On Mar 14, 2011, at 1:15 PM, Shane Mage wrote:
>> 'Libya' Does Not Exist
>> By Justin Raimondo. March 13, 2011
>>
>
>> The idea that there is a nation called “Libya” is the central
>> problem with our understanding of what is going on in that fake
>> “country,” the flaw in our projections of what will or ought to
>> happen.
>>
>> The country known today as Libya has only existed since the end of
>> World War II, and was the product of a shotgun marriage of the
>> three “provinces”: Tripolitania, in the West, Cyrenaica, in the
>> East, and Fezzan in the South. “Libya” was created, first, by the
>> Italians in 1933, who sought to incorporate the three distinct
>> areas into a unified colony, under a single Fascist proconsul.
>> After the defeat of the Axis powers, the British took control and
>> installed an “emir” in Cyrenaica. Writing in the New York Daily
>> News recently, Diedreick Vandewalle, a professor of government at
>> Dartmouth, gives us some historical perspective:
>>
>> “History has not been kind to this nation. Its three provinces —
>> Cyrenaica, Tripolitania and Fazzan — were united for strategic
>> purposes by the Great Powers after World War II. Cyrenaica in the
>> east, and Tripolitania in the west, the two most important
>> provinces, shared no common history and were suspicious of each
>> other.
>>
> “The monarch, King Idris al-Sanusi, the heir to a Sufi Islamic
> movement that had its headquarters in Cyrenaica, kept complaining to
> the U.S. ambassador that he wanted to rule only as Amir of
> Cyrenaica, not as King of Libya.”
>
> The kindness of history is found lacking, by Vandewalle, because, as
> he complains later on in his piece,
>
> “In many ways, Libya remains the tribal society it was in 1951, when
> the country became independent. As a political concept, Libya for
> many of its citizens remains limited to tribe, family or province:
> The notion of a unified system of political checks and balances
> remains terra incognita.
>
> “The danger for future governments is that they could easily
> continue this hands-off government, remaining little more than a
> conduit for the country’s vast natural resources. The real challenge
> for Libya will not only be reconstruction — but the creation, for
> the first time since 1951, of a true state with a shared national
> identity.”
>
>
> Has Gadhafi’s long reign of terror really been an episode of “hands-
> off government”? Although, in theory, Gadhafi has several times
> proclaimed the abolition of the Libyan government, with power
> supposedly devolving to the local “revolutionary committees,” in
> reality – as we can see with our own eyes – anyone who who
> challenges the Gadhafi dictatorship is flirting with their own
> mortality.
>
> Gadhafi and the mid-level officers who led the coup against King
> Idris in 1967 were modernizers who emulated the Western model of a
> super-centralized unitary state. That Gadhafi had to mask this
> centralism under the rubric of his Jamahiriya variant of socialism –
> which claims that Libya is a direct democracy, where power is vested
> in local “Basic People’s Congresses” – merely underscores the
> difficulty of imposing any sort of central government in a society
> that naturally resists it.
>
> This is the “factual” basis of the daffy dictator’s seemingly
> crazyargument that he can’t step down from office, since he doesn’t
> hold any in the (officially nonexistent) Libyan state.
>
>
> In order to maintain his rule, Gadhafi had to set up a system that
> limned the already existing state of affairs, which Professor
> Vandewalle bemoans as “the tribal society it was in 1951.” The
> ideological fiction ofJamahiriya, however, has been abruptly
> unmasked by the dictator’s brutal response to the Benghazi-based
> rebellion. I’m surprised he hasn’t already styled himself as the
> Libyan equivalent of Abraham Lincoln, the heroic leader who will
> stop at nothing to save the sacred unitary state.
>
> Western intellectuals and politicians bring their cultural bias in
> favor of cosmopolitanism to bear on a region that has always lived
> in another way altogether: Vandewalle enthuses over the idea that
> Libya may some day see the emergence of “a true state” and enter a
> state of grace by achieving “a shared national identity” – but why
> should Libyans want any such thing?
>
> After all, their experience with the unitary state – from the
> idiocies of theGreen Book, to the decrees of colonial administrators
> – has been entirely negative. The only periods of relative peace,
> prosperity, and stability have been when the peoples of the region
> are allowed to revert to local “tribal” allegiances.
>
> (cont...
>
>
>> Article taken from Antiwar.com Original - http://original.antiwar.com
>>
>> URL to article: http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2011/03/13/libya-does-not-exist/
>>