African Revolutionary
Writers, Part 8c
Colonel Gaddafi as he was
Muammar Gaddafi
Muammar Gaddafi led a small group of junior military officers in a
bloodless coup d'état in
Libya against the pro-Imperialist King Idris on 1 September 1969. When the
second annual edition of this course went out Gaddafi was still the leader of his
country. In the third edition we had to note that Muammar Gaddafi was now dead,
having been murdered by counter-revolutionaries, like so many others of our
African Revolutionary writers.
Libya is a large African
country on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, West of Egypt and East of
Tunisia. One used to say that Libya was much more developed than in colonial
times. But now Libya has been “underdeveloped” again in a catastrophic way.
Gaddafi and Mandela
We will still take Muammar
Gaddafi as a writer. Writing transcends human mortality.
Gaddafi’s 1975 “Green Book”,
and especially the part on “Democracy”, is a very useful text for discussion in
study circles, because it does not take bourgeois democracy for granted, but
interrogates it, criticises it severely and to a considerable extent, rejects
it. This document is attached.
Gaddafi was certainly an
African Revolutionary Writer. In the other, much more recent piece for the New
York Times, attached and linked below, Gaddafi set out a plain case for the
“One-State Solution” in Palestine, which is the same in principal as South
Africa’s post-apartheid one-state solution (“One person one vote in a unitary
state”). This document is also attached.
Muammar Gaddafi more recently
Muammar Gaddafi was a wise
and humble Muslim man of great energy, in spite of the sorrows that he
personally had to bear. He was loved by the revolutionaries of Africa.
Between the first and second versions of this introduction, Libya was bombed and invaded by forces of Britain, France and the USA. One of Gaddafi's sons and one of his grandchildren had been killed. This was on top of the daughter killed in the raid organised by Reagan and Thatcher in 1986. The Wikipedia entry on Muammar Gaddafi had been re-written to conform with Western propaganda.
Muammar Gaddafi did not
retreat or run away. He stayed and faced his terrible death.
We have touched on the question of Libya before in this series, in the item on Ruth First, which in turn is linked to a download from First's book on Gaddafi's Libya.
We have touched on the question of Libya before in this series, in the item on Ruth First, which in turn is linked to a download from First's book on Gaddafi's Libya.
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-texts: Muammar Gaddafi,
The Green Book, Part 1, on Democracy, 1975 and Muammar Gaddafi, The One-State
Solution, 2009.
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