Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

A fan’s scrapbook

In a more than 6000 word article titled “Notes on Libya” in the February Viewpoint Magazine, Max Ajl makes the case for Gaddafi by drawing liberally from Horace Campbell’s 2013 “Global NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya” published by Monthly Review. This was the not first time he defended Gaddafi. The same year that Campbell’s book was published, Maxmilian Forte’s “Slouching Towards Sirte” came out, a book Ajl reviewed for the pro-Gaddafi MRZine. Although I have not read Campbell’s book, it seems that it was mostly about the calamity of NATO intervention rather than an encomium to the “Green Revolution”. Indeed, in 2010 Campbell wrote an article about Gaddafi being an obstacle to African unity, evidently something Ajl must have either missed reading or consciously sidestepped.

As for Forte, Ajl probably leaned more in his direction as far as evaluating Gaddafi’s Pan-African credentials:

Furthermore, Forte does a very good job of pulling together the reasons the United States never liked Qadhafi—his prickliness with respect to U.S. investment, his leadership in Africa, his support of the African National Congress, and his resolute hostility to AFRICOM and U.S. bases on African soil.

Of course, if this Cornell graduate student had taken the trouble to spend an hour or so researching Gaddafi’s attitude toward AFRICOM, he would have not written such nonsense—unless of course his only goal was writing propaganda. When General William Ward, the commander of AFRICOM, paid a visit to Libya in 2009, he saw no obstacles to cooperation between the U.S. and Libya:

[D]uring my last visit to Tripoli I had a very good meeting with the Leader. He and I were able to talk about my command; we were able to give him some thoughts on the United States Africa Command and what the command is about. And I think because of that, we gave him additional information that enabled him to have a better understanding of the command.

AFRICOM issued a press release that confirmed Ward’s impressions:

“They (AFRICOM officials) clarified everything,” Abdelgane [a Libyan air force General] said in an interview with AFN-Europe. “And they are making our mission easier … to rise up the level of understanding between the militaries … and to move for further cooperation to the benefit of both countries.”

In January 2009, Libya and the United States signed a defense cooperation memorandum of understanding, which provides the framework for a military-to-military relationship and cooperation on programs of mutual interest.

Even Wikileaks noticed the amity between the anti-imperialist leader and those who posed a mortal threat:

there was a possibility for cooperation with AFRICOM in combating terrorism in the Sahara and piracy. He said that he could deal with “the new America without reservation”, now that the United States was governed by “a new spirit of change.”

So what the heck was that “new spirit of change”? It was about the rapprochement between the Bush administration and Gaddafi that was symbolized in part by his weird obsession with Condoleeza Rice, whose photos he kept in an album that rebels found in his enclave after he was overthrown. On the occasion of her state visit to Libya, the NY Times reported:

After all, the Libyan leader had professed his “love” for the American secretary of state. “I support my darling black African woman,” Colonel Qaddafi told the network Al Jazeera last year. “I admire and am very proud of the way she leans back and gives orders to the Arab leaders.”

He continued: “Yes, Leezza, Leezza, Leezza… I love her very much.”

“Combatting terrorism” created the same kind of bromance—at least on a temporary basis—as there is between Trump and Putin. The LA Times reported on September 4, 2005:

As it struggles to combat Islamic terrorist networks, the Bush administration has quietly built an intelligence alliance with Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi [sic, a novel spelling if there ever was one], a onetime bitter enemy the U.S. had tried for years to isolate, topple or kill.

Kadafi has helped the U.S. pursue Al Qaeda’s network in North Africa by turning radicals over to neighboring pro-Western governments. He also has provided information to the CIA on Libyan nationals with alleged ties to international terrorists.

In turn, the U.S. has handed over to Tripoli some anti-Kadafi Libyans captured in its campaign against terrorism. And Kadafi’s agents have been allowed into the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba to interrogate Libyans being held there.

