Dictator falls off hamster wheel

Bloodthirsty, weirdly-costumed psychopathic dictators appear to be in decline: Muammar Gaddafi, dictator of Libya for 40 years, is dead.

While keeping a healthy scepticism on who you believe in the media, there are some that can be somewhat trusted to provide facts. A Reuters journalist says he’s seen his body.

As usual, it’s a select few media organisations that have put a spotlight on who supported his regime in the past; this gives his geo- political influence context. In late August this year, Aljazeera journalist Jamal Elshayyal said he discovered documents linking Gaddafi to former assistant secretary of state under George W Bush, David Welch. Welch now works for war-profiteering US corporation Bechtel.

Elshayyal claims that in a meeting between Welch and top Libyan officals, Welch gave the Libyans advice on how to win the propaganda war. Welch also offered advice on how to undermine Libya’s rebel movement, with the potential assistance of foreign intelligence agencies, including Israel.

There is nothing particularly new in these published confidential meetings between top officals and US interests; WikiLeaks has a huge swag of similar cables. What’s important here is the hamster wheel: the never-ending cycle of foreign policy domination by the West over less technologically/democratically adept countries in oil rich states such as Libya.

One of the most profound songs ever penned about the US military industrial complex is Work for Peace by Gil Scott Heron, written in the time of the first Iraq war/US military invasion. 

It sums up the hamster wheel perfectly:

‘The Military and the Monetary, get together whenever they think its necessary, they turn our brothers and sisters into mercenaries,
‘They are turning the planet into a cemetery.
‘The Military and the Monetary, use the media as intermediaries. ‘They are determined to keep the citizens secondary, they make so many decisions that are arbitrary... ‘They took the honour from the honourary, they took the dignity from the dignitaries, they took the secrets from the secretary, but they left the bitch in obituary.’