Robert is joined again by David Bell and they continue discuss the insane life of the controversial former leader of Libya, Muammar Qaddafi.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Mmm, hello friends, I am Robert Evans, and this is
Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you everything
you don't know that's the very worst people in all
of history. And today is part two of our epic
two parter on Momar Kaddafi, the Colonel, the dictator of
(00:21):
Libya and one of, if not the craziest people to
ever run a country. In part one, we went through
how Momar conquered all of Libya, overthrew the existing government
with the help of a bunch of friends he made
in high school. We talked about his Amazonian bodyguards, we
talked about his crazy theories on how the world ought
to run, and how the start of his brutal, repressive
(00:43):
state kind of went against everything that he claimed in
his rhetoric to want for the world. So now we
are getting in two more about Mama Kadafi. This episode
is going to include how he spent his fabulous oil wealth,
how he became maybe the richest man on earth, and
how he delivered probably the craziest speech ever delivered at
the United Nations. And oh, this is going to feature
(01:03):
a little cameo from a guy you may have heard of,
Donald Trump. So let's get into it. Uh. Now, the
entire oil and gas industry of Libya was under Colonel
Kadafi's personal control. He managed that part of the country
very hands on. By the time of his death in
two thousand eleven, he was thought to have amassed a
fortune squirreled around the world of over two hundred billion dollars,
(01:26):
which put him way ahead of Jeff Bezos at the time. Yeah,
he was probably the richest man in the world when
he died. It's hard to say, because he hit a
bunch of money in all sorts of places. Libya was
making something at its height like a billion dollars a
day in the oil revenue, and a lot of that
went to fund projects. But it seems like that he
was treating his people a little better than than Jeff Bezos.
(01:49):
You could argue that, I mean, they all had healthcare.
The Libyans did have a better healthcare plan than Amazon employees. Yeah.
Um So, Kadafi spent a huge amount of Libya's wealth
supporting terrorists and revolutionary groups around the world. Um. There
was no real through line between them other than that
they were all rebelling. He supported the Ira, the Basque
(02:12):
separatists in Spain, Iraqi Kurds. He was actually the only
Arab leader to support the Iraqi Kurds. He backed the Sandinistas,
the Red Brigades in Italy and Japan, Carlos the Jackal,
numerous groups across Africa. Almost every bomb used by the
ira during the height of their terror and like the
eighties and the nineties, was believed to have been made
using Simtex explosives shipped out of Libyan ports. He was
(02:36):
the man for international terrorists. So if terrorists were indie films,
He's like Harvey Wines. He is. He is the Harvey
Wine Stain of terrorism. You nailed it. Yeah, yeah, he's
the Harvey Wine Stain of terror. Yeah. And the ira
Is has been Affleck Yeah oh yeah, absolutely yeah. Okay,
there we go. I apologize. I all right. You guys
(02:57):
deserve better than be compared to benaff Like, that's not fair.
The ira has better tattoos, yeah, um, and they're better
at music. I don't know if Ben Affleck has a band, right,
he has to. He has to have a terrory bet
he plays a guitar every now and then at a party, okay, um.
So Kadafi also supported a bunch of legitimate governments across Africa,
(03:20):
sending the money and even troops to help them in
their wars. In return, he convinced almost thirty African nations
to cut off contact and diplomatic ties with Israel. UM
Colonel Kadafi's greatest African coup was convincing Jean Benell Bokasa,
the Emperor of Central Africa, to convert to Islam. Kadafi
personally handled his conversion ceremony and gave him one million
(03:41):
dollars as a gift. This money, and Kaddafi's money in general,
was sorely needed by Bocasa because he had almost bankrupted
the Central African Republic with an outrageously expensive, eighty million
dollar coronation ceremony. We're going to talk about Macaza Sunday.
So there's like Roman eagles made out of throw just
that detail. It was just brilliant. Becasa converted back to Christianity,
(04:07):
the religion of eight of his people, three months later.
It was at a lastic victory. Yeah. Um. Libya occupies
an awkward geographical and cultural position. It's part of Africa,
but its population is Arab. Kaddafi initially hoped he might
be the leader of a vast Arab resurgence across the
Middle East and North Africa, but he quickly alienated everyone
(04:28):
else in the Arab world. So once that door was closed,
he decided to try his hand at uniting Africa instead.
So he had to chow options. He figured, yeah, m
he was aiding in a united Africa or the Arab world. Yeah,
that was his goal. Why because he never he never
Libya was too small for him. He didn't just he
(04:51):
wanted to be leader. And he looked at the Middle East,
you like, He's like, no, they're not going to go
for it. It was more like as a kid, he
was he was really into Gamil Nasser, who was like
the president of Egypt, who was like an pan Arab
nationalist all basically reuniting the Ottoman Empire kind of deal, right,
and that was Kadafi's dream for a while. But all
of the other Arab leaders came to hate him. Okay, yeah,
(05:13):
he was like, okay, those guys hate me, I'm going
to go somewhere where I haven't burnt bridges as much. So,
like his best buddy was Idi Amine and he was
friends with right, yeah, you know what I mean. He
must a guy to hang out. Yeah, he gave soldiers
to Idi Amine, which didn't end well for him because
his army was not good at being an army at
(05:34):
any point in this which is yeah, they were terrible. Yeah,
so it's like a shitty gift. It's a shitty gift.
It was better than Idi Amine's army. Okay, did he
give armies often and people would have to pretend to
like it and then like give the army to someone else,
like re gift the army. He kind of gave armies
(05:54):
to a couple of people and then they got badly
beaten and then he didn't have much of an army
at least, and they were in an national sanctions against him,
so he couldn't give away his army anymore because he
was running low on tanks. Not great. Uh So. Yeah.
If you go searching through the wild woolies of the
Internet for documentaries about Momar Kadafi, you will find a
number of very positive takes, many of which are homemade
(06:16):
by guys in their rooms. There is a reason behind this, though,
because a lot of his legacy in Africa was positive.
He established a five billion dollar fund that invested in
legitimate businesses across the continent. The Guardian claims he did
more than any other leader to establish the African Union.
So it's not all negative. Again with Kadafi, it's always
(06:38):
a mix of Again, it's him, he's the problem. He
is the problem. Like if he like wrote everything he
wanted to have done down and then they just like
put him somewhere where he couldn't hurt anybody. Yeah, in
the desert. Yeah, yeah, maybe that's why he went to
the desert that one time. There was a lot of times.
He has never stayed there, which is the problem. Right,
(06:59):
he should have stayed there if he just said, hey,
there should be an African Union, and then once everyone
was like yeah, that is a good idea, he fucked
off to the desert. He never would have been murdered
in the street and I'm out and I'm out, like
George Sans in the in the Seinfeld episode one joke. Yeah, yeah,
that would have been a better way to Kaddafi. Um.
But instead he did all of this ship um. So
(07:21):
he was He was popular though in a lot of
parts of Africa outside of Libya, even when he wasn't
popular inside of his own country, but to the West.
In the nineteen eighties, Momar Kaddafi was the goddamn boogeyman.
In nineteen eighty six, a bomb went off in a
Berlin discotheque. Several people died. Ronald Reagan called Kaddafi a
mad dog, and he was portrayed as sinister and a
deadly figure pulling strings around the world, which is like
(07:43):
half true. He may have been involved in the discotheque bombing.
Um probably was to some extent. You know, maybe he
didn't know about it. And again, the way Harvey Weinstein
sort of has his hand in every Indy film or production. Yeah, yeah,
probably somewhere there was some money in there. He probably
winsteined a bunch of different tape reactions. Yeah. Sanctions weren't
(08:04):
placed on Libya during the Reagan administration, which cut the
nation's revenue by a third overnight. Uh. This was the
start of the dark times for Momarkadafi. On April fifteenth,
nine eighteen, US bombers took off from the UK and
dropped sixty tons of bombs on a Libyan airfield, naval academy,
and Momar Kadafi's Bob Alzizia compound. Several civilians were killed
(08:26):
in the bombing. Kadafi claimed his four year old daughter, Hannah,
was also killed. This is the first time the world
heard about his daughter, and it's hard to say what's true.
Reporters from multiple major outlets have attempted to track down
the truth of Hannah. We don't know. Basically, the possibilities
are she's either dead, a practicing doctor not real, or
(08:47):
two different people. That's a hell of a thing to
be of one of those things. Yeah, Like after his
regime fell, they found her room and her passport that
never her and there was like some in the room
that she may have been working as a doctor in Libya,
but nobody knows what happened. So they found her passport
(09:08):
that must assisted well. But he gets to issue passports. Okay,
So is this again going back to like Seinfeld. Is
this like a Seinfeld desk thing where he does a
lie and then has to like continually back it up.
May the point that he's making passports for this fake
dead person. It is obviously totally possible that when NATO
(09:30):
bombed his home, his daughter died in the bombing because
they bombed his home. It's also totally possible that the
guy in charge of the government faked having a daughter
or faked his daughter dying and then hit her from
the world under a different in the passport. She was
like two years older than he claimed she was. Okay,
so what he's like, Yeah, it's very hard to tell
(09:54):
what happened with Hannah. Um, whatever happened to her. The bombings. Actually,
we're kind of a pr coup for Kadafi. Uh. He
built a massive statue at the bomb site to commemorate
the attack, and he would for years afterwards hold press
conferences and meet with dignitaries in front of it. The
statue is called Golden Fist Clinching an American airplane. Is
(10:16):
the statue of a golden fist crushing in American statue.
It's an amazing statue. Ye, oh my god. It could
also be like a tribute to King Kong. There's a
lot of things that statue could stand in for. Oh,
it's so good, it's amazing. Now. Kadafi's actual military response
(10:37):
to the US bombing was to fire two missiles at
an American Coast Guard base on an Italian island and
miss Both missiles landed in the ocean. Yeah, which maybe
he just wanted to funk with the ocean. Yeah. Oh, yeah,
he hates the ocean. If you remember from part one,
Momar Kadafi's terrified of the ocean, right so, rightfully so
uh so. The wonderful book Libya, The Rise and Fall
(11:00):
of Kaddafi argues that Reagan's obsession with Kaddafi actually helped
the colonel. He'd been widely unliked before this point. After
the bombing, he could credibly claim to be a leader
of Arab and African resistance to the Western imperialist powers.
That said, the sanctions increasingly fucked up life from Momar
Kaddafi and mainly for the people of Libya. Their anger
(11:21):
made Kaddafi worry that at some point they might take
their rage out on him, so he announced a bold
reform package. First off, he abolished the people's Counsels and
the revolutionary committees, and he claimed that all of Libya's
problems had been the fault of those assholes, because you know,
he's not in charge, so he threw them all under
the bus. From the bus. Good step one. To drive
(11:41):
this point home. On March third, nine, nineteen days before
I was born, Momar Kaddafi gathered a bunch of supporters
and foreign diplomats at the Furnash prison in Tripoli. He
got into an enormous bulldozer and then drove it into
the jail's massive gate to break it down. Unfortunately, the
bulldozer could not break the gate of the jail, so
Kadafi backed up and rammed the prison wall until it
(12:02):
collapsed outwards onto the crowd of diplomats and supporters. Then
a sewage pipe ruptured and ships spilled into the street.
That's like something that would be on the Simpsons. That's
like something Homer Simpson would do. Oh my god, that's great. Eventually,
so Yakete Sacks has still been playing. It never stopped.
(12:26):
That was the Libyan national anthem for forty years. Four
prisoners eventually rushed out through the hole in the wall.
