The Dialectic and the Detective: The Arab Spring and Regime Change in Libya

A radical and timely dissection of imperialism, as well as a particularly interesting case study of Libya and Gaddafi.

-  Steph Carey, Editor, Biteback Publishing & Politicos.co.uk

This book offers a rich analysis of the intricacies of the Arab Spring and the regime change in Libya, a process that, despite the killing of Colonel Gaddafi, is far from concluded. The analysis to unveil the hidden dynamics and the anti-imperialistic nature of the Arab Spring is ingeniously developed using Marx’s materialist dialectics. Posing as a murder detective, the author takes the reader through each element of the plan that Western countries concocted to pursue regime change in Libya by eliminating Colonel Gaddafi and using the Arab Spring, and its purported aspirations of liberation from dictatorship and repression, to disguise their true intentions.  Julian Lahai Samboma cleverly triangulates information mostly available in the public domain to reconstruct the jigsaw of the imperialist driven process that led to the fall of Colonel Gaddafi and the ensuing unrest and fragmentation of Libya.

-  Grazia Careccia, Human Rights and Middle East Senior Consultant

INTRODUCTION

Because it bothers me, and I couldn’t sleep.  And I kept thinking about it...      – Lieutenant Columbo, police detective

This book is not an ode to Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, nor is it a lament for his passing.  Despite his anti-imperialist trappings, Gaddafi was a self-serving dictator.  He called himself a socialist, but stifled the self-activity of his people.  He called himself a Pan-Africanist, but was a racist.   

My goal in this book was to study the 2011 imperialist aggression against Libya from the perspective of a detective investigating the murder of the Libyan leader. Put simply, this is a study of naked, imperialist aggression.

So, a reader could ask, why write a book about the aggression against Libya seven years after it happened?  Isn’t that ancient history?

Quite the contrary.  It is our present; it is our reality, the latest in a long line of Western, imperialist meddling in the affairs of weaker nations – especially those whose leaders are deemed antithetical to the interests of empire.  A study such as this is important because, as socialists and anti-imperialists, we need to know everything we can about the methods and the machinations of the imperialist beast.  Know thine enemy, as the ancient philosopher said. [1]

The manuscript for this study began life as a script for a documentary film I wanted to make about the intervention.  I realised halfway through that I still had not figured out how the conspiracy to invade Libya unfolded.  And those were details I wanted to include in the film. Like most on the political left, I had surmised it was a conspiracy.  But where was the proof?  It is quite a three pipe problem, as that good fellow, Mr Sherlock Holmes, would have put it.  

Was my film going to say, It was a conspiracy but, sorry mate, we can’t prove it?  There were enough of those on YouTube already!

So, I abandoned the unfinished script to the gnawing criticism of the mice.  That was a few years ago.  But I kept thinking about it.  Then it dawned on me, while watching an episode of the classic Columbo detective series, that one could study the imperialist assault on Libya as if investigating a murder  – in the manner of the lovable lieutenant.  He invariably knew or suspected the identity of the culprit, but was always challenged in figuring out how they did it.

And that was the exact position in which I found myself:  I knew imperialism and its Libyan running dogs killed Gaddafi.  But how did they do it?  If I could figure that out, I reasoned, I would know how the imperialist conspiracy to effect regime change in Libya was planned and executed. 

Not long after that, during the umpteenth rereading of my old copy of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, I was suddenly thrust into another Eureka moment: Why not attempt to use the method Marx used in his study of capital to investigate the Libyan leader’s murder?  The result, dear reader, is this book.

As I progressed with my investigation using materialist dialectics (Marx’s method) as my framework of analysis, the various elements in this conspiracy and their interconnections and interactions became increasingly clear.  Using dialectical logic, I was able to prove that the so-called Arab Spring uprisings which erupted in that arid North African terrain seven years ago was essentially the faithful execution of an elaborate and ultimately successful plot to murder Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. 

Yes, you heard that right.  The Arab Spring was essentially a plot hatched in the citadels of imperialism to kill Gaddafi, remove Syria’s Bashar Al-Assad and  reshape the map of the gigantic oil barrel that is the Middle East.  (The scope of the present work will not permit us to explore the Syrian case or the geopolitical motives and calculations of Western imperialism.)  

You may or may not be surprised by this statement.  If you are, then you need to read this book, to find out exactly what happened and how it happened.  You will discover why everything you thought you knew about the Libya intervention was a big, fat lie.  If you already knew this (or thought that you did), then you also need to read this book – to ascertain whether what you thought you knew correlates with what actually happened.

Aside from the fact that this murder conspiracy theory is the only one that is in perfect accord with the objective reality of what unfolded on the ground, treating the Western intervention in Libya as a murder plot against its then leader enables us to look at this episode of blatant imperialist aggression from a different perspective – that of a murder detective.

