The barefaced lie about Gadaffi being killed in the crossfire bodes ill for the openness, transparency and good government we can expect to see now in Libya. But today I am worrying about the effect on our society of human death as entertainment. I have never been an apologist for Gadaffi, but if his regime tortured and murdered, the remedy is not to torture and murder him – even the Nazis were given due process.
This murder is becoming the norm. It was a NATO air strike which took out Gadaffi’s escaping convoy and first wounded him. Two days ago two teenage sons of Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical US/Yemeni cleric executed without trial last week, were executed by a US drone attack as they had dinner. They were aged 16 and 19. They had committed no crime I can find alleged against them. There has been no publicity.
All this killing brings triumphalist politicians smirking on our screens. We seem to have become as dehumanised as ancient Rome. Little human pity is expressed for the way Gadaffi was killed – indeed there is notably less media reflection of pity or revulsion than there was at the (at least judicial) hanging of Saddam Hussein. Is that a measure of the descent into bloodlust barbarism in our society? The complete lack of empathy towards the traveller families being torn from their homes at Dale Farm is part of the same brutalism towards “the other”. Why don’t we go the whole way and have them eaten by lions in the ring?
History shows that bloody appetite once aroused feeds upon itself. We have already had Defence Secretary Hammond on Sky News today positing NATO action now against Syria, while the current US proto-pretext for attacking Iran – the fantasy plot against the Saudi Ambassador – is as believable as Gadaffi’s death in the crossfire.
More death is on the way, to keep the circus going. Then the crowds may not notice there is no bread – no jobs, and their earnings and income eaten up by huge state enforced transfers to the bankers, whether by bailouts or “quantitive easing”.
Quantitive Easing is the best con of all for the ruling classes. In the UK, the £225 billion of printed money to date under quantitive easing has been – every single penny – given to the bankers. Good money for bad, used to buy up the junk bonds which the bankers bought in their terrible investment decision making, and for which fake assets they had awarded themselves many, many billions in personal bonuses. They are rescued from the consequences of their disastrous judgements by the Bank of England printing (in old parlance) new, good money to buy the rubbish they invested in. The result – more rounds of huge personal bonuses for celebrating bankers!! Hooray!!! For you and I, stagflation.
30 months ago, when I explained that Q.E. was another huge transfer to the bankers and predicted it would lead to stagflation, I was widely ridiculed across the web. Now we have the stagflation and everything I predicted has come to pass.
All of which you would normally expect to make people pretty unhappy at the biggest transfer of wealth from poor to rich in history.
Quick! More War! More Militarism! More Blood! More Executions! More Victory for Democracy! Keep the Peasants Happy!
Get a Move On There! Come On!! Come On!! More Blood!! More Blood, Quick, Damn You!!
UPDATE
You are not alone. On the average of the last three hours, 900 people per hour were reading this article and fifty others are at this moment reading this, invisibly alongside you. Those who understand what is happening are not given a mainstream media or political voice, but we are more than you may think. Don’t feel alone in your perception of the tricks of those who govern us, and leave a comment so we can start to feel each other’s support.
Arsalan
In short, the govts. know that it doesn’t matter about £250 billion QE because the good cash has gone to buy land in war zones. Thus sterling is not getting watered down, just swapping good cash for rubbish. The perfect scam.
Thank you Craig, a pool of sanity in so much madness. I could hear the collective sigh of relief from the parasites that ‘rule’ us when the news broke of Gaddafi’s death, and with Bliar and his gang off the hook again it’s business as usual. I can no longer watch the propaganda, sorry news, without my anger rising causing me to walk away and do something else.
‘Dictators’ shaking in their boots? NOT. Clegg as state herald.
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21 October 2011
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Gaddafi death a signal to dictators, says Nick Clegg
Col Gaddafi died on Thursday in his hometown, Sirte
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The death of Muammar Gaddafi sends a “huge signal” to others in the region that the sins of “grotesque dictators” eventually catch up with them, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg has said.
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He said events in Libya would allow the whole region to move towards “greater democracy and greater freedom”.
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In the coming hours, Nato is due to declare an end to the Libya campaign.
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Up to 1,000 members of the UK’s armed forces, mainly pilots, are currently deployed on the campaign.
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Mr Clegg said he had been a leading advocate of the Libyan campaign because the UK could not stand “idly by while Gaddafi massacred innocent citizens in Benghazi as he was threatening to do”.
