Muammar Gaddafi

African Revolutionary Writers, Part 8c

Colonel Gaddafi as he was

Muammar Gaddafi

Muammar Gaddafi led a small group of junior military officers in a bloodless coup d'état in Libya against the pro-Imperialist King Idris on 1 September 1969. When the second edition of this course went out last year he was still the leader of his country. It is a sad thing to have to note in this third edition that Muammar Gaddafi is now dead, having been murdered, like so many others of our African Revolutionary writers.

Libya is a large African country on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, West of Egypt and East of Tunisia. Last year one was able to say that Libya was much more developed than before. But since last year, Libya has been “underdeveloped” in a catastrophic way.

Gaddafi and Mandela

We will still take Muammar Gaddafi as a writer. Writing transcends human mortality.

Gaddafi’s 1975 “Green Book”, and especially the part on “Democracy”, is a very useful text for discussion in study circles, because it does not take bourgeois democracy for granted, but interrogates it, criticises it severely and to a considerable extent, rejects it. This document is downloadable via links below.

Gaddafi was certainly an African Revolutionary Writer. In the other, much more recent piece for the New York Times linked below, Gaddafi set out a plain case for the “One-State Solution” in Palestine, which is the same in principal as South Africa’s one-state solution (“One person one vote in a unitary state”). This document is also  downloadable via links below.

Muammar Gaddafi more recently

Muammar Gaddafi was a wise man and a humble Muslim man of great energy, in spite of the sorrows that he has personally had to bear. He was loved by the revolutionaries of Africa.

Between the first and second versions of this introduction, Libya was been bombed and invaded by forces of Britain, France and the USA. One of Gaddafi's sons and one of his grandchildren had been killed. This was on top of the daughter killed in the raid organised by Reagan and Thatcher in 1986. The Wikipedia entry on Muammar Gaddafi had been re-written to conform with Western propaganda. 

Muammar Gaddafi did not retreat or run away. He stayed and faced his terrible death.

We have touched on the question of Libya before in this series, in the item on Ruth First, which in turn is linked to a download from First's book on Gaddafi's Libya. 

• The above is to introduce the original reading-texts: Muammar Gaddafi, The Green Book, Part 1, on Democracy, 1975 and Muammar Gaddafi, The One-State Solution, 2009.

• To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.