From
the documentary
HyperNormalisation
by
Adam
Curtis
Faced
with the humiliating defeat in the Lebanon, President Reagan’s government was desperate
to shore up the vision of a moral world where a good America
struggled against evil. And to do this they were going to create a
simple villain. An imaginary enemy, one that would free them from the
paralysing complexity of real Middle-Eastern politics. And the
perfect candidate was waiting in the wings. Colonel Gaddafi, the
ruler of Libya.
The
Americans were going to ruthlessly use Colonel Gaddafi to create a
fake terrorist mastermind. And Gaddafi was going to happily play
along, because it would turn him into a famous global figure. Colonel
Gaddafi had taken power in a coup in the 1970s but from the very
start, he was convinced that he was more than just the leader of one
country. He believed that he was an international revolutionary whose
destiny was to challenge the power of the West.
When
he was a young officer, Gaddafi had been sent to England for training
and he had detested the patronising racism that he said he had found
at the heart of British society. Once in power, Gaddafi had developed
his own revolutionary theory, which he called the Third Universal
Theory. It was an alternative, he said, to communism and capitalism.
He published it in a green book, but practically no-one read it. He
had sent money and weapons to the IRA in Ireland to help them
overthrow the British ruling class. But all the other Arab leaders
rejected him and his ideas. They thought that he was mad. And by the
mid-1980s, Gaddafi was an isolated figure with no friends and no
global influence.
Then,
suddenly, that changed. In December 1985, terrorists attacked Rome
and Vienna airports simultaneously, killing 19 people, including five
Americans. There was growing pressure on President Reagan to
retaliate. President Reagan immediately announced that Colonel
Gaddafi was definitely behind the attacks. But the European security
services who investigated the attacks were convinced that Libya was
not involved at all and that the mastermind behind the attacks was,
in fact, Syria – that the terrorists had been directed by the
Syrian intelligence agencies.
But
what made it even more confusing was that although there seemed to be
no evidence that Gaddafi had been behind the attacks, he made no
attempt to deny the allegations. Instead, he went the other way and
turned the crisis into a global drama, threatening suicide attacks
against America.
Gaddafi
now started to play a role that was going to become very familiar. He
grabbed the publicity that had been given to him by the Americans and
used it dramatically. He promoted himself as an international
revolutionary who would help to liberate oppressed peoples around the
world, even the blacks in America.
The
Americans and Gaddafi now became locked together in a cycle of mutual
reinforcement. In the process, a powerful new image was created that
was going to capture the imagination of the West. Gaddafi became a
global supervillain, at the head of what was called a “rogue state”
– a madman who threatened the stability of the world. And Gaddafi
was loving every minute of it.
Then,
there was another terrorist attack at a discotheque in West Berlin. A
bomb killed an American soldier and injured hundreds. The Americans
released what they said were intercepts by the National Security
Agency that proved that Colonel Gaddafi was behind the bombing and a
dossier that they said proved that he was also the mastermind behind
a whole range of other attacks. President Reagan ordered the Pentagon
to prepare to bomb Libya. But again, there were doubts – this time,
within the American Government itself. There were concerns that
analysts were being pressured to make a case that didn’t really
exisτ, and to do it, they were taking Gaddafi’s rhetoric about
himself as a global revolutionary and his manic ravings and then
re-presenting them as fact. And, in the process, together, the
Americans and Gaddafi were constructing a fictional world.
The
European intelligence agencies told the Americans that they were
wrong, that it was Syria that was behind the bombing, not Libya. But
the Americans had decided to attack Libya because they couldn’t
face the dangerous consequences of attacking Syria. Instead, they
went for Gaddafi, a man without friends or allies.
In
April 1986, the Americans attacked Libya. Their targets included
Colonel Gaddafi’s own house. Immediately after the attack, Gaddafi
appeared in the ruins to describe what had happened. Many other
children were killed in the raid because the American bombing was so
inaccurate. Gaddafi realised that the attention of the whole world
was now focused on him and he grabbed the moment to promote his own
revolutionary theory, The Third Way, as a global alternative to
democracy.
