The pseudo-revolution in Libya and the Degenerate “Left”, Part II: The role of the degenerate "Left", TAKIS FOTOPOULOS, The International Journal of INCLUSIVE DEMOCRACY, Vol. 7, No. 1 (Winter-Spring 2011)

The end of the Left as a radical movement

The present criminal attack on Libya by the transnational elite and its client regimes is the first war not only to unite the entire transnational elite ―roughly comprised of the G7 countries— but also to secure at least the tolerance of those wishing to become full members of it: countries like China, India and Brazil which are “big” economies purely because of their size, being far behind the G7 countries in every other sense and, therefore, ineligible to participate in the process of taking major global economic and political decisions. Furthermore, for different reasons, this criminal campaign has also secured the tolerance of the “Islamic group”, i.e. Iran, Hezbollah —and consequently Lebanon— as well as Hamas etc, as we saw in Section 4.

Crucially, however, the same criminal campaign has further secured a very significant amount of active or passive support from the Left in general: parties, groups and intellectuals ranging from the usual cheerleaders of the “humanitarian” wars of the transnational elite (the European Greens under Daniel Cohn-Bendit et. al.) to various assortments of Trotskyites, as well as postmodern and life-style “anarchists” and “libertarians” who do not see any need for a political project, preferring instead to fight for human rights alongside liberals all over the world! The amount of direct or indirect Left “support” shown for the present war is, indeed, unprecedented ― even greater than that seen during the first Gulf War. The inevitable result of this is that the “world Left” (as Wallerstein calls it) have not managed to organize a single major demonstration against the war so far, i.e. in the two months since the war was launched. How do we explain this major development which, to my mind, signals the end of the Left as a radical (let alone an anti-systemic) movement?

I think that the explanation lies not so much in terms of that part of the “Left” who actually support the NATO criminal campaign—a part which does not seem to have increased significantly since the previous wars—but mostly in terms of the huge rise of another part of the “Left” who, in effect, adopt the ideological globalization defined below, irrespective of their anti-capitalist or even anti-statist rhetoric. This is the part who, on the one hand, have been criticizing the NATO campaign and, on the other, have been siding with the so-called Benghazi “revolutionaries,” whose role we examined in Part I. This blatantly inconsistent approach has completely emasculated any struggle against the present criminal campaign, as it has created a fundamental contradiction: how can one condemn the NATO intervention and, at the same time, support the “revolutionaries,” who not only asked for this intervention in the first place and played a crucial role in its realization through the UNSC resolution, but who also celebrate the fact that they are currently being used as “Nato's army” ―as a western strategist aptly called them[1]― on the ground? Below, we shall see the various “arguments” put forward by “Left” organizations and members of the “world Left” intelligentsia so as to cover up this blatant contradiction. All the same, it is this indirect support for the war by this degenerate “Left” that is squarely to blame for the present lack of any significant protest movement opposing the new crime of the transnational elite.

To my mind, this stand of the “world Left” on the matter marks the end of the Left as a radical, anti-systemic movement (a pro-systemic Left is meaningless), irrespective of the anti-capitalist rhetoric which this “world Left” occasionally use just as a kind of logo to remind people of the past, in exactly the same way that traditional social-democratic parties like the British Labour party continued to use the term “socialist” long after they had abandoned any links with socialism ―until they finally abandoned the term altogether. Of course, this has not prevented crooks such as Mubarak of Egypt and Ben Ali of Tunisia, who are members of the Socialist International ―which is presently under the chairmanship of the arch social-liberal and destroyer of every social conquest made by the Greek people in the past 100 years, George Papandreou― from continuing to declare themselves socialists!

However, it is not just the stand of most western left-wing parties on the present war that firmly excludes them from the Left, in its traditional sense as a radical movement. This stand only marks the culmination of a process which began with the establishment of the New World Order, signified by two monumental events:

the first was the final collapse of the Soviet revolution and its legacy, as expressed through the regimes of “actually existing socialism’, which resulted in the collapse not just of the communist project but also of the traditional anti-systemic project, and the end of traditional anti-systemic movements.[2]
the second was the rise of the internationalized market economy (often inaccurately called “neoliberal globalization”), which had very significant implications at the economic but also the political and ideological levels. At the economic level, the emergence, and subsequent predominance, of the multinational corporation necessitated the opening and “liberalization” of the markets for commodities, capital and labour which, at the political level, made the social-democratic welfare state no longer feasible and the social-democratic parties redundant, and at the ideological level gave rise to “ideological globalization”.[3]

As regards the ideological globalization in particular, this is a transnational ideology that legitimizes economic and political globalization. In other words, it is an ideology whose purpose is to justify, on the one hand, the minimization of the state’s role in the economy ―which, in a market economy system implies a corresponding maximization of the role of the market and private capital― and, on the other, the decrease of national sovereignty, which complements the corresponding decrease of economic sovereignty implied by economic globalization. Therefore, the core of ideological globalization consists of two basic “dogmas”:

a) the dogma of limited economic sovereignty which legitimizes the present destruction of all social conquests, i.e. the elimination of most of the social controls on markets to protect society from the market system; and

b) the dogma of limited national sovereignty, which legitimizes the destruction of any “rogue” state (i.e. non-client state of the transnational elite) which is not yet fully integrated into the internationalized market economy and its political complement in the form of representative “democracy”. The new version of this dogma is, as we saw in Part I, the “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P).

According to the latter dogma in particular, there are certain universal values which should take priority over national sovereignty. Thus, when, in the transnational elite’s perception, universal values like that of “democracy” (as defined by the same elite ―no relation to the classical conception of it!) are violated, the international organizations (UN Security Council, NATO, etc.) which express the will of the “international community” ―read the transnational elite― or, if necessary, the transnational elite itself headed by the US elite, should impose them using “any means necessary” ―to quote the UN terminology― irrespective of national sovereignty considerations. It is this doctrine of “limited” sovereignty which is used to “justify” military interventions/attacks not only on “rogue” regimes but also on resisting political organizations and movements, which are characterized by the same elite as “terrorist”. And yet, the nations participating in the drafting of the UN charter agreed to the principle of unlimited sovereignty, which was to be limited only with regard to their right to wage war in case of an attack, in exchange for the Security Council’s promise to provide collective security on their behalf ―an arrangement blatantly violated by the US’s “wars” against Afghanistan and Iraq and the present war against Libya.

The brave exceptions to the degenerate “world Left”

To my mind, it is without precedent in the history of the Left that people and organizations who label themselves as “Left”, while supporting exactly the same objectives as those supported by the elites or, even worse, using Left or even anti-capitalist rhetoric for this purpose (as in the case of the calamity “Marxists” and “libertarians” that we shall see below), have now become the norm, when they used to be the exception to the rule. And, unfortunately, in most cases this is not just due to an error of judgement; I would accept this explanation for those in the Left who mistakenly thought that the Libyan “revolution” resembled the genuine mass insurrections of Tunisia and Egypt when it supposedly erupted and later on, in the light of the events that followed, admitted their error. However, once the true nature of the Libyan “revolutionaries” had become clear through their willingness to invite the criminal transnational elite to destroy their enemy and the infrastructure of their country in the process, while giving up any ambition of achieving self-determination (if they had ever had such an ambition!), and those “Leftists” continued to support them, we cannot talk anymore about an error of judgement.

Clearly, such support can only indicate either people and organizations who have been completely assimilated into the New World Order and its ideology and who just wish to play the role of loyal opposition to the system, or alternatively, supporters of a “progressive” Zionism, who have always given less priority to the ideals of the Left than to those of their Zionist ideology. The conflict between the Left ideals and Zionism has now become particularly important, since it is obvious that changing the Gaddafi regime in favour of a client regime of the transnational and Zionist elites, together with similar regime-change in Syria and then Iran, would not only consolidate the client regimes imposed in Iraq and Afghanistan and determine the nature of the client regimes to be established in Tunisia, Egypt and the Gulf states ―including Saudi Arabia― but it would also permanently sort out the Palestinian problem in favour of the Zionists. Therefore, the stakes were never higher for those members of the Left who are also progressive Zionists.

Yet, in the midst of this catastrophic crisis of the Left which, as I wrote above, may prove to be fatal, there have been a significant number of intellectuals and parties/organizations in the Left who have been brave enough to go “against the stream,” at the risk of being called “pro-Gaddafi”, “pseudo-libertarian”, pseudo-anti-capitalist, etc. ―as has already happened to the author of this article. I will not go into the various communist parties which have been called “Stalinist” by the usual Trotskyites, or the Latin American regimes like that of Chavez et al. which have been called similar names. I will only mention, briefly, the views of some intellectuals in the Left who have not betrayed their ideals, for reasons like the ones I mentioned above.

One such intellectual is Prof. Michel Chossudovsky, whose writings and interviews on RT, throughout this criminal attack on Libya, have been very revealing. Indeed, he raised the question of whether the Libyan insurrection was, in fact, a “US-NATO Attempted Coup d'Etat” well before the UN resolution and the NATO attack had taken place.[4] As he stressed in his article:

The US and NATO are supporting an armed insurrection in Eastern Libya, with a view to justifying a “humanitarian intervention”. This is not a non-violent protest movement as in Egypt and Tunisia. Conditions in Libya are fundamentally different. The armed insurgency in Eastern Libya is directly supported by foreign powers (…) The operation was planned to coincide with the protest movement in neighbouring Arab countries. Public opinion was led to believe that the protest movement had spread spontaneously from Tunisia and Egypt to Libya. The Obama administration in consultation with its allies is assisting an armed rebellion, namely an attempted coup d'Etat (…) The real objective of “Operation Libya” is not to establish democracy but to take possession of Libya's oil reserves, destabilize the National Oil Corporation (NOC) and eventually privatize the country's oil industry, namely transfer the control and ownership of Libya's oil wealth into foreign hands (…) The strategic scenario would be to push towards the formation and recognition of an interim government of the secessionist province, with a view to eventually breaking up the country…The broad strategic objectives underlying the proposed invasion are not mentioned by the media. Following a deceitful media campaign, where news was literally fabricated without reporting on what was actually happening on the ground, a large sector of international public opinion has granted its unbending support to foreign intervention, on humanitarian grounds.

As the reader can see, most of these predictions have already been verified or are about to be verified, unlike the ridiculous predictions of people like Immanuel Wallerstein, none of which have been verified, as we shall see below! Furthermore, Chossudovsky saw this new criminal campaign as being “part of the broader military agenda in the Middle East and Central Asia which consists in gaining control and corporate ownership over more than sixty percent of the world's reserves of oil and natural gas, including oil and gas pipeline routes”. In other words, as he put it, “an invasion of Libya under a humanitarian mandate would serve the same corporate interests as the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq. The underlying objective is to take possession of Libya's oil reserves, destabilize the (Libyan) National Oil Corporation (NOC) and eventually privatize the country's oil industry, namely transfer the control and ownership of Libya's oil wealth into foreign hands”. “More generally”, he concluded, “what is at stake is the redrawing of the map of Africa… Libya is targeted because it is one among several remaining countries outside America's sphere of influence, which fail to conform to US demands”.

Although I would not define the aim of this new criminal operation as being purely to take possession of Libya's oil reserves, and I would prefer to regard oil as being part of the strategic campaign of the transnational elite to integrate all non-client regimes into the internationalized market economy and its political complement, representative “democracy” (the New World Order), one cannot, nevertheless, ignore the tremendous importance that the growing scarcity of energy resources in the 21st century has acquired. This is particularly borne out by the recent revelation that, five months before the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, the US administration was making deals with oil companies to determine how Iraq’s energy resources would be divided among them in the post-Saddam era: “the papers show that Lady Symons agreed to lobby the Bush administration on BP's behalf because the oil giant feared it was being "locked out" of deals that Washington was quietly striking with US, French and Russian governments and their energy firms”. At the same time, members of the transnational elite were vehemently denying this, with Tony Blair, for instance, describing "the oil conspiracy theory" as being "the most absurd". [5]

Second, James Petras is worthy of mention, an academic whose militant writings have always revealed him to be a radical Left writer, even if one may not always agree with his conclusions. Although Petras’s conclusions with regard to the ultimate aim of the new criminal campaign are more problematic than those of Chossudovsky, his analysis of the pseudo-“revolution” in Libya and the role of the degenerate Left is, nevertheless, pertinent.

The trouble with Petras’s analysis of the aims of the new criminal attack is that, due to his lack of a theory on globalization and the New World Order, he cannot see that in an internationalized market economy it is, first of all, wrong to continue to refer to US empire-building etc. Although it is true that the US elite is still hegemonic within the transnational elite, more because of its military-political power than its economic power, it is completely inaccurate to identify the transnational elite with the US political and economic elites. Next, it is wrong to assume that the driving force behind the transnational elite’s campaign in Libya is either economic in general (as Marxists of various tendencies assume, or as Chossudovsky does with respect to oil) or strategic geo-political-military (as Petras assumes). In fact, as I have shown elsewhere,[6] the transnational elite’s driving force is both economic and political-military, the ultimate aim being the full integration of all non-client regimes into the New World Order of the internationalized market economy and its political complement, representative “democracy,” as I mentioned in Part I.

