The mask is cuz he’s gonna be a banker soon
The most obvious question about Libya is: Why?
The reason you have to ask that is a little secret you won’t hear much about: Libya under Qaddafi wasn’t that bad for most people. And that’s according to the CIA. Take a look at the CIA factbook on Libya under Qaddafi and you’re in for a shock.
Subsidized medical care, subsidized education, one of the highest average incomes in Africa, a life expectancy of 77 point something, and rankings in the 90s, pretty low, on most of the bad stuff like infant mortality.
It’s easy to say that they had oil, but not every country with oil seems to benefit. At one end of the spectrum you’ve got Norway, which pampers every single Norwegian with an equal share (and raises psycho killers who can’t stand all that equality tree-hugging stuff)…and at the other there’s places like Nigeria, where the notion that the oil money should benefit everyone would get big belly laughs from the big-bellied generals.
Now if you were going to add that Libya had a small population, about six million, along with big oil revenues, you’d be closer to the truth. But even then, not every small country with oil spreads the wealth around. Kuwait, sitting on way bigger tar pits than Libya, has a population of less than four million, but no way on earth they’d consider sharing the oil money with the two-thirds of that number who are dirty foreign workers. The Indians, Egyptians, and Iranians who do all the actual work never see more than the minimum wage, and get the boot as soon as their contracts are over.
Libya was actually more generous with foreign workers, unless you happened to be unlucky—like the Palestinian doctor and Bulgarian nurses who happened to be working in Benghazi when kids started dying of AIDS. They got tortured into confessing to a doctors’ plot, Libyan version, although it was pretty obvious the kids were infected before they even arrived in Libya.
But then people go a little crazy when their kids get hurt, or even when they start thinking they might. A whole lot of people are rotting in stateside prisons because their kids had some schizo episode and decided to tell teacher that mommy and daddy belong to a big Satan cult where babies are the entrée at every Thanksgiving dinner, and there was a time when judges and juries believed every word of this crap even though it was dumber than a Bewitched rerun.
If you were unlucky like those guys, Libya was a very bad place to be. If you pissed off Qaddafi, if you were a Berber, if your family was from an eastern tribe that had a history of fighting with Qaddafi’s, you were in for a hard time. But if you went about your business, you could live a pretty decent life there, as far as I can find out. Maybe that’s naïve; if it is, somebody who’s lived there can tell me about it. But from what I can tell, nobody starved in Libya, kids had the chance to see a doctor, go to school, eat OK, all that stuff. All the usual UNICEF indicators were on the rise. So why the revolution?
There’s always that “revolution of rising expectations” cliché that “revolutions don’t happen when things are bad, they happen when things are improving but not fast enough.” There’s some truth to that one, partly because when things are really bad, people are too busy to make a revolution. Starving people don’t usually revolt. They’re too tired. Starving people don’t feel like doing anything except crawling into the shade and maybe waving away the flies around their eyes.
Still, that doesn’t cut it for Libya. I guess we’re supposed to believe that a longing for freedom started the revolution. “Freedom.” I just wish I knew who started that one. Where on this planet does anybody see any longing for freedom? I’m not talking about Libya now, I’m talking about California. Where have you ever seen anybody who wanted freedom? Go down the block where you grew up, house by house, in your head and tell me where there was a family that wanted freedom. I can’t think of one, in the whole Bakersfield tract where I grew up, that wanted that.
Ed Jagels: Freedom’s Face
The most popular elected official in Bakersfield for most of my lifetime was the District Attorney, Ed Jagels. Look him up yourself; I won’t even give you a link, because you’d think I picked it on purpose to make him look bad. He was in charge of one of the worst of those Satanic child-abuse cases and never backed down even when it was obvious to everybody in town the whole thing was a fantasy. Two dozen people rotted in prison because of Ed, and he retired after about a lifetime in office. Everybody loved him. Never saw a prison he didn’t like, never saw a citizen he didn’t think would look better in an orange jumpsuit. Don’t tell me about freedom.
