wanted to just say there's no God but God and Gaddafi is God. Yeah, so that's it. And then went further than that, you know, by banning the Hadith. You know, for a few years he banned them. And so Muslim scholars from Saudi Arabia and Egypt and everything declared him to be a heretic. And he was angry about that. And he said, I understand Islam more than they do.

okay, Gaddafi, just calm down. Um, and then he started to come up with the weirdest, you know, of economic ideas, you know, from, um, establishing what he called the great river of, of Libya, um, you know, which wasted all of Libya's aquifers, uh,

pumping them into the sea. I don't know for what reason, for a great agricultural project, but actually it was a failure, $27 billion failure. Let's put it this way. And then he went on to, after the project started to fail, in 1996, he was talking to the Libyan people. He was saying, you know what, my fellow Libyans,

Libya is so uninhabitable. I mean, there is hardly any water. It's too hot. It's just desert. There is nothing there for us. Yes, there is a little bit of oil, but that's it. You know what? How about we give every Libyan $10,000 a month and let them just go somewhere else, find somewhere else to live, and we close Libya. It's not a restaurant. It's not like a failed business. I

And this actually shows that he was dealing with Libya as if it was just a group of tribes wandering in the desert. What was he, Moses? And the Libyans are the Israelites.

One of my favorites is how he altered the name of Libya. Oh, yes. He gave Libya the longest name. It's a real mouthful. Say it in Arabic. I love hearing you say it in Arabic. So basically, I love how Sadat used to say it.

So he will say, Sadat, he will say, okay, what did he name his country, this mad boy of Libya? Ah, yeah, you know, take a breath, take a breath again, so, you know, which means that the republic of the masses of the Libyan socialist Arab great

In our republic or something like that. The great socialist people's Libyan Arab, Jamahiriya. That's what it was called. And I want to talk about this word, Jamahiriya, because it symbolizes much of what we're saying because it's a nonsense word. I mean, already it's a...

It's a word that he made up. It's sort of, I mean, the word jumhur in Arabic is the mass, a mass of people. So a republic is jumhuriyah, a mass, you know, the people's state.

But the plural of Jumhur is Jamahir. So he was like, no, we're not just a republic. We're like a republics. We're like many. We're a huge republic. It's insane. It's a super republic. It's so narcissistic. It's a super republic. The great socialist people's Libyan Arab super republic. Yeah.

I mean, it's such a mouthful. And, you know, not to mention the other antiques, like, you know, living in a tent, having only female bodyguards, by the way. You know, what was that about? I have no idea. Only female bodyguards. But what about his infamous, you know, hashish smoking? Oh, my God. I think a lot of this can be explained by the fact that the man was high as a kite most of the time. High as a kite? More like high as a satellite. Ha ha ha!

I mean, I will tell you a story of what happened. You remember I told you about how he's always had spats with other Arab leaders. One of the most famous one, which was because of his high, you know, and because he was higher that time in Hashish, he had a spat with King Abdullah. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. This is, in fact, when Abdullah was still crown prince. This is in 2003. So this was in Egypt. And, you know, President Mubarak of Egypt was the chairman of the summit. And,

And when it came time to introduce Muammar Gaddafi, he, you know, so he said, this is, you know, the, and now I have the pleasure to introduce, and of course he, he pulled, he pulled the big paper in order to read it, you know, the dear brother Muammar Gaddafi, the leader of the great revolution of the September of 1969, you know, the king of kings of Africa, the dean of the Arab leaders, you know,

The supreme guide of the Libyan revolution, you know that?

And the Imam of all Muslims, you know. Brother Muammar, you know, the floor is yours. So, and he started talking rubbish about King Fahd, you know, at the time King Fahd was having a stroke. So King Abdullah as the Prince Regent and the Crown Prince was there. And so he started talking rubbish about, you know, how King Fahd was afraid of Saddam and how King Fahd was running to the Americans to ask them to come to defend him during the Iraq invasion of Kuwait.

And that's when King Abdullah lost it. Well, this climaxed with Gaddafi saying the Saudi king would cooperate with the devil himself to protect his kingdom. This was too much for Abdullah. Yeah. So, you know, he said to him, you know, you do not talk about things that do not concern you.