Now, of course, “fighting terrorism” is something near and dear to Ajl’s heart, just as it is to Max Blumenthal. Their obsession with jihadis is as extreme as Christopher Hitchens’s was in the early 2000s but legitimate in their eyes since it was Putin rather than Bush who was trying to “fight al-Qaeda”.

Much of his article refers to Islamic terrorists like the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) that tried to assassinate Gaddafi in 1996 and that was, in his words, “linked to Western intelligence”. Ajl wants you to believe that the MI6, which did pay $160,000 to the LIFG for a hit on Gaddafi, was in cahoots with the same outfit that would play a leading role in the 2011 uprising. However, that’s only if you don’t bother to investigate what happened down the road when jihadis became persona non grata after 9/11. In 2004 MI6 turned over an exiled LIFG leader, Abdel Hakim Belhaj, to Gaddafi’s torture dungeons. Mark Allen, the head of MI6’s counterterrorism unit, crowed, “This was the least [the UK] could do for you and for Libya to demonstrate the remarkable relationship we have built in recent years”.

Like Stephen Gowans’s defense of the idea that socialism existed in Syria, Ajl relies on non-Marxists to lend credibility to the absurd idea of a socialist Libya albeit with a hedging strategy:

One of the leading scholars of Libya argues, “If socialism is defined as a redistribution of wealth and resources, a socialist revolution clearly occurred in Libya after 1969 and most especially in the second half of the 1970s.” Certainly such a redistribution must redistribute downwards if the word is to retain any meaning. Furthermore, we may object at limiting socialism to material distribution. Socialism can also more broadly refer to self-management, including participation in political institutions. In Libya, the character of state institutions was prohibitive of that participation – a structural defect which laid the grounds for Libya’s later deterioration.

The leading scholar referred to above is one Ronald Bruce St John, who whatever his credentials, and I am sure they are substantial, has little grasp of what a socialist revolution consists of given his assertion that “Socialism was a part of most 20th century revolutions, especially those in the Middle East”. Especially those in the Middle East? What could he possibly be speaking of? We also had African socialism, which involved “redistribution”. Under Julius Nyere, Tanzania put a ceiling on capitalist development in order to allow petty commodity production to prevail. Was that socialism? When the FLN took power in Algeria, it nationalized oil—just as Gaddafi would—and fostered worker self-management as well as “redistributing” oil wealth.

What Ajl misses is the real character of such states that can best be described as rentier in nature or what Gilbert Achcar calls patrimonial. In my review of his “The People Want” for CounterPunch, I describe a state of affairs that prevailed in nearly every state in the Middle East and North Africa:

The analysis in that chapter is at least for this reader the major theoretical contribution made by Gilbert Achcar. While Max Weber is a thinker who might be unfashionable in the academy nowadays, Achcar puts his concept of the patrimonial state to good use.  For Achcar, patrimonialism is an absolute, hereditary type of autocratic power that relies on an entourage built of “kith and kin” and which uses the state to protect its interests and those who it favors. Essentially, the term “crony capitalism” describes the power relationships that existed throughout the region despite the tendency of some rulers to cloak themselves in the rhetoric of national liberation and socialism.

For some on the left, there is a tendency to put the most positive spin on patrimonial states when they appear disposed to provide benefits of one sort or another to the population. While this is obviously not socialism, it is a petroleum-fueled welfare state that bears some resemblance to Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution—or so it would seem.

However, oil revenue can be a double-edged sword. When a state’s treasury relies on oil revenues rather than taxes, such as is the case in Kuwait where tax revenues comprised less than 1 percent of GDP, the ruling clique is not bound by obligations to a largely non-existent tax-paying population.

Oil and gas production in MENA is an industry that generates ground-rent in terms understood by Karl Marx in V. 3 of Capital. This simply means that unlike manufacturing, the means of production can largely do without labor. Wealth is being generated but not jobs. This goes a long way to explain the disproportionately large informal sector in MENA. If factory jobs are virtually non-existent, then the only recourse is to emigrate (the region is known for its massive export of labor) or becoming a street peddler. When a state that has grown indifferent to a non-taxpaying base and has nourished corruption and payoffs throughout the body politic, no wonder someone like Mohamed Bouazizi, a Tunisian fruit peddler, could have touched off the Arab revolts through his self-immolation after years of paying off the cops or being beaten and harassed by them.

