Muammar Gaddafi's life spans a bizarre childhood marked by hate crimes, including the murder of a gay cadet, culminating in his 1969 coup. His "Green Book" proposed abolishing the state for direct rule, yet he centralized power while enforcing misogynistic views and brutal repression via revolutionary committees. Despite oil-funded social services, economic mismanagement and atrocities like the killing of Yvonne Fletcher defined his regime. Ultimately, Gaddafi's instability, corruption, and violent actions rendered his rule unsustainable, setting the stage for a two-part analysis of his terrorism sponsorship and UN speech. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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The Con Artist's Last Target00:02:38
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I doctored the test once.
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Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Lesby and Michael Marcini.
My mind was blown.
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How could this have happened in City Hall?
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A shocking public murder.
This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
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Hello, friends.
I am Robert Evans, and this is Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history.
Gaddafi's Revolutionary Origins00:14:49
Now, my guest today is a personal friend of mine, former roommate, current and former colleague, David Christopher Bell.
Hello, Robert.
David is a writer, a podcaster, one of the two heads of the Gamefully Unemployed Network, which you can find on Patreon.
Dave, anything else you want to introduce about yourself?
No, you got it right.
I also have been writing for Bunnyears.com, which is Macaulay Culkin's lifestyle website.
David is Macaulay Colkin's personal biographer.
Yeah.
No, I am his spiritual guru, though.
Fantastic.
Yeah.
He's also been taking care of my cat for months, which I feel like readers should know.
Great cat.
Really solid cat.
Now, today, David, we are going to talk about a gentleman and a scholar named Mu Mar Gaddafi.
Great name.
What do you know about Mu Mar Gaddafi?
Great name.
That's pretty much.
I was thinking about this a lot since you asked me to be on this.
MoMar is like a great name.
Solid name.
Right.
Yeah.
Qaddafi is a solid last name.
Gaddafi.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I know he did stuff in Libya, and it didn't end well for him.
It did not.
Yeah.
That's about it.
I know his country once asked a scientist to make him a bomb in 1985, and the scientists used it to make a time machine instead.
Really, really screwed over the Libyans there.
Yeah, they were very angry.
Yeah.
Doc Brown.
Yeah, and that's the extent of my knowledge.
Well, yeah, Muamar was the leader of Libya for 40 years.
He was executed in the street in 2011 by a partisan mob, and that's what I would guess most people listening right now know about Muamm Qaddafi.
The more detailed story, which we're about to get into, is the tale of probably the craziest person to ever run a country.
And not like Hitler Crazy, where you have this very cohesive idea about the world and history, and you're trying to make this video like crazy as in he probably I don't even know.
Like, I don't even know how to just...
I'm just going to read you 21 pages about the guy.
Oh, delightful.
Okay.
So, you know, we live in a time of political extremes right now in the United States.
That fact is obvious enough that even saying it is like yielding to cliché.
And in times like these, extreme men with extreme plans and very little relevant experience can wind up in charge of the destiny of millions.
That basic story has played out a lot of times throughout history, but never quite like it did during the reign of Muammar Gaddafi.
He was a dictator, and like Saddam Hussein, a writer as well.
But while Saddam used his novels to imagine a fantasy world far away from Iraq's troubled reality, Gaddafi actually based the Libyan state entirely on his fevered fantasies.
Now, Muamar Muhammad Abu Minyar Qaddafi was born in 1941, or perhaps 1943, in a little hamlet of tents near a town called Sirte in the deserts of western Libya.
No one knows exactly when he was born because he lied about every aspect of his past and also probably lied about his birthday so that he could join the military.
That seems like a running theme, having listened to this show.
They like to make their own history.
Yeah, you never really know anything about these people.
They're all a little like Houdini.
They like the razzle-dazzle there.
Or like the Joker, who is actually kind of a good way to look at Mumar Qaddafi when I say he's crazy.
He's like Heath Ledger's joke.
Okay.
Yeah.
So yeah.
Like Hitler had a plan.
Yeah.
Muamar was just...
He just was going to see what happens.
Yeah, he had a plan, but it was not...
Not that.
It wasn't a great plan.
It wasn't a great plan.
It kept changing.
It was, yeah, we'll get into that.
I'm getting ahead of myself.
So he was a Bedouin, which are like sort of wandering nomadic desert people, kind of the original Arabs.
He was the only son of a goat herder named Abu Minyar and his wife Aisha.
Neither of Gaddafi's parents could read.
He had three older sisters, but otherwise the fictional figure his childhood most resembled would probably be Ray from Star Wars, because Libya had been an Italian colony right up until World War II when it became a battleground between the Axis and the Allies.
So as a child, Gaddafi and his family would wander the desert finding empty ammo casings, pieces of downed planes, destroyed tanks, and like taking scrap off of them and selling it.
Like that was his early childhood.
So yeah, like Ray from Star Wars, basically.
Right, selling it to Simon Pegg in a big costume.
Exactly, exactly.
Yeah, Simon Pegg does come into the story a number of times.
I thought he would.
Yeah.
Now, aside from occasionally rooting through crash Stukas and P-51 Mustangs, Gaddafi's early life was basically the same as the life of a Libyan born a thousand years earlier.
His family mostly lived in tents around an oasis.
His early education was given by a wandering priest who taught him to memorize verses of the Quran.
So that's, you know, young Qaddafi.
That sounds kind of awesome.
No, it doesn't.
Getting your education by a wandering anything.
Like, I'm picturing something very probably way more like magical than what it actually was.
It was probably more boring, but yeah.
I mean, I wish if I could change one thing in time for Muamm Qaddafi, it would be to have that wandering priest have been a wandering karate master.
Then it's a very different story.
Yeah, yeah.
That would have, yeah, changed a lot of history.
Yeah.
So in 1954, young Muamm Qaddafi convinced his dad to let him go to school, which is something he has in common with Saddam Hussein, having to beg his family to let him learn how to read and stuff.
I just want to learn.
The school was so far away from his home that he had to live in town while he attended classes.
He slept at a mosque every night and went back home on the weekends, walking 15 miles each way.
That sucks.
Yeah, that's really rough.
That's less.
I like the wandering priest like he comes to you.
I don't want to travel that much to learn.
You have to commute every week to get to school.
No, no, I would not have gone to school under those circumstances.
So school was tough, but it gave Muamar a chance to develop his first, last, and greatest love, ranting about politics.
In 1952, the Egyptian government had been overthrown by a group of Arab nationalist army officers headed by a guy named Gamal Abdel Nasser.
Qaddafi fell in love with Nasser's politics, which is like Arab pan-Arab nationalism.
All the Arab states need to form one new country again, like there was in the days of the Ottoman.
Like, that's the idea that Gaddafi loved as a kid.
Right.
So he started memorizing Nasser's speeches and reciting them to other kids at school.
Rather than beating him up, his classmates started carrying around a small wooden stool so he could stand on it and speak.
That's Gaddafi's version of the story.
Okay, I was about to say, that doesn't sound like children.