Damn, if Americans would actually look at America, the one outside the windows instead of the one you got from Civics class, we’d get somewhere, because we could start from a few facts, not this lame fantasy that we’re all Thomas Jefferson at heart.
The people I grew up with—and the ones you grew up with too, unless you were rich and on the coast somewhere–were all pissed off about something, but it wasn’t freedom. It was the Blacks at first, the riots and the muggings and all that Civil Rights noise. Then it was the Mexicans driving wages down and not picking up their trash. Then it was the Liberals, even though nobody’d ever spotted a live one in the city limits. They didn’t want freedom, they wanted the people they hated bashed, the harder the better.
So I really doubt “freedom” is what set them off in Libya. That is, if by “freedom” you mean all the Thomas Jefferson crap you learned in Social Studies. If by “freedom” you mean something like “being like the cool kids,” then maybe it was a longing for freedom.
When you really look at the CIA Factbook stats on Libya, the one thing that stands out is age.
Lotta Kids in That Minaret
Almost a third of the population is under 16, more than half are under 30. Only 4 percent is over 65. That’s what you get when a tiny desert country gets mass medical care: Birthrate zooms and just keeps zooming.
What that means is a huge chunk of the population that isn’t that interested in having security and food and schooling—did you, when you were 18? Well, maybe you did, if you’re one of these nambs and pambs I see around now who worry about their resumes when they wake up in the morning, and spend the day ticking off points on their college application profile…but I don’t think Libyans are quite that disgusting yet. Their yout’ want normal yout’ wants: sex, money, fast cars, and war. It’s no accident that the population profile of Libya says in two-foot neon, “Males of Military Age Surplus!” One of the reasons they wanted a war is that it was a war. At 18, especially in a culture where they keep the girls locked up, any war is better than no war. And when it’s a war against an old man who’s been in power for 42 years, about three times as long as you’ve been alive, you’re just in favor of it on principle. All those slogans like “Better the devil you know”—they’re for old, worried people. The young slogan is more like, “Blow it up, as long as something happens for once in this boring dump.”
And in this case, nobody can accuse the kids of being stupid. It’s never easy to guess how a revolution is going to shake out, but this time around the kids were right. What they did is good—for the kids. For a while.
What’s going to happen in Libya is most likely to be a lot like what happens everywhere else that one of these old-school “regimes” gets booted by a multinational “alliance.” There’s a script, and it’s pretty familiar by now. First the cheering and the statue-demolition stage, then the foreign experts reorganizing the currency, then the corporations coming in.
The biggest recent example is Russia. When the USSR crumbled, the experts came in and reorganized the economy, revalued the currency, changed everything from the faces on the money to the national anthem. If you were old, you were in serious trouble. Your pension was suddenly worthless, because they’d added a few zeros to the ruble and what used to pay your rent wouldn’t buy a pound of beets any more. You could still get bread, from what I’ve read, for an interesting reason: Ever since the French Revolution, turns out, European countries have subsidized the price of bread because the masses gotta have their bread. Typical nervous-poor Euro families, the dad’d always be saying, “Eat yer bread!” or “The one that eats the most bread gets the most pudding!” So the oldies could still get bread at Socialist prices in Yeltsin’s IMF version of Russia, but they couldn’t pay their rent and they couldn’t buy medicines. So if they got sick, they died. If they lost their apartments, they died.
All the wealth that was tied up in those pensions was instantly worthless. All the money went in a fairy-godmother flash to the kids who were still young enough to reinvent themselves as bankers. Now Russia’s a normal country, run by bankers under 40. Look at a picture of bitter commies demonstrating in any Russian city and you’ll notice most of them are old. Spry, most of them, but old. The ones who weren’t spry, who needed those blood pressure or diabetes meds, you won’t see them at the demo because they’re dead.
