Qaddafi’s People’s Temple

[n2doc]

Qaddafi’s People’s Temple

Posted on 10/21/2011 by Juan Cole
The final weeks of Muammar Qaddafi’s violent and coercive life reminded me vividly of Jim Jones and the People’s Temple Cult. It was obvious from late last August that Qaddafi had lost. The people in his own capital of Tripoli rose up against him in all but a few small neighborhoods, courageously defying his murderous elite forces.

Qaddafi had on more than one been occasion offered exile abroad, but sneaked off to his home town of Sirte to make a suicidal last stand. His glassy-eyed minions determinedly fired every last tank and artillery shell they had stockpiled right into the city that sheltered them in order to stall the advancing government troops. This monumentally stupid last stand turned Sirte into Beirut circa the 1980s, as gleaming edifices deteriorated into Swiss cheese and then ultimately blackened rubble. Qaddafi had favored Sirte with magnificent conference centers and wood-paneled conference rooms even as he starved some Eastern cities of funds, and in his death throes he took all his gifts back away from the city of his birth, making it drink the tainted Kool-Aid of his maniacal defiance of reality.

Among the attackers were citizen militias from Misrata, the city of 600,000 that Qaddafi had determinedly besieged, subjecting its civilian population to cluster bombs and tank and artillery shells, even bombing it from the air before the UNSC intervened. The Security Council strictly instructed him to cease attacking his own population simply because they had come out to peacefully protest his rule. Qaddafi’s siege turned a Tahrir-like popular uprising into a civil war, as inexperienced young civilians in the surrounded city took up arms to fight off the armored Khamis Brigades and save their parents and younger siblings from the awful ire of the dread enforcers of Qaddafi’s malevolent will.

His defiance of the UNSC order turned him into a recognized war criminal, for which he was indicted by the ICC. But of course the bomber of PanAm 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, the butcher of Abu Salim prison, the aggressor against neighboring Chad, and the fomenter of wars, tyranny and strife in Sierra Leone and Liberia, had long been a war criminal when few would mouth the words in public.

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http://www.juancole.com/2011/10/qaddafis-peoples-temple.html

[joshcryer]

1. "People are not in the mood to put up with semi-genocidal dictators." Juan Cole, saying it like...

...it is.

[Corey]

2. Juan Cole and US Terrorism

Juan Cole:

Supported the US invasion, describing it as “worth the sacrifices”—now amounting to some one million Iraqi lives—to rid the world of Saddam Hussein. (http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/oct2011/cole-o25.shtml)