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Listen to this Article: "Humanitarian Imperialism Created the Libyan Nightmare."
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Listen to this Article: "Humanitarian Imperialism Created the Libyan Nightmare."

NATO’s military intervention in Libya in 2011, which overthrew the regime of Muammar Gaddafi, resulted in a chaotic and murderous failed state. Libyans pay a horrific price for this catastrophe.

Narrated by Eunice Wong

Text originally posted Sept. 16, 2023

Business is Booming - by Mr. Fish

“We came, we saw, he died,” Hillary Clinton famously quipped when Muammar Gaddafi, after seven months of U.S. and NATO bombing, was overthrown in 2011 and killed by a mob who sodomized him with a bayonet. But Gaddafi would not be the only one to die.  Libya, once the most prosperous and one of the most stable countries in Africa, a country with free healthcare and education, the right for all citizens to a home, subsidized electricity, water and gasoline, along with the lowest infant mortality rate and highest life expectancy on the continent, along with one of the highest literacy rates, swiftly fragmented into warring factions. There are currently two rival regimes battling for control in Libya, along with an array of rogue militias. 

The chaos that followed Western intervention saw weapons from the country’s arsenals flood the black market, with many snatched up by groups such as the Islamic State. Civil society ceased to function. Journalists captured images of migrants from Nigeria, Senegal and Eritrea being beaten and sold as slaves to work in fields or on construction sites. Libya’s infrastructure, including its electrical grids, aquifers, oil fields and dams, fell into disrepair. And when the torrential rains from Storm Daniel —  the climate crisis being another gift to Africa from the industrialized world — overwhelmed two decrepit dams, walls of water 20 feet high raced down to flood the port of Derna and Benghazi, leaving up to 20,000 dead according to Abdulmenam Al-Gaiti, Mayor of Derna, and some 10,000 missing. 

“The fragmentation of the country’s disaster management and disaster response mechanisms, as well as deteriorating infrastructure, exacerbated the enormity of the challenges. The political situation is a driver of risk,” said Professor Petteri Taalas, Secretary General of the World Meteorological Organization.

Taalas told reporters last Thursday that “most of the human casualties” would have been avoided if there had been a “normally operating meteorological service” which “would have issued the [necessary] warnings and also the emergency management of this would have been able to carry out evacuations of the people.”

Western regime-change, carried out in the name of human rights under the doctrine of R2P (Responsibility to Protect), destroyed Libya - as it did Iraq - as a unified and stable nation. The flood victims are part of the tens of thousands of Libyan dead resulting from our “humanitarian intervention,” which rendered disaster relief non-existent. We bear responsibility for Libya’s prolonged suffering. But once we wreak havoc on a country in the name of saving its persecuted — regardless of whether they are being persecuted or not — we forget they exist. 

Karl Popper in “The Open Society and Its Enemies” warned against utopian engineering, massive social transformations, almost always implanted by force, and led by those who believe they are endowed with a revealed truth. These utopian engineers carry out the wholesale destruction of systems, institutions and social and cultural structures in a vain effort to achieve their vision. In the process, they dismantle the self-correcting mechanisms of incremental and piecemeal reform that are impediments to that grand vision. History is replete with murderous utopian social engineering — the Jacobins, the communists, the fascists and now, in our own age, the globalists, or neoliberal imperialists.

Libya, like Iraq and Afghanistan, fell victim to the self-delusions peddled by humanitarian interventionists — Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Ben Rhodes, Samantha Power and Susan Rice. The Obama administration armed and backed an insurgent force that they believed would do the bidding of the U.S.  Obama in a recent post urged people to support aid agencies to alleviate the suffering of the people of Libya, a plea that ignited an understandable backlash on social media.

There is no official tally of the casualties in Libya that have resulted directly and indirectly from the violence in Libya over the last 12 years. This is exacerbated by the fact that NATO failed to investigate casualties resulting from its seven month bombardment of the country in 2011. But the total figure of those killed and injured is likely in the tens of thousands. Action on Armed Violence recorded “8,518 deaths and injuries from explosive violence in Libya” from 2011 to 2020,  6,027 of which were civilian casualties.

In 2020, a statement published by seven U.N. agencies reported that “Close to 400,000 Libyans have been displaced since the start of the conflict nine years ago — around half of them within the past year, since the attack on the capital, Tripoli, [by Field Marshal Khalifa Belqasim Haftar’s forces] started.”