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“It would have sent a terrible signal that Britain and the rest of the world included did not care what happened in countries like Libya,” he said.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-15405138
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BBC 1’s 6pm News is being transmitted live from Tripoli at the moment with greasy Huw Edwards presenting and Bowen and Gatehouse reporting. What a waste of fossil fuel and resources.
Thank you Mr Murray for once again being the rare voice of reason in the perilous time in history when the brutality of the ruling class, which were cleverly masked during the peace time, are exposed to our eyes. What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun. [Ec 1:9] But we shan’t despair. Let us try our best to be cheerful pessimists who are kind to neighbours whoever that might be.
Thank you Craig.
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“There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always — do not forget this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.”
Banksie, by doing ‘something else’…your not alone, many feel just as you do, personally speaking, I attack a lump of limestone and make somethin’ of it, just can’t help myself….
ever swung a pencil or brush?
Have been reading your blog regularly since almost day one.
I rarely comment as I cannot usually find words that express my thoughts any better than your words, or those of most of the regular contributors here.
Your posting today is a masterpiece.
The one newspaper website that I saw yesterday was utterly sickening. The gloating and obscene glee and pride that it displayed in the few words written amongst the many images, if seen by the newspaper’s usual readership, must surely make a quantum leap in destroying our society.
Wars, any wars, always transfer money and power from the ordinary people to the rich and powerful. That includes eventually the rich and powerful on the ‘defeated’ side. It’s such a simple analysis to do, just follow the money and open your eyes and truly see.
So I suppose, as the internet increases the danger of people actually starting to understand, their minds and eyes must be filled with more and more obscenities of public killings and media glee, to keep the truth hidden.
So I leave my comment here so we can know we are not alone.
@Ingo and Banksie – yes, exactly. For the first time in my life I’ve joined and art class.
Rod,
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Re: God is dead
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You make a good point. Once Christianity is dumped by “enlightened” liberals like Craig Murrary and countless others “everything is permitted,” as Ivan Karamazov observed.
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Craig Murray claims to be an upholder of Gladstone’s liberal values. But Gladstone was a Christian.
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Since Gladstone’s time, Christianity has been dumped by the elite and the West no longer aspires or even pretends to be better than the rest: “The throne stands upon shit and shit stands upon the throne, to use a variant of Angrysoba’s excellent misquotation of Nietzsche.
Mark_Golding,
nice work! I have visited coia.org.uk website, things that BBCs or Skys never talk about.
Stupid muslims! When will they get together to stand up against tyranny and despots from outside and defend themselves properly?!
Great article, I agree with all you say. The reporting of yesterday’s events in Libya in the mainstream media was truely awful. As uncivilised as the events themselves.
Gaddafi killed around 50,000 of his own people, that in a country of 6 million. The infamous massacre of political prisoners in the 90s in Tripoli is very well documented now. He was a crazy, cruel, blood thirsty, thieving dictator which after 40 years of dictatorial rule did not leave anything for people of Libya except poverty and now a ruined economy after he tried to wage a war against his own people after they rose at last against him. I can’t believe people here pity him????? The only person that did not know that he is going to be executed once he is arrested was himself I believe. Of course they were going to execute him. What, keep him alive? So that his sons and loyalists use billions of dollars he had stashed in foreign banks to hire more African mercenaries and continue the civil war???? As long as he was going to stay alive, his sons and family were going to use those dollars to hire mercenaries and cause trouble in hopes of regaining power.
A more rational argument as to why Gaddafi should have been kept alive rather than lynched and be found here http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2011/10/muammar_qaddafi_should_not_have_been_killed_but_sent_to_stand_tr.html
What I find interesting is how many here seem to have more sympathy and pity for Gadaffi than the 13 who were gunned down by Assad’s thugs after prayers today – and where was their pity and faux outrage for those who were being shelled by Gadaffi before Nato intervened???
Thank you Craig, that’s all very well put. I knew when I heard about Gaddafi that there was something deeply uncomfortable about execution at the hand of victor’s justice as seems to be happening all too often these days. For all the Gaddafi’s there are the Salvador Allendes, and why is it ok for Gaddafi to be executed in a world where Kissinger is given the Nobel Peace prize for a far greater level of genocide. I do not think a discomfort in the lack of due process constitutes somehow being in favour of, or pitying Gaddafi as such, it means that we lament a breakdown in legal and moral boundaries and as you say that simply cannot be a good foundation for an emerging society.