Uh Momar Kadafi announced people's don't triumph through building prisons
and raising their walls even higher, to the stunned silence
of his country, half of whom were buried in rubble.
Oh no, Kadafi opened up his country to a small
(12:50):
amount of privatization. People were allowed to run personal businesses.
Hotels started to open up in Tripoli. Things actually seemed
like they were moving forward in a positive direction. But
then December, one night, PanAm flight one oh three went
down over Lockerby, Scotland after a terrorist bomb detonated on board.
Two hundred and seventy people died, including eleven on the ground.
(13:13):
Uh In nineteen ninety, the Lockerby bombing was credibly linked
to Momar Kadafi's Libya. A computer chip and the bomb
debtonator matched debtonators found previously on Libyans who've been arrested
in Senegal. Um Kadafi denied any wrongdoing and anything to
do with the bombing. He refused to hand over the
accused bombers. He said the evidence against Libya is less
than a laughable piece of a fingernail, which is weird. No,
(13:34):
it's weird. It's weird to compare that to a fingernail.
I mean, it's like the same size the chip, the chip. Yeah,
I guess, yeah, maybe that's what he was going after.
I don't know. Yeah, it's a yeah, it's a weird.
It's a weird thing to say. It's one of those
things I have to assume. It's like something you say
when you're guilty, when you don't know how to defend yourself. Yeah.
(13:56):
Uh So. The nineteen nineties were a bad decade from
MOMR Kadafi's regime. Libya spent most of that time under
a strangling set of international sanctions. Kadafi also had to
fight off in his Lamist uprising that threatened topple his regime.
Um he spent years doing that. There was like a
brutal little almost civil war between the Islamists and the
Kaddafi regime. Uh The economy collapsed due in part to
sanctions and in part to the war, and also in
(14:18):
part to expensive projects like the Great Man Made River scheme.
So Kadafi believed that all great peoples need a great
riverbya does not have many great rivers or any great
rivers naturally, but it does have the largest underground reserves
a fossil fresh water. So Kadafi's plan was to pipe
(14:39):
water from underneath the deserts to the coastal cities. This
was an enormous engineering task, the largest irrigation plan ever
carried out six hundred miles of pipe. It's an enormous
fucking thing. It took up fifteen percent of the government's
budget during the years that it was under construction, and
it was under construction for a very long time. This
(15:01):
is again something that actually turned out to be a
good idea because now that it is complete, it currently
provides something like of Libbya's fresh water and supports a
huge amount of their agriculture. I mean, a river is
water that hasn't been corrupted by the ocean becoming the ocean.
He just keeps trying to ocean. Yeah exactly. Yeah. Um,
(15:22):
but it took a long time to finish this man
Rade River, and during the nineties it was just incredibly
expensive when they didn't have a lot of money to
spare this big dig. What they had the Big Dig
in Boston where they had construction for like a decade,
and it was awful and everybody hated it. It sounds
like He's big dig. So oh, I was gonna say,
it sounds like Kadafi's Boston. M Yeah, I'm not an
(15:42):
East Coast guy, right. Have you been to the East Coast? Yeah? Yeah,
I've been to the East Coast terrible where like the
East parts, I feel like you need to give it
another shot. No, I actually I liked Boston the one
time I was there. Its like a lovely city. Um.
I wasn't there during the Big Dig unless I was,
but I wasn't driving, So yeah, no, I I enjoy
(16:03):
the East Coast unless it's the summer, in which case
I don't. Y'all, summers are the worst. Yeah, the winters
are also kind of the worst. I'm fine with winter,
but I come from Texas, so if it's hot outside,
I expect there to be air conditioning. And no one
on that coast is figured out a c at least
that's the way it seems when you travel right. There's
also mosquitoes, and that's kind of a deal breaker. Yeah,
you gotta deal with those in the south too, so
(16:24):
I guess I don't notice that so much. But I'm
not a summer guy anyway. Let's talk about mar Market office.
Um so. Yeah. Libya's government, um during this sort of
giant slump in the nineteen nineties, tried a number of
different tactics to fix the economy. In nine, he established
a Tourism Secretariat and dedicated the nation's gorgeous coastline to tourism.
(16:46):
This again, is not a crazy idea. Libya is a
beautiful country, especially around the coast. Um. The problem is that,
of course Libya was still subject to massive international sanctions
and alcohol was illegal, but of which kind of put
a damper on a vacation destination. You need the booze, Like,
if you can't offer anything else, you need the booze there. Yeah,
(17:07):
it's okay if there's not a lot of variety in
the food, but I need to be able to drink
on the beach. Yeah. Like if I were going, if
I went into the convenience store and it was just
Italian suits and milk powder, I'd be like, well, okay,
there's vodka, so I can make this work. I can
have a vacation. Yeah, I have a good time. But
if there's no alcohol, then it's like what am I
gonna do? Yeah? What are we even? Why am I
(17:28):
even here? Um. At one point, a journalist asked the
head of Libya's national tourism agency, who would want to
go there for vacation. The head of the tourism agency answered,
perhaps reformed alcoholics come dry out in Libya. I've been
drinking to hit rock bottom. Come to Libya. He also said,
(17:54):
and then there are those who like adventure, so which
I'm gonna get ninety of people who like adventure also drink. Yeah,
And I think people when they say I like adventure,
they mean like zip lining and then drinking Margarite's afterwards.
Um so like Saddam Hussein. By the mid nineteen nineties,
(18:15):
Kadafi seemed to have soured on being a dictator. He
turned to the warm embrace of writing, and in nineteen
published a collection of short stories titled Escape to Hell.
The eponymous story appears to be written from the perspective
of a dictator fleeing his own unhappy people. It's like
he knew. It's like he knew. I'm gonna start reading
(18:38):
from Momarkat Daffy's short stories, which I should have plugged
at the end of the last episode, because this is
really the best thing we got here. This sounds wonderful.
So when we get back, we're going to just dig
right into mo Mars, but first by things. Products. Yeah, everything,
(18:59):
And we're back and we're about to get into the
part of the story I'm most excited about, where we
talk about Momar Kadafi's career as a short story. Right,
it sounds delightful. So the collection was of course called
Escape to Hell, which was the title of a story
in it about a dictator fleeing his own people. I'm
just going to read one selection from Escape to Hell. Sorry,
I was about to say that sounds like a John
(19:20):
Carpenter movie. It does, it does, and the hell in
this is the Desert. He's talking about how he hates
being in charge so much that he wants to escape
to hell the desert because it's nicer than being around
his people people loves the desert. I mean, he's a
better one like That's these people are desert people, so
that it makes sense. Hates the ocean, loves the desert.
(19:43):
Who can stand against the crushing current and the blind
engulfing power. How I love the liberated masses on the
march they are unfettered, with no master, singing and marry
after their terrible ordeals. On the other hand, how I
fear and apprehend them. I love the masses as much
as I love my father. Similarly, I fear them no
less than I fear him. In a Bedouin society where
(20:05):
no government system exists. Who can deter a father from
persecuting any of his children. Yes, how much they love
him and how much they fear him at the same time.
That is how I love and fear the masses exactly
as I love and fear my father. He knew what
was coming. And there's a great there's a line in
there where he talks about like how all he knew
(20:27):
how to do was tear down the old government, and
he didn't know how to do stuff like be a plumber,
so like why should people expect things to work? But
he's like, dude, you're the one who stayed in power.
So yeah. At this point he's like tony soprano, like
that's all he can do, and he sort of knows
eventually it's you know, they're going to come back to
bite him on the road. Yeah, exactly, and he forgot
(20:49):
how to use the brakes. Um. He calls these all
short stories, but they are really just collections of rants
with no cohesive plot structure or characters. Safe for almost
one story, Suicide of the Astronaut, which I am convinced
might be the greatest thing ever written in any language.
That sounds like a great band. It is a great
name for a band, and it's a great short story.
(21:11):
And Dave and listeners, I don't have any option but
to read the story and its entirety, every single word
of it. I have no choice in the matter. I
could no more cut out my own tongue than I
could keep Colonel Kadafi's brilliance hidden from the world. Are
you ready, David Bell, for suicide of the astraid? I
don't know if I'll ever be ready. Yeah, do it?
(21:32):
H Having traveled far and wide and giddy outer space,
and since budgets can no more support the great expense
of outer space programs, and now that man has landed
on the Moon but found nothing much except that the
two astronauts have exposed the wild guesses and vain hypotheses
of scientists that there were sees and oceans on the Moon,
which led to the competition to own them and designate
(21:54):
names for them by the insolent great powers, who nearly
went to war on Earth for the sake of dividing
the Moon that real resources, especially the marine ones. And
having roamed around the planetary system taking pictures of all
the planets, and after giving up hope of finding intelligent
life or any suitable place for living there, man returned
to the Earth frustrated and suffering from giddiness, vomiting, and
(22:17):
fear of perdition. That's the first sentence. Holy shit, Okay,
hold on, I need to unpack that. So this is
the story takes place after this. This is like, so,
you know how we went to the Moon and we
found all this the oan we almost went to war
(22:37):
over the Moon. Yeah, well you can forget about all that.
We're done with space. We're done with that, okay, next sentence,
he has now realized the fact that the Earth is
unique and incomparable as a source of life, which in
simple words means food and water, and that which is
indispensable to life is secured by the atmosphere of the
(22:59):
Earth at etera. Thus man had to return to the
Earth from his outer space escapade. Right all right, paragraph too.
Back on the Earth, the astronaut took off his space
suit and put on his familiar one, which is suitable
for walking and living on the Earth. Now that his
mission with the Space Corporation had come to an end,
(23:21):
he began to look for an earthly job. He applied
for one at a carpentry workshop, but he failed the
test because he lacked the essential no how of what
he thought was a simple trade. Also, he had to
go at the lathe workshop at a blacksmith sporge building
and plumbing. He even tried painting and whitewashing. He had
not studied fine art or music or weaving, as they
(23:41):
had nothing to do with his scientific specialization the Space Corporation.
This is a Neil Breen film. People, some people, most
people won't know what that means. People would do. This
is a this is a bad B movie plot. Yeah,
it is. It's amazing that he thinks an astronaut would
have trouble getting a job anywhere, because, like, I've had
(24:02):
to hire people on a number of occasions in my life,
and I know that if anyone had walked in and
said I was an astronaut and was in space, that
would be the end of the internet. Yeah. If the
word astronaut is on a resume, yeah you got it.
Even if they can't do anything, I just have them
there all day to be like, so, what's space like? Well,
and I just I assume anyone who can be an
(24:22):
astronaut can pick up any other skill, right, Yeah. We
decided when we were in elementary school collectively that the
best job as astronaut, which means any job less good
than an astronaut, an astronaut can do like oh yeah,
for sure. Yeah, even if you're a surgeon, they'll pick
it up. Being an astronaut is basically being really smart
but in space. Yeah, so like, yeah, any anything they
(24:46):
can do, like if they can do it in space, yeah,
they can handle it here. Yeah, I assume an astronaut
can do anything, but Mombarcadafi assumes he can't get a
job at a woodworking shop, which, well, this is the
future where we were already on the moon and stuff,
and this is like, this is like the Ridley Scott astronauts.
These are like the space truckers. That's why I'm pretty
(25:09):
sure he's imagining. He just watched Aliens and the right there.
It's extremely possible this might be in that cinematic universe.
