Friday, March 4, 2011

Tyrants and buffoons

I'm watching Al Jazeera and the news tape that run at the bottom of the screen say that the FAO reported the highest food price index ever during the month of February 2011. The images from Libya are worrying. I am not worried about the revolution, but about its human cost. As we had all expected, Kadhafi is not going to leave quietly, he will have to be flushed out of his refuge in Tripoli by the armed resistance. This is not like Egypt or Tunisia, where the Western world was awed by the "non-violent" aspect of the uprisings. Here, the people have taken arms and are fighting a war of liberation. Many army brigades have joined the rebels and have given them some training as well as weapons as varied as rocket launchers and anti aircraft guns.

The West doesn't seem to mind this departure from the Ghandian rhetoric it has been preaching to the Palestinians in their struggle against an enemy way more nefarious than the rabid dog of Libya: the Zionist state. Here, the West is supporting the right of people to use violence to obtain their rights, because it thinks it might serve its purpose. Somewhere in the dreams of the Empire there is the possibility that the regime of Kadhafi, which it has nurtured and supported after it became one of its puppets, will give place to a regime that will accept to be subservient to the US and to its Western appendages and give it free control over its oil. Dream on.

But isn't it pathetic to see how everyone is now suddenly waking up to the fact that Kadhafi is a despicable human being and a mad tyrant? Isn't it pathetic to see that the US administration is now wanting to oust him, that the Interpol is circulating accusations against him, how LSE is suddenly rejecting his son's donation and finding out (o surprise!) that his PhD thesis was plagiarized? Does the Empire really think it has any credibility?

I got a bit worried about the noises the US made about a military intervention in Libya. Of course the reasons for such an intervention would be humanitarian: saving the oil without which its economy will collapse, causing distress to millions of people. Some believe that an intervention is warranted, while the Libyan people have been very clear about that: we will do our own revolution, they say. Leave us alone. Whatever it costs us in human and material losses is nothing compared to the price we would have to pay if the US or any surrogate army sets foot on Libyan soil. The freedom fighters in Libya know it very well: there is not a single revolution the US tried to help that has not completely been derailed into becoming a puppet operation serving the US and Israeli agenda. Look what happened to the March 14 movement in Lebanon: under the leadership of its true chief, former US ambassador in Lebanon Jeffrey Feltman, it now openly serves the Israeli agenda of disarming the Lebanese Resistance. On the scale of "pathetic" the March 14 have reached Everestian heights: while the rest of the Arab World fights to rid itself of hereditary regimes, the mega-demonstration they are planning for March 14 has one central theme: that Saad Hariri must remain prime minister, a seat he has inherited from  his father...What a bunch of time-forgotten buffoons.




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