Libya was a lot like Russia, a smaller, warmer Russia. Life wasn’t bad for the average Arab (the average Berber had a harder time). The basics were guaranteed, you weren’t going to be thrown in prison unless you mouthed off. Russia in the 70s and 80s, I mean, not Stalin’s Russia. And although you’re not supposed to admit it, a lot of Russians liked it better back then, when you could take a day off and not lose your job. The ones who liked it were the old, the ordinary, the ones with no ambition.
When you’re 20 years old, you want more. You don’t know what, just more. And in Qaddafi’s world there wasn’t any way to be all you can be, like the Army used to say. You couldn’t be the hero of the story, going off to seek your fortune and start a frozen yogurt empire. You could shuffle along and get a job, squirm your way up to senior teacher or mid-level figurehead in an office with a ceiling fan, but that was about all.
So when all these 20-year olds see kids in the street in Cairo—Egyptian kids, and Egypt has always been the cool big kid next door for Libya—and their neighbors in Tunisia booting the same sort of old fool who’s been sitting on the country longer than their parents have been alive—they thought they couldn’t lose.
Try remembering being actually young. It’s not as easy as you’d think. Remember when you just instantly substituted for the hero of every story. How could you not take up the gun when the time came? In that way I understand these kids way better than I do the actual American kids I see around now. Those poor babies seem to do whatever their parents tell them every hour of the day. In this last job I had, I worked in one of those open offices with two guys half my age (which is a horrible story in itself, but I’ll skip it). They were both so clean-cut that I swear to God I thought it had to be fake and they’d take me out for drinks after a few days and try to get me to join their Satan cult or Fight Club. But it wasn’t fake. I wish to God it was. They were the new breed of mommy’n’daddy’s boys. Even grandparents’ boys—one of them said one day he hadn’t been able to skype his grandparents for a week and he really missed talking to them. His GRANDparents! A WEEK!
That’s a pervert, if you ask me. Even if he never does anything indictable there’s something horribly wrong with a 20-something like that. The kids in Libya are way easier to sympathize with.
And like I said: In the short run, they’re right. Things will start to happen in Libya now, and most of the good stuff will happen to the young people. Young men, in this case, because most of the girls will stay at home for the first generation or so. So the under-30 demographic that was out there trying to find the trigger on those AA guns will actually be the ones to benefit from the war they fought, for once. Impressive when you think of it that way.
It won’t last, the boom time. Never does in these places. Oil doesn’t produce a lot of jobs at the point where it leaves the ground.
For a few years, the multinationals will need local collaborators, and there’ll be payoffs to the new breed of “democratic” politicians. And you know the funny thing? Those payoffs will be totally legal and every Western reporter will love the guys who get them because they’ll look good in suits, talk English and have good accountants.
Then the system will “normalize” and they won’t need those local auxiliaries as much. The jobs will dry up.
Libyan Coastline: Freedom Schmeedom, That’s Real Estate!
The most aggressive Libyan youth will have gone into coastal condos by then—whole lotta Mediterranean coast to be sold off in Libya, whole lotta Euro retirees to buy it–and the million or so families who sold their fishing shack for the price of dad’s dialysis will be wondering what the Hell went wrong, because they could swear they’re poorer than they used to be because now the doctor takes half their income from sweeping the floors at Club Med down the beach. But they’ll know they’re just crazy or something, and there’ll be experts to back them up on that.
Would you like to know more? Gary Brecher is the author of the War Nerd. Send your comments to gary dot brecher at gmail dot com. Read Gary Brecher’s first ever War Nerd column by clicking here.
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46 Comments
Add your own1. choodak | August 30th, 2011 at 11:08 am
stop wasting your time. write for a living. you’re damn good at it.
2. CB | August 30th, 2011 at 11:34 am
Ah, I see you looked at that tiny bit of optimism^W less-cynicism from before and decided that this shall not be! Another good one, keep it up.