Is this Are you saying that that that mo market
off He's suicide of the astronaut is is in the
Aliens cannon? It might be. So far, I've seen no
reason not to say that. All right, let's see where
it goes. Let's start with paragraph three. Um, So he
(25:31):
had to leave the city a frustrated failure and set
off for the countryside, where he looked for work as
a farm hand in order to support himself and his family.
One of the farmers asked if he was attracted to
the Earth by which he simply wanted to know if
the astronaut liked farming. But the astronaut answered, the attraction
of the Earth decreases as we go up, and our
weight also decreases gradually until we get to the point
(25:52):
of weightlessness. Then and there we get free of the
Earth's attraction or gravity as we call it. But soon
afterwards we get attracted by another planet, and our weight
begins to increase gradually. And so on. I hope I
have answered your question. Hold on, So the astronaut was
asked how how how do you like the Earth? He
thought that he the guy was asking him about how
(26:16):
weighed down by gravity to the Earth. Would you say
you are right, which would be an insane interview question.
That's amazing, that's that's yeah. The farmer showed signs of
someone who did not comprehend and looked as if he
wanted more explanation, and the astronaut, hoping to impress the
(26:37):
simple farmer in order that he would take him on
as a farm hand, went on parading his space knowledge.
The volume of the Earth is about twenty times less
than that of Jupiter's and that twelve years on the
Earth equal to one year on Jupiter, and that Jupiter
spot is big enough to hold the Earth in its center.
You may also be interested to know that saturness seven
forty four times bigger than the Earth, it is only
(26:59):
about nine times heavier than the Earth. So we know
now why this astronaut can't get a job. We figure
that he's literally talking about as far from farming as
he can just keeps given space facts. Okay, so I
think I understand the point of I don't know if
we want to talk about this. At the end, I
think I understand what Momar is trying to say. We'll
let me continue with the astronauts rant. The diameter of
(27:23):
the Earth is about fifty times bigger than that of
the Moon's, and its volume is about eighty times bigger
than that of the Moon's. The pull of the Earth's
gravity is six times greater than that of the Moon's.
The Earth is about a hundred and fifty million kilometers
away from the Sun, whose light takes eight minutes to
reach the Earth at the speed of three hundred thousand
kilometers per second. The volume of the Earth is about
(27:43):
one million, three hundred thousand, eight hundred times smaller than
that of the Sun's and the mass of the Earth
is also three eight times smaller than the mass of
the Sun, whose density is thirty times bigger than that
of the Earth's. The Earth come third, and distance from
the Sun. Mercury is the nearest planet to the Sun.
(28:03):
Venus comes next, and then the Earth et cetera. Venus
is about forty two million kilometers away from the Earth,
which is about four to tho kilometers away from the Moon. Yeah,
if you had a car that ran this is still
the fucking astronaut explainings to the farmer. If you had
a car that ran at a hundred kilometers per hour,
it would take you one hundred and forty six days
(28:24):
to get to the moon. But if you had no
car and decided to walk to the moon, it would
take you eight years and a hundred days to get there.
I think I have answered the question fully now, as
you see, I am well informed in matters concerning the Earth.
As soon as he had heard this last repetition of
the word earth, the farmer became aware of himself and
closed his mouth, which had been wide open during the
whole story of the astronaut's journey from one planet to another.
(28:46):
From the time he left Earth until he returned home.
The farmer did not comprehend much, but he too felt
dizzy because he fell under the spell and felt that
he was also coming home from a space journey with
no tangible gains concerning his farm. What matter to him
was the stance between one tree and the other, and
not the distance between the Earth and Jupiter. He was
also interested in the volume of the yield of his farm,
(29:06):
and not in the volume of mercury. He felt very
sorry for the begging, pathetic astronaut and had the desire
to give him some alms, but he was unable to
take him on as a farm hand, and so, having
lost all hope of finding any breadwinning job on Earth,
the astronaut decided to commit suicide. That's the story. That's
the end. That's the end. No, we don't even learn
(29:28):
like how we carry that out. So he's writing this
like a fable basically. Yeah, I think that was the goal. Yeah,
Oh my god. He should have written movies. He should
have written movies. He probably could have gotten something made. No,
I would watch a ninety minute adaptation of suicideh the Astronaut.
(29:49):
If there are producers listening to this show. I will
make sure that script gets written. Probably we can we
can do this. Um, so he's trying to say. I
mean it's pretty it's pretty clear what he's trying to say, right,
I think so. I I think the point this feels
it felt obvious, but maybe it's not. It's that he's
(30:11):
basically like I think about people like Elon Musk, who
is like, we're going to space and that we're sitting here, like, hey,
we need like clean water and affordable they drink. Yeah.
I think that's what he's saying, is the end of that,
like we go to space and we we want to
acquire this sort of knowledge, but it's useless to the
(30:34):
practicalities of actually living and like farming, and like the
idea that an astronauts job is essentially useless once we
learned that there's nothing out there for us, that the
Earth is the thing, is the thing we should be
taken care of and working on, and and the most
useful skills are it's down to just growing food. I
(30:57):
think that's what he's trying to say. I in a
really dumb story, in a really dumb story, and like
I'm not going to get on a rant about space
programs here. I'm one of those people who thinks that
we're going to get killed by a rock if we
don't get better at space. I think it's good to
explore space, absolutely. I just think that um our expenditures
on the space program are not why America does not
(31:19):
have good social programs. Like if someone with the charism
of Kennedy could start a program that's just like everybody
gets water. Yeah, like we want to be star Trek.
But like Star Trek started with her, they were like,
let's figure this ship out, let's make sure no one's starving. Yeah,
and then maybe we can start going into space and
figuring that out. Which, yeah, that's a reasonable message. Kadafi's
(31:40):
is insane. Yeah, I mean sorry that technically Star Trek
started because it was a Third World War, and then
Cochrane invented the warp drive and Vulcan sad, we'll be
doing a whole episode on zeph from cock okay for
uh yeah, so that's the suicide of the astronaut. Good god, Yeah,
life anging right, wonderful. So by the late nineteen nineties,
(32:05):
it was clear to mo markt Dafi that Libby's only
option was to make nice with the West and convinced
them to lift sanctions. This started in nineteen nine when
Kaddafi finally handed the Lockerbie bombing that was the plane
that got blown up until two seventy people. Uh he
handed the suspects in that bombing over to be tried
under Scottish law in a neutral international court. UM. This
was a start, but it took three years for things
(32:27):
to really ramp up, and it wasn't until the nine
eleven terror attacks that Colonel Kadafi got his big break.
So September eleventh, two thousand and one, was the best
day ever for three groups. Sam Been Laden and al Qaeda,
all of the Whales in the world, and mo Mark Dafi.
Despite being an observant Muslim himself, Kadafi had been fighting
Islamist terrorists and trying to warn the world about them
(32:49):
for years. Uh So when nine eleven happened, he publicly
condemned it, and he told the world like, this is
what I've been warning you about for a long time.
I'm against those guys too. He arranged a blood drive
to help victims of nine eleven. He declared the US
invasion of Afghanistan and active self defense UM and at
this point, the Bush administration was eager for a foreign
(33:09):
policy win, so you know, they decided to start talking
with Kadafi about opening Libya back up to the world
and dropping the sanctions. This wound up leading to in
two thousand three, Libya renouncing its plans to build nuclear weapons. UM.
Western corporations, particularly oil and gas companies, were hugely excited
for the possibilities that Libya represented because there's a shipload
(33:30):
of oil inside Libya. UM and in general, it seemed
to be a major coup for the Bush administration. Um
it later came back to bite them in the ass. Uh.
It seemed like it seemed like it vindicated their policy,
Like because we fucked with Saddam Hussein and you know,
murdered him. Uh, then that's why Kadafi gave up his nukes.
So clearly, fucking with one dictator might make the others better.
(33:52):
But of course, then America and the other Western countries
intervened to get Kadafi killed in two thousand eleven, which
provided a very good reason for North Korea and Iran
to not give up their nuclear weapons programs. So that said,
I'm not going to condemn anybody who tries to stop
a country from getting nukes because we got enough of those, uh,
and that that did work in the short term. Did
(34:12):
you say all the whales whales love nine eleven. Yeah,
it's a well documented it's another ocean thing. This is
another reason to stay away from the ocean. Well, the
actual reason that you can read up on this. I'm
not I'm not just making a joke. Uh. Scientists who
listen to whales you can tell the stress levels and
the whales based on the kind of songs that they sing.
And they noticed that in the weeks after nine eleven
(34:33):
their stress levels plummeted to the fact where they weren't
stressed at at all. They were super happy. They're all like,
we did it funk nine eleven. Yeah No. And it
turned out that what it is is that the the
like sonar and whatever equipment on planes that that that
it uses to communicate with air traffic, like that stuff,
whales can hear it. And it's like whales always have
(34:54):
a headache because there's always planes everywhere. We are the
noisy upstairs, And for like a week or so after
nine eleven, there was no more noise. So nine eleven
was the best thing ever for whales. Yeah, and Kadafi. Yeah,
this is really an anti ocean podcast, which I had
not intended when I started writing it. Yeah. Well, I'm
sure over time it will gradually shift to being mostly that. Yeah. Yeah,
(35:17):
the ocean is a bastard. Yeah. Um, So we're going
to talk about the rest of momarkt Daffi's Western rehabilitation
of his image tour and his trip to speak to
the United Nations in New York City. Kadafi in New
York City, it's like a fucking crocodile dundee, but with
the market office straight. Yes. Uh so we're gonna get
(35:39):
to that. But first products, and we're back from products.
Let's continue talking about mom market Daffi. So we left
off he just sort of agreed to give up his
nuclear weapons. Eleven had brought him closer to the United States,
and this whole Western rehab tour culminated in two thousand
(36:03):
and nine with a trip to New York City to
speak in front of the United Nations. Now, this was
not as simple as it might sound. True to his
Bedoin roots, Kadafi brought an enormous tent with him wherever
he traveled. His initial plan was to arrent it in
New Jersey on a piece of land owned by the
Libyan embassy, but the State Department said, no, you can't
put up a giant tent. There's a ton of people
(36:24):
with guns in America and they might just shoot you.
Like it was one of those like there's way too many.
I can see that request coming in. Then being like
he wants to what a tent? Oh god, no, does
he not know everyone has a rifle and there's angry
people about. Yeah. So he tried next to find a
large enough plot of open land in New York City
for the tent, but everyone he asked turned him down
because he's a violent dictator. Finally, Momar Kadafi was able
(36:47):
to find one friend in America who would rent him
some land. Donald J. Trump, Mr. Trump rented him a
large plot of land in Westchester County. Here is how
a two thousand and nine Guardian article described the erection
of the tent. Workers were seen yesterday erecting a tent
and satellites in the glamorous neighborhood of Bedford on an
(37:10):
estate owned by Trump. Local officials tried to stop them,
saying it was illegal to build a temporary residence without
a permit. An ABC News helicopter filmed a large tent
on the hundred and thirteen acre Seven Springs estate with
rugs and patterned wall hangings. Green and yellow fabric lined
the walls in a pattern dotted with images of small
brown camels, according to a local newspaper website image. Last night,
(37:32):
a State Department official told AP the tent might be
used for entertaining by Kadafi, but he would not be
sleeping there. And here is a picture of Momar Kadafi's tent. Okay, why,
oh my god, why didn't this come up during the election?