Petras then goes on to dismantle the myths ―one by one― created and promoted about Libya by the media of the transnational elite, and parroted by the degenerate “Left”. First, he demolishes the myth of “humanitarian intervention” on the basis of the well-known, catastrophic effects that similar “humanitarian interventions” by the same elite have had on the peoples of Yugoslavia, Iraq and Afghanistan since the establishment of the New World Order, through the use of exactly the same tactics: “bombing civilian as well as military targets on the ground, [in their effort] to overthrow the legitimate government. The current imperial warmongers leading the attack on Libya, just like their predecessors, are not engaged in anything remotely resembling a humanitarian mission: they are destroying the fundamental basis of the civilian lives they claim to be saving.” Thus, as he describes it:

The bombing of Libya has already destroyed major civilian infrastructure, airports, roads, seaports and communication centers, as well as “military” targets. The blockade of Libya and military attacks have driven out scores of multi-national corporations and led to the mass exodus of hundreds of thousands of Asian, Eastern European, Sub-Saharan African, Middle Eastern and North African skilled and unskilled immigrant workers and specialists of all types, devastating the economy and creating, virtually overnight, massive unemployment, bread-lines and critical gasoline shortages…

Next, he demolishes the myth about Gaddafi being a “terrorist” and a violator of human rights, reminding us of the fact that the United Nations Human Rights Commission gave the Gaddafi regime a clean bill of health in 2010! Furthermore, Gaddafi could hardly be described as a “terrorist” after his recent about-turn towards the West (even if it was a superficial one, as we saw in Part I), in which he joined the transnational elite’s “war on terror” during the past decade. As Petras rightly stresses, “the imposition of neo-liberal “reforms,” his political “apostasy” and cooperation in the “War on Terror” and the elimination of weapons of mass destruction, only weakened the regime. Libya became vulnerable to attack and isolated from any consequential anti-imperialist allies”. In fact, as we shall see below, it is exactly on the basis of this about-turn that various Trotskyite Zionists now attempt to distort History completely by claiming that Gaddafi was never an anti-imperialist, and they even attempt utterly to discredit the type of welfare state that he created in Libya (something that Petras describes in detail), with the obvious aim of indirectly justifying the criminal intervention on the grounds that the Libyan CIA-led “insurrectionists” are genuine revolutionaries!

By contrast, Petras demolishes the myth that there are “revolutionary” masses in Libya, a myth used extensively by the degenerate “Left” to justify the brutal attack either directly, or indirectly, as when they hypocritically condemn it while enthusiastically supporting the “revolutionaries,” in the process “forgetting” who invited the transnational elite in the first place, and how those responsible for this fully depend on this elite in order to achieve “regime change” in Libya! Petras accurately describes the role of the degenerate “Left”:[7]

The Left, including the mainly electoral social democrat, green and even left-socialist parties of Europe and the US swallowed the entire mass media propaganda package demonizing the Gaddafi regime while lauding the “rebels”. Parroting their imperial mentors, the “Left” justified their support for imperial military intervention in the name of the “revolutionary Libyan people”, the “peace-loving” masses “fighting tyranny” and organizing peoples’ militias to “liberate their country”.

In fact, as Petras stresses, nothing could be further from the truth and, in the following extract, he describes the real activities of these “revolutionaries” which I also described above:

The center of the armed uprising is Benghazi, long time monarchist hotbed of tribal supporters and clients of the deposed King Idris and his family. Idris, until he was overthrown by the young firebrand Col. Gaddafi, had ruled Libya with an iron fist over a semi-feudal backwater and was popular with Washington, having given the US its largest air base (Wheeler) in the Mediterranean. Among the feuding leaders of the “transitional council” in Benghazi (who purport to lead but have few organized followers) one finds neo-liberal expats, who first promoted the Euro-US military invasion envisioning their ride to power on the back of Western missiles. They openly favor dismantling the Libyan state oil companies currently engaged in joint ventures with foreign MNCs. Independent observers have commented on the lack of any clear reformist tendencies, let alone revolutionary organizations or democratic popular movements among the “rebels”. While the US, British and French are firing missiles, loaded with depleted uranium, at the Libyan military and key civilian installations, their “allies” the armed militias in Benghazi, rather than go to battle against the regime’s armed forces, are busy rounding up, arresting and often executing any suspected members of Gaddafi’s “revolutionary committees”, arbitrarily labeling these civilians as “fifth columnists”.

He then goes on to describe who Gaddafi’s “mercenaries” really are, i.e. those used extensively by the world media to justify the blatant lie that “the people were against the tyrant” at the beginning of this criminal campaign ―a myth that has largely been forgotten now that the racist crimes of the “revolutionaries” have openly been revealed:

The anti-Gaddafi force’s lack of any democratic credentials and mass support is evident in their reliance on foreign imperial armed forces to bring them to power and their subservience to imperial demands. Their abuse and persecution of immigrant workers from Asia, Turkey and especially sub-Saharan Africa, as well as black Libyan citizens, is well documented in the international press. Their brutal treatment of black Libyans, falsely accused of being Gaddafi’s “mercenaries”, includes torture, mutilation and horrific executions [and] does not auger well for the advent of a new democratic order, or even the revival of an economy, which has been dependent on immigrant labor, let alone a unified country with national institutions and a national economy.

This is why, as he explains in a more recent article,[8] there has been major popular support for the Gaddafi regime in this conflict, despite the fact that Libya has, over the past few weeks, been subjected to the most brutal imperial air, sea and land assault of its recent history:

Dozens of CIA and SAS special forces have been training, advising and mapping targets for the so-called Libyan “rebels” engaged in a civil war against the Gaddafi government, its armed forces, popular militias and civilian supporters (NY Times 3/30/11). Despite this massive military support and their imperial “allies” total control of Libya’s sky and coastline, the “rebels” have proven incapable of mobilizing village or town support and are in retreat after being confronted by the Libyan government’s highly motivated troops and village militias (Al Jazeera 3/30/11) (…) The decisive issues in the civil war are not weapons, training or leadership, although certainly these factors are important: the basic difference between the military capability of the pro-government Libyan forces and the Libyan “rebels,” backed by both Western imperialists and “progressives,” lies in their motivation, values and material advances. Western imperialist intervention has heightened national consciousness among the Libyan people, who now view their confrontation with the anti-Gaddafi “rebels” as a fight to defend their homeland from foreign air and sea power and puppet land troops ― a powerful incentive for any people or army. The opposite is true for the “rebels,” whose leaders have surrendered their national identity and depend entirely on imperialist military intervention to put them in power (…) The “rebels,” who enter their villages, are seen as invaders, breaking doors, blowing up homes and arresting and accusing local leaders of being “fifth columnists” for Gaddafi. The threat of military “rebel” occupation, the arrest and abuse of local authorities and the disruption of highly valued family, clan and local community relations have motivated local Libyan militias and fighters to attack the Western-backed “rebels”. The “rebels” are regarded as “outsiders” in terms of regional and clan allegiances; by trampling on local mores, the “rebels” now find themselves in “hostile” territory.

And of course, Petras easily demolishes the other myth promoted by the degenerate “Left” that Gaddafi and his family had just been appropriating all the social wealth of the country at the expense of the proletariat:

The Western media, unable to grasp these material advances by the pro-government forces, attribute popular backing of Gaddafi to “coercion” or “co-optation,” relying on “rebel” claims that “everybody is secretly opposed to the regime”. There is another material reality, which is conveniently ignored: the Gaddafi regime has effectively used the country’s oil wealth to build a vast network of public schools, hospitals and clinics. Libyans have the highest per capita income in Africa at $14,900 per annum (Financial Times, 4/2/11). Tens of thousands of low-income Libyan students have received scholarships to study at home and overseas. The urban infrastructure has been modernized, agriculture is subsidized and small-scale producers and manufacturers receive government credit. Gaddafi has overseen these effective programs, in addition to enriching his own clan/family (…) Libyans, who might otherwise resent Gaddafi’s long autocratic tenure in office, are now faced with the choice between supporting an advanced, functioning welfare state or a foreign-directed military conquest. Many have chosen, quite rationally, to stand with the regime.

Finally, Petras deals with the original myth on which all the propaganda by the degenerate “Left” was based, the myth that the Libyan pseudo-revolution ―which may prove to have been no more than a coup, once all the relevant information has become available― had anything to do with the genuine Arab insurrections in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere:

Unlike all ongoing mass popular Arab uprisings, the Libyan conflict began as an armed insurrection, directed at seizing power by force. Unlike the autocratic rulers of Egypt and Tunisia, Gaddafi has secured a mass regional base among a substantial sector of the Libyan population. This support is based on the fact that almost two generations of Libyans have benefited from Gaddafi’s petroleum-financed welfare, educational, employment and housing programs, none of which existed under America’s favorite, King Idris. Since violence is inherent in any armed uprising, once one picks up the gun to seize power, they lose their claim on “civil rights”. In armed civil conflicts, civil rights are violated on all sides. Regardless of the Western media’s lurid portrayal of Gaddafi’s “African mercenary forces” and its more muted approval of “revolutionary justice” against Gaddafi supporters and government soldiers captured in the rebel strongholds, the rules of warfare should have come into play, including the protection of non-combatants-civilians (including government supporters and officials), as well as protection of Libyan prisoners of war in the areas under NATO-rebel control. The unsubstantiated Euro-US claim of “genocide” amplified by the mass media and parroted by “left” spokespersons is contradicted by the daily reports of single and double digit deaths and injuries, resulting from urban violence on both sides, as control of cities and towns shifts between the two sides.

Last, but not least, it would have been a serious omission not to have included, in the sample list of brave exceptions to the degenerate “world Left,” Alain Badiou[9] ―the philosopher who put a number of unanswerable questions to Jean-Luc Nancy, a supporter of “Western” intervention in Libya. I will only include some of his main questions here, given that most, if not all of them, also refer to the “arguments” of the degenerate Left that we shall see below:

Didn't you notice right from the start the palpable difference between what is happening in Libya and what is happening elsewhere? How in both Tunisia and Egypt we really did see massive popular gatherings, whereas in Libya there is nothing of the kind?

Didn't you know that the French and British secret services have been organizing the fall of Gaddafi since last autumn?

Aren't you amazed that, in contrast to all the other Arab uprisings, weapons of unknown origin emerged in Libya? That bands of young people immediately began firing volleys in the air, something inconceivable elsewhere?

Weren't you struck by the emergence of a supposed “revolutionary council” led by a former accomplice of Gaddafi, whereas nowhere else was there any question of the masses who had risen up appointing some people as a replacement government?

Don't you realize how all these details, and many more, chime with the fact that here, and nowhere else, the great powers were called in to support? That such riffraff as Sarkozy and Cameron, whose aims are transparently sordid, were applauded and worshipped—and you suddenly give them support

Don't you see how after the terror from the air, heavy weapons are going to be supplied on the ground, along with instructors, armoured vehicles, strategists, advisers and blue helmets, and in this way the reconquest (hopefully a fitful one) of the Arab world by the despotism of capital and its state servants will recommence?

Can you simply accept the “humanitarian” umbrella, the obscene blackmailing in the name of victims? But our armies kill more people in more countries than the local boss Gaddafi is capable of doing in his. What is this trust suddenly extended to the major butchers of contemporary humanity, to those in charge of the mutilated world that we are familiar with? Do you believe, can you believe, that they represent “civilization,” that their monstrous armies can be armies of justice?

Badiou then concludes ―in effect responding to the distorted “arguments” of many in the Znet stable (see below)― that it will be too late for the Left to intervene “after the fact,” i.e. after regime change has taken place in Libya, just as it is too late now to intervene in the countries which have already experienced regime change (Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.), countries which are, in effect, ruined for generations to come:

You say in your text that it will “later” be up to “us” (but who is this “us,” if today it includes Sarkozy, Bernard-Henri Lévy, our bombers and their supporters?) to make sure that oil and arms deals, and the like, don't make their return. Why “later”? It is now that we have to make sure, by stopping the great powers as much as we can from interfering in the political processes under way in the Arab world. By doing all that is possible so that these powers, fortunately out of the picture for a number of weeks, cannot reintroduce ―under the damaged name of “democracy” and the moral and humanitarian pretexts that have been used ever since the first colonial conquests― oil and other deals, which are quite simply the only deals that these powers and their states are interested in.

Finally, it is at best stupid and at worst deliberately disorientating to suggest, as many in the Znet stable do, that in helping the pseudo-revolutionaries in Libya (and, indirectly, their butcher patrons in the transnational elite) we are effectively helping the genuine insurrections in Tunisia and Egypt to be transformed into real revolutions. In fact, the opposite is the case! Social self-determination is impossible without national self-determination, and there is no doubt that the present Libyan regime, even after Gaddafi’s seeming about-turn during the past decade, was never a client regime (otherwise there would have been no need for this criminal military campaign in the first place!), and the aim of this new crime of the transnational and Zionist elites is precisely to turn Libya into a client regime. This would have catastrophic indirect implications as regards the future of the insurrections in Tunisia and Egypt, as it would help to ensure that these genuine insurrections were phased out so as to make way for “democratic” client regimes, thereby cutting short any process that could lead to the real political and social self-determination of these peoples. As Badiou indirectly puts it:

the target of the bombers is definitely the popular uprising in Egypt and the revolution in Tunisia, it is their unexpected and intolerable character, their political autonomy, in a word: their independence. To oppose the destructive interventions of the powers means supporting the political independence and the future of these uprisings and revolutions. This is something we can do, and it is an unconditional imperative.