And the vantage point of the murder detective has paid off handsomely; combined with the methodology of materialist dialectics, we have been able to decipher exactly how the murder conspiracy unfolded, providing a unique insight into the true nature of the so-called Arab Spring and how it functioned as cover for regime change in Libya. 

It brings to mind that famous scene from the film Dead Poets Society, where Robin Williams’s character, Mr Keating, reveals that standing on his desk prompts him to look at things in a different way?  Well, our desk in this novel study of the imperialist skulduggery has been the Marxian methodology of materialist dialectics.  And, as a consequence, we have quite literally been able to see what others could not see. 

However, unlike the traditional murder mystery, whose goal is to unmask a dastardly killer, we already know the identities of those who committed the dastardly deed; we also have an inkling as to motive – it was to protect Western economic interests.  Our task will be to shine a spotlight on exactly how they did it.

It is now seven years after the Libyan counter-revolution, but the mechanics of that imperialist operation are still shrouded, if not in secrecy, then certainly in ignorance.  This book will finally put an end to that – through the simple device of positing the intervention as a murder mystery and then attempting to solve it by using the dialectic.

In that sense The Dialectic and the Detective: The Arab Spring and Regime Change in Libya could not have come at a more opportune time. 

At its most basic, the dialectical materialist methodology perceives matter as a unity of contradictory opposites in a constant state of motion; and that phenomena are interconnected and functioning parts of a larger unit or organism.

As a tool of scientific investigation, it will enable the investigator to strip away what Marx calls the outward appearance of things to reveal their essence, their inner core. [2]  Marx deployed it to very devastating effect in Das Kapital, his seminal study of capitalism.  And, quite naturally, it has proved more than adequate to expose the barbarity and the skulduggery of the imperialist intervention in Libya and the subsequent murder of Muammar Gaddafi under the smokescreen of the so-called Arab Spring.

The Dialectic and the Detective has not conjured up any magical secrets out of thin air.  The material contained herein – or rather, the raw data – was already in the public domain.  What we have done is posed the right questions and deployed an appropriate methodology to tease out the answers; or, as Marx, the master dialectician himself, would put it, smashed the mystical shell in order to expose the rational kernel. 

In the process of this dialectical investigation, we have turned the spotlight on the intricacies of a well-planned and executed conspiracy which had remained hidden these past several years. 

Before the publication of this book, the common perception of the so-called Arab Spring was that it was a rebellion against domestic despotism.  However, by judicious deployment of the Marxian dialectic, we have proved that it was nothing of the kind.  We show in these pages that the Arab Spring was anti-imperialist in nature.

To paraphrase Marx, previous perception of the Arab Spring had it standing on its head.  What we have accomplished in these pages is to stand it right-side up. 

Because of false consciousness and the reified appearance of phenomena, we could not crack the mystical shell. I mulled over it for several years, but it was only after finally going back to my books and studying and applying the master's method meticulously like a devoted pupil, that I was able to finally get at the rational kernel.

Read for yourself, and find out why the mainstream, imperialist media got it so spectacularly wrong! 

One incidental bonus of reading this book is that it renders the dialectical method so accessible that even a baby could apply it to get a firmer grasp of various social or historical events and processes.

CHAPTER ONE – MURDER CASEFILE

There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.   – Sherlock Holmes, consulting detective

Common sense and arrogance

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On 20 October 2011, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi was murdered in cold blood – a very long two months after his government was toppled by a coalition comprising the NATO powers, a few Arab nations and, on the ground, jihadist and allegedly secular rebels. [3]

Within the space of just six months after an armed insurgency sparked off by al-Qaeda-linked extremists in the east, a confluence of interests between Western imperialism, neocolonial Arab leaders, and a disparate collection of Libyan rebels brought the 42-year rule of Colonel Gaddafi to a murderous, emphatic end. 

Since then the country has plunged into a downward spiral, fragmenting into virtual city-states that have become fiefdoms of rival factions, presided over by Western-backed opportunists and Islamic extremists.  The formerly stable and relatively prosperous polity is now a failed state characterised by corruption, extrajudicial executions and political gangsterism. [4]

Many factors have been advanced to justify the toppling of the regime and the subsequent murder of its leader.  At the forefront of these is the allegation – by the imperialists and their fellow travellers and also by the hopelessly naïve – that he had been killing his own people, a ubiquitous form of words that has now entered the political lexicon as justification for imperialist aggression against the leaders of weaker nations. [5]

Then there are those – largely on the other side of the political divide – who posit that control of Libyan oil was the overriding motive.  Also mentioned is Gaddafi’s campaign to create of a gold-backed international currency that would have posed a threat to the Western-dominated global financial system. [6]

The goal of this book is not to rehash those claims per se, but to solve the puzzle that plagued me a few years ago when working on the aforementioned documentary script.  We take it as a given that the imperialist assault on Libya was predicated on the economic self-interests of those nations who participated in that act of naked aggression.

The task we have set ourselves is one which, to our knowledge, has not