Oh it did, David. It seems like if someone's running
for president and someone's running against him, and that person
(37:53):
running against him says he let Momar Kadafi camp in
his backyard. I feel like that's enough. Right, How did
we get here? That is too big a question for
this podcast. It's just, oh my god. Yeah, what a tent? Right, Yeah,
it's a pretty good it's a pretty good tent. Barbecue
(38:14):
website like, there's nothing in it though, I don't think
they'd finished setting it up yet. Okay, it looks like
it would be a good place for like a wedding
or something. Yeah, I'm legitimately jealous of the tent. Nobody's
going to claim that moll Mar Kadafi did not have
good taste intense. So the town was furious about this
and banned Kadafi from putting up his tent. The whole
incident caused an outcry that forced the Trump organization to respond.
(38:34):
They said that the land was quote least on a
short term basis to Middle Eastern partners who may or
may not have a relationship to Mr Kaddafi. We are
looking into the matter. Mr Kadafi never got to stay
in the tent. In two thousand sixteen, then candidate Trump
bragged about the whole affair. Don't forget I'm the only
one I made a lot of money with Kaddafi if
you remember which a lot of people made money. How
(39:01):
did how did I think? He was a big fan
of Death of the Astronaut, So he's probably just kind
of psyched to have his favorite author in town. Yeah,
but the colonel did get to give his speech at
the United Nations, and my god, what a speech it was.
He was scheduled to speak for fifteen minutes, He spoke
for more than ninety and now we're gonna hear the
(39:25):
whole speech right now, but we're gonna get into the
cliffs notes. Uh. He had himself announced as quote, Leader
of the Revolution of the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiria,
President of the African Union and King of African Kings. Yeah,
that's a hell of a title. It wasn't until seventeen
(39:45):
minutes into the fifteen minute speech that he hit on
his main point, urging that Africa be given a seat
on the Security Council, which is not an unreasonable demand.
He also complained that permanent seats on the Security Council
were unfair and undemocratic, which is also reasonable. Then he
demanded the un be relocated to Libya, which is a
little bit less reasonable. Again, he's the problem. He's always
(40:09):
the problem. After that, Kadafi went sort of off the
rails with a list of rapid fire demands that were
half reasonable, half bug fuck nuts. He demanded thorough investigations
into the deaths of Martin Luther King Jr. And JFK.
So that had just been bugging him for a while's
been bugging him forever. He just wanted to know. He
(40:29):
proposed Israel and Palestine be merged into a single state
called ezra Stein. Okay, so what's happening here? Um, what's happening?
You ever see the in the scene in the movie
Army Gatting when they have the demands. Yeah, yeah, Yeah,
it's that it's the first time he's gotten like this
(40:51):
much of an audience. So he's like fifteen minutes now,
I'm gonna go for ninety and I'm gonna say yeah.
He's like, it's like being Yeah, it's like a phil
student in a like stuck in an elevator with Spielberg,
Like he's just gonna throw every pitch he's got out.
I love it. It starts with like, yeah, Israel and
Palestine should be one country, which a lot of people
would be like, oh yeah, wouldn't that be nice if
that word is ra Stein. That's not what anyone would
(41:14):
call it. Oh my god. He supported the Taliban's call
to establish an Islamic state. He demanded war crimes trials
for the invasion of Iraq. He demanded seven points seven
trillion dollars in reparations for Africa, which honestly seems kind
of low ball in it um, and he insinuated that
swine flew was a biological weapon. Insinuate just threw that in.
(41:40):
He just dropped that in there. It was a whirlwind,
and I'm going to say right now, probably the greatest
speech the UN has ever seen. The whole event earned
Colonel Kadafi a spread and vanity fair titled Colonel Kaddafi
a Life in Fashion. I'm just going to read you
their fucking introductory paragraph. Since completing his transition from international
(42:00):
parietist statesman, Colonel Momarca Daffi, the longest serving leader in
both Africa and the Arab world, has brought color in
his own is centric panash to the drab circuit of
international summits and conferences. Drawing upon the influences of Lacroix, Libaracci,
Phil Specter for Hair Snoopy and Idioman, Libya's leader, now
in his sixties, is simply the most unabashed dresser on
(42:23):
the world stage. We play homage to a sartorial genius
of our time. I'm going to show you a picture
of him standing next to President Barack Obama, and Barack
Obama is not fucking having it. And it's amazing. This
will be up on the website. Oh my god, you
owe it to yourself to see it. How would you
(42:43):
describe his outfit, David, Oh, he's like a star for
Callier or something. He's like a T and Star trek
where they had thirty minutes to pick it out. Yeah,
just like sequence and color. You never want your fashion
to be described as snoopy and idiom. And Barack Obama's
(43:04):
body language in this is amazing. He's just like, I
got to get away from this guy as soon as possible. Yeah.
It's weird to see a picture of a president rethinking
their career. Yeah, yeah, but this is the moment, of course.
Not long after Kadafi's visit to New York City in
(43:25):
two thousand eleven came the Arab Spring. This brought about
a revolt against Kadafi. The revolts started in the eastern
city of Benghazi because of the arrest of of an
activist who was organizing a protest march. Basically, the revolts
spread quickly throughout the country as Kadafi's forces arrested and
murdered dissidents. The whole time, Kadafi seemed to baffle at
(43:45):
what was happening. After all, Olivia was quote the state
of the masses. It was the people's state, and the
people couldn't rise up against themselves. He wasn't in charge,
of course, what were they doing. Unfortunately for Kadafi, NATO
sided with the rebels and created a no fly zone
that grounded the Libyan air force. You know, Kadafi was
kind of winning up until that point. His hard courted
(44:05):
Western friends abandoned him, so his Western charm tour came
to nothing. The African nations he'd supported also all abandoned him,
as did his fellow Arab leaders. NATO moved on from
a no fly zone to launching air attacks against the
Libyan army and sending an adviser to train the rebels.
After a very bloody year of fighting, the capital of
Tripoli was taken. Colonel Kadafi went on the run, but
(44:26):
his convoy was blown apart by NATO jets on a
highway outside of his old hometown. Kadafi was found by
the rebels, wounded and hiding in a sewage pipe. He
was shot dead on October two thousand eleven. His corpse
was displayed inside a freezer for several days. Yeah this
is Cadafi style. Yeah, you you live by hiding your
(44:46):
dead enemies in a fridge, and you die by having
your enemies put you in a fridge. Wow. So nothing
in particular sparked this, um. I know, the Arab spring
originated in Tunisia with the overthrow of the guy who
was in charge of Tunisia at the time, who I
think was a friend of Kadafi's, and that sort of
started the domino effect that you know, convinced people in
Libya it was time to start agitating for change. And
(45:09):
it was possible when it started he could have launched
real reforms because there's a long history that we got
into some of them. This of Kadafi is saying there's
going to be reforms and then nothing happened. It seemed
like it was time though. Yeah. It was like the
drunk guy at a party where it's like at a
certain point, everybody's like, okay, you gotta go. Yeah. If
he had said, like, hey, you know what, I built
(45:30):
that giant underwater river and now I'm going to step
down and try to forget all the people I had
killed and just remember the river, that might have worked. Yeah.
I mean, he did enough good. He could have hid
behind it. Yeah, but he did so much bad stuff too. Yeah,
and that his repression of the rebellion was very brutal.
A lot of people locked up, a lot of people executed,
(45:52):
huge numbers of people killed and bombed. Um. And so yeah,
by the time the rebels got to his comp hound,
there was no chance they weren't just going to shoot
that guy straight off. This podcast is not the place
to get into whether or not NATO intervention in Libya
was a good idea. Uh. It hasn't been a clean thing, obviously, UM.
But I do want to point out some numbers, one
(46:13):
of which is that the two thousand eleven civil war
against that dethroned Kadafi, there was an estimated twenty thod
people dead from that. Uh. There was another civil war
that started in two thousand fourteen, and the estimate for
that is about ten thousand deaths. We're looking at thirty
maybe forty thousand people dead as a result of the conflicts. UH,
and those deaths probably, I mean, it's it's one of
(46:34):
those things. If NATO hadn't stepped in, it's possible Kadafi
would have just stopped the rebellion cold in its tracks. UH,
and there wouldn't have been that many deaths, but it's
also possible that it would have wound up like Syria,
where more than half of a million people have died
because there was no no fly stone established. So it's
it's hard to say whether or not Libya is better
or worse off as a result of the intervention, but
(46:57):
they do now have a sort of functioning to mock Grissy,
and Kadafi is out of power. Um, it has not
been a smooth transition to democracy because again, when Kadafi
left power, there were no political parties, there was no
no one who knew how to run anything in the
country because the people who were in charge when Kaddafi
died were people who had been his friends when he
(47:18):
was a teenager, that had been running things the whole time.
None of the younger people really knew how to do anything.
So like it has been a messy road. They're doing
their best. He didn't set them up for success, which
part of his point, because it does seem like he
had to go. But that's yeah, it's a tough thing
to to figure out. Then, Yeah, it's not as when
(47:40):
people say it was a mistake to intervene, it's not
something that you can say that easily. Yeah, I'm not
gonna say it was the right thing to do either,
but it's a complicated morally. It's that Yeah, because again,
anybody who has should get involved, we should something should
be done. Yeah, And he was, you know, a very
(48:03):
repressive leader. He executed a lot of people, um, which
we talked about in this sometimes and made a lot
of people watch and televised a lot of executions, um,
and they were pretty brutal. He would have a lot
of people hung on television. So he was he was
a bad dude and probably would have killed a substantial
number of people if he'd succeeded in stomping down the revolution,
(48:24):
because he did when there was that Islamist rebellion against him,
he killed like people in one massacre. So like, you know,
if he had had his way with the revolutionaries, there
could have been more than thirty thousand dead. It's hard,
it's hard to weigh that, like how many deaths versus
how many and this alternate didn't get involved, Like yeah,
(48:46):
it's a bleak question. And he's a hard guide away
because presumably in a hundred years, we don't know what
Libby is going to be like, but hopefully they'll still
have that giant fucking underground river he built, so who knows? Yeah,
at you of the fist they do. It's in a
war museum in the city of I think miss Ratta.
They took it as like a trophy for like cameer
(49:07):
that time we overthrew the dictator. Here's a statue, right,
I mean the river is cool, but that fist, that
fist statue, it's like a like a Banksy sculpture. That's wonderful.
It is great. Um. Well, that is all the time
we have for Momakadafi today, Dave, thank you for joining
me in this epic tale of whatever the hell we
(49:29):
call MoMA. Thank you for having me. This is a blast.
All right. Well, Colonel Bell, you want to plug the
things that you have to plug? Yeah, I'll plug things. Um.
You can find me on the Twitter at a movie
who look in uh where I tweet stuff. Um. I'm
also co run a podcasting and a Twitch network called
game Fully Unemployed g am E f U l O
(49:52):
Y it's a I guess a pun. Yeah. We have
a Patreon, Patreon, dot com slash game fully Unemployed check
us out. Um. Yeah, and you can find me on
Twitter at I write okay, which is just two letters.
You can find our podcasts, Twitter, and other social media
stuff at at Bastards pod. You can find us on
the internet at behind the Bastards dot com, which is
(50:14):
where the pictures and sources for this particular episode will
be uh. You can also find my book on Amazon,
A Brief History of Vice. David himself appears in it.
I don't want to go into too much detail, but
there's a hospital visits and a milkshake and a milkshake
so if you want to see how those things are
connected by my book, A Brief History of Vice. Um.
(50:35):
Other than that, I got nothing. Next week we'll be
back with another bastard or potentially several bastards to talk about,
so please join us next Tuesday and every Tuesday from
now until the end of time. I love like you.
