If
Muammar al-Qaddafi falls, as seems increasingly likely, he will land with the
rending crash of an immense, rigid object, like the statue of Saddam Hussein
pulled down in Baghdad's Firdos Square. This is not because, despite his own
delusions, Qaddafi mattered to the world remotely as much as Saddam did. Rather,
it's because the Jamahiriya, or stateless society, he fostered in Libya
constitutes the last of the revolutionary fantasies with which Arab leaders
have mesmerized their citizens and justified their ruthless acts of
repression since the establishment of the modern Arab world in the years after
World War II.
Qaddafi and the other junior
officers who overthrew Libya's King Idris in a bloodless coup in 1969 were
inspired by the revolt of the Free Officers in Egypt, who had similarly deposed
an unpopular, pro-Western monarch in 1952. The Free Officers under Gamal Abdel
Nasser declared a new socialist regime, confiscating the properties and
eliminating the privileges of the old elite. Especially after the Bandung
Conference of nonaligned nations in 1955, Nasser's pan-Arab vision, which
would dissolve colonial borders in order to establish an Arab superstate,
became the default ideology of a generation of young thinkers and activists in
the Middle East.
Read more.
Read More
(1)
HIDE COMMENTS LOGIN OR REGISTER REPORT ABUSE