The disgraceful role of the “world Left” in the pseudo-revolution and the new crime of the transnational and Zionist elites

I think that before we start examining the disgraceful stand of most of the “Left” on this issue, it would be useful to see how Bernard Henry-Levy, the well-known playboy of the French “new philosophers,” not only provided the tone for this stand but also, in fact, played a crucial role in the launch of the criminal campaign itself through his close connection with the “mini-Napoleon,” Sarkozy. Thus, as The Observer reported at the time, “the self-appointed intellectual-at-large was under attack for reportedly persuading France's president, Nicolas Sarkozy, to meet and recognise the rebels in Libya. He has been nicknamed "foreign minister B" and was allegedly the driving force behind Sarkozy's "diplomatic blitzkrieg" to secure international approval for military action against Muammar Gaddafi. In short BHL, as he is known, is accused of meddling in affairs of state.” In fact, when asked about this by the reporter he could not hide his enthusiasm at having helped to initiate this new crime of the transnational and Zionist elites by disguising it as “R2P”:[10]

What is important in this affair is that the devoir d'ingérance [the right to violate the sovereignty of a country if human rights are being excessively violated] has been recognized. For the first time this concept was endorsed by the Arab League, by the African Union and by the UN security council. This is huge. And what is even more important is that we avoided a bloodbath in Benghazi.

In fact, according to the same report, the role of BHL (as he is called in France) was not just “intellectual” in the matter. According to a version of events recounted in Le Point magazine, which he has not disputed, Lévy's Libyan adventure began before he left for the country. He called Sarkozy, asking him if he were interested in making contact with the rebels. The answer was “yes”. He then went to Benghazi (via Egypt), where he attended a rebel meeting and asked to speak. "I explained that the world was looking at them and that their struggle was our struggle. It was a very dramatic meeting, very tragic; it was like Sarajevo at its worst time," he told the Observer. And this is his description of what followed ―which is, of course, the PR view of what actually happened, filtered through this well-known egomaniac’s love for publicity given that the rebel leaders had established contacts with the western secret services long before this (as was shown in Part I), and they did not exactly need to wait for BHL to “save” them! :

“I told them, I can be in contact with Nicolas Sarkozy; we are political adversaries, but I can try to persuade him to see you. What do you think about coming to Paris and meeting the president?” The rebel leaders agreed but, following Lévy's address, began making demands about official recognition. More phone calls to Sarkozy followed. The demands were met and the French president launched himself into getting European and UN approval for military action against Gaddafi.

What is even more important is how Lévy justified his motives for taking this stand ―motives which, “by coincidence”, exactly correspond to the arguments of the degenerate “Left” that we shall see next. Thus, when BHL was asked, “why Libya”, his far-from-convincing reply was:

It was an accident of history. I happened to be in Egypt when Gaddafi sent his planes to shoot at the pacifist demonstrations in Tripoli. It seemed to me such an enormous, unprecedented thing, and I felt the Egyptian democrats around me were so horrified by it that I decided on instinct to go to Libya straight away. Afterwards there was the reasoning, and that reasoning was that if we let this butcher massacre his own people, the consequences will be terrible not only for Libya but for the region in general. An unpunished Gaddafi would sound a death knell for the Arab spring, the end of this democratic movement and the immense hope it had raised…."Nicolas Sarkozy telephoned me when he had the result of the UN vote. It was 11.30pm. He said: 'We have won'.

At this point it is worth recalling some details of BHL’s rich career, so that we may understand who he really is. Lévy's reliance on his connections with the French literary and business circles to promote his works is well known. He had business ties with the billionaire François Pinault for years, and he also befriended Jean-Luc Lagardère ―who owned Hachette Livre (the largest publishing house in France) and Hachette Filipacchi Médias (the largest magazine-publishing house in the world)― forcing Vidal-Naquet to go as far as to say that "BHL's intellectual dishonesty is properly unfathomable".[11] He was also one of the first French intellectuals to call for intervention in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and his Zionist connections were publicly revealed at the opening of the May 2010 conference in Tel Aviv entitled, "Democracy and its Challenges". There, his estimation of the Israeli Defence Forces, (i.e. the Zionist army which has arguably been involved in more crimes against humanity than any other army in post-war History), was high: “I have never seen such a democratic army, which asks itself so many moral questions. There is something unusually vital about Israeli democracy”![12]

The Znet empire and the transnational/Zionist elites

Znet, the well-known US-based Empire of “alternative” information, have proved once again that their actual role is that of “Left” cheerleader for the crucial decisions made by the transnational and Zionist elites. This was shown conclusively with respect to the “pink” revolution in Iran two years ago,[13] when they played the role of celebrating the pseudo-revolution of the Iranian bourgeois classes in preparation for regime change there, i.e. the replacement of the Islamic regime by a client regime of the transnational and Zionist elites. Now, not only have most of the main Znet writers been celebrating the Libyan pseudo-revolution even more shamelessly but, also ―directly or indirectly― the criminal NATO attack itself, as we shall see next! This is, of course, absolutely consistent with their stand on the Iranian “revolution”, given that the present Libyan “revolution” ―which is already followed, it seems, by a similar “revolution” in Syria― might well pave the way for a new “revolution” in Iran which, if all has gone well for the transnational and Zionist elites in Libya and Syria, would be decisive this time around as it might be accompanied by a new criminal Western campaign to “save” the Iranian people from the Islamist dictators and impose regime change!

Gilbert Achcar

Achcar, the Trotskyite Lebanese academic and writer (co-author of a book with Noam Chomsky), has been playing the role of the “guru” on the Libyan crisis, with his “insights” having been adopted in one way or another by the other main members of the Znet stable (as we shall see below), but also by other Trotskyites at large. It is, therefore, necessary to devote some time and space to his views.

To begin with, in an interview on Libya which was reproduced widely by the Left Press (ranging from Znet to Red Pepper!),[14] he has no qualms about adopting all the world media’s propaganda on the “impending massacre” in Benghazi, with the obvious aim of justifying his absolute support not only for the “revolutionaries,” but even for the no-fly zone, with all the implications of this ―which had been well predicted even by Pentagon officials but not, presumably, by “leftists” and Trotskyites adopting Achcar’s views! The conclusions he draws in this interview are as follows:

To sum up, I believe that from an anti-imperialist perspective one cannot and should not oppose the no-fly zone, given that there is no plausible alternative for protecting the endangered population. The Egyptians are reported to be providing weapons to the Libyan[s]… The bottom line here again is that we should support the victory of the Libyan democratic uprising. Its defeat at the hands of Gaddafi would be a severe backlash negatively affecting the revolutionary wave that is currently shaking the Middle East and North Africa.

In fact, as we have seen in Part I, exactly the opposite is the case. Yet, this “expert” has not had the decency to regret his despicable statement, even though, just a few days after the launch of the NATO attack, the Libyan air force was destroyed as an effective power (as NATO officials declared at the time) ―to which the response of the “revolutionaries” was to keep asking for more bombing by NATO, obviously not for the “protection of civilians” but for the destruction of their “enemy”, i.e. the Libyan people resisting the criminal foreign attack. One may justifiably wonder, therefore, whether this “analysis” has come from a supposed Trotskyite or just a lackey of the transnational elite!

Then, in a later Znet article[15] written in reply to his critics (there were several of them even among the Znet readers), Achcar repeats and expands on the same intellectual dishonesties to justify the crime. Thus, he informs us, first, that:

(…) every general rule admits of exceptions. This includes the general rule that UN-authorized military interventions by imperialist powers are purely reactionary ones, and can never achieve a humanitarian or positive purpose. What is decisive is the comparison between the human cost of this intervention and the cost that would have been incurred had it not happened.

So, gone are the days when the Left fought for the peoples’ right to self-determination as a general rule, with no exceptions. From now on, this rule is to be conditioned by whatever misinformation the elites may feed us on world events (through their complete control of the world media), and by their power to decide where humanitarian interventions may be necessary (e.g. Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan and now Libya—all of which, “by coincidence,” had been ruled by non-client regimes) or unnecessary (Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and so on — where the opposite is the case)! Thus, the elites see no need to ask the real people of Libya what they want, even though the regime itself offered to organize whatever kind of elections may be required; even if it were not being genuine in its offer, it would, of course, have been very easy for the West to impose a referendum under international observers etc., instead of starting to bomb the country as soon as some “rebels” in Benghazi had begun an armed insurrection with the active support of the western secret services. It is no wonder that, at the end of April, when the “revolutionaries” attempted to prove that their movement enjoyed “massive” support among the tribes, they managed to gather together the leaders and representatives of only 61 major Libyan tribes in Benghazi, whereas some 420 tribes gathered at a tribal meeting in Tripoli a week later, calling on their “brothers of the east” to support the Gaddafi regime![16] This, despite the fact that tribal leaders and representatives were, by then, well aware that the transnational elite, with the greatest military might on Earth behind them, would never ultimately accept any solution to the conflict in Libya other than the overthrow of the existing regime, which will mean that the “revolutionaries’ will take revenge on these tribal leaders as soon as they have taken charge of the new regime to be installed by NATO. And these “revolutionaries” have already shown their brutality against their opponents, as we saw in Part I.

Next, Achcar deviously uses an irrelevant analogy (with his supporters in the Trotskyite and “libertarian Left” often following his example in this): the Second World War! He asks:

Could Nazism be defeated through non-violent means?...In hindsight, would we now say that the anti-imperialist movement in Britain and the United States should have campaigned against their states' involvement in the world war?

So, according to this distorted and ludicrous “anti-imperialist” analogy, the request for help from the USSR or Britain by, say, the Polish or Greek people in their struggle for freedom from Nazi occupation, (something that could obviously not have been achieved by these peoples without foreign help) is the same as one side in a civil war requesting the help of the strongest military force on Earth ―that of the imperialists― in order to fight the other side! This is, of course, unprecedented in world History, as no real revolutionaries have ever made such a request before in any civil war. Requests like these were only ever the preserve of systemic lackeys like the anti-communist white Russians in the civil war which followed the Russian revolution of 1917, or the Francoist fascists in the Spanish civil war, or the Greek rightists in the Greek civil war or, finally, the South Vietnamese lackeys of the Americans in the Vietnam war. Even more importantly, it is the first time that the Left in general (not just certain sectors of it, as in the previous wars of the transnational elite) have supported the “systemic” side (i.e. the one backed by the transnational elite) in a civil war--an historic event that will inevitably mean the demise of the Left as an anti-systemic force.

Achcar then goes on to state a bunch of blatant lies about the nature of the Gaddafi regime ―all in the form of assertions without a shred of evidence to substantiate them. This is the case when he asserts, for instance, that “More than 10% of the Libyan population were "informants" paid for exerting surveillance over the rest of the society” (Question: did he count them? What is his source? —the CIA is excluded). Or, similarly, when he states that Gaddafi “devoted part of the state's oil revenue to improving the living conditions of Libya's citizens, a "revolutionary" version of the way in which some of the Gulf monarchies with high per capita oil income cater to the needs of their own citizens in order to buy themselves a social constituency”. (Question: How, then, would this “expert” explain the UN data to which I referred in Part I, demonstrating that Libya has much better social services even than Saudi Arabia, a much richer country?)

Next, he comes to the reasons for the present attack, arguing first that “the idea that Western powers are intervening in Libya because they want to topple a regime hostile to their interests is just preposterous”. This, at best, shows a zero ability to assess the situation, especially since it is the view of an “expert” on Middle-Eastern Affairs (who has even co-authored a book with Chomsky entitled “The Middle East and U.S. Foreign Policy”!), while people like Chossudovsky, Petras and myself ―not “experts” like him— simultaneously predicted exactly this reason for the intervention. It is we, of course, who have already been proven right, since Obama, Clinton, Cameron, Sarkozy and Co. have been repeating the need for regime change almost every day! At worst, Achcar deliberately lied for his own reasons ―as he has done with regard to most other issues concerning Libya. He then asserts that “equally preposterous is the idea that what they are after is laying their hands on Libyan oil.” In fact, he states that “the whole range of Western oil and gas companies is active in Libya” (which he proceeds to list). However, this list of active companies is, of course, meaningless and only useful in creating false impressions, without concrete data to show the exact amount of oil revenue that these companies receive from Libya and the proportion of the total that their own revenues constitute ―particularly since he does not mention the Wikileaks information on how Gaddafi attempted to reduce the oil revenue of Total drastically, a couple of years ago and, even more so, the Forbes report about the US fears of re-nationalisation of oil (see Part I). Furthermore, there is the recently revealed fact that, for several years now, Gaddafi (under the necessary conditions of secrecy) has systematically been trying to create a new kind of reserve currency to replace the US dollar and the Euro: he organized two international conferences, in 1986 and 2000, with the aim of introducing the Gold Dinar as a single African currency and, in the months leading up to the military intervention, he called on African and Muslim nations to join together to create this new currency through which they would be able to sell oil and other resources around the world. Clearly, such a move would have drastically undermined the power of the transnational elite and threatened one of the main pillars of their economic power, as Anthony Wile, founder and chief editor of the Daily Bell, stressed:[17]

“If Gaddafi had an intent to try to re-price his oil or whatever else the country was selling on the global market and accept something else as a currency or maybe launch a gold dinar currency, any move such as that would certainly not be welcomed by the power elite today, who are responsible for controlling the world’s central banks…So yes, that would certainly be something that would cause his immediate dismissal and the need for other reasons to be brought forward from moving him from power.”

Achcar then continues with another set of blatant lies and distortions, such as the following:

After watching for a few weeks Gaddafi conducting his terribly brutal and bloody suppression of the uprising that started in mid-February ―estimates of the number of people killed in early March ranged from 1,000 to 10,000, the latter figure by the International Criminal Court, with the Libyan opposition's estimates ranging between 6,000 and 8,000― Western governments, like everybody else for that matter, became convinced that with Gaddafi set on a counter-revolutionary offensive and reaching the outskirts of Libya's second largest city of Benghazi (over 600,000 inhabitants), a mass-scale slaughter was imminent.