Statistically
Mmm, hello friends, I am Robert Evans, and this is
Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you everything
you don't know that's the very worst people in all
of history. And today is part two of our epic
two parter on Momar Kaddafi, the Colonel, the dictator of
(00:21):
Libya and one of, if not the craziest people to
ever run a country. In part one, we went through
how Momar conquered all of Libya, overthrew the existing government
with the help of a bunch of friends he made
in high school. We talked about his Amazonian bodyguards, we
talked about his crazy theories on how the world ought
to run, and how the start of his brutal, repressive
(00:43):
state kind of went against everything that he claimed in
his rhetoric to want for the world. So now we
are getting in two more about Mama Kadafi. This episode
is going to include how he spent his fabulous oil wealth,
how he became maybe the richest man on earth, and
how he delivered probably the craziest speech ever delivered at
the United Nations. And oh, this is going to feature
(01:03):
a little cameo from a guy you may have heard of,
Donald Trump. So let's get into it. Uh. Now, the
entire oil and gas industry of Libya was under Colonel
Kadafi's personal control. He managed that part of the country
very hands on. By the time of his death in
two thousand eleven, he was thought to have amassed a
fortune squirreled around the world of over two hundred billion dollars,
(01:26):
which put him way ahead of Jeff Bezos at the time. Yeah,
he was probably the richest man in the world when
he died. It's hard to say, because he hit a
bunch of money in all sorts of places. Libya was
making something at its height like a billion dollars a
day in the oil revenue, and a lot of that
went to fund projects. But it seems like that he
was treating his people a little better than than Jeff Bezos.
(01:49):
You could argue that, I mean, they all had healthcare.
The Libyans did have a better healthcare plan than Amazon employees. Yeah.
Um So, Kadafi spent a huge amount of Libya's wealth
supporting terrorists and revolutionary groups around the world. Um. There
was no real through line between them other than that
they were all rebelling. He supported the Ira, the Basque
(02:12):
separatists in Spain, Iraqi Kurds. He was actually the only
Arab leader to support the Iraqi Kurds. He backed the Sandinistas,
the Red Brigades in Italy and Japan, Carlos the Jackal,
numerous groups across Africa. Almost every bomb used by the
ira during the height of their terror and like the
eighties and the nineties, was believed to have been made
using Simtex explosives shipped out of Libyan ports. He was
(02:36):
the man for international terrorists. So if terrorists were indie films,
He's like Harvey Wines. He is. He is the Harvey
Wine Stain of terrorism. You nailed it. Yeah, yeah, he's
the Harvey Wine Stain of terror. Yeah. And the ira
Is has been Affleck Yeah oh yeah, absolutely yeah. Okay,
there we go. I apologize. I all right. You guys
(02:57):
deserve better than be compared to benaff Like, that's not fair.
The ira has better tattoos, yeah, um, and they're better
at music. I don't know if Ben Affleck has a band, right,
he has to. He has to have a terrory bet
he plays a guitar every now and then at a party, okay, um.
So Kadafi also supported a bunch of legitimate governments across Africa,
(03:20):
sending the money and even troops to help them in
their wars. In return, he convinced almost thirty African nations
to cut off contact and diplomatic ties with Israel. UM
Colonel Kadafi's greatest African coup was convincing Jean Benell Bokasa,
the Emperor of Central Africa, to convert to Islam. Kadafi
personally handled his conversion ceremony and gave him one million
(03:41):
dollars as a gift. This money, and Kaddafi's money in general,
was sorely needed by Bocasa because he had almost bankrupted
the Central African Republic with an outrageously expensive, eighty million
dollar coronation ceremony. We're going to talk about Macaza Sunday.
So there's like Roman eagles made out of throw just
that detail. It was just brilliant. Becasa converted back to Christianity,
(04:07):
the religion of eight of his people, three months later.
It was at a lastic victory. Yeah. Um. Libya occupies
an awkward geographical and cultural position. It's part of Africa,
but its population is Arab. Kaddafi initially hoped he might
be the leader of a vast Arab resurgence across the
Middle East and North Africa, but he quickly alienated everyone
(04:28):
else in the Arab world. So once that door was closed,
he decided to try his hand at uniting Africa instead.
So he had to chow options. He figured, yeah, m
he was aiding in a united Africa or the Arab world. Yeah,
that was his goal. Why because he never he never
Libya was too small for him. He didn't just he
(04:51):
wanted to be leader. And he looked at the Middle East,
you like, He's like, no, they're not going to go
for it. It was more like as a kid, he
was he was really into Gamil Nasser, who was like
the president of Egypt, who was like an pan Arab
nationalist all basically reuniting the Ottoman Empire kind of deal, right,
and that was Kadafi's dream for a while. But all
of the other Arab leaders came to hate him. Okay, yeah,
(05:13):
he was like, okay, those guys hate me, I'm going
to go somewhere where I haven't burnt bridges as much. So,
like his best buddy was Idi Amine and he was
friends with right, yeah, you know what I mean. He
must a guy to hang out. Yeah, he gave soldiers
to Idi Amine, which didn't end well for him because
his army was not good at being an army at
(05:34):
any point in this which is yeah, they were terrible. Yeah,
so it's like a shitty gift. It's a shitty gift.
It was better than Idi Amine's army. Okay, did he
give armies often and people would have to pretend to
like it and then like give the army to someone else,
like re gift the army. He kind of gave armies
(05:54):
to a couple of people and then they got badly
beaten and then he didn't have much of an army
at least, and they were in an national sanctions against him,
so he couldn't give away his army anymore because he
was running low on tanks. Not great. Uh So. Yeah.
If you go searching through the wild woolies of the
Internet for documentaries about Momar Kadafi, you will find a
number of very positive takes, many of which are homemade
(06:16):
by guys in their rooms. There is a reason behind this, though,
because a lot of his legacy in Africa was positive.
He established a five billion dollar fund that invested in
legitimate businesses across the continent. The Guardian claims he did
more than any other leader to establish the African Union.
So it's not all negative. Again with Kadafi, it's always
(06:38):
a mix of Again, it's him, he's the problem. He
is the problem. Like if he like wrote everything he
wanted to have done down and then they just like
put him somewhere where he couldn't hurt anybody. Yeah, in
the desert. Yeah, yeah, maybe that's why he went to
the desert that one time. There was a lot of times.
He has never stayed there, which is the problem. Right,
(06:59):
he should have stayed there if he just said, hey,
there should be an African Union, and then once everyone
was like yeah, that is a good idea, he fucked
off to the desert. He never would have been murdered
in the street and I'm out and I'm out, like
George Sans in the in the Seinfeld episode one joke. Yeah, yeah,
that would have been a better way to Kaddafi. Um.
But instead he did all of this ship um. So
(07:21):
he was He was popular though in a lot of
parts of Africa outside of Libya, even when he wasn't
popular inside of his own country, but to the West.
In the nineteen eighties, Momar Kaddafi was the goddamn boogeyman.
In nineteen eighty six, a bomb went off in a
Berlin discotheque. Several people died. Ronald Reagan called Kaddafi a
mad dog, and he was portrayed as sinister and a
deadly figure pulling strings around the world, which is like
(07:43):
half true. He may have been involved in the discotheque bombing.
Um probably was to some extent. You know, maybe he
didn't know about it. And again, the way Harvey Weinstein
sort of has his hand in every Indy film or production. Yeah, yeah,
probably somewhere there was some money in there. He probably
winsteined a bunch of different tape reactions. Yeah. Sanctions weren't
(08:04):
placed on Libya during the Reagan administration, which cut the
nation's revenue by a third overnight. Uh. This was the
start of the dark times for Momarkadafi. On April fifteenth,
nine eighteen, US bombers took off from the UK and
dropped sixty tons of bombs on a Libyan airfield, naval academy,
and Momar Kadafi's Bob Alzizia compound. Several civilians were killed
(08:26):
in the bombing. Kadafi claimed his four year old daughter, Hannah,
was also killed. This is the first time the world
heard about his daughter, and it's hard to say what's true.
Reporters from multiple major outlets have attempted to track down
the truth of Hannah. We don't know. Basically, the possibilities
are she's either dead, a practicing doctor not real, or
(08:47):
two different people. That's a hell of a thing to
be of one of those things. Yeah, Like after his
regime fell, they found her room and her passport that
never her and there was like some in the room
that she may have been working as a doctor in Libya,
but nobody knows what happened. So they found her passport
(09:08):
that must assisted well. But he gets to issue passports. Okay,
So is this again going back to like Seinfeld. Is
this like a Seinfeld desk thing where he does a
lie and then has to like continually back it up.
May the point that he's making passports for this fake
dead person. It is obviously totally possible that when NATO
(09:30):
bombed his home, his daughter died in the bombing because
they bombed his home. It's also totally possible that the
guy in charge of the government faked having a daughter
or faked his daughter dying and then hit her from
the world under a different in the passport. She was
like two years older than he claimed she was. Okay,
so what he's like, Yeah, it's very hard to tell
(09:54):
what happened with Hannah. Um, whatever happened to her. The bombings. Actually,
we're kind of a pr coup for Kadafi. Uh. He
built a massive statue at the bomb site to commemorate
the attack, and he would for years afterwards hold press
conferences and meet with dignitaries in front of it. The
statue is called Golden Fist Clinching an American airplane. Is
(10:16):
the statue of a golden fist crushing in American statue.
It's an amazing statue. Ye, oh my god. It could
also be like a tribute to King Kong. There's a
lot of things that statue could stand in for. Oh,
it's so good, it's amazing. Now. Kadafi's actual military response
(10:37):
to the US bombing was to fire two missiles at
an American Coast Guard base on an Italian island and
miss Both missiles landed in the ocean. Yeah, which maybe
he just wanted to funk with the ocean. Yeah. Oh, yeah,
he hates the ocean. If you remember from part one,
Momar Kadafi's terrified of the ocean, right so, rightfully so
uh so. The wonderful book Libya, The Rise and Fall
(11:00):
of Kaddafi argues that Reagan's obsession with Kaddafi actually helped
the colonel. He'd been widely unliked before this point. After
the bombing, he could credibly claim to be a leader
of Arab and African resistance to the Western imperialist powers.
That said, the sanctions increasingly fucked up life from Momar
Kaddafi and mainly for the people of Libya. Their anger
(11:21):
made Kaddafi worry that at some point they might take
their rage out on him, so he announced a bold
reform package. First off, he abolished the people's Counsels and
the revolutionary committees, and he claimed that all of Libya's
problems had been the fault of those assholes, because you know,
he's not in charge, so he threw them all under
the bus. From the bus. Good step one. To drive
(11:41):
this point home. On March third, nine, nineteen days before
I was born, Momar Kaddafi gathered a bunch of supporters
and foreign diplomats at the Furnash prison in Tripoli. He
got into an enormous bulldozer and then drove it into
the jail's massive gate to break it down. Unfortunately, the
bulldozer could not break the gate of the jail, so
Kadafi backed up and rammed the prison wall until it
(12:02):
collapsed outwards onto the crowd of diplomats and supporters. Then
a sewage pipe ruptured and ships spilled into the street.
That's like something that would be on the Simpsons. That's
like something Homer Simpson would do. Oh my god, that's great. Eventually,
so Yakete Sacks has still been playing. It never stopped.
(12:26):
That was the Libyan national anthem for forty years. Four
prisoners eventually rushed out through the hole in the wall.