That doesn't sound like kids.
Having been a child, I think we would have thrown rocks at him.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But who knows?
He was a charismatic guy.
The 50s and 60s were a time of growing and exploding unrest across Africa at the unjustness of colonialism.
Qaddafi organized protests, including a general strike every 2nd of December, to protest against the Balfour Declaration, which was that's the thing where Britain was like, there's going to be an Israel, and then there was an Israel.
That's how that was.
Yeah.
Not a fan of Israel.
Yeah.
It's important to note that our number one source on the life of Young Gaddafi is adult Qaddafi.
It's also important to note, though, that everybody that's been interviewed from his childhood and early life says that he was like electrifying to listen to.
Very charismatic, good-looking young guy.
There's older pictures I saw of him.
I quickly went on Wikipedia, and he seemed like a good-looking guy.
He was a handsome fellow.
He looked good in a uniform.
Yeah, his dressing.
We'll get into his fashion choices a little later.
His sense of style really evolved over the years.
So yeah, it's not hard to imagine that young Qaddafi might have actually been an anti-colonial rabble-rouser and a popular speaker.
Now, when he grew up, one of his earliest memories is just of being terrified of the sea because the Libyan people for the last 3,000 years had just been invaded by an endless series of empires.
So like that was a thing that he was scared of.
He hated the ocean.
He hated the ocean and he loved the desert.
I'm 100% with him on that.
Yeah, yeah.
You are very on the record of hating.
I'm extremely anti-ocean.
It doesn't want us there.
We have no reason to be there.
Yeah.
You can't drink it.
You can't breathe in it.
There's nothing there for us.
Stay out of the ocean.
It's filled with monsters.
Mu Mar Gaddafi would not disagree with you on any point there.
Yeah, so far I'm getting along with the guy.
So when he was a kid, or when he had been a little, little kid, the Italians had been in charge of his country.
And, you know, they'd invaded in 1911 and killed his grandfather.
Then they'd carried out a brutal anti-insurgency operation against Libyan civilians in 1929.
They'd put two-thirds of Libya's population into concentration camps.
A lot of them died.
We don't know how many.
But yeah, we just did an episode about concentration camps listening to it.
Yeah, yeah.
This is just yet one more country that Europeans camps in.
Good God.
It's easier to pick the countries that didn't ever have a concentration camp in them because there's like three.
So yeah, under Italian rule, Libyans couldn't receive anything beyond an elementary school education.
Most of that education was dedicated to civilizing these savages with Italian values, which I assume are mostly based around macaroni and plumbing.
And kissing your fingers when something's good.
Yes, yes.
And I can say that because my family is Italian.
That is 100% of our culture.
Yeah, I'm pretty Italian too.
Yeah.
When this caused unrest, you know, the not letting them get educated or talk thing, dictator Benito Mussolini tried to charm the Libyans by declaring himself the protector of Islam.
was one of his titles.
He had a sword made in Tuscany and engraved by Libyan Jewish goldsmiths that he claimed was the sword of Islam.
When he declared himself protector of Islam, Benito gave himself the sword in a huge ceremony.
Which is the whitest man thing to do.
Oh yeah.
Like that is that is peak colonialism.
Oh yeah, that's that's top-notch colonialism.
It's really really something I'm doing that Italian kissy finger thing I just described.
So good.
Yeah.
So Libya gained its independence from well, I mean obviously the Italians, it was taken over by the Italians in World War II by the Allied forces.
The new United Nation gave Libya its independence in 1951.
The Western powers appointed a king named Idris to rule over the country because they trusted him to be their man in Libya.
Idris banned political parties and was sort of repressive, but his heart wasn't really in ruling.
He didn't really care about being king.
Okay.
Yeah.
So Libya's new National Assembly wrote their first constitution that same year.
Libya had never been a country before 1951, so there wasn't any precedent for them being united.
It had just been like there's some cities on the coast that kind of kept to themselves and people in the desert who kind of kept to themselves.
It was just a place?
It was just a place.
That's charming.
Like, I didn't know we could have that.
Well, yeah, I mean, it had been parts of other countries a bunch of people.
But just no one gave a shit about it.
Yeah, and nobody had said, like, you're part of this empire now.
You're part of this empire now.
But it was never like the people in the desert in the middle of Libya had never viewed themselves as the same thing as the people in Benghazi or Tripoli.
Okay.
And for that matter, the people in Tripoli and Benghazi didn't consider themselves all part of it.
There was, no, I'm from fucking Tripoli.
It was, they just had no history of being a thing.
Yeah.
So no one could agree where the capital would be, so they decided to rotate capitals every two years between Tripoli and Benghazi.
This meant that every two years, the whole federal government and diplomatic corps had to pack up and move across thousands of miles of brutal desert.
So they chose the least convenient way to do this.
Let's just do this the worst.
The worst way possible.
Which makes our pick of DC as the American capital seem less dumb, where they're just like, let's just pick a swamp in the middle of everyone.
Like a lot of people died of malaria, but it's smarter than switching capitals.
Right.
And we committed and yeah, we stuck to it.
Yeah.
I'm sure now, like now that we expanded the country and stuff, there's some better candidates, but no, we're sticking to DC.
Yeah, now it's got history.
Yeah.
Okay.
So for his part, King Idris did not want to be king.
He refused to put his face on the money or have any landmark other than the airport named after him.
So this was like a hobby?
He was king, but he was like, eh, I'm not really into it.
He was like a high-up leader in one of the cities.
And the British were like, he had a lot of power in a region, and he was friendly to the West.
And the West was like, if we make this guy king, he'll let us take oil out and he'll let us keep Air Force bases.
And in return, we'll train up his army and we'll have British soldiers there protecting his reign.
But the king didn't really give a shit about.
He liked running his area, the city he was in, but he had no ambition to run all of Libya.
So yeah, he refused to have anything but the airport named after him.
He spent most of his time at home.
And his sort of absence from the public sphere opened up opportunities for young, ambitious, politically-minded men.
Young men like Muamar Gaddafi.
Qaddafi was not happy with the status quo in his country.
As a strict Muslim, he was outraged that foreigners lived there, brought alcohol into Libya, and partied.
As a teen, he led his fellow children to smash the windows of a hotel that had a bar in it.
King Idris kept the company open to American and British bases.
Qaddafi had nothing but contempt for this and for Westerners.
Here's an anecdote about him from Allison Pargeter's Libya, The Rise and Fall of Gaddafi, which was one of the major sources for this podcast.
Quote, one target for his invective was the English school inspector, Mr. Johnson, whom Gaddafi dismissed as no more than an agent of imperialism.
On one occasion, Qaddafi refused to stand up when Mr. Johnson entered the room and, in a provocative gesture, waved a keychain bearing the image of President Nasser at the haughty inspector.
Upon being ordered to leave the room, Gaddafi coldly told the inspector, you are the one who should leave for good.
Not this room, but the whole country.
Damn.
Yeah.
How old was he?
He's like 16 or something.