His original source of information here was obviously Al Jazeera, which manufactured this entire mythology of the “terribly brutal and bloody suppression of the uprising”, something that was never substantiated or corroborated ―certainly not by the blurred images we watched on TV channels, worldwide, of people running through half-empty streets (which could have been archive footage taken anywhere and which, anyway, did not prove what they were intended to prove). And of course, the figures that he quotes as to the number of people killed (between 1,000 and 10,000) could only have come from the “One Thousand and One Nights” and not from the International Criminal Court, whose original indictment refers to the killing of less than 300 people, as I mentioned in Part I. In any case, this court has proven to be an unreliable kangaroo-court set up by the transnational elite in order to “legitimize” their attacks on rogue regimes —it is no wonder that those suspected of real crimes against humanity, like the Bushes (father and son), Tony Blair, Sharon, Netanyahu and others, have never been prosecuted! Finally, Achcar repeats the world media story about a mass-scale slaughter in Benghazi being imminent, a supposition which has now turned out to be a myth similar to the one about Saddam’s WMD. This is simply because, even if the Gaddafi regime had ever intended to carry out such a slaughter (and only a stupid regime would have even considered it, with the western armada at its shores), it was just not in a position to do so. Yet, this calamity Marxist and self-styled “anti-imperialist” is absolutely sure of it! As Milne (a serious Guardian analyst and ―fortunately― not a Middle-East “expert”) stressed: [18]

Cameron insisted on Monday in the Commons that the air and sea attacks on Libya had prevented a “bloody massacre in Benghazi”. The main evidence was Gaddafi's threat to show "no mercy" to rebel fighters who refused to lay down their arms and to hunt them down "house to house". In reality, for all the Libyan leader's brutality and Saddam Hussein-style rhetoric, he was scarcely in any position to carry out his threat. Given that his ramshackle forces were unable to fully retake towns like Misurata or even Ajdabiya when the rebels were on the back foot, the idea that they would have been able to overrun an armed and hostile city of 700,000 people any time soon seems far-fetched.

Then, Achcar attempts to provide an explanation for the motives behind western intervention, aware of how ridiculously inconsistent his argument is that Gaddafi is both “a man of imperialism” and, at the same time, deserving of a very expensive and bloody war against his regime by NATO’s entire armada! His “explanation” involves nonsensical (from the economics point of view) arguments about oil prices and embargoes but, in the end, is founded on the assumption that “the massacre had to be prevented” by the transnational elite. Here is why:

It is nonsensical, and an instance of very crude “materialism,” to dismiss as irrelevant the weight of public opinion on Western governments, especially in this case on nearby European governments. At a time when the Libyan insurgents were urging the world more and more insistently to provide them with a no-fly zone in order to neutralize the main advantage of Gaddafi's forces, and with the Western public watching the events on television ― making it impossible that a mass-scale slaughter in Benghazi would go unseen, as it was so often the case in other places (like the above-mentioned Hama, for instance, or the Democratic Republic of the Congo) ― Western governments would not only have incurred the wrath of their citizens, but they would have completely jeopardized their ability to invoke humanitarian pretexts for further imperialist wars like the ones in the Balkans or Iraq. Not only their economic interests, but also the credibility of their own ideology was at stake.

So, the hysteria created by the world media ―i.e. by the transnational elite controlling them― with regard to Libya, is then used to “explain” why the same elite had to intervene! Interestingly, such hysteria was not created around (proportionately even greater) massacres like the one taking place in Bahrain, where security forces even beat up doctors and nurses inside the hospitals where demonstrators were being treated and caused the disappearance of many of the medical staff.[19] Of course, the hysteria with regard to Libya was completely groundless as it was based on the supposed bombing of demonstrators from the air ―something which was never proven. In reality, apart from the fact that both the Russian satellites and the US Pentagon later denied this false information, as I mentioned in Part I, new evidence is continually emerging which disproves the “massacres” of the regime[20] and, therefore, exposes the lie propagated by NATO ―and repeated by almost everyone in the degenerate “Left”― about the need to save the people of Benghazi from a massacre. Achcar’s fig leaf is the assertion made by the “revolutionaries” that they have not requested any foreign intervention on the ground, only air cover —an assertion backed by the UNSC resolution. However, “foreign intervention on the ground” has already begun in the form of military advisers (which was exactly how the Vietnam war started!) and nobody in NATO excludes the possibility even of “boots on the ground”, as long as this does not constitute a long-term occupation! The French and British media have already mentioned the possibility that “there might yet be a case for the deployment of Nato ground troops if the threat of a massacre returns” ―as stated in a leading article in the Independent recently! [21]

Yet, the same apologist for this crime, who has done more than many to dishonour the Left, has the nerve to criticize those who have seen through his arguments. Thus, after dismissing those in the Left who “shed doubt on the nature of the uprising's leadership”(!) as pro-Gaddafists, he concludes that although it may be unclear what a post-Gaddafi Libya would look like, it is certain that “it can't be worse than Gaddafi's regime”. So, for this calamity Marxist who dishonours everything that Marxism ever stood for, if the successor regime abolishes the present law prohibiting multiple-house ownership and puts an end to the current high standards of education, health and social security (as it is certain to do, since the puppets of the transnational elite who will take over will fully integrate the country into the internationalized market economy), completely converting the country into a client regime on top of all this ―it will not be a worse regime than the present one! But the following question is what clearly shows that either the man does not know what he is talking about or, most probably, that he fully knows what he is talking about — which is infinitely worse! The future will reveal who is right and who is wrong in this assessment:

Can anyone claiming to belong to the left just ignore a popular movement's plea for protection, even by means of imperialist bandit-cops, when the type of protection requested is not one through which control over their country could be exerted? Certainly not, by my understanding of the left.

The blatant lies that he utters next explain the above conclusion:

What then was the alternative to the no-fly zone in the Libyan case? None is convincing. The day when the UNSC voted its resolution, Gaddafi's forces were already on the outskirts of Benghazi, and his air force attacking the city. A few days more, they might have taken Benghazi.

Actually, there is no evidence that Gaddafi’s air force “bombed the city” (it is a different thing if they bombed military installations, which they had every right to do). Furthermore, it is ridiculous to assert seriously that “a few days more, [his forces] might have taken Benghazi”, the second biggest city in Libya, when they are still fighting for control over some villages on the coastline; the same applies to Misurata which is a much smaller city than Benghazi and much closer to the regime’s centre of power!

Then, he argues that “a political solution could have been contemplated had Gaddafi been willing to allow free elections, but he wasn't”. This is one more blatant lie, as shown by the fact that the regime accepted the African Union’s proposal for a political solution but the “revolutionaries” and their NATO patrons refused even to discuss it, by setting the unacceptable precondition of “regime change”. This proves, without doubt, what kind of democrats hypocrites like Achcar and his friends are when they do not even allow the Libyan people to decide the fate of their own regime, as presumably they “know better”!

But his hypocrisy knows no bounds when he says:

Under such conditions, in the absence of any other plausible solution, it was just morally and politically wrong for anyone on the left to oppose the no-fly zone; or in other words, to oppose the uprising's request for a no-fly zone. And it remains morally and politically wrong to demand the lifting of the no-fly zone ― unless Gaddafi is no longer able to use his air force (…) On the other hand, we should definitely demand that bombings stop after Gaddafi's air means have been neutralized (…) And we should oppose NATO turning into a full participant of the ground war beyond the initial blows to Gaddafi's armor needed to halt his troops' offensive against rebel cities in the Western province ― even were the insurgents to invite NATO's participation or welcome it.

Of course, all this has now happened, i.e. Gaddafi’s air force has been neutralized but the bombings still continue, even through the use of murderous US drones whose lethality has been proven in the killing of many more innocent Pakistani and Afghan civilians than “terrorists”. Furthermore, it is a long time since NATO became a full participant of the war, as borne out by the fact that Western military strategists now refer to the “NATO air force of the rebels”. Yet, Achcar and his “Left” supporters have not even thought of dissociating themselves from the pseudo-revolutionaries of Benghazi who demanded NATO’s participation, nor, of course, is it now possible to stop this NATO aggression ―something which should have been done at the very beginning, before it had even started, as Badiou rightly stressed. This is why the “Left” which agrees with Achcar on the following disgusting statement is, indeed, a degenerate “Left”:

The left should certainly not proclaim such absolute “principles” as “We are against Western powers' military intervention whatever the circumstances.” This is not a political position, but a religious taboo.

One should remind such “Leftists” that it is for the sake of such absolute principles as self-determination that peoples have been shedding their blood through the ages, and not for the sake of political compromises appropriate to professional politicians, not genuine revolutionaries…

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky follows Achcar’s line of thinking ―in a more subtle way, of course. Thus, almost immediately after the “uprising” in Benghazi, he adopted all the propaganda promoted by the western media (plus Al Jazeera) about the “bloodbath” created by Gaddafi’s army through its supposed attack on peaceful demonstrators, without even waiting for any independent corroboration of this claim ―later proven to be a myth perfectly manufactured by the transnational and Zionist elites and the client Arab regime of the Emir of Qatar. The latter, in particular, put Al Jazeera (the Arab and English TV station which it finances and controls) on full alert immediately after the “insurrection” in Benghazi had begun, so as to provide live, 24-hour daily reports from Benghazi on the “Libyan revolution” with lively accounts of the atrocities of the Libyan regime, such as its bombing of demonstrators “from the air” (a blatant lie, as we saw above) which killed hundreds (or, as some of the more zealous reporters claimed, “thousands”) of protesters ―another Goebbelsian lie! An entire edifice of vicious propaganda, without a shred of evidence from independent sources to corroborate it, was created and then continually repeated ad nauseam by all the western media throughout the world in an obvious attempt to demonize the Libyan regime. This attempt has been more successful than any earlier efforts to demonize previous enemies of the transnational elite (Milosevic, Saddam) due to the informal “unholy alliance” I mentioned in Part I, which has meant that the same propaganda has been reproduced by almost every other TV channel in the world ―with the honourable exception, mainly, of the countries which abstained with respect to the UNSC resolution, particularly Russia.

So, just a few days after the first Benghazi “demonstrations”, which instantly prompted members of the transnational elite like Sarkozy and Cameron to create panic by calling on their citizens to leave Libya immediately and, in fact, to start evacuating them (something they never did during any other Arab insurrection), and which were followed by the immediate bombing of the country, Chomsky stated in an interview:[22]

I think that more can be done, what is happening is already pretty awful and that could lead to a really major bloodbath. Information is pretty sparse but at least the eastern province appears to be substantially under control by the popular uprising. Tripoli looks very dangerous. I think efforts could be made to provide assistance and protection to the parts of the population that have succeeded in liberating parts of Libya. However, nobody wants a western intervention. That would probably be not only wrong but also disastrous. But actions could be taken through the UN presumably…

In other words, not only does Chomsky adopt —without hesitation― all the western propaganda about a tyrannical regime creating a bloodbath, but he also refers to a genuine “popular uprising” (presumably like those of Tunisia and Egypt, though he omits the “detail” that the uprising in Libya was an armed one!) and in fact a “liberationist” one (thereby assuming that most, if not all, the people of Libya supported it—a blatant lie, as subsequent events have shown)!

Then, in another interview given to M. Albert and S. Shalom and published in Znet more than a month later, after the western criminal attack had started, Chomsky was able to expand much more on the same theme, shamelessly supporting the pseudo-revolutionaries of Benghazi and therefore, indirectly, the criminal NATO campaign itself ―while, hypocritically, criticizing it![23]

When a non-violent uprising began, Qaddafi crushed it violently, and a rebellion broke out that liberated Benghazi, Libya’s second largest city, and seemed about to move on to Qaddafi’s stronghold in the West. His forces, however, reversed the course of the conflict and were at the gates of Benghazi. A slaughter in Benghazi was likely, and as Obama’s Middle East adviser Dennis Ross pointed out, “everyone would blame us for it.” That would be unacceptable, as would a Qaddafi military victory enhancing his power and independence (…) What Washington seeks is what Bush announced: control, or at least dependable clients.

So, although by the time of Chomsky’s interview it was evident to all, apart from the “commissars of the system” (his own words used to describe the propagandists of the system line) that, far from a non-violent uprising against a “cruel dictator” (as he characterizes Gaddafi) we have been witnessing a civil war in Libya from the beginning, he has continued to reproduce the same lies in which he associates the genuine popular uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt with the armed insurrection in Libya. Furthermore, although he speaks of the transnational elite’s motives in replacing the present regime with one which they could control more easily, he then obscures these motives by adding an explanation which actually whitewashes the elites’ behaviour: that they acted the way they did because they were concerned that the impression would otherwise be created that they were effectively condoning a massacre. This, despite the fact that the elites were, of course, fully aware (as Chomsky also should be, and many other serious non-systemic analysts are) that Gaddafi neither had the intention (it would have been suicide for the regime) nor the capability, for that matter, to carry out such a massacre of the Benghazi population!

Next, in answer to a question on how “…an anti-interventionist who believes in the self-determination of nations and people [can] ever legitimately support an intervention, either by the U.N. or particular countries”, he gives an effective master class in deviousness when he attempts to change the topic from one of self-determination to one of anti-statism:

There are two cases to consider: (1) UN intervention and (2) intervention without UN authorization. Unless we believe that states are sacrosanct in the form that has been established in the modern world (typically by extreme violence), with rights that override all other imaginable considerations, then the answer is the same in both cases: Yes, in principle at least… unless we take the global state system to be sacrosanct in the form established in the UN Charter and other treaties (…) Preventing a likely massacre in Benghazi is no small matter, whatever one thinks of the motives.