Despite the occasional report about diversification in oil-producing nations, manufacturing remains stunted. Compared to Israel that lacks any sort of mineral wealth but enjoys a robust manufacturing base, the Arab states are extremely underdeveloped. Why is there so little commitment from the elites, even on a capitalist basis, to use oil revenue to remove the distortions that plague the local economies?

If you are a Marxist, as Ajl claims to be, that’s the starting point: class relations in a given national framework. Once, your unit of analysis becomes the nation-state rather than class, it is easy to lose your way.

His article is filled with references to many reputable scholars including Raymond Hinnebusch. However, none of them are recognized Marxist scholars. If anything, there is a dearth of Marxist scholarship on Libya. A search in New Left Review, Historical Materialism and Socialist Register turns up practically nothing.

I had hopes to write a series of articles about Libya that would be similar to those I have written about Syria but demands on my time have made that very difficult. If I were to find the time, much of my output would be based on a 2015 collection titled “The Libyan Revolution and Its Aftermath”, edited by Peter Cole and Brian McQuinn.

It goes a long way to explaining the collapse of the Libyan revolution that is to some extent the outcome of NATO intervention, something I agree with Ajl and company on, but there’s a lot more to it. I recommend the NY Review of Books review of the book that this excerpt will help you to understand its value:

It was always unrealistic to expect Libyans to emerge overnight from four decades of whimsical dictatorship into a state of democratic institutions. Western powers provided the military support to oust the colonel, but myopically not the civilian support to put a workable administration in his place. When civilians tried to erect a modern state themselves, warlords from the different parts of Libya easily bypassed the elections that had been held and seized power in the name of whatever cause they hoped might attract support. Some militia leaders justify their recourse to arms as a battle against jihadi Islamists or the remnants of the Qaddafi regime. Others claim to defend whatever tribal, religious, or ethnic group might win them local constituencies. They have tried to revive traditional myths in order to cultivate fresh loyalties. In the process a once relatively homogeneous society has splintered into multiple bickering armed groups.

The irrepressible rise of Libya’s many contending forces is one of the enigmas of the 2011 revolution. When Libyans first revolted, they counted among their blessings that they had few of the cleavages of sect and ethnicity that divided other Arab states. Through intermarriage, relocation for work, and Qaddafi’s deliberate jumbling of ethnic groups, many Libyans had multiple associations spanning the country’s vast terrain.

Yet The Libyan Revolution and Its Aftermath, a compilation edited by Peter Cole and Brian McQuinn, British analysts of Libya, is a timely acknowledgment that Libya’s chemistry is older than the laboratory Qaddafi fashioned. The book traces not only the colonel’s demise, as many others have done, but the appearance of a lesser-known new cast. Written almost entirely by foreign experts, some of whom know the different factions intimately, it is the most detailed account I have read of the old forces shaping new Libya. Chapter by chapter, it analyzes each of the “sub-national identities” jostling for influence, and the communal narratives their representatives use to promote their claims. They include Libya’s Islamists, the merchants of Misrata, the Arab Bedouin tribes concentrated in the Green Mountains of the east, the indigenous Imazighen (i.e., Berbers) in the west, and the two ethnic groups of Libya’s slice of the Sahara—the Tuareg and Tubu.