He said, "In the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, we are Arabs and we are Muslims, and we do not ally with the devil." And speaking of the devil, who brought you to power?

you know, he was talking about who brought you to power. He was accusing him of being, you know, a, uh, a stooge of the, uh, Soviets and, you know, others and, uh, another colonial powers. And so, uh, so, you know, so he said to him, don't lie, you know, otherwise, you know, the grave is before you. What he meant is that, you know, if you keep lying, you know, one day you will die. And,

he will answer before God. So Gaddafi was laughing to his delegation and he said, what is this old man saying? I don't understand what he's saying. He was making fun of the Bedouin accent of King Abdullah and also making fun of, I can't hear what he's saying.

So, two or three years passed and there was the uncovering of a plot by Gaddafi to kill King Abdullah because he felt that he was insulted by King Abdullah. You know, it shows the vindictiveness of this guy. So, they met in a summit in Qatar this time. King Abdullah was there, now he is a king, and Gaddafi is there again in the summit. And the emir of Qatar was speaking and suddenly Gaddafi interrupted him.

And he started talking on the microphone. He was saying, "Abdullah, Abdullah." He was calling the king. He said, "Abdullah, Abdullah, why are we fighting? Why are we?" And he was talking really heavy. He was under the influence of Hashish. "Why are we fighting? Why are we arguing? How about you visit me? I visit you." And we saw this thing between us.

And then he started looking around and he was wearing sunglasses. He was saying, why am I here? You know, and he was looking around, why am I here? How come I'm here? I'm the king of kings of Africa. I am the dean of the Arab leaders. I am the imam of all Muslims. And my international status doesn't allow me to be in a gathering like this.

And then he finished his speech. We all watched this in horror and we were thinking, God save Libya, because this guy. I feel bad for those other Arab leaders, those other Muslim leaders. I mean, can you imagine having to sit opposite Colonel Gaddafi and treat him with respect? I mean, my God. But then came the final insult to everyone. It's the UN speech.

That UN speech was hilarious. Even the translator gave up and left the auditorium altogether. Couldn't keep up at all. Tell us the story. Well, in that speech, he was angry that people were falling asleep. He was saying to everyone in the UN main hall addressing the delegates, he said, why are you sleeping, huh? Didn't you have enough rest? Am I too boring for you? Yeah.

And then he was holding his new book, The White Book. Now, The White Book is one of the funniest reads you'll ever have. He's talking about, you know, a new solution for peace in the Middle East. It is called Israel. So Israel is a country that is both Israel and Palestine.

Isra time. Isra time. So, Isra time is the new country that will usher in a new era of peace in the Middle East. And he said that this is the white book, it's all there. And then he threw the white book at Ban Ki-moon, the sec-gen of the UN at the time. And you can hear the people in the auditorium taking a deep breath and saying,

They couldn't believe what he did. How can you throw a book at the face of Ban Ki-moon? And then he grabbed the UN Charter, he tore it apart in front of everyone. He said, this is from 1945, it's not fit for this world anymore. And then he started talking about all the international conspiracies and how the world is going into rubbish. And that's it. I mean, he was done. But after many hours in which

several interpreters in many languages, like basically were drafted in to relieve the other interpreters who were having nervous breakdown.

Well, I mean, Eamon, you could speak forever about Colonel Gaddafi and his madness. I think we, let's take him a little bit seriously for a while. I'd like to go back to his green book, which as I said, was published in 1975, and which he considered to be a blueprint, not just for the solution to Libya's problems, but he believed he had cracked the secret to governance everywhere. And when you read this book,

you realize that the man was a Bedouin. And I don't actually mean to insult Bedouins. I've met Bedouin. They're charming people, lovely people. But if you remember, dear listener, back in episode two of this series, we talked about the difference between al-Badawa and al-Hadara, the Bedouin and the civilized man. And Gaddafi was...

a symbol or a son of al-Badawa. He was a Bedouin, and he seemed to be animated to some extent by a kind of instinctive hatred for the city, the things of the city, state institutions, hierarchical organizations that weren't just surrounded by him, with him at the center. So he presents the Green Book

as, quote, the ultimate solution to the problem of the proper ruling apparatus. We're already in the world of 1970s radicalism. It's a bit nuts. And his solution is basically this.

