On 4/1/13 3:37 PM, Jim Devine wrote: > > Riddle me this: why would _anyone_ consider Gaddafi to have been > "anti-imperialist"?
Because at one time he was. Back in the 70s he was supplying arms to the Provisional IRA. He also backed Carlos the Jackal. This sort of anti-imperialism was of a problematic nature since it weakened the left as well, particularly with Carlos. Even if all that was true, Qaddafi reversed himself after the Lockerbie bombing. Economic reprisals put pressure on him to make accommodations. In the course of making them, he discovered that capitalism might not be so bad after all especially when he found common cause with the USA against jihadists. I doubt that Maxmillian Forte wrote anything about this in his idiotic book but this really says it all: http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2011/10/more-horrendously-creepy-details-about-qaddafis-condoleezza-rice More Horrendously Creepy Details About Qaddafi’s Condoleezza Rice Obsession By Juli Weiner October 21, 2011 Muammar Qaddafi’s crush on Condoleezza Rice is one of the strangest things about him that is not a part of his face. When Libyans raided Qaddafi’s Bab al Azizia palace, they discovered a homemade scrapbook filled with photos of the former U.S. secretary of state. “Yes, Leezza, Leezza, Leezza... I love her very much,” he told Al Jazeera in 2007, like some sort of despotic Nabokov. Now we get to hear the other side of the greatest love story of this blog post. Tina Brown’s digital concern, the Daily Beast, published an excerpt from Rice’s forthcoming memoir, No Higher Honor, in which Rice reveals that Qaddafi “had a slightly eerie fascination with me personally, asking visitors why his ‘African princess’ wouldn’t visit him.” And it gets worse, by which we mean better: “It was Ramadan at the time of my visit, and after sundown the ‘Brother Leader‘ insisted that I join him for dinner in his private kitchen. ... At the end of dinner, Qaddafi told me that he’d made a videotape for me. Uh oh, I thought, what is this going to be? It was a quite innocent collection of photos of me with world leaders—President Bush, Vladimir Putin, Hu Jintao, and so on—set to the music of a song called ‘Black Flower in the White House,’ written for me by a Libyan composer. It was weird, but at least it wasn’t raunchy.” What she doesn’t know is that “black flower” is an Arabic colloquialism meaning “foreign leader about whom I have sexy dreams, and I mean that in the most grotesque way possible, no, even grosser than that, take it one step further, and right, there it is.” _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