Uh Momar Kadafi announced people's don't triumph through building prisons
and raising their walls even higher, to the stunned silence
of his country, half of whom were buried in rubble.
Oh no, Kadafi opened up his country to a small
(12:50):
amount of privatization. People were allowed to run personal businesses.
Hotels started to open up in Tripoli. Things actually seemed
like they were moving forward in a positive direction. But
then December, one night, PanAm flight one oh three went
down over Lockerby, Scotland after a terrorist bomb detonated on board.
Two hundred and seventy people died, including eleven on the ground.
(13:13):
Uh In nineteen ninety, the Lockerby bombing was credibly linked
to Momar Kadafi's Libya. A computer chip and the bomb
debtonator matched debtonators found previously on Libyans who've been arrested
in Senegal. Um Kadafi denied any wrongdoing and anything to
do with the bombing. He refused to hand over the
accused bombers. He said the evidence against Libya is less
than a laughable piece of a fingernail, which is weird. No,
(13:34):
it's weird. It's weird to compare that to a fingernail.
I mean, it's like the same size the chip, the chip. Yeah,
I guess, yeah, maybe that's what he was going after.
I don't know. Yeah, it's a yeah, it's a weird.
It's a weird thing to say. It's one of those
things I have to assume. It's like something you say
when you're guilty, when you don't know how to defend yourself. Yeah.
(13:56):
Uh So. The nineteen nineties were a bad decade from
MOMR Kadafi's regime. Libya spent most of that time under
a strangling set of international sanctions. Kadafi also had to
fight off in his Lamist uprising that threatened topple his regime.
Um he spent years doing that. There was like a
brutal little almost civil war between the Islamists and the
Kaddafi regime. Uh The economy collapsed due in part to
sanctions and in part to the war, and also in
(14:18):
part to expensive projects like the Great Man Made River scheme.
So Kadafi believed that all great peoples need a great
riverbya does not have many great rivers or any great
rivers naturally, but it does have the largest underground reserves
a fossil fresh water. So Kadafi's plan was to pipe
(14:39):
water from underneath the deserts to the coastal cities. This
was an enormous engineering task, the largest irrigation plan ever
carried out six hundred miles of pipe. It's an enormous
fucking thing. It took up fifteen percent of the government's
budget during the years that it was under construction, and
it was under construction for a very long time. This
(15:01):
is again something that actually turned out to be a
good idea because now that it is complete, it currently
provides something like of Libbya's fresh water and supports a
huge amount of their agriculture. I mean, a river is
water that hasn't been corrupted by the ocean becoming the ocean.
He just keeps trying to ocean. Yeah exactly. Yeah. Um,
(15:22):
but it took a long time to finish this man
Rade River, and during the nineties it was just incredibly
expensive when they didn't have a lot of money to
spare this big dig. What they had the Big Dig
in Boston where they had construction for like a decade,
and it was awful and everybody hated it. It sounds
like He's big dig. So oh, I was gonna say,
it sounds like Kadafi's Boston. M Yeah, I'm not an
(15:42):
East Coast guy, right. Have you been to the East Coast? Yeah? Yeah,
I've been to the East Coast terrible where like the
East parts, I feel like you need to give it
another shot. No, I actually I liked Boston the one
time I was there. Its like a lovely city. Um.
I wasn't there during the Big Dig unless I was,
but I wasn't driving, So yeah, no, I I enjoy
(16:03):
the East Coast unless it's the summer, in which case
I don't. Y'all, summers are the worst. Yeah, the winters
are also kind of the worst. I'm fine with winter,
but I come from Texas, so if it's hot outside,
I expect there to be air conditioning. And no one
on that coast is figured out a c at least
that's the way it seems when you travel right. There's
also mosquitoes, and that's kind of a deal breaker. Yeah,
you gotta deal with those in the south too, so
(16:24):
I guess I don't notice that so much. But I'm
not a summer guy anyway. Let's talk about mar Market office.
Um so. Yeah. Libya's government, um during this sort of
giant slump in the nineteen nineties, tried a number of
different tactics to fix the economy. In nine, he established
a Tourism Secretariat and dedicated the nation's gorgeous coastline to tourism.
(16:46):
This again, is not a crazy idea. Libya is a
beautiful country, especially around the coast. Um. The problem is that,
of course Libya was still subject to massive international sanctions
and alcohol was illegal, but of which kind of put
a damper on a vacation destination. You need the booze, Like,
if you can't offer anything else, you need the booze there. Yeah,
(17:07):
it's okay if there's not a lot of variety in
the food, but I need to be able to drink
on the beach. Yeah. Like if I were going, if
I went into the convenience store and it was just
Italian suits and milk powder, I'd be like, well, okay,
there's vodka, so I can make this work. I can
have a vacation. Yeah, I have a good time. But
if there's no alcohol, then it's like what am I
gonna do? Yeah? What are we even? Why am I
(17:28):
even here? Um. At one point, a journalist asked the
head of Libya's national tourism agency, who would want to
go there for vacation. The head of the tourism agency answered,
perhaps reformed alcoholics come dry out in Libya. I've been
drinking to hit rock bottom. Come to Libya. He also said,
(17:54):
and then there are those who like adventure, so which
I'm gonna get ninety of people who like adventure also drink. Yeah,
And I think people when they say I like adventure,
they mean like zip lining and then drinking Margarite's afterwards.
Um so like Saddam Hussein. By the mid nineteen nineties,
(18:15):
Kadafi seemed to have soured on being a dictator. He
turned to the warm embrace of writing, and in nineteen
published a collection of short stories titled Escape to Hell.
The eponymous story appears to be written from the perspective
of a dictator fleeing his own unhappy people. It's like
he knew. It's like he knew. I'm gonna start reading
(18:38):
from Momarkat Daffy's short stories, which I should have plugged
at the end of the last episode, because this is
really the best thing we got here. This sounds wonderful.
So when we get back, we're going to just dig
right into mo Mars, but first by things. Products. Yeah, everything,
(18:59):
And we're back and we're about to get into the
part of the story I'm most excited about, where we
talk about Momar Kadafi's career as a short story. Right,
it sounds delightful. So the collection was of course called
Escape to Hell, which was the title of a story
in it about a dictator fleeing his own people. I'm
just going to read one selection from Escape to Hell. Sorry,
I was about to say that sounds like a John
(19:20):
Carpenter movie. It does, it does, and the hell in
this is the Desert. He's talking about how he hates
being in charge so much that he wants to escape
to hell the desert because it's nicer than being around
his people people loves the desert. I mean, he's a
better one like That's these people are desert people, so
that it makes sense. Hates the ocean, loves the desert.
(19:43):
Who can stand against the crushing current and the blind
engulfing power. How I love the liberated masses on the
march they are unfettered, with no master, singing and marry
after their terrible ordeals. On the other hand, how I
fear and apprehend them. I love the masses as much
as I love my father. Similarly, I fear them no
less than I fear him. In a Bedouin society where
(20:05):
no government system exists. Who can deter a father from
persecuting any of his children. Yes, how much they love
him and how much they fear him at the same time.
That is how I love and fear the masses exactly
as I love and fear my father. He knew what
was coming. And there's a great there's a line in
there where he talks about like how all he knew
(20:27):
how to do was tear down the old government, and
he didn't know how to do stuff like be a plumber,
so like why should people expect things to work? But
he's like, dude, you're the one who stayed in power.
So yeah. At this point he's like tony soprano, like
that's all he can do, and he sort of knows
eventually it's you know, they're going to come back to
bite him on the road. Yeah, exactly, and he forgot
(20:49):
how to use the brakes. Um. He calls these all
short stories, but they are really just collections of rants
with no cohesive plot structure or characters. Safe for almost
one story, Suicide of the Astronaut, which I am convinced
might be the greatest thing ever written in any language.
That sounds like a great band. It is a great
name for a band, and it's a great short story.
(21:11):
And Dave and listeners, I don't have any option but
to read the story and its entirety, every single word
of it. I have no choice in the matter. I
could no more cut out my own tongue than I
could keep Colonel Kadafi's brilliance hidden from the world. Are
you ready, David Bell, for suicide of the astraid? I
don't know if I'll ever be ready. Yeah, do it?
(21:32):
H Having traveled far and wide and giddy outer space,
and since budgets can no more support the great expense
of outer space programs, and now that man has landed
on the Moon but found nothing much except that the
two astronauts have exposed the wild guesses and vain hypotheses
of scientists that there were sees and oceans on the Moon,
which led to the competition to own them and designate
(21:54):
names for them by the insolent great powers, who nearly
went to war on Earth for the sake of dividing
the Moon that real resources, especially the marine ones. And
having roamed around the planetary system taking pictures of all
the planets, and after giving up hope of finding intelligent
life or any suitable place for living there, man returned
to the Earth frustrated and suffering from giddiness, vomiting, and
(22:17):
fear of perdition. That's the first sentence. Holy shit, Okay,
hold on, I need to unpack that. So this is
the story takes place after this. This is like, so,
you know how we went to the Moon and we
found all this the oan we almost went to war
(22:37):
over the Moon. Yeah, well you can forget about all that.
We're done with space. We're done with that, okay, next sentence,
he has now realized the fact that the Earth is
unique and incomparable as a source of life, which in
simple words means food and water, and that which is
indispensable to life is secured by the atmosphere of the
(22:59):
Earth at etera. Thus man had to return to the
Earth from his outer space escapade. Right all right, paragraph too.
Back on the Earth, the astronaut took off his space
suit and put on his familiar one, which is suitable
for walking and living on the Earth. Now that his
mission with the Space Corporation had come to an end,
(23:21):
he began to look for an earthly job. He applied
for one at a carpentry workshop, but he failed the
test because he lacked the essential no how of what
he thought was a simple trade. Also, he had to
go at the lathe workshop at a blacksmith sporge building
and plumbing. He even tried painting and whitewashing. He had
not studied fine art or music or weaving, as they
(23:41):
had nothing to do with his scientific specialization the Space Corporation.
This is a Neil Breen film. People, some people, most
people won't know what that means. People would do. This
is a this is a bad B movie plot. Yeah,
it is. It's amazing that he thinks an astronaut would
have trouble getting a job anywhere, because, like, I've had
(24:02):
to hire people on a number of occasions in my life,
and I know that if anyone had walked in and
said I was an astronaut and was in space, that
would be the end of the internet. Yeah. If the
word astronaut is on a resume, yeah you got it.
Even if they can't do anything, I just have them
there all day to be like, so, what's space like? Well,
and I just I assume anyone who can be an
(24:22):
astronaut can pick up any other skill, right, Yeah. We
decided when we were in elementary school collectively that the
best job as astronaut, which means any job less good
than an astronaut, an astronaut can do like oh yeah,
for sure. Yeah, even if you're a surgeon, they'll pick
it up. Being an astronaut is basically being really smart
but in space. Yeah, so like, yeah, any anything they
(24:46):
can do, like if they can do it in space, yeah,
they can handle it here. Yeah, I assume an astronaut
can do anything, but Mombarcadafi assumes he can't get a
job at a woodworking shop, which, well, this is the
future where we were already on the moon and stuff,
and this is like, this is like the Ridley Scott astronauts.
These are like the space truckers. That's why I'm pretty
(25:09):
sure he's imagining. He just watched Aliens and the right there.
It's extremely possible this might be in that cinematic universe.
Is this Are you saying that that that mo market
off He's suicide of the astronaut is is in the
Aliens cannon? It might be. So far, I've seen no
reason not to say that. All right, let's see where
it goes. Let's start with paragraph three. Um, So he
(25:31):
had to leave the city a frustrated failure and set
off for the countryside, where he looked for work as
a farm hand in order to support himself and his family.
