Reply #93: Uhm, you should really do some research. [View All]

[Xithras]

Gadaffi wasn't a nice guy by any stretch, but he certainly was a socialist. He was an ardent Nasserist who believed in Pan-Arabism and the nationalization of western owned assets in Libya and across the middle east. He imposed a 79%(!) tax on non-nationalized foreign owned resources including the oil fields, was the head of the Libya Socialist Union, and devoted billions of dollars a year (the vast majority of the nations tax revenue) to social programs for the people, including free government housing, educations, social nets, literacy programs, free medical care, etc. It had a centrally planned socialist economy and dedicated most of its money to the improvement of its people. There is a REASON why Libya had the highest standard of living, highest literacy rate, lowest homelessness rate, and highest average educational level in Africa.

Gadaffi was a dictator and was brutal to those who disagreed with him, but there is no question that he was also a socialist. To claim otherwise is to either demonstrate a lack of research, or a deliberate twisting of history.

And your claim that the two are incompatible is silly. You can have democratic communist nations, and dictatorial communist nations. You can have free market fascism, and free market democracies. One is an economic system, and the other is a political system. While some combinations work better than others, they CAN be combined in multiple ways. China was still communist under Mao. North Korea is still communist under the Kim-klan. While we may not LIKE the dictatorial jackasses who run their countries with socially oriented economic models, the No True Scotsman fallacy fails here.