The ‘Gaddafi Archives – Libya Before the Arab Spring’, which opened this week at the London Festival of Photography is an embarrassment of riches. This exhibition of images recovered from the remains of Gaddafi’s archives and rephotographed by a team assembled by Human Rights Watch, opened yesterday at UCL. The first three rooms document official […]
The trailer for Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest comedy, “The Dictator,” where he plays a thinly veiled cut-and-paste Muammar Gaddafi complete with Bollywood remix, Hamid Karzai lookalike rival, camels and 9/11 themed jokes. Tons of teenage boys will go see this.
“A terrible failure,” is what Danie Odendaal calls Gaddafi’s thwarted escape attempt from his last stronghold, Sirte. And he probably knows. From a Libyan hospital bed, Odendaal informed South African Sunday paper Rapport he was one of some twenty, mostly white, South Africans contracted to get Gaddafi out of town, and into neighboring Niger. It […]
Every major Western government now makes up histories of long-held opposition to Muammar Gaddafi’s dictatorship. Then there’s the truth: As The Financial Times reminded its readers in January this year (H/T: Peter Dwyer) the West’s 2003 decision to change Gaddafi’s regime status from dictatorship to reformer, was really about business. Tony Blair flew down to […]
Today I started thinking of all the odd bits I have read or heard about Gaddafi. Hopefully I’ll post more. Like the apocryphal story of when the G.O.A.T. Muhammed Ali met the future dictator Muammar Gaddafi.
Vijay Prashad: As the euphoria dies down, it might be important to recall that we are dealing with at least two Qaddafis: the first, the Qaddafi of 1969-1988, was the anti-imperialist and the nationalist who was yet unsteady about the importance of democracy; the second, the Qaddafi of 1988-2011, was the neo-liberal privatizer and the […]
Colonel Gaddafi’s aide wants to engineer a retrospective of “four decades of superior dress sense” at the Costume Institute’s annual gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in N.Y.C. He’s trying for 2013. Talib, an aide to Mr. Moussa Khalid Wahabb, the new Minister for Cultural Affairs in Libya, contacted ”New York Times” Fashion Editor Horacio Silva to score […]
One of Gaddafi’s ‘voluptuous Ukranian nurses’ finally speaks. She has some things to say on his pan-Africanism: When we drove around poor African countries he would fling money and candy out the widow of his armored limousine to children who ran after our motorcade; he didn’t want them close for fear of catching diseases from […]
