By Henry McRandall
WRISEUP.COM
The corporate and public mainstream media in the U.S., Canada and western Europe were the biggest cheerleaders a few months ago when the U.S. and its allies — primarily France, Italy and the United Kingdom — invaded the oil-rich North African country of Libya, determined to oust despised (by the western Top One Percent) dictator Muammar Kadhafi and impose western-style, so-called “democracy” — at whatever cost to the Libyan people.
And the cost to the Libyan people has indeed been extremely high. But where is the western mainstream media now? It is certainly not reporting on the horrific consequences of that intervention.
True, Muammar Kadhafi is dead and gone now — slaughtered in cold blood — and without any trial for his alleged offences — when he was already in custody and totally unarmed. And true, there is a national “election” coming up in Libya — to put in place a western-style, supposedly “democratic” government that, above all, will be expected to be “pro-western.”
“Pro-western,” of course, means “pro” the handful of mega-billionaire Amerikkkan oil barons who have now seized control of Libya’s oil. It was Kadhafi’s failure to be sufficiently “pro-western” that doomed him in the first place.
While the U.S. and Libya had generally had strained relations in the four decades of Kadhafi rule in Libya, there had been a significant rapprochement between Washington and Tripoli in recent years, with top U.S. officials even going out of their way to praise Kadhafi as a “strong ally” in the battle against global “terrorism.”
But several things were eating at the craw of the Top One Percent of Amerikkkans and of their puppet political prostitutes:
Firstly, while Kadhafi was indeed brutal toward dissenters, and often bizarre in both appearance and rhetoric, he still enjoyed the support of a very large portion of the Libyan population — and with very good reason. Libyans enjoyed the highest standard of living in all of Africa. Moreover, Kadhafi strictly adhered to a policy of absolute gender and racial equality. Women and minorities enjoyed far more freedom and equality in Libya than in any other Muslim country in the world.
Secondly, not only did the Libyan government have absolutely no foreign debt, it also had massive gold reserves. It owed nothing to the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund, the primary weapons of the U.S. and its allies for controlling and impoverishing so-called Third World countries. Economically, Libya was very strong.
Thirdly, because of being debt-free and flush with gold, Libya was in a position to exert considerable influence in its own largely-poor North African neighborhood. And Kadhafi had developed a plan to exert that influence by launching a new gold coin that would henceforth be the currency in which the region’s oil would be traded. This would have seriously undermined the power of the U.S. dollar as the dominant — if not exclusive — currency of the global oil trade.
For all of these reasons — but primarily because a handful of mega-billionaire Amerikkkan multinational oil barons were lusting after control of that Libyan oil — Kadhafi had to be ousted and a pro-western, so-called “democratic” government would have to be put in place that would remember, at all times, that the vested interests of that handful of mega-billionaire Amerikkkan oil barons must be its number one priority.
The U.S. government began its new mission by deploying the CIA to eastern Libya to provoke an anti-Kadhafi uprising. After initially just secretly arming the rebels for the first few weeks, the U.S then deceived the UN Security Council into authorizing a military intervention by the U.S. and its NATO allies. In a matter of weeks, the entire matter was settled.
And the Libyan people have just begun to pay the horrific price. It is estimated that 30,000 Libyans were killed during the hostilities and another 50,000 were injured.
Today, tens of thousands of Libyans whose homes were destroyed by the western airstrikes are homeless. And hundreds of thousands of Libyans are without electricity for as much as 15 hours every day because so much of the urban and national infrastructure was destroyed. (As I write this column in London, Ontario, Canada, the current temperature in Tripoli, Libya is 26 Celsius or 79 Fahrenheit and the humidex is 32 Celsius or 90 degrees Fahrenheit. And while such luxuries as air conditioning may not be an extremely urgent need for many Libyans, all Libyans are seeing their food rot each day during these blackouts.)
Like its urban and national infrastructure, Libya’s economy has also been devastated. And the entire country has become ungovernable. There are more than 400 separate militia groups operating in Libya — fighting for turf, looting the homes of citizens, raping women and children, torturing visible minorities, and randomly killing men, women and children.
Yes, they may be having a “democratic” election. But whatever government they elect — probably a CIA-funded party deemed most likely to be “pro-western” — the only parts of the country it will actually govern will be the oilfields the Amerikkkan mega-billionaires have staked claim to and some tiny section of the capital, Tripoli, where the government, the civil service and the foreign investment community will all hunker down together — safe, in their own minds, from the people of Libya.
And, of course, there will be a significant CIA contingent sprinkled about to make sure that the Liyans’ new “democratic” government never forgets that its first — and possibly only — obligation is to protect the vested interests of those Amerikkkan oil mega-billionaires.