Yeah, he's a fairy.
He's a classic teenage rebellion.
He's a teenager, yeah.
So Qaddafi's activism earned him a small but dedicated following of other boys.
Rather than convince them to sell drugs for him like a decent American school child, he organized them into a revolutionary cell to overthrow the king.
This is when he's in like the equivalent of high school.
Recruits into Qaddafi's group had to be Arab nationalists and weren't allowed to drink alcohol or quote run after women.
Qaddafi recounted.
We used to meet under a palm tree near the Sebhof Fortress using a light we had made with our hands.
Under this light, I used to give my lessons in secret revolutionary organizations.
Wow.
Yeah.
They're like the straight-edge kids in high school who are like, fuck the government, but they're actually like planning to destroy the government.
They're way more active.
Yeah.
And it's, they stick with it.
Yeah, I mean, you got to respect that.
I gave up most of the stuff I was believed in as a teenager when I was 16.
Secret Lessons Under Palm Trees00:05:41
Yeah, this is like his junior high school band.
Yeah.
But he keeps it rolling.
And also.
He really does, doesn't he?
Commitment.
It's important.
So in 19...
Oh, yeah.
None of the young revolutionaries in Qaddafi's cell were allowed to do anything fun while there was a government to overthrow.
Nightclubs and gambling were banned for the members.
Secrecy had to be total.
Everyone was required to be all in for the revolution.
In 1961, Qaddafi attended a protest in Sebah, the town where he went to school.
He gave a speech attacking the British and American military bases in Libya.
It was apparently an aggressive enough speech that the regime had him expelled from school entirely.
This was a mistake.
It only made Qaddafi more dangerous.
He left his family behind, walked to the coastal town of Maserata, and enrolled in school there.
Then he started to recruit more young students.
By the time he was an adult and old enough to join the military academy, young Mohart Qaddafi had built revolutionary cells in five cities.
Wow.
As a newly minted adult, he went to military school in Benghazi.
Since the Libyan military at this point was basically just a Western puppet, his training was conducted mostly by British soldiers.
Qaddafi refused to learn English.
One of his teachers there, a guy named Colonel Ted Lau, described him as inherently cruel.
He claims Qaddafi murdered a fellow cadet, probably for being gay.
This is a quote from that book, Libya.
The terrified cadet, his hands and feet bound, was dragged to a firing point where Qaddafi and a group of other students began shooting at him before a Libyan officer finished him off with a coup de grace while the others laughed.
So.
Okay, so I no longer like him.
You're no longer on the turning point, right?
Because until this moment, he didn't.
No hate crimes.
He was hate crime-free until this part.
Qaddafi's whole story is like that.
There will be two things he'll do in a row, and you're like, okay, I agree with what you said.
Yeah, like, oh, he's a real self-starter.
Then the murders.
And then he has to murder someone for being gay.
That's real fucked up, Gaddafi.
Yeah, yeah.
I know you're listening.
So Qaddafi's lost the David Bell vote at this point.
Yeah, I know.
That's good to know.
So Qaddafi, discipline was violent for everybody in the military school.
At one point, Gaddafi got in trouble for not keeping his mouth shut and he was forced to crawl on his hands and knees over gravel wearing a backpack filled with sand in the hot desert sun.
So military school's rough for everybody, but roughest for the gay kids who get executed.
Throughout the whole period, Qaddafi continued to work towards his revolution.
He and his fellow cadets viewed the military as their gateway into power, but there was a problem.
They were all just a bunch of cadets who would, when they graduated, be low-ranking officers.
No one with any real power or knowledge wanted a thing to do with them.
Their operational security was very bad, bad enough that the CIA had started to hear about them by 1967.
The CIA did not take Qaddafi seriously because he just seemed like a dumb kid.
So the West continued to suck out Libya's oil and use it as one big airstrip.
Qaddafi later recalled, Our souls were in revolt against the backwardness enveloping our country and its land, whose best gifts and riches were being lost through plunder and against the isolation imposed on our people in a vain attempt to hold it back from the path of the Arab people and from its greatest cause.
So, Qaddafi graduated military school.
So did the kids he'd grown up with and turned into the members of his revolutionary cell.
They named themselves the Free Unionist Officers Movement.
And at first, their ability to overthrow the government did not seem to be very good.
They were as good at naming themselves as they were at overthrowing the government.
They tried to hold meetings, but it was difficult to get everyone in the same place at the same time.
Most of them didn't have cars.
So it is like having a band.
It is like having a band when you're all teenagers.
They tried to get some senior officers on board with their plan, but none of those people wanted anything to do with them.
And so for a while, their revolutionary activities were mostly limited to stealing ammo and hiding it under piles of rocks and inside trees.
There's one story, one of the guys in Qaddafi's group who went on to be his Secretary of Defense, basically, when he was a kid, his mom had to hide a bunch of ammo that he'd stashed in the sewers because the police came looking for him.
So that's the level these guys are on.
We're like their moms are helping them hide bullets.
That's adorable.
Yeah, it is.
It's cute.
Qaddafi and his revolutionaries tried to schedule the overthrow of the government in early 1969.
This got called off because of a concert.
Oh, man.
They set a new date, but this one got fucked up because someone in the military found out and put the king on warned the king.
Qaddafi and several of his friends were questioned, but nothing came of it.
So the history of their revolution is basically an endless parade of near-misses.
There was the time that Qaddafi was driving back to Benghazi with a friend who got so into reciting verses from the Quran that he didn't see a giant cow had stepped in the middle of the road.
The car rammed the cow, which somehow survived, but the car was totaled.
So this is like a teen comedy right now.
Yeah, it's like a teen comedy about trying to overthrow the government.
Yeah, with the occasional hate crimes.
Yeah.
It would sprinkle them.
With the occasional hate crimes.
So basically American pie, just that movie.
Yeah.
Qaddafi's childhood was a lot like a Libyan-American pie.
Libyan pie, which I think is Baklava.
Okay.
Yeah.
Well, it would seem right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it turned out that all their many failures had helped them.
Colonel Aziz Shanib, the third in command of the Libyan army, later said that he and his fellow senior officers knew about Qaddafi's group and their plans and just ignored them.
We always thought it was rubbish that Qaddafi and his group would never be able to do anything, which is not an unfair thing to assume based on what we've heard so far.
Eventually, though, Qaddafi and his revolutionary friends got their shit together enough to set a totally for real this time coup date, September 1st, 1969.
So we're going to get into that coup and of course the madness that came after.
Libyan Pie and Childhood Failures00:03:57
But first, we have to sell some products and services.
You love things that you could purchase.
Yeah.
Receipts, items.
Just objects.
Objects in general.
Well, the objects that are about to come on in through your earbuds are objects that if you buy them, it will support the show.
So there we go.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Sherry stay with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Monument.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
Doctored Paternity Tests Exposed00:15:18
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Oespi and Michael Maracini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
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Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news out of Maricopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to the Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
And we're back.
We're talking about Muamar Gaddafi.