Thus, wearing his anarchist, “anti-statist” hat, first he clearly abandons the principle of peoples’ self-determination and, second, he indirectly sides with the criminal western campaign.

However, as regards the former, it is worth referring to what Murray Bookchin, a genuine anti-statist anarchist (despite his open Zionism which spoiled an otherwise unblemished anarchist record[24]) had to say about Chomsky’s supposed anti-statism:[25]

The dumbing of the Left has gone so far that someone like Chomsky, who professes to be an anarchist, wants to strengthen or at least support the centralised State against demands for its “devolution” to state governments, as though the centralised State could be used against the corporations, which it has always aided in the long run!

So, for Chomsky, the state, which he considers irreplaceable in the people’s struggle against corporations, becomes easily disposable here as it is not something “sacrosanct” ―despite the fact that peoples today (unfortunately) still live in states rather than confederations of local societies and, therefore, it is only through states that they can express their political, economic and cultural self-determination at the national level. It is on the basis of this principle of self-determination that the sovereignty of states was affirmed by the UN charter, as I mentioned in Part I, and even if peoples in some countries manage to establish anarchist federations or confederations instead of states in the future, they will still require a corresponding principle of self-protection at the international level, otherwise any world bully who may not like such new, people-based international entities would be able to destroy them militarily, according to the utterly suspicious pseudo-anarchist principle that Chomsky establishes above. In other words, what Chomsky is effectively doing here is reiterating the R2P principle ―under cover of “anti-statism”― used to pass the UNSC resolution which justifies the present crime of allowing the self-appointed “saviours” to destroy another country in order to “save” its people (whom they never asked, of course) from a cruel dictator trying to massacre them!

As regards the latter, i.e. Chomsky’s indirect siding with the criminal NATO campaign, it is obvious that one cannot applaud the Benghazi “revolutionaries,” who “liberated” part of the country through their “popular uprising,” while simultaneously condemning NATO for actually having different objectives regarding their attack to those they profess to have when, in fact, it is the same “revolutionaries” who demanded the present use of NATO air and naval power ―ostensibly for the protection of civilians from the regime’s air attacks but, actually, as the “revolution’s” air force and navy in order to achieve regime change, as they and their patrons openly declare! In other words, it is now clear that both the transnational and Zionist elites and the “revolutionaries” in Benghazi have only one, common objective: regime change in Libya, and as this objective could never be achieved by the revolutionaries alone, without the massive NATO support which they requested and applauded, supporting the “revolution” inevitably means supporting the NATO campaign as well, and the rest is just a smokescreen.

Finally, Chomsky has no qualms about using a clearly deceptive argument to “justify” his effective abandonment of the libertarian principle of self-determination, under the pretence that he supports an anti-statist position. His answer to the question below is as memorable as the above answers! The question was, “what do you think ought to be the aims of an anti-interventionist and anti-war movement in the U.S. regarding U.S. policies?”, to which his main answer was:

Those concerned for peace, justice, freedom and democracy should try to find ways to lend support and assistance to Libyans who seek to shape their own future, free from constraints imposed by external powers. We can have hopes about the directions they should pursue, but their future should be in their hands.

Of course, the belief that when NATO will have achieved their goal of bringing about regime change they will just leave the country free to follow a “democratic” course and will not try to impose their own client regime, for which they have fought so hard, borders on extreme naivety, to say the least, if one takes into account any previous historical precedent. So, if there are any “Libyans who seek to shape their own future, free from constraints imposed by external powers”, clearly they will not be among the “revolutionaries” (supported by Chomsky and the rest of the degenerate “Left”) who, at best, never raised any objection to the formal request for a “no-fly zone” made by their “Provisional Council” or, at worst, begged NATO to carry out their attack and are actively collaborating with them now. And it is even more naïve to believe that the post-Gaddafi, NATO-imposed governments would allow such movements as those described by Chomsky to flourish. Lastly, it is grossly deceptive for a self-professed anarchist, as Bookchin describes Chomsky, to state that “[the Libyans’] future should be in their hands” ―as though the present criminal campaign were aiming to achieve this objective rather than to make it much harder to achieve than before― since it creates the illusion, for many Libyans, that a sort of “democracy” will have been established in their country once the present regime has been ousted. In fact, a similar illusion is shared by many of Chomsky’s fellow Americans who have not yet realized that it is their economic and political elites who hold “the future in their hands”.

Michael Albert

The founder of the Znet empire has attempted to play a supposedly median role between the “two activist sides” as regards the criminal NATO attack, very reminiscent of how James Petras aptly describes the relevant pseudo-rational way of thinking with respect to the Spanish civil war:[26]

No doubt, Anglo-American progressives and leftists will continue to debate (in “civilized tones”) the pros and cons of this “intervention,” following in the footsteps of their predecessors, the French Socialists and US New Dealers from the 1930’s, who once debated the pros and cons of supporting Republican Spain… While Hitler and Mussolini bombed the republic on behalf of the “rebel” fascist forces under General Franco who upheld the Falangist banner of “Family, Church and Civilization” ―a fascist prototype for Obama’s “humanitarian intervention” on behalf of his “rebels”.

Thus, Albert begins with some “thoughts”, which supposedly are common to all activists debating the matter (he modestly considers everything else to be just “nuances” or “further qualifications”!), and he proceeds to give a list of what he considers to be “some basics” of what we know about US foreign policy and Libya (to which many may object for various reasons, of course), ending with what he calls “our values”[27]:

we all, who are reading this, presumably want :

1. Maximal gain in the quality of life, freedom, and future prospects of people in as many countries as possible, both in the region and elsewhere too, and...

2. That popular movements in Libya and throughout the region have room to enlarge their awareness and demands and to press their cases without suffering extreme repression or even massacre.

Then, in view of these “basics” he asks:

Can we agree, therefore, that any U.S. undertaking in Libya - or for that matter anywhere - will have as its main intentions virtually zero to do with saving innocents other than as something to claim for purposes of rationalization? And can we agree that U.S. intentions will have everything to do with attaining better results for empire, albeit in this case in a difficult situation where U.S. interests are challenged and may be seriously diminished and where public pressure is limiting U.S. options? And can we agree that we want to aid prospects for oppositions to institute new relations throughout the region?

As one can see, none of the “agreed” basics, values and questions refer to the crucial issue which in fact separates the real, from the degenerate, Left today: what is our position on the principle of the self-determination of peoples living in a state — Chomsky has taken a clear position effectively abandoning this principle, as we have seen, whereas Albert tries hard, and in a silly way, to avoid the issue with such sophistries! It is no wonder that he ends up with a set of meaningless or irrelevant conclusions with regard to self-determination. In other words, if one agrees with Albert on his pseudo-basics, no basic principles divide the Left today and there is no question of whether the basic principle of peoples’ self-determination has been brutally violated, whether the “revolutionaries” have been acting as NATO’s ground army or whether Libya has already been destroyed as a result of the attack (irrespective of what will happen in the future), considering that, at best the country will be divided and at worst there will be regime change — all this is unimportant to Albert! Not surprisingly, he draws the following amazing conclusion:

Can't we then all also agree that at most limited protection of the opposition should occur and that as little as possible beyond that will be better than escalating intervention, and that in any event actions widening the assault into an interventionist war would be horrific for countless reasons? (…) Disagreements about the past could then take a very distant back seat to unity against wider war in the future.

So, let’s forget about the past and accept some “limited protection of the opposition” (by F16s, drones and Tomahawks!) ―note that he does not even pretend, as the elites do, to care about “protecting the civilians”— but let’s avoid any “actions widening the assault into an interventionist war”.

And this is the voice of a self-proclaimed anarchist!

Immanuel Wallerstein

Wallerstein, a frequent contributor to Znet who functions as the main spokesperson for the “world Left” ―a euphemism for the reformist Left which, as I tried to show above, is in fact today’s degenerate “Left”— attacked Chavez and other Latin American States for insisting that “the western world wishes to invade Libya and “steal” Libya’s oil”, in an article written on March 15th^[28]. As Wallerstein wrote in his “acute” judgement of the situation at the time:

The whole analysis misses entirely what has been happening, and reflects badly on Chavez’s judgment ―and indeed on his reputation with the rest of the world left… The second point missed by Hugo Chavez’s analysis is that there is not going to be any significant military involvement of the western world in Libya. The public statements are all huff and puff, designed to impress local opinion at home. There will be no Security Council resolution because Russia and China won’t go along. There will be no NATO resolution because Germany and some others won’t go along. Even Sarkozy’s militant anti-Qaddafi stance is meeting resistance within France…. despite the call of the hawks for U.S. involvement, President Obama will resist.

As is well known, just a couple of days after his prediction ―which certainly deserves a place in the Guinness Book of World Records for being one of the worst ever made― the UNSC resolution was passed authorizing a no-fly zone and "all necessary measures" to enforce it, and this was immediately followed by brutal bombings involving F16s, Tomahawk missiles and the rest and, a little later, by a similar decision by NATO authorizing them to take control of the whole military operation!

He then continued with an analysis and predictions as accurate as the above, discovering that if there is any conspiracy, it is one between Gaddafi and the West to slow down, even quash, the Arab revolt!:

The issue therefore is not Western military intervention or not. The issue is the consequence of Qaddafi’s attempt to suppress all opposition in the most brutal fashion for the second Arab revolt. Libya is in turmoil because of the successful uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. And if there is any conspiracy, it is one between Qaddafi and the West to slow down, even quash, the Arab revolt… The key struggle worldwide right now is the second Arab revolt. It will be hard enough to obtain a truly radical outcome in this struggle. Qaddafi is a major obstacle for the Arab, and indeed the world, left.

No wonder a commentator in the redstomp forum accurately pointed out[29]:

The real lesson for people to take away from this, is that the vast majority of the Western Left march in lock-step with their imperialist bourgeoisie. People like Wallerstein are not champions of the poor and oppressed. They are merely part of the imperialist propaganda apparatus, the part aimed at confusing, demoralizing, and sabotaging the most politically advanced elements that would be ready to fight imperialism, if they weren't confined in the ideological straight-jackets people like Wallerstein and the ISO put them in. No, the real conspiracy here is between the phony, fraudulent, establishment Left, and imperialism.

Next, following the NATO attack, Wallerstein made another great discovery, that the new crime was just one big deliberate distraction from the Arab Spring:[30]

The entire Libyan conflict of the last month — the civil war in Libya, the US-led military action against Gaddafi — is neither about humanitarian intervention nor about the immediate supply of world oil. It is in fact one big distraction — a deliberate distraction — from the principal political struggle in the Arab world. There is one thing on which Gaddafi and Western leaders of all political views are in total accord. They all want to slow down, channel, co-opt, limit the second Arab revolt and prevent it from changing the basic political realities of the Arab world and its role in the geopolitics of the world-system.

So, neither humanitarian reasons nor oil are mainly behind the new crime, it is all just about the need of the elites (including the Gaddafi elite!) to limit or channel the Arab revolt and prevent it from changing the basic political realities of the Arab world. Wallerstein, of course, made no distinction whatsoever between the genuine insurrections in Tunisia and Egypt and the one in Libya and, in fact, he explicitly associated the latter with the former (saying that “it was the direct result of the success of the revolts in the two neighbouring countries, Tunisia and Egypt”). Then, to justify the ridiculous predictions he made in the previous article while, at the same time, whitewashing the NATO crime, he reproduced another media tale, according to which the “interventionists” were opposed very strongly by the US military, who considered a war in Libya to be unwinnable and an enormous military strain on the United States. The latter group seemed to be winning out, when suddenly the resolution of the Arab League changed the balance of forces:

How did this happen? The Saudi government worked very hard and effectively to get a resolution passed endorsing the institution of a no-fly zone. In order to get unanimity among the Arab states, the Saudis made two concessions. The demand was only for a no-fly zone and a second resolution was adopted opposing the intrusion of any Western land forces… What led the Saudis to push this through? Did someone from the United States telephone someone in Saudi Arabia and request this? I think it was quite the opposite. This was an instance of the Saudis trying to affect U.S. policy rather than the other way around. And it worked. It tipped the balance. What the Saudis wanted, and what they got, was a big distraction from what they thought most urgent, and what they were doing ―a crackdown on the Arab revolt, as it affected first of all Saudi Arabia itself, then the Gulf states, then elsewhere in the Arab world.

The above account which, in fact, whitewashes the stand of the transnational elite, is not only based on complete inaccuracies but also on a distorted interpretation of what really happened. First, there was never any unanimity among the states in the Arab League, as we saw in Part I, since of the 22 members, only 11 were present and 2 voted against, and out of the 9 who voted in favour of the no-fly zone, 6 were Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) members, the US-supported club of Gulf kingdoms/sheikhdoms, of which Saudi Arabia is top dog. Second, it seems that it was not the Saudis who made the offer to which the poor Americans were forced to submit, as presented here, but the other way around and, of course, the client regimes in the Arab world which voted for UN/NATO intervention had every reason to do so, since they wanted to get rid of one of the very few members of the League which was not a client regime — they needed no “persuasion” from Saudi Arabia in order to do this. This is how Pepe Escobar, the well-known Brazilian analyst, described what happened:[31]

Two diplomatic sources at the United Nations independently confirmed that Washington, via Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, gave the go-ahead for Saudi Arabia to invade Bahrain and crush the pro-democracy movement in their neighbor in exchange for a "yes" vote by the Arab League for a no-fly zone over Libya - the main rationale that led to United Nations Security Council resolution 1973. The revelation came from two different diplomats, a European and a member of the BRIC group, and was made separately to a US scholar and Asia Times Online. According to diplomatic protocol, their names cannot be disclosed.