Libya in its current shape is a recent, fragile construct, originating in Italy’s invasion of 1911, exactly a century before the Arab Spring. It has been fracturing and reuniting ever since. Unable to overcome the Arab Bedouin tribes in the east, Italy’s first wave of colonizers sanctioned the creation of an autonomous Emirate of Cyrenaica. In 1929 Benito Mussolini tried again, and succeeded by imprisoning tens of thousands of Bedouins in concentration camps, where half of them died. After World War II, the British backed the revival of the Cyrenaican emirate replete with a king, Idris I. But the discovery of oil, whose fields and pipelines straddled boundaries, drew Libya’s disparate provinces into ever closer union. In 1951, Cyrenaica established a federation with the Fezzan region in the south, hitherto under French hegemony, and Tripolitania in the northwest, also under the British. King Idris added a green and a red band below and above his black flag with a white crescent. And in 1963, under King Idris, Libya abolished the federation and declared itself a single unified state.

For forty-two years, Qaddafi, who called himself Il Duce with overtones of Mussolini, suppressed these separate identities. But once he had fallen, vulnerable Libyans floundering for some means of protection turned to their closest kin. In Tripoli each district of the city assembled its armed wing. Islamists organized anti-vice squads, and the Imazighen established “rapid deployment forces” to support neighborhoods with high concentrations of Berbers. Libya’s new power brokers revived and inflamed ancient grievances to consolidate their hold.

Nicolas Sarkozy and Moammar Gaddafi

For supporters of the late Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddafi, the news that he had made illegal donations to Nicolas Sarkozy in the 2007 elections to the tune of fifty million euros has yet to lead any to examine how Africa’s leading anti-imperialist figure could have partnered with a man who was commonly regarded as stealing Marine Le Pen’s thunder by running a campaign filled with racist and xenophobic themes. He told prospective voters in 2007 that “We have too many foreigners on our territory” and that “[new arrivals] are not welcome if they’re only coming to receive welfare benefits”.

Surely Gaddafi was aware that when Sarkozy was the Minister of the Interior he visited Benin in 2006, where students protested him as a racist. But Gaddafi didn’t particularly care what radical African students thought. He was far more interested in connecting with a powerful French politician who was seen as a friend of Washington and Tel Aviv during a 4-day trip to the USA in September, 2006. Sarkozy met with President Bush, and Senators McCain and Obama. Also meeting with members of the Israel lobby, he denounced Hezbollah as a “terrorist” organization. Sizing him up correctly, the Times wrote: “Mr. Sarkozy is calculating that his courtship of America, and his affinity with some policies of the United States, may win him votes on the French right.” Wasn’t Gaddafi reading the NY Times? Probably not but maybe some of his anti-imperialist cohorts could have tugged his lapels.

In a speech following his nomination in November, 2007, he continued with his nationalist rhetoric. As the Times put it, “He evoked the classic images of French history, including the Crusades, the Enlightenment, the cathedrals and Joan of Arc, but said little that would appeal to France’s millions of Muslims.” In a dig obviously targeting Muslims, he said that it was unacceptable to “want to live in France without respecting and loving France” and learning the French language. One of his main campaign issues was the need to tighten immigration laws. He bragged that when he was Minister of the Interior,  tens of thousands of illegal immigrants were expelled. He also reminded voters of his 2005 pledge to rid France’s ethnic Arab and Muslim suburbs of “scum” after the banlieues erupted.

In other words, he was France’s Donald Trump.

On March 28, 2018 an article appeared in the ardently pro-Gaddafi Black Agenda Report titled “Another Reason Why Imperialism Wanted Libya Overthrown”. It was an attempt by Abayomi Azikiwe, a Workers World member in Detroit, to make sense of the revelations about Gaddafi’s campaign contributions. Only a year earlier, another Black Agenda Report article had Sarkozy pegged in an article about the French elections that Macron would win:

Even though Sarkozy belongs to the so-called establishment right, his thinking on Africa (see, for instance, his infamous Dakar, Sénégal, address at the Cheikh Anta Diop University, 2007) is more gratuitously racist and dehumanizing than anything Le Pen or, indeed, Jean-Marie Le Pen, her father, founder of front national, both members of the “non-establishment right”, have said or written on this very subject.