3. Captain Run-On | August 30th, 2011 at 11:58 am
Brecher! Hit the deck and give me 20 paragraph breaks!
4. Michal | August 30th, 2011 at 12:03 pm
Awww hell, War Nerd went all commie again.
Free meds? Pfft forget it, if you wanted real health treatment you had to bribe the doctor and then probably pay some more money to get to Malta, Tunisia or Egypt. That’s a lotta money for Libyan people making 200 USD per month. If they’re lucky, because that’s the pay of the ambassador to Czech Republic.
5. Sick and Wrong | August 30th, 2011 at 12:18 pm
Excuse me, but the whole country is in ruins. It’s not gonna be like with USSR. There’s nothing left standing in Libya. And oil is gonna be sold to the West immediately (which will only pay taxes).
Suddenly, no production, no jobs, no anything. And then it’s either poverty&drugs (Afghanistan’s way) or poverty & radical Islam. Woo fucking hoo.
You’re wrong again, USSR and Libya are two very different cases.
6. MQ | August 30th, 2011 at 12:35 pm
The most interesting question isn’t why some Libyans wanted to rebel, it’s why the West supported them with so much. After all without extensive NATO support there’s no way the insurgents would have won.
7. Ganryu | August 30th, 2011 at 12:51 pm
I consider a completely different set of causes for da yout’ uprisings.
I think it was setup by outside forces (i.e. CIA, MI6, etc). Why would they do such a thing? In no particular order: large Chinese presence/trading, central bank not connected to the usual cabal of banker fascists, large quantities of highly sale-able natural resources, high levels of work on infrastructure/social services, nuclear energy, large stashes of gold, proposed currency alternatives to petro-dollars, bartering oil in something other than dollars. Ask Iran or Iraq how things are going when their govt’s propose/implement even half of these items.
8. Oscar Zoroaster | August 30th, 2011 at 2:12 pm
I don’t believe in the age demographic angle. Or spontaneous revolt. Spontaneous revolutions are always crushed quickly
Here’s a more plausible explanation, that it was planned long ago
Interview with General Wesley Clark on how he got a memo that the US would take out 7 countries in 5 years: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Lybia, Somalia, Sudan, Iran. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXS3vW47mOE
9. super390 | August 30th, 2011 at 3:38 pm
Neocons are not subtle, and they are not fast. They had Libya on their target list until he sold out to the capitalists. Then it dropped way down the list, and then the list became a joke as the US failed to even advance from Target 1 to Target 2.
When Iraq was Target 1, it was easy to tell, because Cheney had been working around the clock for 10 years to create an entirely synthetic exile movement that not a single Iraqi was actually willing to fight for. Which appears to be Cheney’s M.O.; he mistrusts populism so much he couldn’t even figure out how to harness the right-wing extremists who were freed in 2008 to become the Tea Party. He didn’t want Iraqis whom other Iraqis would fight for.
Cheney created an entire industry of fake Iraqi stuff: exiles, organizations, and evidence. A lot of people were working on it, and it tied up a lot of Congress’ time in hearings. Pretty busy over on the London end too.
They weren’t subtle about Georgia either, and publications like The Exile were all over Bush’s buildup of the local despot and how it fit into the vast strategic conspiracy against Russia all along the worst pipeline route ever, the BTC. All of it now a shambles.
The neocons completely failed to see Tunisia and Egypt coming, therefore they were completely caught flat-footed in Libya. It takes them years to get anything going precisely because they have no grassroots support in any of the countries they mess up and all the evidence of same must be cultivated in right-wing news media. This time, too many of the right-wingers were cheering for Gadafy because they hate Obama too much to help themselves. It was not possible to achieve that wonderful Goebbbelesque symphony of united voices that worked so well on so many other issues.
So it will probably go more like South Africa, one of the sadder chapters in Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, where the ANC leaders genuinely believed they had to sell out to the West to get the investment money to survive. However, at the time there were no counter-examples. Now, there are quite a few countries that chart an independent course. The Brazilians and South Africans (who did sell out and yet are still pro-Gadafy, notice) should probably do themselves and the Libyans a favor and stop boycotting the place out of spite.