So, the R2P principle was thrown overboard by the transnational elite with regard to the Gulf states in order to secure the Arab league vote, which persuaded Russia and the rest to waive their vetoes and allow the UNSC resolution to be passed. Furthermore, it seems that Wallerstein’s new prediction, that there will be no intrusion by any Western land forces, will soon prove to be as accurate as his previous one: not only has the French elite, over the past few weeks, been discussing the possibility of land forces being sent to Libya, but it has just been reported that, apart from NATO “military advisers” being sent to the “rebels,” operation EUFOR Libya envisages the use of EU ground troops to protect humanitarian convoys at the request of the UN, according to the German newspaper, Bild.[32] Clearly, the involvement of western ground forces in Libya is just a matter of time. So, the attack on Libya, far from being “a great distraction from the Arab revolt” and “a mistake even from the narrow point of view of the United States”, as Wallerstein claims in his effort to whitewash the crime, is in fact very much part of the long-term plan to integrate all non-client regimes in North Africa and the Middle East fully into the internationalized market economy, either through the “democratization” of ex-dictatorial regimes like those of Tunisia and Egypt (and, when the time is ripe, even Saudi Arabia), or through pseudo-revolutions and instigated civil wars which may require a military attack by the transnational elite, as in Libya and, possibly, in Syria and Iran also.

Tariq Ali

Tariq Ali, an ex-Trotskyite and the present editor of the genetically-modified NLR (which formally abandoned its old anti-systemic problematique to adopt the reformist one prevailing in the “world Left,” once the New World Order had been established), is also a frequent contributor to Znet. As soon as the armed insurrection in Benghazi had taken place, Tariq Ali participated in the campaign to demonize Gaddafi through an article in the Guardian[33], in which he tells a pack of lies that even bourgeois historians would not dare to tell. Thus, he describes the 1969 coup, which every historian on earth would call a national liberation coup by low-ranking officers under Gaddafi with massive popular support, as “an eccentric coup in Libya that brought a young, semi-literate officer to power”. Immediately afterwards, he adds the slanderous hint that “his Saudi enemies have always insisted that the coup was masterminded by British intelligence” — presumably because the British establishment were in a suicidal mood and wanted to get rid of their puppet, King Idris, so as to replace him with Gaddafi, one of whose first acts was to get rid of the British military forces in March 1970, just six months after taking over and shortly before throwing US military personnel out of the country and closing down their airbase too! Yet, despite the fact that even the calamity Marxists recognize Gaddafi’s anti-imperialist role during the first three decades of his regime, even though they attempt to discredit him on the basis of his about-turn in the last decade, Tariq Ali, who is also a self-styled historian, has no qualms about resorting to blatant historical lies by declaring that “Gaddafi's professed nationalism, modernism and radicalism were all for show, like his ghosted science-fiction short stories”.

Next, Tariq Ali blatantly distorts the facts even further, in a way reminiscent of tactics which only illiterate security-service agents might use against their opponents, given the evidence presented in Part I (based on UN data and other authoritative sources) relating to the regime’s welfare services: “Despite the oil wealth [Gaddafi] refused to educate Libyans, or provide them with a health service or subsidised housing, squandering money on absurdist projects abroad”.

In a later Monthly Review article,[34] he even finds an alternative “explanation” for the criminal attack. As he puts it:

The US-Nato intervention in Libya, with United Nations security council cover, is part of an orchestrated response to show support for the movement against one dictator in particular and by so doing to bring the Arab rebellions to an end by asserting western control, confiscating their impetus and spontaneity and trying to restore the status quo ante… The assault on Libya, greatly helped by Gaddafi's imbecility on every front, was designed to wrest the initiative back from the streets by appearing as the defenders of civil rights.

In the process, he adopts all the yellow propaganda of what he calls the “debased western media” (presumably to gain some easy credit for being “radical”), about Gaddafi's brutality in ordering his air force to bomb his own people etc. So, for Tariq Ali, the transnational elite gathered together their armada and began a very expensive military campaign just in order to create a favourable image for themselves and to wrest the initiative back from the streets! No economic or geo-political factors are involved, according to him and, of course, the Libyan insurrection is just like the Tunisian and Egyptian ones, i.e. an insurrection by “the people against a brutal dictator”. What he “forgets” to ask (like everybody else in the degenerate “Left”), however, is who invited the UN/US/NATO to intervene in Libya in the first place? Did the request come from those “streets” in Libya which he defends, by any chance, whose inhabitants decided, in a hara-kiri mood, that they wanted the West to wrest the initiative from them?

Trotskyite tendencies and the criminal NATO attack on Libya

Some Trotskyite tendencies, supposedly belonging to the anti-systemic Left, have adopted the position of indirectly supporting the NATO criminal attack ―while formally criticizing it― by associating the genuine “popular insurrections against dictators” in Tunisia and Egypt with the armed insurrection in Libya (which almost immediately turned into a civil war) and, consequently, fully supporting the Benghazi insurrectionists ―who invited NATO to Libya in the first instance― as though they were genuine “revolutionaries”.

One such tendency is the British Socialist Worker’s Party (SWP), which has taken an unacceptable stand on the issue of Libya and should, therefore, be classified as belonging to the degenerate “Left” as well, unlike for example the British Maoist Party (CPGB-ML), which has adopted a clearly anti-systemic line on the matter. Thus, the theoretical guru of the SWP, Alex Callinicos, in answer to the question of whether the Left should back intervention in Libya”,[35] begins with the statement that “[it] has caused some divisions on the genuine left” — giving the impression that he is referring to the anti-systemic Left. But just a couple of lines later, one discovers the dreadful stand adopted by Callinicos and the SWP through his argument that “the most intelligent case for supporting the intervention has been made by my old friend Gilbert Achcar”, whose despicable positions we examined above.

As Callinicos writes about Achcar:

A consistent opponent of Western imperialism, Gilbert argues that this is an occasion when anti-imperialists should be willing to make compromises. Gilbert is right, revolutionaries have sometimes been prepared to take help from imperialist powers. Soon after the Russian Revolution of 1917, invading German armies were threatening the survival of the infant Soviet republic. Britain and France offered help. Lenin wrote to the Bolshevik central committee: “Please add my vote in favour of taking potatoes and weapons from the Anglo-French imperialist robbers.”

Of course, the example Callinicos uses is completely irrelevant to the Libyan case, and whether he uses it because he does not realize what he is talking about or because he is deliberately trying to disorient people in the Marxist Left, the effect is the same: confusion and disorientation. Lenin was obviously talking about accepting material help from certain western capitalist powers while they were fighting another capitalist power ―help that clearly came with no strings attached, since the Bolsheviks had the power to impose this condition on these powers, having already begun creating an alternative socio-economic system in Russia. On the other hand, there are no ideological or other differences between capitalists and the Libyan “revolutionaries”: they have not defined any “progressive” demands ―unless the calamity Marxists supporting them would regard the ousting of Gaddafi, civil rights and civil society as being “progressive”! Furthermore, they have demanded from the transnational elite not just material help, but their entire military might —the greatest on Earth― in order to attack their enemy, and they have, in fact, handed them this power “on a plate”. Obviously, the transnational elite would never embark on such an expensive campaign with no strings attached, i.e. the full integration of the country into the internationalized market economy, the opening and liberation of its markets and, therefore, the eventual takeover of local resources by the transnational corporations. And of course, yet again, Callinicos ―much like his friend Achcar― is not bothered about the main issue involved here: the Libyan people’s right to national self-determination. Even when Callinicos wrote the article, it was obvious that the perception that events in Libya just represented another case of “the dictator against the people” was just a piece of western propaganda, as a full civil war was in development. However, Callinicos and the rest of the degenerate “Left” were merely discussing the pros and cons of military intervention for “humanitarian purposes” at the time, and not the obvious question of how the Libyan people’s right to national self-determination could be secured, for example through a UN-controlled plebiscite that would give the Libyan people the chance to decide whether or not they wanted the present regime to continue to exist.

Next, Callinicos, agreeing with Achcar’s flimsy argument that oil is not the reason for the intervention, concludes that:

The US is rushing to get in front of the Arab revolutionary wave that threatens to sweep away its system of domination… They hope to use the revolutions to restructure Arab societies along more stable neoliberal lines. Taking on Gaddafi is a way for the US to associate itself with the revolutions—and to shape their politics. BHL describes addressing a meeting of revolutionaries in Benghazi and persuading them to appeal for Western support. No doubt he’s bragging, but the anecdote illustrates the immense efforts under way to incorporate the revolutions.

This nonsensical “argument” is based on three equally nonsensical implicit assumptions: first, that the Libyan “revolution” is a genuine one, which it is not, as we saw in Part I; second, that the theatrics described by BHL represent reality rather than the myth according to which the “revolution” was incorporated by the West through similar theatrics, and not through the leadership of the “revolution” which, in fact, consisted of the West’s “men in Benghazi”; and third, that the transnational elite are attempting to use the “revolutions” “to restructure Arab societies along more stable neoliberal lines,” which is only partly true. This third assumption applies to cases like Tunisia and Egypt, where the transnational elite simply used the army of either country ―which it controls― to replace the despots who had been in power while keeping the regimes in place, but it does not apply to cases like Libya where the majority of the people seem to be supporting the regime and not the “revolution”, which has necessitated the military intervention of the transnational elite in order to impose a new client regime on the people through the “rebels”.

The fact that the SWP and its guru do not give a damn about the peoples’ right to national self-determination is also made obvious by their stand with respect to the African Union proposal. This proposal consisted mainly of a ceasefire and a dialogue between the government and the rebels on a political settlement, but it was immediately rejected by both the rebels and their foreign patrons through the usual trick of setting impossible preconditions, like the prior departure of Gaddafi and his inner circle, or the withdrawal of the regime’s militias to their barracks ―presumably, so that the “revolutionaries” (with their NATO air force) could easily take over!

The SWP took exactly the same “revolutionary” stand on the matter as the “revolutionaries” and their patrons, as demonstrated by Judith Orr ―the editor of the party’s theoretical organ, Socialist Review― when she stated that “moves by the African Union (AU) to impose a ceasefire in Libya pose a grave danger that the country’s revolution will be betrayed”,[36] thereby unequivocally accepting that the “revolution” was genuine ―despite everything that has happened in the past month!― and resorting to devious distortions of the facts like the following:

The AU’s involvement has been hailed as an African initiative in order to make it more palatable. In reality it is totally dependent on Western support…

And to the question of why it was “dependent on Western support”, her answer was: “The AU was only allowed to break the “no fly zone” across Libyan airspace and land in the capital, Tripoli, with the permission of Nato. The European Union approved the delegation of African representatives” — as if it would have been possible for the African delegation to land in Tripoli without such Western permission! Of course, Orr omitted to mention the utterly hostile stance of the transnational elite, and their spokespersons like Hillary Clinton, towards the proposal!

Then, she proceeded to utter blatant lies, like the one that NATO “has not ruled out a deal with Gaddafi over the heads of those who made the revolution”, even though Obama, Clinton, Sarkozy, Cameron and all other representatives of the transnational elite now begin all their speeches on Libya with the sentence, “Gaddafi must go”, before the idea of a solution to the crisis has even been discussed. This, without taking into account the fact that certain criminal professional politicians like the above have attempted to assassinate Gaddafi and his close associates several times by heavily bombing his compound, while others even argue that he is a “legitimate target”.

Finally, the same author shamelessly added, in an attempt to legitimize the “rebels” once more:

“The desperation of their situation led many in Benghazi to call on the United Nations and the West to help (…) as the real nature of the West’s intervention is uncovered, some rebels are becoming disillusioned (…) Negotiations for the future shape of the revolution are taking place behind closed doors. These are often between new defectors from the regime and Western emissaries. The organs of popular democracy that emerged in the early days of the revolution are no longer in control.

Question: if this is so, why do “the organs of popular democracy” (which nobody has seen in action, despite the fact that all the Western TV channels have been based in Benghazi, as if Tripoli were non existent!) fail to condemn their leaders, even at this late stage, and why, instead, are the rebels themselves cooperating, at this very moment, with the western military advisers and giving the criminal NATO pilots information on the “targets” (i.e. their fellow Libyans) that they are about to pulverize?

Belatedly, however, the SWP did discover the Libyan people’s right to national self-liberation and, in an article by Simon Assaf[37], it is stressed that:

The euphoria that greeted Western intervention in Libya has given way to deep suspicion as the fighting drags on. Libyan revolutionaries find themselves not only confronting Colonel Gaddafi’s dictatorship, but also struggling for national self-determination… In the early stages of the revolution, the rebels had gone into battle with a gun and a megaphone. Their victories came when they got sections of Gaddafi’s army to crumble and defect. But once the Nato bombing started, the defections stopped cold. The nature of the conflict shifted to a balance of military strength.

However, following these mainly correct observations, the article goes back to expressing the party line, i.e. that the genuine revolutionaries are continuing their attacks on “Gaddafi’s forces” despite NATO (as if it were God who invited NATO in the first place), and it then blames the “rebel” Transitional National Council (TNC) for the situation that has developed because it is “polarised between those who rose out of the insurrection and those who defected from the regime”, with the insurrectionary leaders having been marginalized as the small amount of military aid given to the rebels is sent to those with close ties to the West. His conclusion is:

Libyans now find themselves having to continue their uprising against the regime while they shake themselves free from Western control…The intervention of the West has proved to be a dangerous illusion.