We just got through his childhood, the formation of his revolutionary cell, and the setting of their final date to overthrow the king of Libya.
I do want to note at this point, you know, there's a number of sources for this, including that great book, Libya, a documentary from the BBC called Mad Dog about Qaddafi, and a bunch of others.
You can find all the sources for this podcast on our website, behindthebastards.com.
I always encourage people to check up on us and read further.
So, the date has been set.
The coup has been planned for September 1st, 1969.
Qaddafi distributed plans for the revolution to all of the members in his revolutionary group.
He handed them out in envelopes sealed with red wax.
How big is this group at this point?
I think it's dozens and dozens of people.
Okay.
Yeah, it's a sizable group.
They're all over the country.
Not like hundreds, though.
I don't think hundreds, but it's there's no, I never found like an exact number of how many people were involved.
So the coup had been postponed and delayed so many times that a lot of key members of the conspiracy did not believe it when they got their letters.
They thought it was a trap.
So Qaddafi spent the last moments before starting the coup driving all around Libya, convincing his men that, yes, we're still planning to overthrow the king.
So the whole thing was a comedy of errors mixed with a shit show.
Right, but he really wanted it to work.
He really wanted it to work.
To work, take it aside from that hate crime, like this is like an underdog story almost.
It really is.
Of like these group of chuckle fucks trying to have a revolution and this one guy who's like really oh, he just wants to overthrow the king.
Yeah.
And they're not good at it, but everyone else is so bad at everything that it works out.
Right.
But again, this all has to start with, aside from the hate crime.
Aside from the hate crime.
I can't really just like throw away the hate crime.
No, no.
There will be more hate crimes as the story lengthens.
I assume so.
So Revolution Day comes.
On the day one of his men, there were radio stations they were supposed to take over in Tripoli and Benghazi.
The guy who was supposed to take over the Tripoli radio station and occupy it couldn't find it.
So several other revolutionaries helped him find it.
And once they got there, they were shot at mistakenly by the soldiers who thought they were Israelis invading the country.
A tank commanded by one of the conspirators caught on fire while it was filled with explosives and ammo.
The driver barely managed to disconnect a wire in time to stop it from exploding.
While all this went down, Qaddafi was tearing ass through the desert in a jeep to take over the Benghazi radio station.
They came to a fork in the road.
And here's a quote from the book Libya on what happened next.
Qaddafi took the left turn as planned, expecting the train of vehicles to follow him.
However, in the excitement of the moment, the other drivers went hurtling down the right fork.
He later recounted, I had stopped my jeep to await the rest of the column when I suddenly saw all the other vehicles tearing like demons towards the main road.
Then it dawned on me that the entire Gar Yunus barracks were streaming along in one direction and that the drivers and their enthusiasm were following one another without worrying much where they were supposed to be going.
So this entire revolution could have been scored to Yakity City.
Yeah, exactly.
Okay, that's probably all I can say before we get pulled for copyright infringement.
Yeah.
But it worked.
The revolution worked despite not really knowing what they were doing.
It just happened that the king was out of the country when this went down.
None of the officers were prepared to defend a coup and the Libyan military was not really a functional service at this point.
So Qaddafi and his young friends wound up overthrowing the government with very little bloodshed or fighting.
So let that.
Yeah.
I mean, There's a lot to say about leadership that start where it's just so dumb and like it can't possibly get better from here when like there was no like all every condition had to be perfect for them to do this.
And it was basically everybody else's fault, it sounds like it was everybody else's fault.
A minimally competent government and military would have stopped this in seconds.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Nobody was good at their job.
This is like the apocalypse now of revolutions where everything goes wrong and yet it somehow works out.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
And yeah, I think it's a good lesson.
Other than the hate crime, there's a great lesson in this for kids, which is that you can sometimes succeed in rebelling against the state if you just show up.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Which, okay.
At 6:30 a.m. on September 1st, 1969, Libyans with radios woke up to the sound of Muamar Qaddafi's voice for the very first time.
People of Libya, in response to your own free will, fulfilling your most heartfelt wishes and answering your incessant demands for change and regeneration and your longing to strive towards these ends, listening to your incitement to rebel, your armed forces have undertaken the overthrow of the reactionary and corrupt regime, the stench of which has sickened and horrified us all.
From this day forward, Libya is a free, self-governing republic.
She will advance on the road to freedom, the path to unity and social justice, guaranteeing equality to all her citizens and throwing wide in front of them the gates of honest employment, where injustice and exploitation will be banished, where no one will count himself master or servant, where he will be free, brothers within a society in which, with God's help, prosperity and equality will be seen to rule us all.
What an exhausting thing to hear on the radio.
Just getting up in the morning.
You got shit to do.
We have to do what now?
There's been a revolution.
I only had my fucking coffee.
Yeah.
This is such bullshit.
Who is this guy?
Do you want to go to work?
So the 40-year reign of Muammar Gaddafi had begun.
Well, I really expected it to be something more grand than what you've described.
Just a bunch of dumb kids who got lucky.
If you were a regular Libyan at this time, you might have felt optimistic.
The Western powers hadn't exactly done any good for the regular people, and the king had clearly sucked.
So maybe you'd figure new blood is good.
He's an outsider, you know?
Yeah, I mean, I have similar feelings right now.
If we got red donned, part of me would be like, okay, let's try this.
All right, let's go to Josh.
Yeah, like a bunch of people parachuting in, like, oh, okay, do they have like...
How much worse could it be?
Do they have health care?
Could I go to the doctor now?
Yeah.
So, you know, the bad news about the new regime was that Qaddafi and his crew were a bunch of young men in their 20s and early 30s.
They had very little experience of any kind.
None of them had better than a high school education.
One of Mumar Qaddafi's first sacks in power was to promote himself to colonel and declare himself commandant of the Libyan army.
This makes him part of my favorite historical tradition, which is the fact that almost no one who's been called colonel in all of history has actually been a colonel.
It's just something people call themselves.
Can we be colonels?
Yeah, that's all it takes.
You're a colonel now.
Yeah, I'm putting it on a business card.
You got to get a cool hat.
That is a requirement.
That's fine.
You got to get a sick-ass hat to start calling yourself colonel.
Yeah.
I can do that.
Yeah.
So yeah, Qaddafi promotes himself to colonel.
He's in charge of the Libyan army now.
You know, what would you do, Dave, if when you had been a teenager, you and your friends had suddenly been in charge of the whole country?
I feel like there'd be a point when I'd realize something over my head.
Well, you're a humble man.
That's true.
I wouldn't be a humble man if I successfully.
Because I was a terrible person as a teenager.
Teenagers are generally terrible.
No, they're all monsters.
And like I was all into punk rock and like, yeah, anarchy, take it all down.
So if I was in a position where I took over the government, I'd probably think I was real hot shit.
Yeah.
And be like, yeah, I'm going to run things the way I want to and have just the worst ideas.
Yeah.
But I would never grow out of it.
And I assume that's similar to a lot of people like this.
