Mouammar Gaddafi, the President of Libya has done it again; he got people to talk about him. It happened when he gave a speech at the 2009 meeting of the UN General Assembly in New York, a speech in which he said a few things that some people consider to be far fetched and over the top. What Gaddafi did in reality was to mock the way that the big powers treat him and treat countries like Libya. Because he sees these powers as killer birds more than he sees them as singing ones, he did not mock their singing habits to please the rest of us but mocked their violent activities to highlight the absurdity of their behavior. Gaddafi did this because he wanted them to see and to hear the way that he sees and hears them and the way that he believes all of humanity ought to see and hear them.
But who are these big powers and what do they say or do that displeases Gaddafi? To answer this question we must realize that in the same way some people in the West do not differentiate between one and the other of the people they regard as hostile to them, Gaddafi does not differentiate between the people in the media and the people in government whom he regards as hostile to him or to his country. He sees them both as one and the same because they work in tandem to undermine the lesser powers. And so he judges almost everyone in the West by the manner in which he is portrayed in the Western media.
We see, therefore, that Gaddafi has set up in his mind a structure of symmetries between the way that he is treated and the way that he treats other people. This approach can be seen as a modification of the golden rule which would have him treat the others not the way they treat him but the way he wants to be treated. Gaddafi then goes further and lets the other people know what he is doing and why he is doing it; he lets them know he is mocking them to shame them into modifying their attitude and thus force them to treat him and his country better.
Understanding this about Gaddafi’s personality leads us to postulate that he expects the people who fault him for giving trash talk about the big powers to also fault the Western media for giving trash talk about Libya such as they have been doing for decades. And he expects the people who fault him to appreciate that he takes the time to mock the media and the big powers if only because their kind of talk leads to war whereas his kind of talk diffuses the bad situations that they create. Convinced that the media have become the twitter which sounds the insidious calls inciting the big powers to aggression, he considers his own pleas for understanding to be the balancing force which restores civility in human relations. In sum, he does not see himself as imitating the warlike activities of the big powers but sees himself as mocking the big powers to warn about the consequences of their activities and to ask for self restraint.
Let us take an example to see how subtle can be the media calls to aggression. The thing to do when you want to hurt someone is to show that they are different from the rest of us thus imply they are dangerous by the mere fact that they exist at all. Gaddafi seems to believe that the Western media do so every time they talk about him or his country. He feels that the media always accentuate the differences between Libya and the West to pave the way for aggression and to justify its outcome no matter how severe that outcome may turn out to be.
And the irony is that while he uses the art of mocking to advocate the rejection of violence, the people in the West use mocking to justify the violence they commit. To wit, it happened that there was a clash between the United States and Libya in the year 1986 during which America bombed Libya. The aggression resulted in the death of Gaddafi’s young daughter and when the news of the event was beamed to the world, no regret or apology came from Washington. On the contrary, officials in the government and the media mocked Gaddafi as they opined sarcastically he must have adopted the girl after her death to score propaganda points and win the sympathy of the world.
Now, dear reader, imagine someone sarcastically opining that in the year 2001, many of the 9/11 victims were non-American illegal aliens and that deep down, the “real” Americans did not care about their deaths but raised a stink anyway to score propaganda points and win the sympathy of the world. Like it or not, this is how the American reaction to the death of Gaddafi’s daughter sounded to him and to the world, and it was not a nice thing to hear.
Let’s now take an example which demonstrates the intensity of the violence that people in the West are prepared to inflict on someone and laugh about it. The first Gulf war was unleashed against Iraq in the early Nineteen Nineties and it was said to be the first time that a war was shown live on television. The Pentagon which is America’s equivalent of the Ministry of Defense gave daily briefings on a large screen to explain the conduct of the war with images and video clips that resembled those of video games. During the briefings, footage taken by the attacking aircrafts was shown to journalists who sat in a room the size of a television studio. You would expect that because these moments depicted the horrors of war the journalists would treat them with the solemnity they deserve but no, this is not what happened. What happened was that the moments of horror were received with joy and jubilation.