I am no war monger. I have participated in my share of anti-war activism, but this isn’t so clear cut.
Maybe I am still missing some facts, but (1) it’s not clear to me that he was killed out of sport without consideration for due process and (2) he WAS offered safe passage to due process at a time when it should have been obvious to any sane person that his days were numbered. HE chose to make a last stand and fight to the death! HE said he would do so and then he followed through with the threat.
What are the choices in such a case? Submit to his authority to avoid a fight? No. The choices are to (1) kill from far away or (2) risk life for the advancing forces attempting to capture him with non-lethal force.
Did he not retain his ability to project lethal force while giving no hint of surrender? Are you claiming that HAD he offered surrender, he would have been killed without due process anyway?
Can’t pretend that I’m unhappy about Gadaffi being killed. Much more unhappy about reports in the Guardian that his supporters are likely to be tortured.
Some good news: Iraq are saying the USA can’t have any permanent bases. IMHO, this was the main reason for the invasion of Iraq, the USA wanted a tame country where they could have a few good solid bases from which to control Western Asia.
No dice. Invasion of Iraq? Waste of time. Cry in your soup Wolfowitz.
@ Komodo
“one by one, Tony Blair’s friends are meeting grisly ends. If I were Cliff Richard I’d be shitting myself.” – LOL. It reminds me of an Agatha Christie novel. Only difference is: it’s plain whose doing the bumping off!
Voila
Stupid Muslims
The Iraq war was launched as part of the war on terror with no evidence of any proven links between Saddam and what was going on in Afghanistan. The direct beneficiaries of the Iraq invasion was Israel who have put a barrier of Shi’a between themselves and the Gulf states. They already have a barrier to the south consisting of the Egyptian military, entirely funded by the US, and links with North African freemasonry and the Islamic Brotherhood.
Plus a barrier to the North consisting of Turkey which is run jointly by Freemasons and a powerful military. and Iran.
As for Kurdistan, the Kurdish people had been carved up by the British for refusing to become their puppet and they had suffered terribly under Saddam, as Kurds still suffer under the other regimes we the British put them under, in Syria, Turkey, and Iran.
Unlike Gaddafi’s regime, the political class in Kurdistan in Northern Iraq is weak militarily but strong on Freemasonry. This is the country where the Israelis settled in the captivity. This was previously the Kurdish language, Aramaic, of Jesus, pbuh. These leaders embedded themselves in the USUKIS plan to invade Iraq and benefited from the country’s oil.
They provided Bush and Blair with the excuse they needed to include Iraq in the war on terror. There were several Islamic groups in Kurdistan whose raison d’etre was to oppose Saddam.
People supported them and they helped the people, so long as the people submitted to being under their control. Unfortunately, when villages refused to be controlled by them, they slit their throats as a punishment for betraying them.
This was the excuse Bush needed. Taliban like mad mullahs operating on the borders with Iran. Who considered themselves above all secular laws and almost as if they were Amir ul Mu’mineen, an Islamic caliphate in miniature. The first few weeks of the Iraq war, while US planes shattered Baghdad, UK war fighter jets peppered the villages of Kurdistan with bombs.
What NATO clearly understands about the Muslims, is that there is always going to be a group amongst them who are narcissistic enough to regard themselves as above the law, secular or divine.
NATO’s narcissism and Hubris recognises a natural ally in them.
NATO works with the freemasons of a Muslim country and also with the Islamic groups on the side. They work the emnity between these two parties to achieve their own ends.
The result is popular secularism. So I repeat Voila’s question:
‘Stupid Muslims! When will they get together to stand up against tyranny and despots from outside and defend themselves properly?!’
But I add the question: ‘When will they stand up against the tyranny of the freemasons who work with their enemies and the Islamic groups who exceed the remit of Islam, INSIDE their societies?’
The only way to be safe from The Fire is to control it. It remains dangerous, but we knew that all along.
‘”There is only now, he explained finally, his voice not above a murmur. “There is no other dimension but now. In the past we have done everything badly for the sake of the future. Now we must do everything right for the sake of the present”‘
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John le Carre, The Russia House
Great Article Craig
Billy Bragg has come out in favour of an independent Scotland. Had an article in the Scotsman
http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/features/billy_bragg_on_scottish_independence_1_1919016
Neil Young’s on the box.