One of the farmers asked if he was attracted to
the Earth by which he simply wanted to know if
the astronaut liked farming. But the astronaut answered, the attraction
of the Earth decreases as we go up, and our
weight also decreases gradually until we get to the point
(25:52):
of weightlessness. Then and there we get free of the
Earth's attraction or gravity as we call it. But soon
afterwards we get attracted by another planet, and our weight
begins to increase gradually. And so on. I hope I
have answered your question. Hold on, So the astronaut was
asked how how how do you like the Earth? He
thought that he the guy was asking him about how
(26:16):
weighed down by gravity to the Earth. Would you say
you are right, which would be an insane interview question.
That's amazing, that's that's yeah. The farmer showed signs of
someone who did not comprehend and looked as if he
wanted more explanation, and the astronaut, hoping to impress the
(26:37):
simple farmer in order that he would take him on
as a farm hand, went on parading his space knowledge.
The volume of the Earth is about twenty times less
than that of Jupiter's and that twelve years on the
Earth equal to one year on Jupiter, and that Jupiter
spot is big enough to hold the Earth in its center.
You may also be interested to know that saturness seven
forty four times bigger than the Earth, it is only
(26:59):
about nine times heavier than the Earth. So we know
now why this astronaut can't get a job. We figure
that he's literally talking about as far from farming as
he can just keeps given space facts. Okay, so I
think I understand the point of I don't know if
we want to talk about this. At the end, I
think I understand what Momar is trying to say. We'll
let me continue with the astronauts rant. The diameter of
(27:23):
the Earth is about fifty times bigger than that of
the Moon's, and its volume is about eighty times bigger
than that of the Moon's. The pull of the Earth's
gravity is six times greater than that of the Moon's.
The Earth is about a hundred and fifty million kilometers
away from the Sun, whose light takes eight minutes to
reach the Earth at the speed of three hundred thousand
kilometers per second. The volume of the Earth is about
(27:43):
one million, three hundred thousand, eight hundred times smaller than
that of the Sun's and the mass of the Earth
is also three eight times smaller than the mass of
the Sun, whose density is thirty times bigger than that
of the Earth's. The Earth come third, and distance from
the Sun. Mercury is the nearest planet to the Sun.
(28:03):
Venus comes next, and then the Earth et cetera. Venus
is about forty two million kilometers away from the Earth,
which is about four to tho kilometers away from the Moon. Yeah,
if you had a car that ran this is still
the fucking astronaut explainings to the farmer. If you had
a car that ran at a hundred kilometers per hour,
it would take you one hundred and forty six days
(28:24):
to get to the moon. But if you had no
car and decided to walk to the moon, it would
take you eight years and a hundred days to get there.
I think I have answered the question fully now, as
you see, I am well informed in matters concerning the Earth.
As soon as he had heard this last repetition of
the word earth, the farmer became aware of himself and
closed his mouth, which had been wide open during the
whole story of the astronaut's journey from one planet to another.
(28:46):
From the time he left Earth until he returned home.
The farmer did not comprehend much, but he too felt
dizzy because he fell under the spell and felt that
he was also coming home from a space journey with
no tangible gains concerning his farm. What matter to him
was the stance between one tree and the other, and
not the distance between the Earth and Jupiter. He was
also interested in the volume of the yield of his farm,
(29:06):
and not in the volume of mercury. He felt very
sorry for the begging, pathetic astronaut and had the desire
to give him some alms, but he was unable to
take him on as a farm hand, and so, having
lost all hope of finding any breadwinning job on Earth,
the astronaut decided to commit suicide. That's the story. That's
the end. That's the end. No, we don't even learn
(29:28):
like how we carry that out. So he's writing this
like a fable basically. Yeah, I think that was the goal. Yeah,
Oh my god. He should have written movies. He should
have written movies. He probably could have gotten something made. No,
I would watch a ninety minute adaptation of suicideh the Astronaut.
(29:49):
If there are producers listening to this show. I will
make sure that script gets written. Probably we can we
can do this. Um, so he's trying to say. I
mean it's pretty it's pretty clear what he's trying to say, right,
I think so. I I think the point this feels
it felt obvious, but maybe it's not. It's that he's
(30:11):
basically like I think about people like Elon Musk, who
is like, we're going to space and that we're sitting here, like, hey,
we need like clean water and affordable they drink. Yeah.
I think that's what he's saying, is the end of that,
like we go to space and we we want to
acquire this sort of knowledge, but it's useless to the
(30:34):
practicalities of actually living and like farming, and like the
idea that an astronauts job is essentially useless once we
learned that there's nothing out there for us, that the
Earth is the thing, is the thing we should be
taken care of and working on, and and the most
useful skills are it's down to just growing food. I
(30:57):
think that's what he's trying to say. I in a
really dumb story, in a really dumb story, and like
I'm not going to get on a rant about space
programs here. I'm one of those people who thinks that
we're going to get killed by a rock if we
don't get better at space. I think it's good to
explore space, absolutely. I just think that um our expenditures
on the space program are not why America does not
(31:19):
have good social programs. Like if someone with the charism
of Kennedy could start a program that's just like everybody
gets water. Yeah, like we want to be star Trek.
But like Star Trek started with her, they were like,
let's figure this ship out, let's make sure no one's starving. Yeah,
and then maybe we can start going into space and
figuring that out. Which, yeah, that's a reasonable message. Kadafi's
(31:40):
is insane. Yeah, I mean sorry that technically Star Trek
started because it was a Third World War, and then
Cochrane invented the warp drive and Vulcan sad, we'll be
doing a whole episode on zeph from cock okay for
uh yeah, so that's the suicide of the astronaut. Good god, Yeah,
life anging right, wonderful. So by the late nineteen nineties,
(32:05):
it was clear to mo markt Dafi that Libby's only
option was to make nice with the West and convinced
them to lift sanctions. This started in nineteen nine when
Kaddafi finally handed the Lockerbie bombing that was the plane
that got blown up until two seventy people. Uh he
handed the suspects in that bombing over to be tried
under Scottish law in a neutral international court. UM. This
was a start, but it took three years for things
(32:27):
to really ramp up, and it wasn't until the nine
eleven terror attacks that Colonel Kadafi got his big break.
So September eleventh, two thousand and one, was the best
day ever for three groups. Sam Been Laden and al Qaeda,
all of the Whales in the world, and mo Mark Dafi.
Despite being an observant Muslim himself, Kadafi had been fighting
Islamist terrorists and trying to warn the world about them
(32:49):
for years. Uh So when nine eleven happened, he publicly
condemned it, and he told the world like, this is
what I've been warning you about for a long time.
I'm against those guys too. He arranged a blood drive
to help victims of nine eleven. He declared the US
invasion of Afghanistan and active self defense UM and at
this point, the Bush administration was eager for a foreign
(33:09):
policy win, so you know, they decided to start talking
with Kadafi about opening Libya back up to the world
and dropping the sanctions. This wound up leading to in
two thousand three, Libya renouncing its plans to build nuclear weapons. UM.
Western corporations, particularly oil and gas companies, were hugely excited
for the possibilities that Libya represented because there's a shipload
(33:30):
of oil inside Libya. UM and in general, it seemed
to be a major coup for the Bush administration. Um
it later came back to bite them in the ass. Uh.
It seemed like it seemed like it vindicated their policy,
Like because we fucked with Saddam Hussein and you know,
murdered him. Uh, then that's why Kadafi gave up his nukes.
So clearly, fucking with one dictator might make the others better.
(33:52):
But of course, then America and the other Western countries
intervened to get Kadafi killed in two thousand eleven, which
provided a very good reason for North Korea and Iran
to not give up their nuclear weapons programs. So that said,
I'm not going to condemn anybody who tries to stop
a country from getting nukes because we got enough of those, uh,
and that that did work in the short term. Did
(34:12):
you say all the whales whales love nine eleven. Yeah,
it's a well documented it's another ocean thing. This is
another reason to stay away from the ocean. Well, the
actual reason that you can read up on this. I'm
not I'm not just making a joke. Uh. Scientists who
listen to whales you can tell the stress levels and
the whales based on the kind of songs that they sing.
And they noticed that in the weeks after nine eleven
(34:33):
their stress levels plummeted to the fact where they weren't
stressed at at all. They were super happy. They're all like,
we did it funk nine eleven. Yeah No. And it
turned out that what it is is that the the
like sonar and whatever equipment on planes that that that
it uses to communicate with air traffic, like that stuff,
whales can hear it. And it's like whales always have
(34:54):
a headache because there's always planes everywhere. We are the
noisy upstairs, And for like a week or so after
nine eleven, there was no more noise. So nine eleven
was the best thing ever for whales. Yeah, and Kadafi. Yeah,
this is really an anti ocean podcast, which I had
not intended when I started writing it. Yeah. Well, I'm
sure over time it will gradually shift to being mostly that. Yeah. Yeah,
(35:17):
the ocean is a bastard. Yeah. Um, So we're going
to talk about the rest of momarkt Daffi's Western rehabilitation
of his image tour and his trip to speak to
the United Nations in New York City. Kadafi in New
York City, it's like a fucking crocodile dundee, but with
the market office straight. Yes. Uh so we're gonna get
(35:39):
to that. But first products, and we're back from products.
Let's continue talking about mom market Daffi. So we left
off he just sort of agreed to give up his
nuclear weapons. Eleven had brought him closer to the United States,
and this whole Western rehab tour culminated in two thousand
(36:03):
and nine with a trip to New York City to
speak in front of the United Nations. Now, this was
not as simple as it might sound. True to his
Bedoin roots, Kadafi brought an enormous tent with him wherever
he traveled. His initial plan was to arrent it in
New Jersey on a piece of land owned by the
Libyan embassy, but the State Department said, no, you can't
put up a giant tent. There's a ton of people
(36:24):
with guns in America and they might just shoot you.
Like it was one of those like there's way too many.
I can see that request coming in. Then being like
he wants to what a tent? Oh god, no, does
he not know everyone has a rifle and there's angry
people about. Yeah. So he tried next to find a
large enough plot of open land in New York City
for the tent, but everyone he asked turned him down
because he's a violent dictator. Finally, Momar Kadafi was able
(36:47):
to find one friend in America who would rent him
some land. Donald J. Trump, Mr. Trump rented him a
large plot of land in Westchester County. Here is how
a two thousand and nine Guardian article described the erection
of the tent. Workers were seen yesterday erecting a tent
and satellites in the glamorous neighborhood of Bedford on an
(37:10):
estate owned by Trump. Local officials tried to stop them,
saying it was illegal to build a temporary residence without
a permit. An ABC News helicopter filmed a large tent
on the hundred and thirteen acre Seven Springs estate with
rugs and patterned wall hangings. Green and yellow fabric lined
the walls in a pattern dotted with images of small
brown camels, according to a local newspaper website image. Last night,
(37:32):
a State Department official told AP the tent might be
used for entertaining by Kadafi, but he would not be
sleeping there. And here is a picture of Momar Kadafi's tent. Okay, why,
oh my god, why didn't this come up during the election?