“The Libyan economy has been battered by the [civil war], the COVID-19 pandemic, and Russia's invasion of Ukraine,” the World Bank reported in April of this year. “The country’s fragility is having far-reaching economic and social impact. GDP per capita declined by 50 percent between 2011 and 2020 while it could have increased by 68 percent if the economy had followed its pre-conflict trend,” the report says. “This suggests that Libya’s income per capita could have been 118 percent higher without the conflict. Economic growth in 2022 remained low and volatile due to conflict-related disruptions in oil production.”

Amnesty International’s 2022 Libya report also makes for grim reading. “Militias, armed groups and security forces continued to arbitrarily detain thousands of people,” it says. “Scores of protesters, lawyers, journalists, critics and activists were rounded up and subjected to torture and other ill-treatment, enforced disappearances and forced ‘confessions’ on camera.” Amnesty describes a country where militias operate with impunity, human rights abuses, including kidnappings and sexual violence, are widespread. It adds that “EU-backed Libyan coastguards and the Stability Support Authority militia intercepted thousands of refugees and migrants at sea and forcibly returned them to detention in Libya. Detained migrants and refugees were subjected to torture, unlawful killings, sexual violence and forced labour.”

Reports by the U.N. Support Mission to Libya (UNSMIL) are no less dire.

Stockpiles of weapons and ammunition — estimated to be between 150,000 and 200,000 tons — were looted from Libya with many being trafficked to neighboring states. In Mali, weapons from Libya fuelled a dormant insurgency by the Tuareg, destabilizing the country. It ultimately led to a military coup and a jihadist insurgency which supplanted the Tuareg, as well as a protracted war between the Malian government and jihadists.  This triggered another French military intervention and led to 400,000 people being displaced. Weapons and ammunition from Libya also made their way into other parts of the Sahel including Chad, Niger, Nigeria and Burkina Faso. 

The misery and carnage, which rippled out from a dismembered Libya, was unleashed in the name of democratization, nation-building, promoting the rule of law and human rights. 

The pretext for the assault was that Gaddafi was about to launch a military operation to massacre civilians in Benghazi where rebellious forces had seized power. It had as much substance as the charge that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, another example of utopian social engineering that left over a million Iraqi dead and millions more driven from their homes. 

Gaddafi — who I interviewed for two hours in April 1995 near the gutted remains of his home that was bombed by U.S. warplanes in 1986 — and Hussein were targeted not because of what they did to their own people, although both could be brutal. They were targeted because their nations had large oil reserves and were independent of Western control. They renegotiated more favorable contracts for their nations with Western oil producers and awarded oil contracts to China and Russia. Gaddafi also gave the Russian fleet access to the port of Benghazi.

Hillary Clinton’s emails, obtained via a freedom of information request and published by WikiLeaks, also expose France’s concerns about Gaddafi’s efforts to “provide Francophone African Countries with an alternative to the French Fran (CFA).” Sidney Blumenthal, a longtime adviser to Clinton, reported on his conversations with French intelligence officers about the motivations of French President Nicholas Sarkozy, the chief architect of the attack on Libya. Blumenthal writes that the French president seeks “a greater share of Libyan oil”, increased French influence in the region, an improvement in his domestic political standing, a reassertion of French military power and an end to Gaddafi’s attempts to supplant French influence in “Francophone Africa.”

Sarkozy, who has been convicted on two separate cases of corruption and breach of campaign finance laws, faces a historic trial in 2025 for allegedly receiving millions of euros in secret illegal campaign contributions from Gadaffi, to assist with his successful 2007 presidential bid.            

These were the real “crimes” in Libya. But the real crimes always remain hidden, papered over by florid rhetoric about democracy and human rights. 

The American experiment, built on slavery, began with a genocidal campaign against Native Americans that was exported to the Philippines and, later, nations such as Vietnam. The narratives we tell ourselves about World War II, largely to justify our right to intervene around the globe, are a lie. It was the Soviet Union that destroyed the German army long before we landed at Normandy. We firebombed cities in Germany and Japan killing hundreds of thousands of civilians.  The war in the South Pacific, where one of my uncles fought, was bestial, characterized by rabid racism, mutilation, torture and the routine execution of prisoners. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were egregious war crimes. The U.S. routinely destroys democracies that nationalize U.S. and European corporations as in Chile, Iran and Guatemala, replacing them with repressive military regimes. Washington supported the genocides in Guatemala and East Timor. It embraces the crime of preemptive war. There is little in our history to justify the claim of unique American virtues. 

The nightmares we orchestrated in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya are minimized or ignored by the press while the benefits are exaggerated or fabricated. And since the U.S. does not recognize the International Criminal Court, there is no chance of any American leader being held accountable for their crimes.