Yes, that 2007 speech was a humdinger:

The coloniser came, he took, he helped himself, he exploited. He pillaged resources and wealth that did not belong to him. He stripped the colonised of his personality, of his liberty, of his land, of the fruit of his labour.

The coloniser took, but I want to say with respect, that he also gave. He built bridges, roads, hospitals, dispensaries and schools. He turned virgin soil fertile. He gave of his effort, his work, his know-how. I want to say it here, not all the colonialists were thieves or exploiters.

Ah, the white man’s burden.

This fucking Sarkozy had the nerve to make this speech in Senegal, a country that was colonized by France in 1659 and that was drained of its wealth for the better part of 300 years and for what? That France could build a railroad to transport the plantation crops to a ship that would carry them back to France?

None of this mattered to Gaddafi. His sole interest in seeing Sarkozy elected was to get his hands on weapons, planes and other manufactured goods that were being blockaded. This included 21 Airbus planes and a memorandum of co-operation that Libya would negotiate exclusively with France for all future military purchases.

In fact, despite his reputation as being the fearless anti-imperialist, there is every indication that Gaddafi was considered someone you could do business with:

NY Times, November 21, 2008
The Libyan-American Thaw Gathers Pace
By Graham Bowley

Relations are improving between the United States and Libya.

President Bush telephoned the Libyan leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, on Monday, after Libya had paid about $1.5 billion to the State Department to clear up terrorism-related claims from bombings and hijackings during the 1980s.

And Secretary of State Condeleezza Rice this week met with Colonel Qaddafi’s son, Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, who was also in New York for private meetings.

Ms. Rice visited Colonel Qaddafi in Libya in September, the first time in more than half a century that a sitting American secretary of state had gone to Libya. It was a visit that marked, from the American perspective, the rehabilitation of a man whom Ronald Reagan once famously called the “mad dog of the Middle East.”

But it doesn’t end there. Late Thursday, the Senate confirmed a new United States Ambassador to Libya, Gene Cretz, who will be the first American ambassador to the country in 36 years, according to The Associated Press.

The nomination of Ambassador Cretz had been held up over questions about the compensation payment, but those questions were answered when Libya paid the money, which will be divided up among hundreds of victims of Libya’s actions. Libya has also renounced its stockpiles of chemical weapons and its secret nuclear weapons program.

“We’re very pleased,” Sean McCormack, the State Department spokesman, told The Associated Press on Friday, referring to the confirmation of the new ambassador. “We’re anxious to get him out there.”

As one of The New York Times’s Moscow correspondents, Andrew Kramer, reported, Colonel Qaddafi’s visits were seen as a sign that despite the conciliatory steps he has taken toward Washington, the onetime pariah was still maneuvering to pit Russia and the United States against one another in offering commercial and political favors.

After he courted the Kremlin, it remains to be seen what form his diplomacy will take if or when he turns up in Turtle Bay. But Colonel Qaddafi is not known for underplaying his advances: After all, the Libyan leader once professed his “love” for Ms. Rice, whom he called “my darling black African woman.’’

Speaking to the network Al Jazeera last year, he continued: “Yes, Leezza, Leezza, Leezza — I love her very much.’’

As the article should make clear, Gaddafi was not forced to do business with a scumbag racist like Sarkozy. He could have bought planes and weapons from Russia if his overarching purpose was to advance the interests of the anti-imperialist bloc.

Returning to the Black Agenda Article by the Workers World member, he only offers up the boilerplate analysis of such groups: “This crisis extends beyond the legal issues facing Sarkozy. Moreover, it is a problem of modern-day imperialism which is seeking new avenues of conquest for purposes of exploitation and profit-making.” Yes, we understand that but where’s the explanation of why Gaddafi helped to get France’s Donald Trump elected?