Because if you go through your life never being told, hey, cut the shit.
You just stay a teenager your whole life.
Yeah, if by the time you're barely where a normal person will be out of college, you run the country, you don't grow up.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that's...
He's a little Joffrey.
Yeah.
He's, yeah, he's a little, got some Joffrey going on.
So one of Qaddafi's first acts was to ban all political parties and all political activity outside of the government itself.
This was not a big deal because the king had banned that sort of thing too.
In 1972, he made party politics a crime punishable by death, which doesn't sound as bad of a decision right now as it was.
Right.
Yeah.
So at first, a revolutionary council took control of the country with Muamar sort of at its head.
There was great excitement among the population, but it quickly became clear that the new leaders knew even less than the old ones.
Qaddafi immediately turned on his friends, attacking them for their incompetence and telling his comrades they didn't understand anything.
He would insult his colleagues in front of their staff and cancel decisions as soon as they were made.
This started before the regime was even a month old.
So this is like if someone came along in like this country and said, like all the experts and elitists, they don't know how to run this place.
I'm going to.
Yeah.
Even though I have very little experience.
And then they, by some insane way, they became running the country.
And it became very evident that they don't know how to do that.
Yeah.
And then they attack the people around them who they had previously supported in order to deflect blame from the fact that they just don't know how to run a country.
Yeah, I can't imagine such a thing.
No, this is the only time it's ever happened.
So Qaddafi developed a reputation for making meetings, like setting up meetings and then making everyone else in the council wait for hours before he showed up.
Often he wouldn't even show up.
He would regularly schedule meetings for 2 a.m. because he was a night owl.
Because he was in his 20s, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
This is all a thing just a 20-year-old person would be doing.
We don't.
He might have been a little older than that because we don't know his exact fucking, but he was very a young guy.
But there's a reason, like, in this country, where like you have to be, like, 35 to be president.
Like, there's a very clear reason.
And also a reason no 35-year-old has ever been elected because you're still probably not.
You're still not ready.
I'm nearing that age, and it's like, no way.
No, sir.
Yeah.
No, no.
Just a couple of years ago, we were driving to our apartment and you guys were in the back of a truck and I kept slamming my foot on the brake just to make you fly forward because it was fun.
Wait, was that when we were like, had that weird keg?
Yeah.
Like, yeah, yeah.
That was fun.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I shouldn't be president is what I'm getting at.
Yeah.
Or we should both be president.
Well, no, there's a different idea.
You could be my pence.
Yeah, I'll be your pence.
Fantastic.
Our producer Sophie is shaking her head angrily.
We're going to do it.
Which she does regularly.
We're going to make America okay.
Pretty okay.
Just okay.
I feel like those hats will sell too.
So Qaddafi became famous for going AWOL for days at a time whenever he got angry.
He would threaten to resign if anyone argued with him about anything.
At one point, he decided that all members of the Revolutionary Council ought to wear military uniforms and carry pistols at all times.
One of his friends in the council didn't like this rule and showed up to a meeting in street clothes.
Qaddafi's totally reasonable reaction was to hide in the desert for a week.
During another argument, he threatened to leave and fight with the Palestinians in Jordan.
Hold on.
Gaddafi hid in the desert for a while?
Qaddafi hid in the desert for a second.
Such a non-dictator thing.
Like, I thought you were going to say he's, like, had him eaten by dogs or something.
He got upset and just went off.
Did his friend have to, like, go find him and apologize?
I feel like that's probably what happened.
Come up to him in like a tent in the desert, like, hey, man.
Look, I'm wearing my uniform.
I got a gun.
I don't really know why, but here it is.
What an amazingly passive-aggressive way to run a country.
It's incredible.
Oh, my goodness.
So by 1973, things weren't going great with the new Libya.
Qaddafi was so disenchanted with ruling that he decided to resign and fuck back off to the desert, but for real this time.
He told his comrades on the Revolutionary Council that he would announce his resignation to the people of Libya on April 16th.
But surprise.
Qaddafi had no intention of resigning.
Instead, he announced the Popular Revolution, an entirely new domestic program that no one else in the government had been warned about.
They all found out about it at the same time as the people of Libya during the speech.
Under this program, Qaddafi urged the repeal of all existing laws and their replacement by revolutionary enactments, the weeding out of anti-revolutionary elements by taking appropriate measures against perverts and deviators, the staging of an administrative revolution to destroy all forms of bourgeoisie and bureaucracy, the arming of the people in order to make a people's militia, the staging of a cultural revolution to get rid of all imported and poisonous ideas contrary to the Quran.
So, Qaddafi promised at the end of the speech that he was going to take the Libyan people to paradise in chains if he had to.
That's exhausting.
It sounds really tiring.
Like, you're working in the desert.
It's pro- anything you do if you live in the desert is probably exhausting.
Right.
And, like, you've just gotten over the fact that a new government's taken over, and then some guy's like, I'm going to drag you to paradise in chains, and all the laws are different today.
I was like, that really doesn't sound like paradise, buddy.
God damn it.
So this would all be a pretty full plate for most world leaders, right?
But Gaddafi wasn't done innovating.
He started to work on what he called the Third Universal Theory, which was a new political theory he believed was destined to sweep not just Libya, but the entire world.
Here's how one member of his inner circle recalled the brainstorming process for creating this universal theory.
Quote, whenever new intellectuals arrived, Gaddafi would tell me to invite them to visit him.
Then as we talked, he would take notes.
He would ask them how to remedy this or that problem.
The trouble for him was that he couldn't digest their ideas.
He didn't have a basic scientific approach.
When he himself offered an opinion, he came out with immature and confused analyses, such as were later to form the basis of his third universal theory.
So, Qaddafi described his theory as a middle way between communism and capitalism, destined to replace them both.
Capitalism, he said, led to sin and degeneracy.
It was far too individualistic to be healthy.
Communism treated human beings like property of the state, and that wasn't good either.
Balancing Equality and Control00:05:14
So, he needed to find a middle way.
Eventually, Qaddafi codified all of his thoughts about how the world ought to be run into his magnum opus, the green book.
In it, he argued that democracy could not flourish in republican systems.
Such a society was destined to ignore the will of huge chunks of the population.
Accurate so far.
Instead, the state should be abolished entirely, and the people should take charge of their own lives and rule themselves directly.
So far, nothing he said is inherently crazy sounding, but the system he set up didn't actually work that way.
The lowest level of the new government were the people's congresses.
Everyone was supposed to take part in them, debating and voting on policies.
The people's congresses would funnel their decisions up to a general people's congress, which was kind of like a parliament or our Congress.
Their decisions would be passed up to a general people's committee, which was basically a presidential cabinet, which would then implement the decisions.
But here's the catch.
The actual center of decision-making was just Muammar Gaddafi.
None of the people's congresses were allowed to talk to each other about anything.
They had to go through this like line of things that always ended up at Qaddafi.
So no decisions could actually be implemented without Qaddafi's sign-off, and he mostly just did whatever seemed good to him at the time and ignored the Congresses.