Human rights advocates have become a vital cog in the imperial project. The extension of U.S. power, they argue, is a force for good. This is the thesis of Samantha Power’s book “A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide.” They champion the R2P doctrine, unanimously adopted in 2005 at the U.N. World Summit. Under this doctrine, states are required to respect the human rights of their citizens. When these rights are violated, then sovereignty is nullified. Outside forces are permitted to intervene. Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, the former president of the U.N. General Assembly, warned in 2009 that R2P could be misused “to justify arbitrary and selective interventions against the weakest states.” 

“Since the end of the Cold War, the idea of human rights has been made into a justification for intervention by the world’s leading economic and military powers, above all, the United States, in countries that are vulnerable to their attacks,” writes Jean Bricmont in “Humanitarian Imperialism: Using Human Rights to Sell War.”  “Until the U.S. invasion of Iraq, [a] large part of the left was often complicit in this ideology of intervention, discovering new ‘Hitlers’ as the need arose, and denouncing antiwar arguments as appeasement on the model of Munich in 1938.” 

The creed of humanitarian intervention is selective. Compassion is extended to “worthy” victims while “unworthy” victims are ignored. Military intervention is good for Iraqis, Afghans or Libyans, but not for Palestinians or Yeminis. Human rights are supposedly sacrosanct when discussing Cuba, Venezuela and Iran, but irrelevant in our offshore penal colonies, the world’s largest open air prison in Gaza or our drone-infested war zones. The persecution of dissidents and journalists is a crime in China or Russia, but not when the targets are  Julian Assange and Edward Snowden.

Utopian social engineering is always catastrophic. It creates power vacuums that augment the suffering of those the utopianists claim to protect. The moral bankruptcy of the liberal class, which I chronicle in “Death of the Liberal Class,” is complete. Liberals have prostituted their supposed values to the Empire. Incapable of taking responsibility for the carnage they inflict, they clamor for more destruction and death to save the world.

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Discussion about this episode

Indeed the US has become an evil empire. The rest of the world needs to reject our leadership and take our powers away from us.

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It has been the evil empire since Dulles brothers and assassination of Kennedy. Remember genocide in Indonesia where Obama’s mom married a wealthy general...

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Indeed. And the sad part is that I remember those guys.

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America is a 2nd NAZI empire.

Contact Report 840

Billy:

But everything is done to conceal the truth and to lift the biggest criminal state on Earth, America, up into the sky.

And this on the one hand because it has already incorporated many states in its hegemonic mania, and on the other hand because America's revenge with its NATO murder organisation is feared, of which Ptaah once said, as by the way did Quetzal and some others, that America is a 2nd NAZI empire.

Florena:

We do indeed judge it in that process, for the drive for hegemony, according to our observations and findings, has been driven with evil since ancient times.

We have witnessed all the horrors of slavery, such as also how tens of thousands of human beings were robbed in Africa and traded and sold as slaves in America, murdered in their thousands, beaten to death, shot, drowned and dragged to death, strangled and massacred, and so on.

We have followed how the indigenous people were persecuted, wars were waged against them and they were tortured and murdered.

And no state on Earth, according to our findings, has waged so many wars and interfered militarily in foreign states' affairs with dastardly murder and war, secret service murder and crime, as well as with racial hatred, in such a way and somehow blindly as America.

And the way America, with its military and so-called 'security forces' and secret services, and in terms of all the intrigues and so forth, has been dedicated to its delusions of hegemony throughout the world since time immemorial, surpasses anything we know of in terms of evil.

https://www.futureofmankind.co.uk/Billy_Meier/Contact_Report_840

https://www.futureofmankind.co.uk/w/index.php?search=NATO&title=Special%3ASearch&go=Go

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Schantz -- what is with this Contact reports and extraterrestrials?

Letters from a mental asylum?

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Contact Report 814

Billy:

The truth is that everything goes even further, because this NATO clique of murderers manages to involve all the states of Earth in a conflict from which there is no way out that would lead to peace.

I am not the only one who sees it that way, but also many others who even recognise the dangerousness of the murderous organisation NATO and write about it in newspapers etc., as the following article proves:

NATO – the most dangerous Military Alliance in the World

Chris Hedges:

At no time, including the Cuban Missile Crisis, have we been closer to the precipice of nuclear war.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and its thoroughly dependent arms industry, with its billions in profits, have become the most aggressive and dangerous military alliance in the world.