As for China, they’re sitting on 3 trillion bucks of foreign exchange. If they’re kicked out of Libya, they just open up the vaults and buy oil on the open market, driving up the price for everyone else. But 3 trillion bucks speaks louder than everything else currently on Earth, so they’ll be back one day, and they’ll be here, there and everywhere.
In contrast, the biggest joke about those erstwhile armed evangelists of capitalism, the neocons, is that they never understood money.
10. andy | August 30th, 2011 at 4:03 pm
It was like someone grabbing a fly. “Shit, economy’s lookin’ bad. Quick! Gotta steal another country!”
11. anon | August 30th, 2011 at 4:36 pm
Gwynne Dyer catches up with the War Nerd, how many years later?
http://gwynnedyer.com/2011/was-george-bush-a-sleeper/
12. Alen | August 30th, 2011 at 4:53 pm
what revolution? what kids?
it was a plain invasion planed for months.
http://www.southern-mistral.cdaoa.fr/GB/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=56&Itemid=103
13. dominic | August 30th, 2011 at 5:26 pm
Well, i dont have the interest to find the reference, but im sure a commentor with more brain cells than me can do it quick enough, but somewhere I read that the armed factions in Libya have been armed for a long time, and they already tried to revolt sometime in the last ten or so years, and that they were even on the international terrorist list until this war. You know, ‘cuz ‘Daffi was our boy. but im not sure what their motivations where.
War Nerd, make a good point generally speaking with this article, but its journalistic/analystic integrity is a bit lacking. War Nerds “kill ’em with babies” theory plus Kleins “Shock Doctrine” equals This Article. Vaguely true, but basically nothing new or informative.
Its the same story all the time: they want ENFRANCHISEMENT. In this case, into the capitalist global order. In Roman it was the Italians wanting Roman citizenship, later it was the Goths for the same reason. Etc etc
14. Rex | August 30th, 2011 at 7:13 pm
I wonder if Gaddafi’s biggest mistake was making his son Saif the heir to the throne.
All those hopes and dreams by middle management crushed. Who wouldn’t want to become Gaddafi instead of Gaddafi.
15. Joe Guy | August 30th, 2011 at 8:32 pm
Don’t forget all Western Govts hate Quaddafi because in the 70s he helped every dick who wanted to blow stuff up.
He made sure they money and more important, Semtex.
The Brits especially want him gone.
16. Punjabi From Karachi | August 30th, 2011 at 8:49 pm
Food for thought.
Also #15 has a point about the long term hatred Western gov’s have for Qazafi from the “terrorist” days. Remember the opening scene from Back to the Future with those Libyan terrorists?
It’s also interesting that the Exile’s star war ‘reporter’ comes up with the post-Soviet Russia/Shock-Doctrine analogy when another article simultaneously references another made up character.
Good thing to bring to mind the long term “Shock Doctrine” path that Libya might potentially fall in.
There is a bone to pick that maybe some of these kids were not as well educated as Qaddafi could have made them. Maybe some of the more educated ones, who won this “revolution” will keep it won.
The more depressed War Tard can prognosticate on that.
17. Sick and Wrong | August 30th, 2011 at 9:25 pm
If Qaddafi make mistakes, he made just TWO:
– closed down the nuclear weapon program in 2003 cause the US “asked him” to…
– didn’t declare a mobilization in Tripoli, could’ve made his army two-three times bigger…
18. rick | August 30th, 2011 at 9:58 pm
Essay is intermittently awkward and misfiring. I’m just happy to have WN essays, like the guy who used to tape record Charlie Parker solos.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMuItUv9xZc
19. Hannibal | August 30th, 2011 at 10:46 pm
Let me get this straight; NATO intervened in order to prevent a massacre (in Benghazi).