This has been a problem with the Gaddafist left from the beginning. It has failed to see that he was a typical North African strong man, having the same narrow class interests as every other dictator in the region, including Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco. People like Abayomi Azikiwe are not very deep thinkers. They see the world as divided between the Evil West and the Good East and South. It is devoid of contradictions. My suggestions to such simple-minded people is stop calling themselves Marxists unless they are able to understand that the class struggle is primary, not geopolitical rivalries. Anybody who took the trouble to look closely at Libya and Syria prior to 2011 would have seen that these were not the countries they fantasized about. The epoch of the Tricontinental and Baathist radicalism was long gone. I invite you to read a New Yorker article on Libya published in 2006. It would make it crystal-clear how Sarkozy and the Libyan bourgeoisie saw things eye to eye that year. No wonder Gaddafi paid him off:

[Prime Minister Ghanem] Dr. Shukri, as he is called by those close to him and by those who pretend to be close to him–he has a Ph.D. in international relations from the Fletcher School, at Tufts–has a certain portly grandeur. With a neat mustache and a well-tailored suit, he exuded an effortless cosmopolitanism that seemed more conducive to facilitating Libya’s reentry into the world than to winning over the hard-line elements at home. When I arrived, he was sitting on a gilded sofa in a room furnished with Arabic reimaginings of Louis XVI furniture, before many trays of pastries and glasses of the inevitable mint tea. In the Libyan empire of obliquity, his clarity was refreshing, and his teasing irony seemed to acknowledge the absurdity of Libyan doubletalk.

I mentioned that many of his colleagues saw no need to hasten the pace of reform. This was clearly not his view. “Sometimes you have to be hard on those you love,” he said. “You wake your sleeping child so that he can get to school. Being a little harsh, not seeking too much popularity, is a better way.” He spoke of the need for pro-business measures that would reduce bureaucratic impediments and rampant corruption. “The corruption is tied to shortages, inefficiency, and unemployment,” the Prime Minister said. “Cutting red tape–there is resistance to it. There is some resistance in good faith and some in bad faith.”

Nor was he inclined to defer to the regime’s egalitarian rhetoric. “Those who can excel should get more–having a few rich people can build a whole country,” he said. Qaddafi’s “Green Book” decreed that people should be “partners, not wage workers,” but it is not easy to make everyone a partner, the Prime Minister observed. “People don’t want to find jobs. They want the government to find them jobs. It’s not viable.”

Below, Nizar Mhani (Niz Ben-Essa) of the Free Generation Movement responds to common misconceptions relating to the Gaddafi regime …

There are no electricity bills in Libya; electricity is free for all its citizens.
Categorically untrue. Despite poor electricity infrastructure and poor coverage of electricity lines, even in the Capital, Libyan homeowners pay monthly/quarterly (area dependent) electricity bills based on meter readings. Electricity is cut off in instances of unpaid bills. Reconnection upon payment is not instant. The electric infrastructure is weak and some areas of Libya do not have electricity available at all.

There is no interest on loans, banks in Libya are state-owned and loans given to all its citizens at 0% interest by law.
Categorically untrue. Banks all over Libya have been giving out loans for years and years. There is a percentage rate charge on all loans, which is comparable to an interest rate, but in the spirit of ‘islamic ethics’ it is not called interest, it is called an ‘Administrative Expense’ – Masareef Edareeya.

A House is considered a human right in Libya
Gaddafi vowed that his parents would not get a house until everyone in Libya had a home. Gaddafi¹s father has died while he, his wife and his mother are still living in a tent.

Gaddafi abused this human right as much as he did other basic rights. It is well known in Libya that political opponents and successful businessmen/women had their homes confiscated and handed over to regime members, usually rewards for Free Officers – Dubat A7rar. Many farms and homes and businesses were confiscated during three infamous phases of Libya’s dictatorial history:

• 1969 – The dreaded Green Revolution. Free Officers were rewarded land, homes, and farms that sometimes belonged to other people and the original owners were not compensated or asked if this was ok.
• Late 70’s – The introduction of the law Albayt le Sakinehee – The Home Belongs to its Dwellers. As this law was passed overnight, thousands of homeowners instantly lost their homes, as tenants (those renting the homes) claimed ownership on account of being the ‘dwellers’. The law applied to homes, farms, shops, etc.
• 90’s – The introduction of Purification Committees (Lejnat al Tatheer). This committee ran by the widely know slogan, ‘Min ayna laka hada?’ – “From where did you obtain this?”, a form of ultra-socialism where people’s possessions, including homes and businesses, were confiscated if seen to be ‘surplus to requirement’ or contributing to a ‘monopoly’.