Question: does the author believe (contrary to the observations of every journalist on the ground) that the rebels would be able to maintain control of just one of the places that they have “conquered” with NATO help, if the huge western umbrella that protects them were suddenly to disappear? If not, and given that, as I showed in Part I, the “rebels” have not been able to reconquer a single region since the regime’s militias began their guerrilla war against them, even with the full military support of the strongest armada in the world (proving that there is strong social support for the regime), why does the “revolutionary” Left of the SWP variety still support them and why does it not, instead, adopt our stand in favour of the national self-determination of the Libyan people, with no foreign intervention from any side? For parties and organizations like the SWP, and other Trotskyite tendencies that we shall consider next, their stand on Libya is the litmus test which determines whether they really belong to the anti-systemic Left or to the degenerate “Left”, which plays the role of the “loyal” opposition to the system.

Another Trotskyite tendency which has adopted a similar position is the Coordinating Committee for the Refoundation of the Fourth International (CRFI), of which the General Secretary of the Greek section (EEK), Savvas Michael (Sabetai Ben)-Matsas (MM), has launched a vicious attack on Inclusive Democracy and on the author of this article personally because of our stand on the issue. Thus, although MM mainly reproduces Achcar’s miserable “arguments” ―which we saw above― in the article that he wrote before the NATO attack entitled, “Tunis, Cairo, Benghazi, Athens, Wisconsin”,[38] it would be worth our while to consider the devious distortions of historical facts to which he has resorted in order to demonize the Libyan regime and extol the Benghazi “revolutionaries”.

At the outset, MM not only associates the Libyan “insurrection” with the genuine insurrections in Egypt and Tunisia, like Achcar does, but he goes a crucial step further by asserting that the “Arab masses” are now turning against “not only monarchs and emirs but first of all, regimes that emerged in the anti-colonial awakening in the 1950s and 1960s and then capitulated to imperialism to serve their own greedy interests.” In other words, in a blatant historical distortion, he associates the client regimes of Sadat/Mubarak and Ben Ali with that of Gaddafi which, even after his opportunistic but superficial about-turn in the last decade, never became a client regime —otherwise, the present brutal NATO attack on it would have been meaningless, something that calamity Marxists like the author of this article obviously fail to understand! Indeed, it is worth adding some recently-revealed facts at this point, which show that Gaddafi’s about-turn in the last decade was a superficial one― of which the transnational elite were well aware but, evidently, the calamity Marxists were not! The first fact relates to the pan-African Dinar which I mentioned above. The second was revealed very recently by a reporter for the Independent based in Derna (a main “rebel” stronghold): in the middle of the previous decade, while Gaddafi was supposed to behave like a good imperialist, according to calamity “Marxists” and “anarchists”, his regime was secretly recruiting people to fight the US army as it invaded Iraq (Chomsky called these fighters “terrorists,” of course!). Thus, according to an eyewitness in Derna, “many here remember that it was the regime that opened offices at the local university offering to pay students' passage to go and fight the Americans in Iraq”.[39]

MM then goes on to tell a series of blatant lies, like when he states that the regime “deliberately” prevented the development of a local working class as “the workforce was imported from abroad and now it is evacuating the country”. Of course, the assertion that a regime deliberately forbade the development of a working class (presumably to avoid the working-class revolution that calamity Trotskyites constantly believe to be imminent ―not unlike how Jehovah’s witnesses see the Second Coming!) would not be out of place in a science fiction scenario. As any real Marxist knows, the non-development of a fully-fledged working class is not the outcome of a deliberate act by a dictator but, actually, the outcome of the uneven process through which capitalism developed not only in Libya but in every peripheral country during the post-war period (see, for example, the effects on the European South which this process, being the ultimate cause of the present economic crisis in the EU, has had[40]). Although Libya has had the resources to develop a self-reliant economy, it has not managed to do so, and neither have all the other oil-producing countries ―even those run by non-client regimes― since none of them have tried to break systematically away from the internationalized market economy. This is how Gerald A. Perreira, who has lived and worked in Libya, described the reasons that labour has had to be imported from abroad: [41]

The fact is that the Libyan revolution has achieved such a high standard of living for its people that they import labor from other parts of the world to do the jobs that the unemployed Libyans refuse to do. Libya has been called by many observers inside and out, “a nation of shop keepers.” It is part of the Libyan Arab psyche to own your own small business and this type of small scale private enterprise flourishes in Libya.

MM then creates even more historical distortions which he does not even bother to substantiate: one of his accusations against Gaddafi is that, “for an entire period, [he] played the role of a Bonaparte balancing between the conflicting interests of imperialism, the Arab masses and other anti-imperialist forces, particularly during the Cold War period and the resurgence of the national struggles in the periphery”. This is, of course, blatantly untrue, as every reliable historical account refers to his clearly anti-imperialist role in the first three decades following his rise to power in 1969, (something which MM himself is forced to admit below) ―a role that he seemingly betrayed, mainly in the last decade, only by superficially capitulating to imperialism, rather than by really doing so, as we saw above. But this is MM’s completely distorted view of what happened:

The Gaddafi regime, lacking a real social popular base, capitulated to imperialism in the most obscene manner, particularly the last decade. While in the first period the US base in Whilas was kicked out and the oilfields were nationalized, now, Gaddafi and his corrupt clique sold out the oil producing country to big companies of Britain and Italy at the first place. The old “demon” of the West was transformed into a darling of the rulers in London, Paris, and Rome.

Aside from the fact that MM’s assertion that Gaddafi sold “the oil producing country to big companies” is just a blatant lie, as we saw in Part I, his other fabrication that the Gaddafi regime “lack[s] a real social popular base” may well fit in with his scenario (which is actually a copy of the propagandist script promoted by the transnational and Zionist elites, and the media they control, to justify Western intervention), but it does not at all fit in with the facts!

Question: if the regime lacks any real social base, who on Earth are the people comprising Gaddafi’s militias (if we reject the myth that they are mercenaries ―as even the Western media have now done), who so bravely continue to fight not only the pseudo-revolutionaries, whom MM supports, but also the strongest and most brutal military force in the world, instead of surrendering and saving their own skins?

At this point, MM finds it appropriate to launch a dishonest attack on Inclusive Democracy and on the author of this article personally:

It is a shame, an unequivocal symptom of political and moral bankruptcy the fact that Chavez and his “Socialism of the 21st century”, or… the “libertarian” Takis Fotopoulos and his “Inclusive Democracy” give support, hardly “critical” or covered under the veil of “neutrality between the two civil war camps” in the name of anti-imperialism. Radical “socialist” or “anarchist” anti-imperialism that does not challenge capitalism shares now the fate of radical bourgeois nationalism in its inglorious but bloody fall.

I will not respond to his insults which, as always, are characteristic of the insulter, as it is obvious that what constitutes an unequivocal symptom of political and moral bankruptcy is not an anti-systemic analysis which sets out to show the systemic factors at work in the NATO attack on Libya (and which does not support Gaddafi, as he mendaciously claims!) but, rather, the calamity Marxists’ indirect support for the present internationalized market economy and the transnational and Zionist elites controlling it, who attempt to integrate any “rogue” state into the New World Order through their wars. It is, however, slanderous (as well as ridiculous!) to assert that the Inclusive Democracy project “does not challenge capitalism” and that “it shares now the fate of radical bourgeois nationalism in its inglorious but bloody fall”. It is no wonder that calamity Marxists (and particularly those of the Trotskyite variety among them) have not yet understood that the Marxist project itself has been in a crisis ―marked by the collapse of actually existing socialism, in particular― since May 1968, as, presumably, they just blame Stalinism for it!

MM’s conclusions are as utterly nonsensical as his unsubstantiated assertions. His first conclusion is that “Gaddafi is the man of imperialism, even if now hypocritically it abandons him” (this must be the first time in History that “a man of imperialism” has forced the entire transnational elite to launch a long and expensive military campaign to remove him, just out of hypocrisy!). His second conclusion is that although “there is no doubt that imperialism has its own supporters in the opposition camp…to actually fight imperialism in the region we have to support the just struggle of the Libyan people to crush its tyrant” (which is, yet again, the same old NATO & media myth that there is a struggle going on between “the people” and the “tyrant”—presumably those constituting the militias and bravely fighting the “rebels”, who are unable to advance a few kilometres without massive NATO help, are just mercenary aliens recruited by Gaddafi from other planets!). Finally, his third conclusion is simply an apotheosis of contradictions:

The working class, first of all in the NATO countries, has the duty to stop any imperialist intervention and stand by the side of revolutionaries, opposing pro-imperialist forces and calling for a program of Permanent Revolution in the country, in the region and internationally.

So, it is the duty of the working classes in NATO countries to stop any military intervention and stand by the “revolutionaries,” i.e. those who not only applauded their CIA-led leadership’s decision to invite NATO, but who have also been helping NATO to kill the regime’s militias in any way possible! And as we have not seen a single “popular organ” of the “revolution” opposing the NATO attack either, when MM says that we have to “stand by the side of revolutionaries, opposing pro-imperialist forces”, he is either consciously lying and attempting to disorient the anti-war movement, or, at best, he is living on a planet of Permanent Revolution with no means of returning to Earth!

In a later article, MM attempts to “theorize” the above conclusions (i.e. to place them on the Procrustean bed of a primitive kind of Marxism), by trying directly to connect the world capitalist crisis of 2007-09 with the Arab “revolutions,” indirectly castigating all those who do not make this unsubstantiated and utterly silly connection (which surely bears no relation to the Libyan case, by any stretch of the imagination) for being apologists for capitalism! Thus, as he puts it, “the essential relation between world crisis and revolution…is what all the apologists [for] Capitalism, right and “left”, ignore and/or try to keep in the darkness”. Of course, I would be the last to deny any relationship between the capitalist system and the Arab “revolutions,” but this relationship is much more complicated than the simplistic one that MM attempts to establish, as I shall try to show below ―and, in fact, this argument of his is even worse than the “oversimplifying vulgar economicism” that he supposedly rejects.

First, he completely misunderstands the process of neoliberal globalization which he sees as just being a financial phenomenon, as is clear from the following extract:

The quadrupling of the oil price after the 1973 war in the Middle East and in the context of world crisis after the collapse of the Bretton Wood framework in 1971-73, had as consequences not only growing budget deficits, recessions and growth of external debts, but also the process of “recycling of petrodollars,” which played an important role in the transition to finance capital globalization and neo-liberalism from the 1980s onwards.

Obviously, MM (like many primitivist Marxists, and unlike enlightened Marxists such as Leslie Blair[42] who have aptly tried to update Marxist theory to suit today’s conditions) is totally unaware of the historical phenomenon that has marked our era: the emergence of the multinational corporation and its need for the opening and deregulation of markets in order to expand, which has led to the present form of globalization and neoliberalism and, in turn, to the present crisis, as I have tried to show elsewhere.[43] As a result, he is completely oblivious to the fact that the economic crisis in peripheral countries is structural, i.e. that it is due to the structural distortions in their economic development caused by their integration into the capitalist market economy in the post-colonial era, and that this crisis has now intensified with their closer integration into the internationalized market economy. As such, the crisis of peripheral economies is unrelated to the central financial crisis, which has completely different causes. In other words, the present expansion of poverty and unemployment in peripheral countries is due to their closer integration into the internationalized market economy, which implies the further opening of their markets to the transnational corporations as well as the further liberalization of them which, in turn, necessitates the minimization of social controls on markets. But at this point, we need to make the crucial distinction between client and non-client regimes in peripheral countries.

In peripheral countries with non-client regimes which have both the ability (e.g. oil revenue) and the will to maintain a form of welfare state (Venezuela, Libya, Iran, etc.), poverty and involuntary unemployment can be minimized through the fair distribution of oil revenue. In this way, the effects of these countries’ integration into the internationalized market economy can be offset to a significant extent, particularly when the same regimes also adopt policies maintaining as many social controls on markets as possible — something that inevitably urges the transnational elite to add them to the blacklist of “rogue” states. However, this is also why such regimes have strong social bases, making “regime change” according to the dictates of the transnational elite (i.e. so as to integrate these countries fully into the New World Order) impossible without a military attack by them, usually preceded, nowadays, by some kind of “orange revolution” encouraged by the same elite. On the other hand, in peripheral countries with client regimes (Tunisia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, etc.) which have neither the ability nor the will to do something similar, the despotic regimes are kept in place only through the most brutal repressive mechanism imaginable, as they are only able to maintain power through the bribery of some privileged social groups and through their ties with the transnational elite. However, once the transnational elite had decided that pseudo-democratic regimes like the ones being established now in Egypt and Tunisia could bring about the integration of these economies into the world market more effectively than the despotic regimes could, the writing was on the wall for the likes of Ben Ali, Mubarak and the rest.

Furthermore, the Arab “revolutions” hardly bear any relation to the Greek “implosion of 2008”,[44] as Greece does not have a despotic regime but, rather, the kind of pseudo-democracy that the transnational elite is now planning to impose all over the Arab world. Greece is also a member of the EU, of course, and the economic parameters of the crisis in the peripheral countries of the EU are defined very differently. So, when MM mixes up everything from the Greek implosion to the genuine insurrections against the client peripheral regimes of Tunisia and Egypt and the pseudo-revolutions to overthrow the non-client peripheral regimes of Libya and Syria, far from demythologizing the actions of the ruling classes, as he claims to do, he is actually attempting to disorientate people. Specifically, he is trying to disorientate the anti-capitalist movement, so that instead of fighting the common enemy of the peoples of both the North and the South ―i.e. the transnational elite― they may be persuaded to support the struggles of “rebels” (organized by the same elite) against peripheral, non-client “rogue” regimes, in association with the transnational elite!