Craig your up there with him.
The Al Qaida (so-called) collaborators with NATO should look to their own collaboration with the enemies of Islam before condemning the collaborators with Gaddafi, who they are murdering, raping and terrorising at this time.
@ Lwtc:
It reminds me of an Agatha Christie novel. Only difference is: it’s plain whose doing the bumping off!
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More like the Pink Panther, I’d say. With the MSM as Clouseau…
In the early days of Cameron’s involvement in Libya the UK consficated Gadaffi’s assets in the UK.
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Was this to force him to tough it out in Libya, against NATO.
go to Youtube. Watch the footage for free. It ain’t pretty, and you don’t have to put up with the hand wringing. The mofo’s dead.
I can’t stand purists in Islam who condemn socialism because it is secular, but take the benefits anyway, and who then support Islamic groups who murder people who followed Gaddafi’s socialism.
Either condemn it totally and pay your own way or realise that other people taking benefit from socialism from another regime doesn’t automatically condemn them to execution when they are only doing the same as you. Talk about stupid Muslims.
‘Leave some for tomorrow’ as my mum-in-law used to say to the dog licking its bottom.
Conjuction,
The BO administration say they will keep on persuading iraqis to change their mind. Not yet to rejoice true liberation for iraqis.
Empire or Democracy – The 1% chose Empire.
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You cannot have both as there is no symbiosis. In this blog commentators write of chaos and brutality, how the human mind has been conditioned by images to accept the brutality of war, as human death becomes entertainment. Many realise a snap-shot reveals the imperial thrusts, the contagion of destruction and death that precedes empire, is expanding, growing, while the imperial propaganda machine obfuscates reality by lies and deception to stifle or smooth over any discontent that could lead to rebellion.
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Others here see the inevitability of chaos burning into their minds and ask, ‘what are we going to do? Others also fall to the obscurity of manufactured consent.
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I believe the way forward is not easy because the journey is through a matrix of fear that must be conquered by fast-track education that reaches to very heart of xenophobic nationalism, those peerage pillars that support the temple of imperialism complete with religious fundamentalism, the key-stone, guide and communicator. It is these ideological nostrums that have become internalised and believed by the susceptible and naive.
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I believe knowledge is key to puncture and shine an awareness light through the ideological fog perpetuated by those purveyors of xenophobic nationalism and religious fundamentalists. With knowledge we can see a strategic core that reveals an agenda calling for the destruction of all barriers to the empire building machine’s predatory interests and the unleashed destruction of any opposition to the one percent machines control of the world’s resources and its exploitation of the world’s populations.
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The struggle is growing and the containment and purification of a pyroclastic facism and a militarised security state is possible as the awakening embraces the formation of a mass movement in every major country that replaces the ethos of war and proclaims the fundamental principle of government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
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These are my thoughts and my message, a message I annoyingly try to announce or even instill at every opportunity.
Stephen,
Nobody is symphatetic to Gaddafi here. It just brings obvious questions about why a man ( head of state) who had international court arrest request, was killed while captured alive. Why should people take the arbitration into their hands without due process? And why so called civilized nations in the West rejoice extra judicial killings these days? Why there is so much eagerness towards extra judicial killing over outspoken enemies of the usukis? Is it because they know too much about smth, or is it because they speak the truth? Where is the principle of Not guilty until proven so? Was Nato authorised to bomb head of state’s car, home and children? If Gaddafi was a bad guy, who is then saudi king, or uzbecki president karimov who butchered several hundred civilians in one night, or russia’s putin who is terrorising independence seekers in the south caucasus? Why would Bliar, supposedly a democracy promoter, would end up kissing with one of the life term tyrants in Central Asia advising him on how to rule the country? Where is the principle of honesty? Why we are not being told the truth and what comes next? These are questions many here are trying to ask.
Geneva convention, 1949
Art 3. In the case of armed conflict not of an international character occurring in the territory of one of the High Contracting Parties, each Party to the conflict shall be bound to apply, as a minimum, the following
provisions:
(1) Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, colour, religion or faith, sex, birth or wealth, or any other similar criteria. To this end the following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever with respect to the above-mentioned persons:
(a) violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture;
(b) taking of hostages;
(c) outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment;
(d) the passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.
(2) The wounded and sick shall be collected and cared for.
An impartial humanitarian body, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, may offer its services to the Parties to the conflict.