Regarding Gaddafi’s ‘vow’: While Gaddafi waited for ‘everyone in Libya’ to be housed, he himself lived in a sprawling 6km square compound in the centre of the capital which was home to state of the art security and an underground network of rooms and ultramodern bunkers. He also had a vast and well-known farm on Airport Road in Tripoli. This, just in the capital.

All newlyweds in Libya receive $60,000 Dinar (US$ 50,000 ) by the government to buy their first apartment so to help start up the family.
This is a well-known rumour and a common joke in Libya. Whilst it may have been passed as official legislation, I know of not a single family who has been given this grant. The backbreaking bureaucracy associated with such grants and loans make them more or less impossible to obtain.

Education and medical treatments are free in Libya. Before Gaddafi only 25% of Libyans are literate. Today the figure is 83%.
Education and Health Care – Free does not mean adequate. It is well known that Libya’s standard of health care is nothing short of appalling. It is widely known that the majority of Libyans seeking medical care leave for neighbouring countries for treatment. Our Education system is no better. It is outdated, teachers are underpaid and under-trained and libraries are largely non-existent. The syllabus was constantly being revised and reviewed under direct instruction from the former regime e.g. banning English, changing Quranic verses, etc.

It is commonly said that Libyans would be happy to forfeit their ‘free healthcare’ and pay for a National Health Service if it was up to the required standard.

Should Libyans want to take up farming career, they would receive farming land, a farming house, equipment, seeds and Livestock to kick-start their farms all for free.
This has never happened, in addition to this many farms and homes have been confiscated by the government to build civil roads,

The Great Man-Made River and civil roads.
The owners of the land were only compensated if there was a covered structure on the land as the Gaddafi regime legally owned any land and the people were only allowed to build on it. When there was compensation offered it was nowhere near the actual value of the property and many waited years to receive anything if at all. This system was also rife with corruption many residents told they had to pay a bribe to receive what little they were given.

If Libyans cannot find the education or medical facilities they need in Libya, the government funds them to go abroad for it not only free but they get $2,300/month accommodation and car allowance.
Categorically untrue. If this was the case, the former regime would have been in receipt of 6 million application forms – one for every man, woman, and child who ‘cannot find education or medical facilities they need’. This grant does not exist for the mainstream public. There is anecdotal evidence of some medical grants being given but again, the system was corrupt and opaque.

(from “History’s Warriors”, an article about the Misrata militia written by Brian McQuinn for “The Libyan Revolution and Its Aftermath“.)

Yet it was dump trucks filled with sand that would turn the tide of the battle. While accounts differ as to which individual or group first conceived the innovation, the results were definitive. By the middle of April, Tripoli Street was impassable, blocked by huge dump trucks (parked by drivers who were often shot in the process), effectively cutting government supplies to the city centre. The weight and height of the vehicles prevented tanks from running over or pushing them aside. Additionally, the truck’s load of sand absorbed tank rounds, making them almost indestructible. A deadly cat-and-mouse game unfolded over the next weeks as Qadhafi’s forces brought armoured bulldozers to remove the vehicles, only to see them destroyed, blocking their sup-ply route even further. By the end of April, Tripoli Street was a grave-yard of vehicles. Starved of ammunition, food and reinforcements, the towering buildings occupied by Qadhafi’s forces became prisons. Over the next two weeks, Misratan forces slowly encircled the Insurance Building, using the mosques’ speakers to play Allahu Akbar (`Allah is great’, `God is great’ or ‘God is the greatest’)” continuously, boosting Misratan fighters’ morale and preventing government soldiers from sleeping. At night, cats and dogs were outfitted with flashlights and released onto the streets surrounding the Insurance Building to draw sniper fire. This tactic wasted snipers’ ammunition and revealed their position for counterattacks. Eventually, the futility of wasting further ammunition on a position so well fortified was recognised. The military committee demolished the first floor stairs of the building and directed battalion leaders to pull back, leaving the remaining government soldiers stranded. The remaining soldiers were given the chance to surrender, those who refused were left to starve. Misratan fighters continued to make advances along Tripoli Street throughout April and early May. Sand-filled dump trucks, and later, when these became scarce, ISO shipping containers, were deployed throughout the city, parsing Misrata into discreet neighbourhood zones. This, combined with the Tripoli Street blockade, starved Qadhafi’s forces of supplies, dislodging them from the city centre.