Abolish all state institutions so that society can rule itself directly. So he's really trying to create a stateless society. He wants to go back in some modern way to the way that Bedouin life has always been: no state, just people kind of doing their own thing in subservience to a stronger patriarchal personality. Now,

For this reason, he opposed all parliamentary or representative democracy as false. He opposed political parties. He said that they led to deceit, to internal discord, and to partisanship. In fact, and this I find fascinating, he wasn't wrong about this really.

And one of the things about reading the Green Book is every now and then a sentence will jump out at you as like, oh, that's actually true. And then you don't know what to think. Maybe Gaddafi was a genius. Who knows? This is what it's like to be in conversation with a narcissist. He said, in parliamentary democracies, the opposition party must minimize the government's achievements and cast doubt on the government's plans, even though those plans may be beneficial to society.

Consequently, the interests and programs of the society become the victims of the party's struggle for power. Such struggle is therefore politically, socially, and economically destructive to society despite the fact that it creates political activity.

Anyone who lives in a postmodern democracy can see the truth in this, where you have an opposition party that must rubbish everything that the government's doing. A government is constantly having to defend itself and in the meantime society just fragments. But as an outsider, as a Bedouin, he's looking at this process and he says this is just corruption. This is too complicated. Why is it so complicated? Listen, listen my friends. It's simple. Just do what I say. All will be well.

Exactly. So instead of this sort of democracy as we understand it, he advocated direct democracy. He thought, and he created these things, what are they called? The People's Council. Yeah, the People's Council, the Majal of the Shabia. Everything would be ruled according to what he called the third universal theory. He says...

The third universal theory now provides us with a practical approach to direct democracy. The problem of democracy in the world will finally be solved. It will be replaced by its true definition, the supervision of the people by the people. I mean, you read it, you start losing your mind. He says, the people become the instrument of government.

And the dilemma of democracy in the world is conclusively solved. So he thought that he's going to create these people's councils, and he did. They were all around Libya. He even had these sort of revolutionary councils that were in charge of dispensing with justice, revolutionary justice against criminals or sinners against the revolution. And he thought it would just all run itself.

At the same time, he believed in radical equality. He did not believe that some people should have more than other people, that some people should have money while other people don't have money. So he said the ultimate solution in the problem of inequality in society is to abolish the wage system.

This would emancipate people from the bondage of wage slavery and revert to natural laws which defined relationships before the emergence of classes. So for this, for example, meant that farmers were no longer allowed to hire laborers to help them run their farms because they weren't allowed to pay anyone a wage. It was illegal to pay a wage to someone in Libya. So what do you suppose happened to the farms?

Well, again, we come back to, you know, the problem of insane people trying to experiment with people's lives. And that's exactly the consequence. He also had a solution to the housing crisis. Housing crisis is a big, big thing that whips around the Western world today. He said, quote, housing is an essential need for both the individual and the family and should not be owned by others.

Living in another person's house, whether paying rent or not, compromises freedom. So he abolished rent. And this meant, of course, that people had no money to build houses, to maintain their houses. In the end, the irony is that by trying to create this so-called classless, stateless society...

Gaddafi allowed the state to take ownership of everything indeed in his stateless society The state was all that there was and the state was Gaddafi That's how the system played out Libya became a what it was called a centrally unplanned economy It was a chaotic unplanned economy where the state dominated everything and the state was

was reducible to Gaddafi the man. But then this, this is the final gaslighting moment. He even pretended that he wasn't in power. He refused to be given any official title like president, no, no. He was simply the brother leader. He was the brother of the Libyans. He wasn't their official leader at all. He was only the leader of the revolution, but that's it. No more than that. Just the leader of the revolution.

