Reflections on the Demise of the So-Called "King of Kings"


Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

There has been no end of commentary about Moammar Gadhafi's bizarre reign of chaos and terror in Libya.

His grisly death at the hands of fighters from the city of Misrata, which had suffered so grievously during the long civil war that finally led to his ouster, was captured by video cameras and broadcast around the world.

The essence of his rule was one almost unique for a 20th-21st-century ruler. The so-called ‘King of Kings' was truly an absolute monarch, a modern-day Egyptian pharaoh or Roman emperor.

Monsters such as Hitler, Mao, Kim Il-Sung, Saddam Hussein, and Stalin were, after all, to some extent bound by their own ideological formulations and political parties.

Saudi kings, even when absolute rulers, must govern within the strictures of Wahabi Islam.

But Gadhafi was literally able to do whatever he felt like doing; he was, after all, his own creation, a deity, and not beholden to any ideologues, dead or alive.

His "Green Book," a treatise that spelled out his "third universal theory" that would supplant both capitalism and communism - could it have been just an elaborate cruel joke, mocking his own people? - allowed him, in effect, to crown himself a philosopher-king. No popes or ayatollahs or caliphs stood in his way.

His idiosyncrasies were legendary and his every whim carried out: at one point he had decided that camels on roads near Tripoli made the city look "backward." They were immediately shot by his compliant military.

For all his buffoonery and comic-opera outfits, Gadhafi was a brutal tyrant, ordering the deaths of people at home and abroad with absolutely no qualms. He was a sociopath without a conscience.

And his family used the country's oil wealth to live in untold luxury. Libyans visiting their various compounds since Gadhafi's downfall have come away astounded by the affluence. The humble Bedouin persona Gadhafi affected was nothing but a pose.

"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men." Lord Acton's warning remains as relevant today as it did when he expressed it in 1887.

Gadhafi left behind no institutions, not even the kind other dictatorships have allowed, such as tame parliaments, compliant political cabinets, or political parties that had been hollowed out. Libya is starting from scratch. It is a political as well as a physical desert.