Right.
So it was basically like, man, we should all just govern ourselves and figure it out, and then I make the decision and then I decide what we do still.
Yeah.
The Green Book was filled with other fun stuff besides blueprints for the government.
Quotes like this.
Sport is like praying, eating, and the feeling of warmth and coolness.
It is stupid for crowds to enter a restaurant just to look at a person or group of persons eating.
It is stupid for people to let a person or group of persons get warmed or enjoy ventilation on their behalf.
It is equally illogical for the society to allow an individual or team to monopolize sports while the people as a whole pay the costs of such a monopoly for the benefit of one person or a team.
So he hated sports teams.
Yeah, I mean, I'm not a big sports.
I'm not a good sports guy either.
But people like sports.
Yeah, people like sports.
We need sports.
Yeah, people like sports.
Nobody likes watching someone else eat.
Yeah.
Like, but we know people are.
Oh, well, now there's, and there's those videos.
So Gaddafi was just wrong.
Yeah.
The Green Book also bans being a landlord.
No one has the right to build a house additional to his own and that of his heirs for the purpose of renting it because the house represents another person's need and building it for the purpose of rent is an attempt to have control over the need of that man, which not inherently crazy.
I'm not totally against.
It's really that boiling down to, and I make the decision.
And that's where it all gets fucked up.
Yeah.
It's great to say all these things like we should be reducing the amount of power one individual can hold over the another up until you demand to be in charge.
And maybe, I mean, people listening might have different opinions about this, but like maybe even if like if he tried to do it right, it might not work out still.
It might just be, you know, him dreaming.
But like, yeah, the really, like, he didn't give it a chance here.
No, he was always.
He was always, it sounds like a dictator.
He was always wanting it to be about himself.
And he always had to be the center of it.
He couldn't stand, like, he was never going to let any counsel make a decision that he didn't agree with.
He's Jaden Smith.
Like, he has a bunch of.
Nobody told him no.
He doesn't, yeah.
And he has a bunch of crazy ideas how the world should work, but he doesn't have like the background to actually understand how to implement that.
Yeah.
That's exactly what's going on here.
So it's also important to note if you're one of the people for whom the other stuff I've said from the Green Book sounds kind of good, that Qaddafi was also super misogynistic.
I'm going to read this quote.
I'm going to apologize to our producer first because it's pretty bad, but it's important that we be balanced about who Qaddafi was.
According to a gynecologist, women menstruates or suffers feebleness every month while man, being a male, does not.
When a woman does not menstruate, she is pregnant.
If she is pregnant, she becomes, due to pregnancy, feeble for about a year.
Afterwards, woman breastfeeds the baby she bore.
Breastfeeding means that a woman is so inseparable from her baby that her activity is seriously reduced.
She becomes directly responsible for another person whom she helps to carry out his biological functions, without which it would die.
All these innate characteristics form differences of which man and women cannot be equal.
That's such a misunderstanding.
And it's one of those things.
Like this person just launched a human out of their body and it causes a lot of really freaking painful after carrying it for months and then has to keep it alive.
Yeah.
What a weakling.
And it's just like, no, you idiot.
No, I mean, if anything, the conclusion to be, yeah, I mean, we can't be equal because men can't make human beings.
But oh my God.
Anyway, so again, you got to balance this shit out because if you read just the stuff about everyone should be equal, Qaddafi sounds like not the piece of shit that he was.
Right.
I mean, here's going back to it.
The only thing I know about Qaddafi is that he was murdered horribly in the streets by his people.
I kind of assumed he did something to deserve that.
The Weakness of Forced Equality00:04:19
Oh, and we are going to get into all of the somethings he did.
So now the Qaddafi reign is up and running, and the utter madness is about to start.
We have not even dug into the craziest of the crazy yet.
But before we dig into that crazy, we have to dig into some ass.
So get out your credit card, pull out a wad of cash, veer your car off of the road, and pull out your laptop and prepare to order things.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
They said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
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My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat.
Just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
Imported Milk Powder Scandals00:15:21
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
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Listen to the Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
And we're back.
MoMAR Gaddafi has taken control.
He has launched his second revolution in a couple of years and elucidated his plans for a perfect society in the green book.
Right.
So, yeah, now here we are.
Moamar Gaddafi starts releasing his green book chapter by chapter rather than all at once.
I think he was releasing it as he wrote it because he just didn't have the ability to delay his gratification by that much.
And he said, as he dropped the first chapter, with the establishment of this unique democratic experiment, all political theories in the world have collapsed.
So Qaddafi changed Libya's name to the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, which means like the People's Republic, basically.
And the flag was changed to the color green.
Now, Qaddafi had no official role in this new people's state.
He was still in charge of the army, of course, but he was not technically in charge on paper.
He demanded to be called leader of the revolution or brother leader, but he didn't actually have a job.
So that whenever there was a problem, he could be like, I'm not in charge of Libya.
It's these other guys.
It's this council here that fucked up or it's this guy here who fucked up.
Don't get angry at me.
I'm not in charge.
So that was his whole tactic.
It's a good racket.
Yes.
Solid racket.
Good scam.
Being in charge of the country and pretending you're not for 40 years.
Yeah.
So Qaddafi's like, I don't actually have a job.
It's not me who's in charge.
So that, you know, he can't be blamed for anything.
Right.
He's in charge.
It's a good plan.
It's like if you were like president and you were blaming like the rival party or like a like a special deep state for all your problems.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's not unlike that if that were to ever happen somewhere in the globe.
Yeah.
And for all of his rhetoric about like freedom and liberty and stuff like that, the people of Libya were brutally repressed whenever they spoke out.
One month after declaring the people's state, some students protested in Tripoli.
They were hung in front of their classmates and the executions were broadcast on state television.
Qaddafi established a series of revolutionary committees across the nation made up of loyal young men who got super high off of having a little bit of power.
The official purpose of the committees was to protect the revolution and remove any obstacles to Colonel Qaddafi's vision.
This had the dual advantage of helping Qaddafi solidify his power while freeing him from any possible blame because, hey, it's not his fault if these kids hurt the wrong people.
Which they did.
They would just like rob people, take their stuff, throw them in prison, execute their own personal enemies.
You know, the kind of things do when you let young people establish paramilitary committees.
Right.
Yeah.
So Qaddafi was basically a master at outsourcing his methods of repression and control.
When a TV news presenter in Tripoli became too popular for the colonel's comfort, he ordered the people to take over the job of presenting the news.
Random Libyans would line up every day for a chance to read the news live on television.
That's amazing.
TV got really weird under MoMA control.
Oh my god, that sounds like a blast.
Oh, yeah.
For most of his reign, there was only one official channel, the state television channel, that ran like six or eight hours a day.
One day, it broadcast hours' worth of just a picture of army boots with the caption, from a viewer to the broadcasting house.
Another day, it played hours of footage of a dirt road shot out the window of a moving vehicle.