President
Assad didn’t want stability. He wanted revenge. In December 1988, a
bomb exploded on a Pan Am plane over Lockerbie in Scotland. Almost
immediately, investigators and journalists pointed the finger at
Syria. “The bombing had been done,” they said, “in revenge for
the Americans “shooting down an Iranian airliner in the Gulf a few
months before.” And for 18 months, everyone agreed that this was
the truth. But then, a strange thing happened. The security agencies
said that they had been wrong. It hadn’t been Syria at all. It was
Libya who had been behind the Lockerbie bombing. But many journalists
and politicians did not believe it. They were convinced that the
switch had happened for the most cynical of reasons. That America and
Britain desperately needed Assad as an ally in the coming Gulf War
against Saddam Hussein. So, once again, they blamed Colonel Gaddafi
as the terrorist mastermind.
The
attacks in September 2001 were suicide bombs, but now on a huge
scale. They demonstrated the terrifying power of this new force to
penetrate all defences. They had come to kill thousands of Americans
on their own soil. 20 years before, President Reagan had been
confronted by the first suicide bombers. They had been unleashed by
President Assad of Syria to force America out of the Middle East. But
rather than confront the complexity of Syria and Israel and the
Palestinian problem, America had retreated and left Syria – and
suicide bombing – to fester and mutate. They had gone instead for
Colonel Gaddafi and turned him into an evil global terrorist. And
after 9/11, this led to a new, and equally simple, idea. That if only
you could remove these tyrannical figures, then the grateful people
of their country would transform naturally into a democracy, because
they would be free of the evil.
Both
Tony Blair and George Bush became possessed by the idea of ridding
the world of Saddam Hussein. So possessed that they believed any
story that proved his evil intentions. And the line between reality
and fiction became ever more blurred.
Iraq
was imploding. While, at home, they were being accused of lying to
their own people to justify the invasion. What they desperately
needed was something that would show that the invasion was having a
good effect in the Arab world. So, they made an extraordinary
decision. They turned for help to the man who they had always
insisted was one of the world’s most dangerous tyrants: Colonel
Gaddafi. And, instead, they set out to make him their new best
friend. A man who had been created by the West as a fake global
supervillain was now going to be turned into a fake hero of
democracy. And everyone, not just politicians, would become involved.
Public relations, academics, television presenters, spies, and even
musicians were all going to help reinvent Colonel Gaddafi. It would
show just how many people in the Western Establishment had, by now,
become the engineers of this fake world.
Colonel
Gaddafi confirmed that Libya has, in the past, sought to develop
weapons-of-mass-destruction capabilities. Libya has now declared its
intention to dismantle its weapons of mass destruction completely.
Colonel Gaddafi now became, for Western politicians, a heroic figure.
His decision to give up his weapons of mass destruction seemed to
prove that the invasion of Iraq could transform the Middle East. And
Tony Blair travelled to meet Gaddafi in his desert tent. To welcome
him back into what one journalist called, “The community of
civilised nations.” But, as in the past, nothing was what it seemed
with Colonel Gaddafi.
In
reality, Gaddafi did not really have the terrifying weapons of mass
destruction that he was promising to destroy. His nuclear programme
had stuttered to a halt long ago and never produced anything
dangerous. But now, he had to pretend to have a terrifying arsenal of
weapons. And the West had to pretend that they had avoided another
global threat.
And
then the made-up stories became even more complicated. As part of the
deal, the West said that if Gaddafi admitted that Libya had done the
Lockerbie bombing, then they would lift the sanctions. But many of
those who had investigated Lockerbie were still convinced that Libya
hadn’t done it. That, really, it had been Syria. But Colonel
Gaddafi confessed. His son, Saif, was interviewed about this
confession. He said that his father was simply pretending that he had
been behind the Lockerbie bombing to get the sanctions lifted. That
new lies were being built on top of old lies to construct a
completely make-believe world.
So,
the
Western hypocrites
eventually decided that puppet Gaddafi should change role and become
again the 'bad guy'. Do not forget what Hillary Clinton said when
Gaddafi brutally murdered: 'We came, we saw, he died'. You know the
rest: Libya sunk in chaos, but the neocolonial hyenas didn't care
that much. They just started a race for country's resources
on behalf of their beloved corporate monsters.
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