Libyan Turmoil 101


Gaddafi/Tribes/Russia/Flanders


Our reader and personal friend Atl. asked the Russian readers on this blog why they defended so unanimously Gaddafi.
This fits right in with a private e-mail exchange I had wth our reader Levantine who became quickly a soulmate.
Of course reader and personal friend Capo has no trouble attuning to this line of thought, he knows Russia extremely well.


The starting position is the personality of Gaddafi:
- Strong personality, alone and contemplative.
- He doesn't give a shit about luxury or money.
- Strong nationalist Libyan first and always.
- Says "F..k you" to the whole world.


If you go looking in the Russian folklore and Saga's, that's exactly the type the Russians love, the type of their heroes.
Russians have an unbelievable capacity for suffering and respect other people with the same capacity.
The sufferings of the Napoleonic war and '40/'45 wouldn't have been possible with any other people AND it was an expression of their nationalism.
A Russian who lives abroad is only happy when he goes back home.


Which brings me to the main topic of this article: Nationalism.


For the people who are new on this blog, I am not Libyan, I am a Flemish (Belgian) businessman who works with Libya since approx. 10 years.
When this whole rotten thing started I was so upset that I wrote an article, my first on this blog here, which nobody wanted to publish. they accused me of making a "saint out of Gaddafi".
So I started this blog and I am proud of it.
You are now 18.000 to read me.
As a Flemish man, from the land of Tyl Ulenspieghel, a book every Russian knows, I know about national pride and betrayal.
Nationalism became a bad word because of the nazi semantics, they were not nationalists, they were power hungry dictators who copied the Marxist Soviet State structure: the state takes care of you, so you don't question the state.
The state becomes an anonymous nomenklatura with no responsibility, no matter who is member of the nomenklatura, it's the power game of the state control.
When Gaddafi started his real revolution he had no clue how to govern a third world country, he was a military man.
So he made a lot of mistakes and since the Soviets were the only people willing to help him, he chose socialism.
After some years he realized his mistake and figured his own solution:
The Tribal hierarchic system.
The tribes were not ready to accept "democracy", they didn't even know what it meant, but they had run their tribe's social structure since thousands of years.
They had their justice system and their tribal support system, based on "The tribe and its people first".
And it started working.
He left all the social and inner tribal problems to the tribes and give them the budget for it. He only interfered in inter-tribal problems and guided the discussions until the tribal leaders worked it out. He pushed in a certain direction but never ordered a solution.
The composition of the social structure of the tribes is the original democracy. 
Within the tribe you have the clans, composed of the families belonging to each clan, each clan having a territory.
Each family has its own rights of social distribution and can request justice any time instantaneously.
The whole clan or tribe, if it's important, participates.
Bad justice? I don't think so. With hundreds of people judging it's the ultimate democratic system.
That's the reason why Gaddafi is respected by the tribes and why he can't be a cold blooded murderer of his own people, he wouldn't survive 5 minutes.


More later.