With the rebels declaring an all out assault on Sirte(Gadhafi’s hometown) to be imminent, does that mean NATO will be compelled to intervene in order to prevent a similar massacre?
20. Michal | August 31st, 2011 at 1:04 am
@ 17. Oh but Sick and Wrong, have you missed out on Gaddafi propaganda saying weapons were handed out to every single family? About how proud Libyan people are going to battle the foreign colonialists to the last child?
Geeeeeee, I sure wonder why that didn’t work out.
21. empire in decline | August 31st, 2011 at 4:04 am
Really, Gary’s right to compare Libya to Russia in that the West really have absolutely no interest or knowledge on how to fix their problems.
Russia is on track to lose a third of their entire population by 2050. Could anyone imagine if that was their projected population decline under the Soviet Union? Everyone would say it was the fault of Communism and that’s why it’s such an abysmally shitty system.
Millions crawl into the United States from Mexico and Central America but nobody blames capitalism or the Western style of government they’ve adopted. There really is no magic formula to fix Libya’s problems.
The reason why the “solution” is usually carried out using military power is because it’s the easiest option and it’s all they rich nations know how to do: kill and destroy. Building takes a longer period of time and is far more difficult. You have to understand how to build a political consensus, fix infrastructure and the economy. You have to understand the people’s history, language, and culture. You know, stuff faggot liberals care about.
For all that stuff this country just relies on the military, which are full of people from the south and midwest who really wouldn’t care if every person in these peasant country’s were wiped off the planet.
Honestly, does anyone seriously think there was a Marshall Plan for Southeast Asia after the United States killed millions there?
Libya is just desperate to be dragged out of subhuman territory for a generation. They think the U.S. and Europe are interested in helping them but there’s a reason the United States is investing in hydraulic fracturing, fuel cell technology, biofuels, deep underwater offshore drilling and oil sands from Canada, and that reason is so the United States can isolate itself from a world it cares very little for.
What the U.S. has always really wanted was to hear that millions are suffering and dying in places like Libya knowing it doesn’t have to even pretend to care anymore. Maybe the Libyans will get a taste of being treated like decent human beings, but if Russia and Central America is any indication of what rich Western countries can do when they start “caring” Libya can get ready for a pathetically depressing future.
22. Flatulissimo | August 31st, 2011 at 6:14 am
Of course the kids in the US are boring and pathetic. They don’t have the numbers to do anything like stage a revolt. They better be nice and make sure to Skype their grandparents, because the grandparents are probably the only ones left in the family with any money. Not like the grandkids can afford to own a house (even with the housing bubble slowly collapsing), and not like they or their parents will ever have a pension. They better hope granny has a spare room.
Look at the population distribution of the US. It’s all olds. By the time the young are the majority in the USA, I’ll be the old geezer who they don’t care about, like the Russians War Nerd described. Dammit.
Screwed by the Boomers on the way up, and by whatever they are going to call the generation after the Millennials on the way down. Sucks to be me.
23. Sick and Wrong | August 31st, 2011 at 6:17 am
@ 20 Michal, that is not how the mobilization works. I got to admit, what he did there was very fucking lame. “Rise my people, do everything by yourself!”.
@ 19 Hannibal, that is correct, Sirte is being bombed for 3 days already, there’s a blockade around it. Water supply system has been bombed, everyone inside the city is fucked.
24. Mad Props | August 31st, 2011 at 7:33 am
fuck you.
as a pervert, i object to that shit
25. Pilot MKN | August 31st, 2011 at 10:49 am
I can show you people in the United States who are wanting (and assburrowing) for billionaires’ freedom:
The Free State Project in New Hampshire
Of course, it shouldn’t surprise you that I, a closet-case Lincoln Apologist, thinks Jefferson was full of crap.
26. franc black | August 31st, 2011 at 10:54 am
@21. empire in decline
“You have to understand the people’s history, language, and culture. You know, stuff faggot liberals care about. ”
Can I use this line ? I haven’t seen or heard it expressed any better.