So I always knew that this episode was going to be a bit looser, a bit more conversational than our other episodes. And God knows we could talk for another hour or two about Gaddafi and about the times, the life and times of Colonel Gaddafi. And perhaps we'll have to do another episode one day because there's lots that were not

talking about. I mean, he had an infamous rivalry with Yasser Arafat, an infamous rivalry with Saddam Hussein. We mentioned his spat with King Abdullah, but my goodness, I'm just looking at my notes here, Eamon. His African adventures, supporting liberation movements in countries in Zimbabwe, Angola, Mozambique, he helped Idi Amin, for goodness sake. He

He had a network of mercenary armies all around Africa trying to spread his revolution or whatever the hell he was trying to do. You mentioned how he made Libya a center of organization for all sorts of terrorist groups, the IRA, the Red Brigades, the Basques, the Sandinistas.

Carlos the Jackal, who led the 1975 OPEC hostage crisis, which Muammar Gaddafi is understood mastermind. The killing of Louise Fletcher outside the Libyan embassy in London in 1984. Terrorist attacks, hijackings of airplanes. Bombing of airplanes. Bombing of airplanes.

most famously the infamous Lockerbie airplane disaster of 1988. This caused America to become increasingly infuriated with him. They bombed Libya in 1986, including his own palace, to try to bring him to heel. Oh my goodness, the life and times of Colonel Gaddafi are really huge, and we can't do them justice.

So, I just want to talk here about two things, really. First of all, Islamism. Colonel Gaddafi comes to power as a Nasserite, a Nasserist. He rules as a kind of weird, psychotic Nasserist Islamist to some extent, but then he

He, as you said, he's proclaimed a heretic because his views on Islam are crazy and he becomes a target of this growing Islamist, all these growing Islamist movements throughout the Middle East at this period. And as a result, he ends up cracking down hard on Islamists in Libya. Well, there is the infamous Abu Salim prison massacre.

Abu Salim prison is a prison that Gaddafi reserved only for the Libyans who went to fight the jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan. As you know, he supported the Soviets. However, those Libyans who came back or those Libyans who supported the Afghan jihad or those Libyans who were members of the Muslim Brotherhood

They were sent to Abu Salim prison in Benghazi, and that was a very notorious prison. They had organized themselves in Afghanistan. They had decided, when we come back to Libya, we're going to overthrow Gaddafi, whom they called the pharaoh. They believed he needed to be overthrown, and they were right about that. So they founded what was called the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, and in 1995,

The regime in Libya uncovered their network and cracked down on them hard, sending them to this Abu Salim prison, which in the end was the site of an enormous prison uprising in June of 1996. It is this uprising that led to the infamous massacre. Indeed, which, of course, the.

Gaddafi gave the order that everyone inside the prison to be shot. 1,286 people were killed and buried in a mass grave.

Indeed. No dignity, nothing afforded to these people, regardless of the fact that, I disagree with every single one of them, an ideological reason, but no matter what, you don't just kill them and then you put them in mass grave. And I think the reality is that Gaddafi had

ruled Libya with a mix of intimidation and cruelty and, you know, just pure, pure vindictiveness for many, many, many years. The people of Benghazi in the east of the country experienced this particularly harshly after the Abu Salim crackdown. I mean, Islamist activity was particularly strong in the east

That's where the Senussis had been based, this kind of Sufi pietistic movement that eventually gave rise to the king. So the east of the country was always particularly Islamic. They had a form of Islam not so different from Wahhabism, actually. And so it's where the Islamists were largely located. And after the Abu Salim crackdown, Gaddafi punished the whole area.

So he basically implemented collective punishment against eastern Libya. And Benghazi and the surrounding towns, they became much, much, much less developed than the rest of Libya. And therefore, perhaps it's unsurprising, that in 2011, it is

where it's there that the uprising against Gaddafi began, which would result in him meeting a very, very hairy end. You see, the pity here is that in the last days of Gaddafi, you know, we're talking about 2009, 10 and 11. I mean, you know, roughly the last two, two and a half years,

of his life or his reign over Libya were less vindictive and less repressive than the previous 40 years. And why is that? We say because of his son, Saif al-Islam al-Qaddafi.

