Vanguard:

A LIBYAN revolutionary fighter has bragged in a leaked video that he was the man who killed that country’s despotic former ruler, Colonel Moammar Gaddafi. The young man, who is pictured but has not yet been identified, said he killed the fallen dictator because he could not bear the thought of taking him alive.

‘We grabbed him,’ the fighter says in the video. ‘I hit him in the face. Some fighters wanted to take him away and that’s when I shot him, twice: in the face and in the chest.’

To prove the video’s authenticity, the fighter then flaunts what appears to be Gaddafi’s bloodstained shirt, before brandishing a gold ring he says he took from the despot’s lifeless finger.

I disagree with the claim that one man killed Gaddafi. It is not a matter of a single individual pulling the trigger. Thousands of people and lives brought the handgun into the circle of time and space that contained the dictator’s body. The person who pulled the trigger is easily replaceable; the movement that made the execution possible is not at all easily replaceable. And was killing Gaddafi necessary? Yes it was. Dictators only understand this language. Recall Camus’ brilliant insight in The Rebel: There is a time when people are willing to compromise, to strike a deal. If that moment is missed, if the people cross the point of no return and become rebels, then no deal is possible. The end can only be the end.

Charles Mudede—who writes about film, books, music, and his life in Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, the USA, and the UK for The Stranger—was born near a steel plant in Kwe Kwe, Zimbabwe. He has no memory...

10 replies on “I Killed Gaddafi”

  1. We all kill everyone, since we are corporal beings participating in this chaotic and cosmic dance. I sneeze on my work computer, and 3 months later… Gaddafi is dead.

    Yay me!

  2. Charles,
    Tough call as to whether Gaddafi “needed” to be killed. As a humanist, I wouldn’t go with it. From the photography, it looked like he was captured, injured and could have been taken prisoner. But, I wasn’t caught up in the frenzy of both the euphoria of overthrowing a dictatorship and even capturing that dictator. Those who did him in may yet face justice or worse. Gaddafi, evidently expressed disdain at being perhaps the rest of his life in exile. His demise should have come as no surprise to him. Alas, like the partisans that did in Mussolini and his wife, a “mob mentality” was in place to wreak vengance. That’s still greatly uncomfortable to me.

    BTW, I am glad you read Camus. I’ve read The Stranger, The Plague & The First Man. He’s one of my favorites.

  4. I personally have hoped for this outcome. Libyans have been in the throes of violence and death because of this monster for too long as it was. It needed to end. He needed to end. The soldier that killed him deserves a medal.

  7. Just put on your medieval glasses and it makes perfect sense. Gaddafi styled himself a king. He was planning on establishing a hereditary monarchy. When you depose a king, you also kill all his ministers and every member of his family you can get your hands on. The Libyans are just doing transition of power 7th century style.

  8. Yesterday I watched more video of his capture, including the part where a rebel soldier sodomized him with some kind of a tool (screwdriver, shovel, it’s hard to see). He was clearly already injured but alive, and would have survived. He clearly suffered violations of the Geneva Conventions.

    The thing that really interests me is what happens to his vast fortune, estimated by some to approaching $500 billion. How much of that is in European, Arab or Caribbean banks? Who in his family is still at large? There’s one son who’s still alive, rumored to be in the desert. Will it be like Mobuto’s supposedly vast fortune, which has never been found and may have never existed? Mobuto’s children have enough to live a modest playboy lifestyle in France but not a plutocrat’s.

  9. @9 The money will disappear at the banker’s leisure. These are secret accounts, and the people who had access to them are dead (or will be shortly). This is why money from Arafat, Mubarek, Mobuto, and other tyrants never makes it back to the people from whom it was stolen. It is stolen by the banks, who never should have been holding it in the first place. Destroy the evidence, and make yourself a tidy profit in the process.

  10. You people are MORONIC ASSHOLES. The government lied its ass off about 9/11. It lied about Iraq. (Remember those weapons of mass distraction?) It lied about Afghanistan, Al Qaeda and a thousand other things.

    Yet you believe everything the government and corporate media say about Gaddafi, under whose leadership Libya enjoyed the highest standard of living in Africa. Libya was debt-free. Black Africans traveled to Libya in search of new lives – until the racist bastard “rebels” supported by NATO began murdering them.

    The truth isn’t hard to learn. You could start with Wikipedia’s article about Gaddafi – or the CIA World Factbook.

    Or you can read what I have to say about The Stranger’s sewer journalism at http://blog.seattle-mafia.org/2011/10/li…

    Fuck you.

    David Blomstrom

    Candidate for Washington State Governor

    http://2012.seattle-mafia.org

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