The Crimes of Col. Qaddafi

August 26, 2011

In the euphoria of the current celebrations, we must not lose sight of the former leader's foul deeds.
By Christopher Hitchens

"In George Orwell's 1939 novel, Coming Up for Air, his narrator, George Bowling, broods on the special horrors of the new totalitarianism and notices "the colored shirts, the barbed wire, the rubber truncheons," but also, less obviously perhaps, "the processions and the posters with enormous faces, and the crowds of a million people all cheering for the Leader till they deafen themselves into thinking that they really worship him, and all the time, underneath, they hate him so that they want to puke."

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Posted by Tom at 05:35

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4 comments:

Solly said...
August 26, 2011 at 8:39 AM  

Hitchens has a lovely way of turning out quote after quote: either his own or pulling out a prescient one from somebody else. It is a rare gift to be able to sum up a person or a situation in just a sentence or two.

 
Karen Olsen said...
August 27, 2011 at 2:44 AM  

I can only hope Libya's next government will be better than the last. They definitely don't need another crazy, amoral dictator at the helm. I still recall Gaddafi up there at the U.N., babbling on for 98 minutes about gosh-only-knows-what, when he wasn't looking for someplace to pitch a tent...


--Karen Olsen

 
Jonathan said...
August 27, 2011 at 7:27 AM  

I find it ironic that he holds Omar Mukhtar as a hero when the opposition used Mukhtar's image in their posters.

Mukhtar fought Italy before the Allies came, but not before Italy ambushed and killed him. The UN gave Libya their independence and a Monarch prior to the criminal known as Gaddafi.

The corruption of the Monarch and Gaddafi can be summed up in one word: oil.

 
Anonymous said...
September 2, 2011 at 1:33 PM  

so Gaddafi was a sweet kid who got caught up in the oil game? Like charlie sheen on wall street? What's next? 9/11 happened because our cars use too much gas? Next card please...

 

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Christopher reads from Hitch-22: A Memoir