For the most part, state TV broadcast speeches by Qaddafi and conferences where people talked about the brilliance of his green book.
This is like public television.
Yeah, where there'll be like six hours of old people dancing.
Yeah, it's like that, but he's the only one deciding who's going to be on it.
So, as it always does, repression in Libya bred dissent.
Not all of those dissenters were arrested before they could flee Libya.
Some of them made it out of the country.
Qaddafi made use of an international network of assassins to murder political enemies who managed to make it to the safety of a country like Britain.
This did not always work out well for him.
In 1984, there were a bunch of angry Libyan dissidents protesting in front of a Libyan government office in London.
People inside of the office started shooting into the crowd, but they missed and hit and killed a British policewoman named Yvonne Fletcher.
Britain suspended their diplomatic relations with Libya as a result of the shootings.
Qaddafi was known to demand that his assassins bring back all or part of his murdered enemies.
He would often keep the corpses of his murdered foes in refrigerators.
A member of his inner circle said that he did this to see them once in a while, to speak with them when they were dead.
He kept some corpses stored this way for more than 20 years.
Oh, dear.
Things have taken a turn with Mo Mar.
Yeah, I mean, okay, there's been a hate crime.
There's been a hate crime.
And he was described as cruel, but this is now Hannibal Ector territory.
Yeah, we have, it ramps up, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And this is like a thing you see with dictators.
Like, when we talk about these guys being pure evil, most of them really weren't until they would have some dark moments, but they're dark moments that might make them like a criminal.
They always feel like they have something to prove.
Yeah.
And power.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like, like in the sense that they would kill someone and then vent at their corpse for 40 years.
Yeah.
Like they couldn't, they can never walk away from a disagreement or that's what it sounds like.
They like this guy, if this guy's never in charge of Libya.
He's the dude where somebody insults him and it burrows into his heart for years and he starts a fistfight over it or maybe even murders somebody in a crime of passion.
Because he's the dictator, it morphs into keeping corpses in a fridge for 20-something years.
He has a support system.
Yeah.
He has way more resources to be a terrible dick.
Yeah, it's just what happens when you have power mixed with whatever the hell is going on inside Mu Mar's head.
When you mix power, when you mix unlimited power with the weird damage that we all have inside of us, everybody has their version of keeping their political enemies in a fridge.
Right.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Maybe it's just banning a solar.
I have a fridge in my heart that I keep people in.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't like squash.
Yeah.
We have people in our lives to tell us to cut the shit, which is something he does not have.
Yeah, it's like anything that you feel strongly about.
If you were a dictator, you could turn into something terrible.
Yeah.
And that's what Qaddafi did.
He also had a secret rape chamber in his compound.
Yeah.
He would, yeah, that is where he would violate women that his henchmen abducted for him.
I say women, but that's not accurate.
He would visit schools and pick out girls and indicate which one he wanted by patting her on the head.
His men would pick the girl up after school and bring her to him.
One teacher recalled during a BBC documentary, the girl they wanted, they would simply take her and treat her like a ragdoll in their hands.
They had no conscience, no morals, not an ounce of mercy, even though the girl might be 15 or 16 years of age, a mere child.
If the child was a virgin, Qaddafi's staff would show her porn movies until she understood what he wanted.
He was apparently turned on by violence.
It's hard to know how much of all of this to believe exactly because these particular interviews came from a BBC documentary called Mad Dog, Gaddafi's Secret World.
And obviously the BBC is one of the NATO nations that helped depose Qaddafi.
So it's one of those things where, and they're interviewing actual Libyans, but those Libyans are people with a grudge against the administration.
They definitely, like, they found the rape room.
There's like pictures of it and stuff.
So it's hard to say how much of everything is true, but it seems like most people.
Just the rape room is horrifying.
Yeah.
If 10% of this is true, it's awful.
Yeah, exactly.
And that's kind of where I land on this.
Yeah, so Nouri al-Mismari, Qaddafi's former chief of protocol, also claimed that he molested young boys in addition to young girls.
Quote, he had his own boys.
They used to be called the services group.
All of them were boys and bodyguards, a harem for his pleasure.
Some of the women he used were tossed out on the street, basically, but others claim they were sent to mental institutions, so no one would believe them.
So, yeah, it's dark now.
It's horrifying.
Yeah.
The colonel's rule was idiosyncratic, by which I mean he turned on a dime and demanded insane things from his followers.
At one point, he ordered all of the camels in Tripoli shot dead.
The only explanation given was, Brother Leader has decided that camels have no place in a modern society.
I don't disagree with that one.
Yeah, no.
Yeah.
They don't have any place in modern society.
I don't like camels.
They're terrible, they're fucking assholes.
That doesn't justify the other horrible thing.
No, yeah.
Again, there's things beliefs that align with my beliefs in terms of ocean and camels.
Yeah.
But at this point, I think it's safe to say that I would not like Muamar Gaddafi.
Yeah.
Would not get along with him.
It's just that even a rapey clock is right twice a day.
Exactly.
Yeah.
So it's possible that Muammar Gaddafi had Anwar Sadat, the president of Egypt, murdered.
Some of his former insiders alleged this, and Qaddafi did claim after the relationship soured that Sadat had been, quote, an agent of Hitler since 1948, which there's a lot to unpack in those few words.
Because he's very specific that Sadat became an agent of the Nazis after 1948.
Which...
Yeah, there's a lot that needs to be expanded.
There's a lot going on in that sentence.
Yeah.
I wish there was more.
I wish Qaddafi had spoken at length about how he thought World War II ended, but I have not found that.
Yeah, I bet that's a really special conversation.
It does seem like he thinks Hitler survived into the late 40s at least.
So that's fun.
For the first half of Gaddafi's reign, basically all private enterprise was banned by the government.
Qaddafi and his people decided what could be imported.
They ran state supermarkets to distribute these goods to their citizens.
In 1986, a journalist found that the main floor of one such supermarket had only ghee, which is butter with the milk fat removed, and powdered milk.
In 1987, another foreigner reported that the markets in two cities held nothing but Dutch milk powder, Italian suits, and Chinese tea.
Oh, yeah, you can really live on that stuff.
You can have, what would you do with Dutch milk powder, Italian suits?
Okay, you're so good.
All right, hold on.
You boil down the Italian suits to get into their tastiest components.
Again, the Italian chef kissing fingers.
You boil that down to its nice and stuff.
You add the tea, I want to say.
You boil it with the tea?
Yeah, that feels right.
I think you strain it from the tea.
Yeah.
And then mix it with what's the last one?
Milk powder.
Dutch milk powder.
So you don't straight it all the way, but you add the milk powder and it thickens like mac and cheese.
That's basically macaroni.
Yeah, you cut it up.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I assume Italian suits are made out of pasta.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Fantastic.
Some of this was, you know, some of the absence of goods in the supermarkets was a result of sanctions, which we will get to later.
But a decent amount of it was just Qaddafi fucking with people.
He's quoted as having said, Sometimes we make items disappear to force people to work harder and produce them, which is a dick move.