The video above is in two parts. The first part is footage made by The Libyan Rebel just about two years ago when the revolutionaries were advancing on Tripoli. The second part is an interview I conducted with him over Skype on the current state of Libya, addressing questions of whether it is a “failed state”, a symbol of the Arab Winter, etc.

When the revolution broke out in Libya, the left had two choices. It could back Qaddafi, who Fidel Castro had dubbed “the lion of the desert”—a sobriquet made obsolete when the dictator had begun keeping a scrapbook of Condoleezza Rice snapshots or it could back the revolution. For the pro-Qaddafi camp, there were many experts to rely on, Maximilian Forte one of the most prominent. When Forte explained imperialism’s assault on Libya as a response to Qaddafi’s resistance to AFRICOM, a bid to increase Western military assets on the ground, my first reaction was to check the story. No matter how many times I pointed out that Qaddafi looked forward to working together with AFRICOM “in ways that help us achieve those common objectives for peace and stability”, it never registered on the Qaddafi fan club. Faith is difficult to shake.

After Qaddafi got the boot, I came into contact with a young Libyan identifying himself as The Libyan Rebel who had shown up on the North Star website that tended to feature articles backing the revolution. The rebel wrote comments every so often that grounded the debate in a lived experience:

Binh’s portrayal of the Syrian revolution reflects a deep understanding of the situation leading him to not be swayed to either extreme. He’s simply stating the reality as it is and it is indeed complicated. In Syria, there is an element of everything. There is, has always been and there always will be an “imperialist” interest in the region. There is a sectarian aspect to the strife. There is also an extremist aspect. There are world powers seeking their interests. There are also regional powers competing for a foothold in the future Syria. Most importantly, there is a people’s revolution. A revolution against one of the most murderous and barbaric regimes the region has ever known. Keyboard activists on both extremes have no idea what oppression and tyranny means for the people whom they claim they understand and believe to be serving. They live in free lands while seeing the events only through the narrow slit of their ideologies. Their goals and intentions may be noble, but they lack the maturity to understand the true complexity and dynamicity of the struggle.

With a refreshingly honest assessment of his nation’s complexities, I looked forward to conducting  an interview with him. There is one thing in our recorded conversation over Skype that sticks with me that I want to dwell upon a bit as a preface. The rebel told me that his cousin was one of the students hung for peacefully protesting Qaddafi and that he had to flee Libya in order to avoid the same fate.

When you check the NY Times archives for articles dealing with Qaddafi’s repression of the student movement in the 1970s, nothing turns up. This was at a time when the dictator’s reputation was at an all-time high with the left. Most of the publicity around Qaddafi dwelt on his “anti-imperialism”, mostly verbal in nature or when not verbal manifested itself in support for Carlos the Jackal’s spectacular but misguided adventures.

Today when the bourgeois press has total freedom to operate in Libya, every “excess” is viewed under a microscope to the glee of people like Maximilian Forte who obviously longs for the days when the country was as peaceful as a graveyard. It is too bad that Libyans prefer the loud and boisterous freedoms of a new society trying to find itself.