27. DeeboCools | August 31st, 2011 at 1:15 pm
A lot of American youths are extremely angry, don’t skype their grandparents, and are available for a revolution right now. You just didn’t meet them because they’re unemployed.
28. Born in USSR | September 1st, 2011 at 6:12 am
The Revolution has one meaning – a change of the elite, so it was in Russia in 1917 and 1991. Everyone wants power and money, freedom is a delusion. People who honestly work – lose.
PS I did not know that Americans are incapable of thinking with your head rather than patterns of propaganda.
I apologize for my English.
29. Anarchy Wolf | September 1st, 2011 at 4:45 pm
@27, also out of shape. And not getting laid.
30. darthfader | September 1st, 2011 at 4:59 pm
I’d also note that the lesson for dictators the world over is clear: don’t give up your nukes or in less than ten years you will be removed by the CIA.
31. Ivan | September 1st, 2011 at 8:54 pm
It’s really really sad that the revolutions stopped on Libya. It would have been MUCH MUCH better if there were tensions and overthrowing of government in Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates. Those are the countries and ruling sheiks that REALLY DO DESERVE to be removed from power.
32. void | September 2nd, 2011 at 8:30 am
Interesting article on Gaddafi’s Mercenaries:
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/08/former-qaddafi-mercenaries-describe-fighting-in-libyan-war/244356/?single_page=true
33. Saif | September 3rd, 2011 at 12:24 pm
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Do the right thing. Wire me, Saif, C/O Hotel Villa Real, Bravo No. 643, Ciudad Acuña, Coahuila, MX.
34. Sonja | September 3rd, 2011 at 3:22 pm
Isn’t it a bit strange that even ‘before’ the revolution got going the ‘rebels’ set up a Central Bank? Vice reports that the rebels are all very young. Who did THIS for them? Well, we know who. This is not a grassroots revolution but just another step in ousting non globalist players to be replaced by NWO puppets.
Tripoli was pretty nice a few weeks ago, now it’s a complete shit-hole. The rebels are imported Al CIAda that have worked for the US and UN all over the world in various uprisings going back to Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Now commie/libs like all the writers on Exile are such nanny state pervs they never mention the US and Europe destroying other countries for profit,(the lack of admission is astoundingly desperate in it’s absence) Obama ordered (tweeted) this invasion from Brazil, claiming a ‘humanitarian bombing’. Well now the ‘rebels are plastic handcuffing all blacks in the country and slaughtering them en masse. I guess the War Commie has not seen that footage. It’s so easy to be blind when you love The State so much as to lick it’s ass while pretending to be an objective journalist.
35. Tim | September 4th, 2011 at 7:20 am
Has Pepe Escobar got some good and useful intel or not???
Al Qaeda Takes Libya with Alex Jones and Pepe Escobar 1/3 @ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5P_y8c78G5s
36. Carpenter | September 6th, 2011 at 8:53 am
“Libya was a lot like Russia, a smaller, warmer Russia. Life wasn’t bad for the average Arab (the average Berber had a harder time). The basics were guaranteed, you weren’t going to be thrown in prison unless you mouthed off. Russia in the 70s and 80s, I mean, not Stalin’s Russia. And although you’re not supposed to admit it, a lot of Russians liked it better back then, when you could take a day off and not lose your job.”
War Nerd, you’ve really been had by the socialist propaganda on websites like … well, the Exile for one thing. Ohh, life was so great in Russia before Yeltsin destroyed it.
Nope. In 1990, the Soviet Union’s GDP was lower than that of Belgium. That’s the entire Soviet Union, not just Russia. People were starving. People had “jobs,” but it was just a propaganda trick, jobs that gave no money to buy bread with. Like the Polish roadside workers told the Western journalist: “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.”
There’s a reason Russians rebelled against the communist criminals. But the socialist propaganda is lying through its teeth about this, as usual.