Like an audience enjoying the taping of a situation comedy for a television show, the journalists continually laughed to express satisfaction at the way they were being entertained. One distressing moment came when a trucker was seen crossing a bridge then suddenly accelerate to get off the bridge as fast as possible. The briefing official explained that the trucker heard the incoming plane and realized the bridge was going to be blown up so “he ran for his dear life.” Upon hearing this sentence the journalists laughed so heartily you could swear they were having a sado-masochistic orgasm.
If you can imagine how ugly this sort of behavior is you will understand why it is impossible for the world to look at the Western media and be satisfied humanity is in good hands. You will also understand the context in which Gaddafi delivered his speech at the United Nations and will concentrate on what he said rather than stay mired in the notion he said something different from what you wished he had said.
All this aside, does Gaddafi really believe that Shakespeare was an Arab as he once asserted? Probably not but this statement could have been a deliberate provocation on his part designed to illustrate the absurdity of the assertions that people in the West constantly make about his country and a few other countries. For example, an American television network once showed a close-up image of an empty shelf at a supermarket it said was in Libya. The reporter then declared with absolute certainty that the people there were fed up with the Gaddafi regime and were ready to start a revolution which the reporter asserted they will do in a matter of weeks. Well, this story was told the first time some 30 years ago, and a version of it was repeated several more times after that but no revolution has started in Libya as yet.
And there is an example which is even more startling than this. Ten years or so before that time, I felt like I was clobbered on the head with a baseball bat as I watched an American network assert without hesitation that a revolution was imminent in Cuba. And why was that? Well, the visual portion of the clip was showing a number of mothers and their children waiting in line to buy ice cream. The reporter opined that when in America no one waits in line to buy ice cream but they do in Cuba, you can be certain that the Cuban people will soon revolt and overthrow Fidel Castro. My God, what a bunch of idiots passing as journalists!
And so we must ask ourselves as Gaddafi probably does if this is journalism or it is the wishful thinking of a bunch of lunatics. To answer the question you must shift the attention from the trivial things to the more serious ones; to where economics play an important role. Water and electricity are important to a modern economy and this is where you can find examples that reveal what the media do to shape the relationship between the big powers and the lesser ones.
Whether it was the Aswan dam in Egypt which the Western media relentlessly vilified for several generations, whether it was the man-made lake in Libya which the media insisted on calling the madman lake (meaning Gaddafi’s lake) or whether it was the Toshka project in Egypt which the Western media openly wished would fail, they all behaved abominably. But why would the media do this? They did it because the Western powers were not given a piece of the action. But those powers were offered a piece of the action and they refused to participate in the projects hoping that this would kill them and retard the development of the developing nations. Oh well, logic was never the forte of the Western press. But mention this and ask for a response and you will wait for ever because no response will ever come either from the press or from the big powers. And this will prompt you to throw your hands up in the air and exclaim: What a bunch of psychopathic schizophrenics not just lunatics!
In any case, this is old history now and there is enough competition in the world today to keep the Western powers in check. However, like discrimination which, even though officially banned, still lingers in the hearts of some people causing grief to many, so it is with the shabby treatment of the lesser powers by the big ones. But unlike the plot in Harper Lee’s novel “To Kill a Mocking Bird”, Gaddafi does not need a lawyer to speak on his behalf; he will express himself in his own good natured way even if the exercise makes him look a bit silly at times. His message will nevertheless remain the same throughout his life and will, in effect, paraphrase that of Harper Lee: The Arabs are like mockingbirds who sing their hearts out to please humanity; it is a sin to kill or to harm them whether they are in Libya, in Palestine, in Iraq or anywhere else.
Finally, the clash between America and Libya began when Gaddafi called Reagan a minor actor in forgettable movies. Had Reagan responded by calling Gaddafi a mere Colonel in a small army instead of bombing Libya, the misery that resulted from the armed confrontation would have been avoided. And the lesson to be learned here is that if the Americans want to spare lives in the future, and if they want to avoid being mocked or parodied in front of the world, they should do more jaw jaw like said Winston Churchill and less bomb bomb like say those who hate the Arabs more than they love America.