Founded in 1949 to thwart Soviet expansion in Eastern and Central Europe, it has become a global war machine in Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, Africa and Asia.

https://www.futureofmankind.co.uk/Billy_Meier/Contact_Report_814

https://www.futureofmankind.co.uk/w/index.php?search=NATO&title=Special%3ASearch&go=Go

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Thank you Chris, for once again laying bare the underlying horror of modern imperialism. What we need to accompany it is the antidote. ASAP, please.

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Sep 27, 2023
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The problem is that that antidote is currently in a locked cabinet to which no one of us has the keys. Let me update my request: how do we get (enough of us) there to open that locked cabinet?

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I just can't figure out how the psychopaths running this shit show get away with all these criminal acts. I guess we the people are just observers similar to watching a movie and have absolutely zero power to effect events

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While here in Canada Justin Trudeau does his best US lap dog/golden retriever routine. So blind in his admins support for the US/Ukraine proxy war, he allowed a Ukraine Nazi to get a heroes welcome in parliament (later rescinded). Justin came to power because of his father Pierre Elliott Trudeau, who fought US hegemony and British Imperialism. PET allowed anti Vietnam war resistors (draft dodgers) sanctuary. Promising billions for Ukraine and even ordering the new F35 flawed jets that will drain even more money, that could go to strengthening our beleaguered health system (US private for profit health care propaganda and pressure including Koch funded Tea Party/MAGA) or for affordable housing etc. He never questions US hegemony and war that is driving the refugees here in the first place and overwhelming many social services. Failed states abound from US hubris and war, now it seems to be dismantling or weakening Canada's social safety net as well. The next US designed Failed States will probably include US allies like Canada.

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Criminals that organized NATO attack will not be punished....

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Eunice, it’s a good job you are a highly trained actor.

I honestly don’t know how you get through these every week without breaking down in tears every time. Just listening to them wrecks me.

But thank you. My middle aged eyes are so thankful.

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Sep 26, 2023Edited
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COVID CONTRARIAN YOUR OBSSESSESION WITH CHRIS SOUNDS INSANE. Rambling distorted dissection's of Chris's writing and speeches is at the point of being labeled as stalking. Of ALL the writers and propagandist /wordsmiths out there that deserve pushback you reserve your vitriol on Chris is a sign of confusion not informed critical analysis. Chris speaks out against wars and the MIC, against corporate power, for the environment, for the working class, pro union, for taxation of the 1%, health care, social safety nets, for public schools, affordable college education. You ignore it all and COVIDIZE EVERYTHING. Chris has said before he is not a medical scientist but chooses to get vaccinated which has been proven to save millions of lives. You on the other hand believe you are smarter and more knowledgeable than disease control specialists and the scientists working for understanding and cures. Dr. Fauci has had a lifelong career going back to the AIDS epidemic. What were you doing 40 years ago? Did you go to university and specialize in medicine or any subject related to it? Did you take metallurgy and engineering to support your 911 claims? Getting a diploma from Rabbit Hole U with a 100% grade is not something to be proud of! Going out in public as a Professor and spewing untruths to the ignorant does more harm than you care to admit. The world needs more Chris's and less PITA COVID conspiracy sheep that latch on to false claims and fixes of fascist Demagogues like Trump is delusional!

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I told you before ...

I'm not here to annoy you ... and I'll be back ...

Live with it, deal with it, adjust and accept it ...

Wish you well Jim ...

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OK I will live with it, deal with it, adjust, un-accept it and ignore it. Thanks for the heads up! Wishing you well and hope for your de-programing and rescue from the Q-Anon Cult. I'll be back too!

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Ha! ... but Jim, I am not a "Trumper" ...

And I did not vote for either of those sexually-obsessed bullies in the '2020 PRES election ...

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Just with this superb analysis that you and I just read/listen to Chris did more than you have ever done.

Stop farting with your cherry picking “quotations” to support your lunatic illustrations

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You have no case here Boris ... none!

I just used his direct verbatim quotes to demonstrate how he has deserted us ...

You can take issue with me busting up the party here, but I'm just giving him a dose of his own medicine ... I've been chasing him all over the 'Net for the past year and more people are expressing their disappointment in him ... please note that a couple people have already given my comment LIKES ... I used to love the guy, but not anymore ...

And you think I'm a lunatic, right? ... well guess what? ... Hedges thinks anybody who questions the motives and tactics of our elected officials are members of his lunatic fringe ... just check out that quote I cited above from his AMERICAN SADISM speech ...

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I think you are obsessed -- it is easy to control OCD with ERP practice

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You think I'm obsessed? ...

I think you've been literally lobotomized by this man's false goodness and your reaction here proves it ... he changed with the lockdowns, not the same person ...

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