He started moderating his father's view. He started reaching out to the Islamists and reaching out to the people of Benghazi and Dirna and Tobruk and other places and started to have a more constructive negotiations with them, started to get them out of prisons, rehabilitating them, inviting them to come back from exile. The whole idea is that Saif al-Islam saying to his father, well, look, I mean,

you are old now, one day you will pass this to me, so let me start putting together a more consensus rule. And Saif al-Islam had a good head over his shoulder. I knew one of his classmates when he was studying, and so...

They were always saying that he was a cool-headed guy, very different from his dad. At the same time, international sanctions, which were leveled against Libya in the 80s and especially the 90s, really did begin to bite. So much so that Gaddafi himself realized that he had to change his relations with the rest of the world somewhat at least.

And so he did agree to give up his weapons of mass destruction plans. He did, to some extent, come in from the cold. And in the noughties, there was this idea that maybe even with Gaddafi in power, maybe Libya can be reformed. Maybe Libya can become a functioning state. Well, whether or not, we'll never know, because in 2011, the Arab Spring came to Libya. And in fact, that's one of my favorite quotes from Gaddafi. When

When the Libyans began protesting, inspired by the protests in Tunisia and in Cairo and elsewhere, Gaddafi was told about the protesters and he said, you know what? I'm going to go protest too. There is so much injustice in Libya. Isn't that defeating the purpose? You know what? His last speech, when he went...

and spoke from the ruins of the palace which the Americans bombed in 1986. He gave a speech, a very passionate speech, but very angry and vindictive and incoherent. And it's like a dad who felt betrayed by his ungrateful kids

He gave that speech in which he was saying to them, you can protest, but not in the streets or the squares. Then where? I mean, I'm sorry, but where then? Where do you want them to protest? But then he said something interesting. He said, you want me to resign? Resign from what? I don't have an official position. If I have an official position, I will throw the resignation letter in your faces.

And you think, but you're the leader. I mean, you are in control. I mean, if you can't see it, then who? And you see this, you know, again, as if like, you know, basically, you know, he felt betrayed by kids who are ungrateful. It's a sign of like, you know, internal madness. And the people were waiting for Saif al-Islam al-Qaddafi to speak.

Unfortunately, when he spoke, he sided so much with his father and he decided that, you know what, blood is thicker than water. We're going to fight it.

And ironically, they were winning. Yeah, NATO intervened because the regime's forces were on the verge of really cracking down hard on Benghazi. There was the idea that there would be mass slaughter. At least that's what was believed. Well, that's the idea. But the problem is to be in all fairness, in all fairness, was there going to be a mass massacre? No.

because they took over Masrata, they took over other places and there was no massacres. I mean, was he reserving the massacre for Benghazi? It is disputed. But nonetheless, the intervention happened. It

It empowered the forces against Gaddafi. Gaddafi himself was forced to flee, first to Sirte, near where he had been born, and then when they closed in on Sirte, he got in a convoy and headed back to his home, his little village in the desert, that place that he was born, that he grew up and lived in a tent.

And there the Arab Spring militants found him crouching, hiding in what was it, a sort of sewage pipe? It was a sewage pipe. Unbelievable. I mean, really, this is an epic story to think that he was reduced. And for all the world to see, they had their iPhones out and you can see him. They drag him out of the sewage pipe. They harangue him. They beat him and they murder him. At the end of the day, it was an unfortunate end.

For me, I wish if he stood trial and answered every single charge against him, including the Abu Salim massacre, and not to be killed in that way. Nonetheless, he's a leader regardless. You don't treat leaders like this. There is a protocol here, and the protocol is that you take him, you put him before a court, and he has the right to defend himself, and he has the right to say what he has to say, but then justice will catch up with him.