It's a real dick move.
It's also true that the entire Libyan government was hilariously corrupt.
Public supermarkets were regularly burned down by their managers so that the managers could steal all of the goods inside before lighting them on fire and then sell the goods on the black market.
So that's.
I mean, they're creating a situation where I feel like, what are you going to do?
Yeah.
If you're managing that supermarket and you're like, oh, God, this is just milk powder.
Yeah.
I'm just burning this place to the ground.
Yeah, I have trouble.
Like, anyone who's worked in a place like a grocery store has wanted to just burn it down.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's a very burnable structure.
Yeah.
It's hard to blame anyone for doing that.
So it's important to note that the Libyan state under Qaddafi was not a total shit show, and in some ways was more functional than the king's government that had come before it.
Qaddafi did establish a successful social safety net where none had existed before.
Everyone in Libya was guaranteed a home, health care, education, and a car, all provided by the state and paid for by the billion dollars a day in oil revenue that poured through Qaddafi's hands.
Okay, so yeah, he had this ideology, and some of it throughout this, we've said, like, well, he's not completely wrong.
It's like the ideology didn't necessarily not work.
He's a broken person.
He's a broken person.
Because like the idea of, okay, the state's going to provide a bunch of shit for people, and we have more oil than almost anyone in the world.
Yeah, that can work.
Other countries have done that for fucking close to a century now.
Yeah.
You can absolutely run a state that way, but not with a guy like Gaddafi in charge.
Yeah.
Not for long.
Well, actually, for 40 years.
Yeah, that's a pretty good run.
It's a good run.
For a maniac.
Yeah, for a fucking nut.
Speaking of schools, which were paid for by the oil money, in the 1980s, Qaddafi replaced school uniforms with military uniforms and mandated that all students take military science courses.
Military officers took over for school administrators and for many teachers.
They were authorized to carry out military punishments, including forcing students to stand out in the desert sun for hours at a time, which is pretty sick.
Yeah.
This seems like a real, this is like he's just asking to be overthrown at that point.
Yeah.
The moment you start a whole generation of people that you just torture and teach them how military science while you're you're begging for them to overthrow you.
Yeah.
In retrospect, you can see the short-sightedness.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's like, it's like having having like a dog that you that you like only let outside and like are a dick to, but also attach like lasers to.
It's exactly like that.
It's like teaching your dog to understand the concept of slavery and then giving it a right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Just generally, yeah, just telling an animal what the score is.
Not a great idea.
Now, of course, David, no self-respecting tyrant would be complete without his elite bodyguard unit.
Saddam had the Republican Guard.
Hitler had the SS.
Mussolini had someone, the macaroni troopers, probably.
Yeah.
We are really being rough on Italy.
We are.
We both established that we have Italian blood.
Yeah.
And so that like released the floodgates.
So it's fine.
It's fine.
It's a fine.
Dictator Bodyguards and Paramilitaries00:05:41
And Mo Mar Qaddafi, of course, had the Haris al-Haas.
In Europe, they were known as the Amazons, an all-female unit of elite, highly trained bodyguards who protected Mumar Gaddafi for more than 20 years.
We got some pictures of these ladies.
They're going to be up on the site, but just take a gander there.
Oh, that's wonderful.
They're all young.
They're all conventionally attractive.
A bond villain type of thing.
It's exactly a bond villain.
Amazon.
It's called the fucking Amazons.
I mean, yeah, and there he is in the second picture in his fucking ridiculous colonel's uniform next to that lady.
Those glasses.
He is a Bond villain.
He's the most Bond villain that a dictator has ever been.
He's like, well, I would say he's more like an Austin Powers villain.
He's a spoof of a Bond villain.
He wears the Dr. Evil outfit from the first.
There's a picture that we'll come to later where he's dressed like Dr. Evil.
And this is like right after Austin Powers had come out.
So it almost makes you think like, did you just watch the movie and dress like Dr. Evil MoMA Qaddafi?
He might have.
He might have watched it.
He was like, oh, that's a pretty, that's a pretty smart act.
You guys got it going on.
So Qaddafi got a lot of bad press for his all-lady bodyguards.
The reality, you know, and a lot of the press was like how cool it was that he had how badass these women were.
Fucking awesome.
But look at these badass lady bodyguards.
The pictures are awesome.
Yeah, they are awesome.
The reality was less awesome.
Most of the women in his bodyguard unit were press ganged into the job with very little choice as to whether to join.
Girls were often sent to act as entertainment for Qaddafi family parties, and the whole thing sounds kind of gross, gross, and very exploitative.
That said, some of his former guards, when interviewed, did report loving the work and loving Qaddafi.
There's also evidence that they acted as sort of a secret state police within his inner circle.
I've also read reports that suggest the job was terrifying for most of the Amazons.
One former bodyguard now in hiding was quoted by the BBC as saying, one night we were going to witness the execution of 17 students.
They did not hang them.
They shot them.
We were forbidden to scream.
We were ordered to cheer.
So again, this is going back to he's just asking for it.
You don't, if you have personal bodyguards, you get the people who like want the job.
You don't force someone to do that job.
You don't want someone half-assing that job.
But if you're only going to have like comb the country for pretty girls and put them in uniforms and teach them how to shoot, they're not necessarily going to love you.
Yeah.
Like, because you're just abducting them from their family.
Exactly.
It feels like the moment things get rough, they're just going to quietly back away.
Yeah.
And just, yeah.
Find new employment.
Like, it's bad.
He's really asking for it.
You should also, and I feel like this should go without saying, I don't support being gender discriminatory with your bodyguards.
Women can bodyguard very well, I'm sure.
But you don't pick your bodyguard entirely by how they look.
Yes.
That's not a good move.
You pick your bodyguard by how good they are at guarding your body.
Yeah.
Yeah, even if you're trying to fire like the most badass looking people, they could be cowards.
Like, you don't know.
Resumes matter.
That's important.
Sit down and interview these people.
One of the through lines in Qaddafi's regime is that there were no resumes.
Yeah, I'm not surprised to hear that.
Because his resume, when he became in charge of the country, was guy.
Yeah.
So we have we've talked about some crazy stuff and we have a lot more crazy stuff to get to.
So much that this is going to be another two-parter because I wound up writing like 9,000 words on MoMA fucking Qaddafi.
So, Dave, we're going to break for right now and come back on Thursday to tell the good people the rest of the legendary story of Mu Mar Gaddafi.
Excellent.
When we get back, we're going to talk about what Gaddafi did with all of his oil money, his career sponsoring insane amounts of terrorism, and the speech he delivered to the UN, which I'm going to go ahead and say is the greatest speech that anyone has ever delivered, maybe to anything.
Oh, man.
Oh, that's going to be fun.
Oh, that's exciting.
All right.
Before we roll out, do you have any pluggables to plug?
Yeah, I mean, find me at Twitter at Movie Hooligan.
As you mentioned at the beginning of this, I am one of two people running a podcast and streaming network called Gamefully Unemployed.