Then came the boys from Harvard, mostly Jews, and led the “reforms” where the big industries were being given for nothing to a group of twelve oligarchs, at least eight of which were Jews, like Boris Berezovsky. They threw out ordinary Russians in the streets, when their homes were tied to the factories. This group is what Putin fought successfully, slapping them with whatever indictment he could come up with. That’s why the Jewish-run media in the U.S. hate him so much.
But the racial angle is too much for a place like the Exile … unless it can be used as a tool against whites, naming race is forbidden. So let’s just talk about “capitalists” instead, right? And dream up fake stories about wealth in the good old Soviet days.
37. Phoenix Woman | September 7th, 2011 at 7:43 am
Saif @33: I’m sure Sick and Wrong will max out his roubles on you!
Void @32: Thanks for the article on the Tuareg mercenaries Qaddafi used. Here’s a couple nice passages therefrom:
38. Punjabi From Karachi | September 12th, 2011 at 12:25 pm
Where on this planet does anybody see any longing for freedom
I don’t know; Pathan country? Maybe that’s why they’re considered crazy; they want actual libertarian freedom, and will fight, die or starve in their mountains & hills for it; whilst all the plains tribes (or as we call them, ethnicities) that populate not just South Asia, but the world, would gladly trade “freedom” for regular food, housing, clothes and education even.
Pathan tribes want their “freedom”. I don’t know, the War Nerd should expound on this “freedom” thing even more, especially in relation to Pathan folk, and their version of Islam.
39. Booster | September 14th, 2011 at 3:43 pm
@36 “Nope. In 1990, the Soviet Union’s GDP was lower than that of Belgium.”
Yea, I remember…bottle of Pepsi about 2 cents, subway fare – fraction of a cent..monthly salary – 30 dollars That was all based on exchange rate back then and had nothing to do with real GDP. In 1990 in Moscow you could buy a two bedroom apartment for about a thousand dollars, 10 years later the price was $50 000, today about $250 000. Same apartment. So much for statistics. Nothing but obfuscation.
40. Tim | September 24th, 2011 at 9:29 am
“Qaddafi enlists new 12,000-strong army of Tuareg tribal fighters” @ http://debka.com/article/21335/
41. quiborum bak | September 24th, 2011 at 9:31 am
One of your best, Gary. I love your cynicism. You should apply it more often.
For over 40 years I have maintained that all West Europeans have a Lawrence of Arabia complex.
If you want to be cured, ask one of those guys to lift their robe – and smell the roses.
42. Rob | September 27th, 2011 at 9:30 am
I’ve read most of your writings on the Exiled, and you are evolving with each article. Keep probing, you are getting closer. You can see that it doesn’t even has a vague resemblance to what passes for the truth in the MSN or in the history books. You are starting to probe into the central mystery, the essence of geo political power. The pen is mightier than the sword, and that makes you dangerous. Learn well.
43. reagan | November 23rd, 2011 at 8:28 am
no comment
44. chatmina.ir | August 8th, 2014 at 10:19 am
After I originally commented I appear to have clicked on the -Notify me when new comments are added- checkbox
and from now on each time a comment is added I recieve
4 emails with the same comment. There has to be a way you can remove me from
that service? Thanks!
45. Christian Louboutin | August 19th, 2014 at 7:29 pm
I tend not to write a great deal of comments, but i did a few searching and wound up here The War Nerd: Libya,
By da Yout, For da YoutFor Now – By Gary Brecher
– The eXiled. And I do have a couple of questions for you if you usually do not mind.
Is it just me or does it look like a few of these remarks look
like coming from brain dead people? 😛 And, if you are posting on other online sites, I would like to keep up with everything new
you have to post. Could you list of the complete urls of your community
pages like your linkedin profile, Facebook page or twitter feed?
46. URL | March 27th, 2017 at 10:12 pm
Good read, enjoyed it!
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