On the basis of this completely false and uninformed theoretical analysis, MM has been updating his distortions with regard to the Libyan case, hypocritically condemning the NATO intervention in the process:

the imperialists of France, Britain and the US, under the cover of the UN Security Council 1973 decision, intervened pretending to be the “saviors of last resort” and arbiters for a “post-Gaddafi transition”, following a stalemate in military operations between rebels and pro-Gaddafi’s forces (…) The main aim of imperialism is to transform Libya into a NATO/UN protectorate, and a crucial strategic military stronghold against the Arab revolution, first of all the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions.

What he does not reveal is, who requested the involvement of the “imperialists” in a civil war, an act that would inevitably lead to Libya’s transformation into a NATO protectorate. Was it, by any chance, the same “revolutionaries” whom he appraises as the spearhead of the coming world revolution (through their leadership from whom they never dissociated themselves), and who are now being trained by NATO troops and are actively helping the NATO pilots to kill those whom they consider their enemies among the Libyan people? In this sense, the position of MM and the Greek section of the CRFI is contradictory, if not deliberately disorienting. According to this position:

our Party (…) fights uncompromisingly the imperialist aggression, and at the same time, supports the popular revolutionary struggle of the rebelled “shebab”( youth) against Gaddafi’s tyranny, warning about the reactionary role of the Benghazi self-appointed “government” of former Gaddafi’s officials and other willing collaborators of imperialism. We say “Imperialists out from Libya and the Middle East”, and at the same time, “Down with Gaddafi and all tyrants! Victory to the revolution!” You cannot fight Gaddafi without fighting to defeat imperialism, and you cannot fight imperialism without fighting to overthrow Gaddafi.

However, if MM were really being honest in stating that “You cannot fight Gaddafi without fighting to defeat imperialism, and you cannot fight imperialism without fighting to overthrow Gaddafi”, he would have referred to the truly revolutionary way in which this double aim could have been achieved: the true revolutionaries of Libya could have clearly dissociated themselves from the CIA-led National Provisional Council and its request for help from NATO. They could, first, have publicly condemned any NATO interference in Libyan affairs, and once such interference had been prevented, they could have requested a non-military UN force to supervise a ceasefire and to hold an internationally-supervised referendum on the political future of the country. If the Gaddafi regime had not been prepared to accept such a referendum (which would have been very peculiar indeed, as it has already accepted the AU peace proposal), these true Libyan revolutionaries could have called upon similar revolutionaries from Tunisia and Egypt and from all over the Arab world and beyond to form an international brigade to fight alongside them and force the Gaddafi regime to accept such a democratic solution to the problem.

Alternatively, the CRFI position is, in fact, covert support for the agenda of the transnational and Zionist elites, under a “revolutionary” pretence. Therefore, those supporting this position and subscribing to the mythology that there is a “popular uprising against the dictatorship of Gaddafi” which is, supposedly, “an inseparable part of the Arab revolutionary process” (a mythology based on the convenient assumption that client and non-client regimes can be dumped into the same category) can only belong, at best, to the degenerate Left or, at worst, to what I earlier referred to as the “progressive Zionist” camp ―particularly if they continue to support this dishonest stand even now that all the new data that we saw in Part I, regarding the pre-planned character of the “revolution”, have come to light. This latter camp is comprised of the Left Zionists who, in fact, control much of the “world Left” and its publications, and who have essentially set the degenerate Left’s agenda on Iran, Libya and Syria according to the R2P principle, which was introduced to the UNSC by NGOs and Bernard Kouchner, the well known Zionist ex Foreign Minister of France (see Part I)!

Conclusions

It is not only those who call themselves "leftists" (e.g. Achcar) or "libertarians" without hesitating to support the transnational elite’s criminal attack, who are clearly shameful. Equally contemptible are the corresponding "leftists" and "libertarians" who, despite (sometimes hypocritically) disagreeing with the NATO campaign, still side with the Libyan “revolutionaries” (like all those in the Znet stable and the Trotskyite tendencies we have just examined). This, together with the international media’s massive propaganda campaign which, as we have seen, now includes the Islamic media, has led to the international anti-war movement being literally frozen, much more so than during the previous wars of the transnational elite. This fact will have catastrophic implications with regard to the struggle to resist neoliberal globalization, unless a new anti-systemic Left is built, so that the fossils of the past who still influence public opinion (partly due to some of them being promoted by the systemic world media for obvious reasons) may be consigned to the dustbin of History!

To my mind, the only honest Left stand that any socialist or libertarian can take on the Arab revolutions is one which supports the struggle against the transnational elite and its institutions, with the aim of forcing this elite to stop the crime that they are carrying out in Libya ―and preventing the similar crimes that they are planning to carry out tomorrow in Syria and beyond― a crime with no other goal than to change the map of North Africa[45] and beyond to the extent that a sea of client regimes, fully integrated into the internationalized market economy, may be created from Morocco and Algeria right through to Afghanistan. It would then be up to these peoples to continue their fight, after being liberated from the oppression of the transnational elite, so as to create truly democratic structures that would ensure the equal distribution of political and economic power among all citizens, i.e. an Inclusive Democracy!

[1] Shashank Joshi (associate fellow of the Royal United Services Institute), “We would be ill-advised to be dragged into another land war like the Iraq disaster,” The Independent (16/4/2011).

[2] see Takis Fotopoulos, “The End of Traditional Antisystemic Movements and the Need for A New Type of Antisystemic Movement Today”, Democracy & Nature. http://www.democracynature.org/vol7/takis_movements.htm

[3] Takis Fotopoulos, “Recent Theoretical Developments on the Inclusive Democracy Project,” in Global Capitalism and the Demise Of The Left: Renewing Radicalism Through Inclusive Democracy, ed. by Steven Best (The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy, 2009). http://www.inclusivedemocracy.org/fotopoulos/english/brbooks/Recent_Developments.html

[4] Michel Chossudovsky, “Insurrection and Military Intervention: The US-NATO Attempted Coup d'Etat in Libya?,” Global Research (March 7, 2011); see also a similar stand taken in Takis Fotopoulos, “Libya: crime and deception,” (in Greek) Eleftherotypia (12/3/2011). http://www.inclusivedemocracy.org/fotopoulos/greek/grE/gre2011/2011_03_12.html

[5] Paul Bignell, “Secret memos expose link between oil firms and invasion of Iraq,” The Independent (19/4/2011).

[6] see “The aims of the global war,” in Takis Fotopoulos, “The global 'war' of the transnational elite”; see, also, Takis Fotopoulos, “Globalisation, the reformist Left and the Anti-Globalisation "Movement",” Democracy & Nature, Vol.7, No.2 (July 2001). http://www.democracynature.org/vol7/takis_globalisation.htm

[7] James Petras and Robin E. Abaya, “The Euro-US War on Libya: Official Lies and Misconceptions of Critics,” The James Petras Website (25/3/2011). http://petras.lahaine.org/articulo.php?p=1847&more=1&c=1

[8] James Petras, “Libya and Obama’s Defense of the Rebel Uprising,” Global Research (2/4/2011). http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=24142

[9] Alain Badiou, “An open letter to Jean-Luc Nancy” (4/4/2011). http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/463-alain-badious-open-letter-to-jean-luc-nancy

[10] Kim Willsher, “Bernard-Henri Lévy dismisses criticism for leading France to conflict,” The Observer (27/3/2011). www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/mar/27/libya-bernard-henri-levy-france

[11] “Bernard-Henri Lévy,” Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard-Henri_L%C3%A9vy

[12] Or Kashti, “Bernard Henri Levy: "I have never seen an army as democratic as the IDF",” Haaretz, (30/05/2010). http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/bernard-henri-levy-i-have-never-seen-an-army-as-democratic-as-the-idf-1.293087

[13] Takis Fotopoulos, The pink revolution in Iran and the “Left” (IJID, summer of 2009), ch. 5. http://www.inclusivedemocracy.org/journal/books/iranian_pink_revolution/Chapter_5.htm

[14] Gilbert Achcar interviewed by Stephen R. Shalom about the situation in Libya, “Libyan Developments: interview with Gilbert Achcar,” Znet (19/3/2011). http://www.zcommunications.org/libyan-developments-by-gilbert-achcar

[15] Gilbert Achcar, “Libya: a legitimate and necessary debate from an anti-imperialist perspective,” Znet (25/3/2011). http://www.zcommunications.org/libya-a-legitimate-and-necessary-debate-from-an-anti-imperialist-perspective-by-gilbert-achcar

[16] “Clans to help shape Libya’s future,” The Financial Times (01/05/2011).

[17] “Saving the world economy from Gaddafi”, RT (05/05/2011). http://rt.com/news/economy-oil-gold-libya/

[18] Seumas Milne, “There's nothing moral about Nato's intervention in Libya,” The Guardian (23/3/2011). http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/23/nothing-moral-nato-intervention-libya

[19] Jeremy Laurance, “Bahrain's secret terror,” The Independent (21/04/2011).

[20] see e.g. Tom Rayner, “No Evidence Of Gaddafi Violence, Say Britons,” SKY NEWS (19/04/2011). http://news.sky.com/home/world-news/article/15975021

[21] Leading article: “Libyan intervention needs to be guided by discretion,” The Independent (21/04/2011).

[22] Noam Chomsky, “Stability, A Cold Code Word With US,” Interview broadcast by Press TV on 24/2/2011. http://www.presstv.ir/detail/166786.html

[23] Noam Chomsky, “On Libya and the Unfolding Crises,” Interviewed by Stephen Shalom and Michael Albert, Znet (31/03/2011). http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/20110330.htm

[24] Murray Bookchin, “Attacks on Israel Ignore the Long History of Arab Conflict,” Burlington Free Press, Vermont Perspective (May 4, 1986).

[25] Janet Biehl, The Politics of Social Ecology (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1998), pp. 148-49.

[26] James Petras, “Libya and Obama’s Defense of the Rebel Uprising”.

[27] Michael Albert, “Very Elementary Thoughts on Thinking About Now,” Znet (22/03/2011). www.zcommunications.org/very-elementary-thoughts-on-thinking-about-now-by-michael-albert

[28] Immanuel Wallerstein, “Libya and the World Left,” Commentary No. 301 (15/3/2011). http://www.iwallerstein.com/libya-world-left

[29] “Immanuel Wallerstein, supporter of US imperialism in Libya,” (16/03/2011). http://redstomp.org/forums/showthread.php?1160-Immanuel-Wallerstein-supporter-of-US-imperialism-in-Libya

[30] Immanuel Wallerstein, “The great Libyan distraction,” Commentary No. 302 (01/04/2011). http://www.iwallerstein.com/great-libyan-distraction/

[31] Pepe Escobar “Exposed: The US-Saudi Libya deal,” Asia Times (02/04/2011). http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MD02Ak01.html

[32] “EU troops would guard aid throughout Libya : report,” RT (26/4/2011). http://rt.com/news/eu-troops-aid-libya/

[33] Tariq Ali, “This is an Arab 1848. But US hegemony is only dented,” The Guardian (22/02/2011).

[34] Tariq Ali, “Libya: A Squalid Protectorate That the West Is Going to Create,” MR Zine (29/03/2011). http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2011/ali290311.html

[35] Alex Callinicos, “Should the left back intervention in Libya?,” Socialist Worker on line (02/04/2011). http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=24350

[36] Judith Orr, “Libya: Western-imposed ceasefire would be a disaster for the revolutionary forces,” Socialist Worker on line (12/04/2011). http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=24516

[37] Simon Assaf , “Libyan suspicion grows at role of Nato,” Socialist Worker on line (23/04/2011). http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=24536

[38] Savas Michael-Matsas, “Tunis, Cairo, Benghazi, Athens, Wisconsin,” Marxilainen Työväenliito (02/03/2011). http://mtl-fi.org/2011/03/02/tunis-cairo-benghazi-athens-wisconsin/

[39] Daniel Howden, “The rebel city Gaddafi says is full of recruits for al-Qa'ida,” The Independent (09/05/2011).

[40] see Takis Fotopoulos, “The Latin-Americanization of Greece and the lessons for the European South,” The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy, Vol. 6, No. 2/3 (Spring/Summer 2010). http://www.inclusivedemocracy.org/journal/vol6/vol6_no2_takis_latin_americanization_greece_south.htm[41] Gerald A. Perreira, “Libya, Getting it Right: A Revolutionary Pan-African Perspective,” Black Agenda Report (3/2/2011). http://blackagendareport.com/content/libya-getting-it-right-revolutionary-pan-african-perspective

[42] Leslie Sklair, The Transnational Capitalist Class (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001).

[43] Takis Fotopoulos, “The myths about the economic crisis, the reformist Left and economic democracy,” The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy, Vol. 4, No. 4 (October 2008). http://www.inclusivedemocracy.org/journal/vol4/vol4_no4_takis_economic_crisis.htm

[44] See, Takis Fotopoulos, “Greece: The implosion of the systemic crisis,” The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy,Vol. 5, No. 4 / Vol. 6, No. 1 (Autumn 2009/Winter 2010). http://www.inclusivedemocracy.org/journal/vol6/vol6_no1_takis_Greece_the_implosion_of_the_systemic_crisis.htm

[45] Prof Michel Chossudovsky, “Insurrection and Military Intervention: The US NATO Attempted Coup d'Etat in Libya?”.