Oh it did, David. It seems like if someone's running
for president and someone's running against him, and that person
(37:53):
running against him says he let Momar Kadafi camp in
his backyard. I feel like that's enough. Right, How did
we get here? That is too big a question for
this podcast. It's just, oh my god. Yeah, what a tent? Right, Yeah,
it's a pretty good it's a pretty good tent. Barbecue
(38:14):
website like, there's nothing in it though, I don't think
they'd finished setting it up yet. Okay, it looks like
it would be a good place for like a wedding
or something. Yeah, I'm legitimately jealous of the tent. Nobody's
going to claim that moll Mar Kadafi did not have
good taste intense. So the town was furious about this
and banned Kadafi from putting up his tent. The whole
incident caused an outcry that forced the Trump organization to respond.
(38:34):
They said that the land was quote least on a
short term basis to Middle Eastern partners who may or
may not have a relationship to Mr Kaddafi. We are
looking into the matter. Mr Kadafi never got to stay
in the tent. In two thousand sixteen, then candidate Trump
bragged about the whole affair. Don't forget I'm the only
one I made a lot of money with Kaddafi if
you remember which a lot of people made money. How
(39:01):
did how did I think? He was a big fan
of Death of the Astronaut, So he's probably just kind
of psyched to have his favorite author in town. Yeah,
but the colonel did get to give his speech at
the United Nations, and my god, what a speech it was.
He was scheduled to speak for fifteen minutes, He spoke
for more than ninety and now we're gonna hear the
(39:25):
whole speech right now, but we're gonna get into the
cliffs notes. Uh. He had himself announced as quote, Leader
of the Revolution of the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiria,
President of the African Union and King of African Kings. Yeah,
that's a hell of a title. It wasn't until seventeen
(39:45):
minutes into the fifteen minute speech that he hit on
his main point, urging that Africa be given a seat
on the Security Council, which is not an unreasonable demand.
He also complained that permanent seats on the Security Council
were unfair and undemocratic, which is also reasonable. Then he
demanded the un be relocated to Libya, which is a
little bit less reasonable. Again, he's the problem. He's always
(40:09):
the problem. After that, Kadafi went sort of off the
rails with a list of rapid fire demands that were
half reasonable, half bug fuck nuts. He demanded thorough investigations
into the deaths of Martin Luther King Jr. And JFK.
So that had just been bugging him for a while's
been bugging him forever. He just wanted to know. He
(40:29):
proposed Israel and Palestine be merged into a single state
called ezra Stein. Okay, so what's happening here? Um, what's happening?
You ever see the in the scene in the movie
Army Gatting when they have the demands. Yeah, yeah, Yeah,
it's that it's the first time he's gotten like this
(40:51):
much of an audience. So he's like fifteen minutes now,
I'm gonna go for ninety and I'm gonna say yeah.
He's like, it's like being Yeah, it's like a phil
student in a like stuck in an elevator with Spielberg,
Like he's just gonna throw every pitch he's got out.
I love it. It starts with like, yeah, Israel and
Palestine should be one country, which a lot of people
would be like, oh yeah, wouldn't that be nice if
that word is ra Stein. That's not what anyone would
(41:14):
call it. Oh my god. He supported the Taliban's call
to establish an Islamic state. He demanded war crimes trials
for the invasion of Iraq. He demanded seven points seven
trillion dollars in reparations for Africa, which honestly seems kind
of low ball in it um, and he insinuated that
swine flew was a biological weapon. Insinuate just threw that in.
(41:40):
He just dropped that in there. It was a whirlwind,
and I'm going to say right now, probably the greatest
speech the UN has ever seen. The whole event earned
Colonel Kadafi a spread and vanity fair titled Colonel Kaddafi
a Life in Fashion. I'm just going to read you
their fucking introductory paragraph. Since completing his transition from international
(42:00):
parietist statesman, Colonel Momarca Daffi, the longest serving leader in
both Africa and the Arab world, has brought color in
his own is centric panash to the drab circuit of
international summits and conferences. Drawing upon the influences of Lacroix, Libaracci,
Phil Specter for Hair Snoopy and Idioman, Libya's leader, now
in his sixties, is simply the most unabashed dresser on
(42:23):
the world stage. We play homage to a sartorial genius
of our time. I'm going to show you a picture
of him standing next to President Barack Obama, and Barack
Obama is not fucking having it. And it's amazing. This
will be up on the website. Oh my god, you
owe it to yourself to see it. How would you
(42:43):
describe his outfit, David, Oh, he's like a star for
Callier or something. He's like a T and Star trek
where they had thirty minutes to pick it out. Yeah,
just like sequence and color. You never want your fashion
to be described as snoopy and idiom. And Barack Obama's
(43:04):
body language in this is amazing. He's just like, I
got to get away from this guy as soon as possible. Yeah.
It's weird to see a picture of a president rethinking
their career. Yeah, yeah, but this is the moment, of course.
Not long after Kadafi's visit to New York City in
(43:25):
two thousand eleven came the Arab Spring. This brought about
a revolt against Kadafi. The revolts started in the eastern
city of Benghazi because of the arrest of of an
activist who was organizing a protest march. Basically, the revolts
spread quickly throughout the country as Kadafi's forces arrested and
murdered dissidents. The whole time, Kadafi seemed to baffle at
(43:45):
what was happening. After all, Olivia was quote the state
of the masses. It was the people's state, and the
people couldn't rise up against themselves. He wasn't in charge,
of course, what were they doing. Unfortunately for Kadafi, NATO
sided with the rebels and created a no fly zone
that grounded the Libyan air force. You know, Kadafi was
kind of winning up until that point. His hard courted
(44:05):
Western friends abandoned him, so his Western charm tour came
to nothing. The African nations he'd supported also all abandoned him,
as did his fellow Arab leaders. NATO moved on from
a no fly zone to launching air attacks against the
Libyan army and sending an adviser to train the rebels.
After a very bloody year of fighting, the capital of
Tripoli was taken. Colonel Kadafi went on the run, but
(44:26):
his convoy was blown apart by NATO jets on a
highway outside of his old hometown. Kadafi was found by
the rebels, wounded and hiding in a sewage pipe. He
was shot dead on October two thousand eleven. His corpse
was displayed inside a freezer for several days. Yeah this
is Cadafi style. Yeah, you you live by hiding your
(44:46):
dead enemies in a fridge, and you die by having
your enemies put you in a fridge. Wow. So nothing
in particular sparked this, um. I know, the Arab spring
originated in Tunisia with the overthrow of the guy who
was in charge of Tunisia at the time, who I
think was a friend of Kadafi's, and that sort of
started the domino effect that you know, convinced people in
Libya it was time to start agitating for change. And
(45:09):
it was possible when it started he could have launched
real reforms because there's a long history that we got
into some of them. This of Kadafi is saying there's
going to be reforms and then nothing happened. It seemed
like it was time though. Yeah. It was like the
drunk guy at a party where it's like at a
certain point, everybody's like, okay, you gotta go. Yeah. If
he had said, like, hey, you know what, I built
(45:30):
that giant underwater river and now I'm going to step
down and try to forget all the people I had
killed and just remember the river, that might have worked. Yeah.
I mean, he did enough good. He could have hid
behind it. Yeah, but he did so much bad stuff too. Yeah,
and that his repression of the rebellion was very brutal.
A lot of people locked up, a lot of people executed,
(45:52):
huge numbers of people killed and bombed. Um. And so yeah,
by the time the rebels got to his comp hound,
there was no chance they weren't just going to shoot
that guy straight off. This podcast is not the place
to get into whether or not NATO intervention in Libya
was a good idea. Uh. It hasn't been a clean thing, obviously, UM.
But I do want to point out some numbers, one
(46:13):
of which is that the two thousand eleven civil war
against that dethroned Kadafi, there was an estimated twenty thod
people dead from that. Uh. There was another civil war
that started in two thousand fourteen, and the estimate for
that is about ten thousand deaths. We're looking at thirty
maybe forty thousand people dead as a result of the conflicts. UH,
and those deaths probably, I mean, it's it's one of
(46:34):
those things. If NATO hadn't stepped in, it's possible Kadafi
would have just stopped the rebellion cold in its tracks. UH,
and there wouldn't have been that many deaths, but it's
also possible that it would have wound up like Syria,
where more than half of a million people have died
because there was no no fly stone established. So it's
it's hard to say whether or not Libya is better
or worse off as a result of the intervention, but
(46:57):
they do now have a sort of functioning to mock Grissy,
and Kadafi is out of power. Um, it has not
been a smooth transition to democracy because again, when Kadafi
left power, there were no political parties, there was no
no one who knew how to run anything in the
country because the people who were in charge when Kaddafi
died were people who had been his friends when he
(47:18):
was a teenager, that had been running things the whole time.
None of the younger people really knew how to do anything.
So like it has been a messy road. They're doing
their best. He didn't set them up for success, which
part of his point, because it does seem like he
had to go. But that's yeah, it's a tough thing
to to figure out. Then, Yeah, it's not as when
(47:40):
people say it was a mistake to intervene, it's not
something that you can say that easily. Yeah, I'm not
gonna say it was the right thing to do either,
but it's a complicated morally. It's that Yeah, because again,
anybody who has should get involved, we should something should
be done. Yeah, And he was, you know, a very
(48:03):
repressive leader. He executed a lot of people, um, which
we talked about in this sometimes and made a lot
of people watch and televised a lot of executions, um,
and they were pretty brutal. He would have a lot
of people hung on television. So he was he was
a bad dude and probably would have killed a substantial
number of people if he'd succeeded in stomping down the revolution,
(48:24):
because he did when there was that Islamist rebellion against him,
he killed like people in one massacre. So like, you know,
if he had had his way with the revolutionaries, there
could have been more than thirty thousand dead. It's hard,
it's hard to weigh that, like how many deaths versus
how many and this alternate didn't get involved, Like yeah,
(48:46):
it's a bleak question. And he's a hard guide away
because presumably in a hundred years, we don't know what
Libby is going to be like, but hopefully they'll still
have that giant fucking underground river he built, so who knows? Yeah,
at you of the fist they do. It's in a
war museum in the city of I think miss Ratta.
They took it as like a trophy for like cameer
(49:07):
that time we overthrew the dictator. Here's a statue, right,
I mean the river is cool, but that fist, that
fist statue, it's like a like a Banksy sculpture. That's wonderful.
It is great. Um. Well, that is all the time
we have for Momakadafi today, Dave, thank you for joining
me in this epic tale of whatever the hell we
(49:29):
call MoMA. Thank you for having me. This is a blast.
All right. Well, Colonel Bell, you want to plug the
things that you have to plug? Yeah, I'll plug things. Um.
You can find me on the Twitter at a movie
who look in uh where I tweet stuff. Um. I'm
also co run a podcasting and a Twitch network called
game Fully Unemployed g am E f U l O
(49:52):
Y it's a I guess a pun. Yeah. We have
a Patreon, Patreon, dot com slash game fully Unemployed check
us out. Um. Yeah, and you can find me on
Twitter at I write okay, which is just two letters.
You can find our podcasts, Twitter, and other social media
stuff at at Bastards pod. You can find us on
the internet at behind the Bastards dot com, which is
(50:14):
where the pictures and sources for this particular episode will
be uh. You can also find my book on Amazon,
A Brief History of Vice. David himself appears in it.
I don't want to go into too much detail, but
there's a hospital visits and a milkshake and a milkshake
so if you want to see how those things are
connected by my book, A Brief History of Vice. Um.
(50:35):
Other than that, I got nothing. Next week we'll be
back with another bastard or potentially several bastards to talk about,
so please join us next Tuesday and every Tuesday from
now until the end of time. I love like you.
Statistically
Behind the Bastards News
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Robert Evans
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