I don't know, Eamon. I don't feel much sympathy for Colonel Gaddafi. He ruled as a Bedouin, he died as a Bedouin. I don't really think, I don't care, I don't need him to have been put on trial. I mean, I mourn for what happened to Libya next, the descent into terrible civil war, being torn apart by different foreign powers, by its own chaos. All of this is the legacy of Gaddafi, and God knows when that will be sorted out. But

We started this episode by me suggesting that Gaddafi could be a symbol of how the Arab world as a whole, in a way, after the defeats of 1967 and the death of Nasser, kind of went nuts and all sorts of crazy characters came to power. Saddam, Hafez al-Assad, and then his son Saleh in Yemen, Bani Ali, perhaps less so but still

bit of a dick in Tunisia, Mubarak even in Cairo. This style of Arab big man wearing sunglasses, spouting nonsense, ruling rather haphazardly, rather impetuously, and completely dictatorially, even like Yasser Arafat to a certain extent. I mean, what do you think? I mean, you're an Arab, Eamon, although you're not from one of those countries, but nonetheless, what

What the hell happened? Why was the Arab world forced to endure for so many decades such characters?

I'm afraid I'm going to have to resort to one of the statements by the Prophet Muhammad in order to explain this. Please do. I mean, Gaddafi wouldn't like it. Well, I don't care what he likes or doesn't like. He's dead. Good. Six feet under. Anyway, but what the Prophet Muhammad said, he said, كَمَا تَكُونُوا يُوَلَّىٰ عَلَيْكُمْ As you are, your rulers will be.

your rulers will reflect you. So if you're good people, if you're decent, you know, your rulers will be good and decent.

But if you are deceitful, if you are not united, if you are distrustful towards each other, if you are not aspiring for a better life, for dreaming for a better future, then why should your rulers be better than you? Also, if you have become under the influence of

totalitarian, absolutist, modern ideologies, various isms, nationalism, internationalism, communism, even to some extent, you know, liberalism, capitalism, while at the same time wishing to remain faithful to what you understand to be your inherited tradition of Islam and all of that. Ugh.

It's hard. And Gaddafi symbolizes that. You and I, Eamon, we've had this ongoing debate about the extent to which modern ideas, which are largely Western in origin, can coexist harmoniously with Islam. And I know what you say, and the listener knows what I think, but certainly in the case of Gaddafi, there's a symbol of my argument, which is that

When modern ideas... Yeah, but he was unhinged. He was unhinged. But you say, you know, you say that the Arabs at the time who were trying to balance in their minds these different, I think, irreconcilable ways of thinking and ways of living. Yeah. You know, they...

They got the rulers that they deserved, you know, because the Arab soul was being torn apart by these mutually incompatible ideologies, perspectives, whatever you want to call them, religions even. Exactly. And you see, he wasn't the only leader who met, you know, a bloody fate. Look at Saleh.

in Yemen. He was killed by his allies in the end. Saddam? Hand. So at the end of the day, and one day Bashar al-Assad will receive that, like karma has its own way. Bashar will end up like this, inshallah. So what I'm saying here is that we come back again to the fact that

This is what happened when you jeer against a saint like King Idris and you cheer for an insane clown like Gaddafi. You get what you deserve. The Arab masses will get what they deserve. And this is why what I'm saying is that when someone was saying, how do we achieve al-mamlaka al-fadila, the virtuous kingdom? I remember in front of me one of the

most celebrated Salafi Ahl al-Hadith clerics in the Arab world. He was asked, how do we achieve al-Mamlaka al-Fadila? How do we achieve the virtuous kingdom? And he said, first establish it in your heart and it will become a reality in your life.

on the ground, but if your heart is not virtuous, there will be no virtue in real life. - The kingdom of heaven is within you. I certainly believe that. - Yes. - That's a note of unity between you, my Muslim friend, and me, your Christian friend.

I hope, dear listener, you've enjoyed our rather strange conversation about a very strange man, Colonel Gaddafi. After a few episodes that have told more or less a single story, climaxing in the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War, we've spent this episode and we're going to spend another couple of episodes meandering a bit.

this episode on Colonel Gaddafi. In the next episode, we are thankfully going to leave the Arab world for a while and travel to the Indian subcontinent. Yes, stay tuned for Eamon and me discussing Kashmir, partition, and all things Indo-Pakistani.

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Conflicted is a Message Heard production. This episode was produced and edited by Rowan Bishop. Sandra Ferrari is our executive producer. Production support and fact-checking by Molly Freeman. Our theme music is by Matt Huxley.