Around this time I also worked on the Al Pacino movie Simone. It was a two day booking on a cattle call, which meant hundreds of extras and all the crap that came with it in terms of trying to gain access to changing facilities, bathrooms, and so on.

This particular movie was not one of Pacino’s best, it has to be said. In it he played a movie director who creates a virtual movie star named Simone. I was booked to play a fan outside an awards show, cheering Pacino’s character when he pulls up in a limo, gets out and walks the red carpet. I was also booked to play a guest at the same movie awards show after-party, thus entailing a costume change into a black dinner suit. On the first day — which would also turn out to be my last — the temperature was blisteringly hot with a brilliant white sun venting its fury on every living thing below. As we stood around waiting to be called to set for the first scene, I got talking to this guy I recognised from various bookings but had never spoken to at any length up to now. His name was Bill and he was around my age.

“You can tell there’s a lotta extras on this booking by the amount of beat-up cars in the parking lot,” he announced with a wry smile. “Extras drive shitty cars and wear cheap clothes.”

He was right, but it was uncomfortable hearing it being articulated in such a forthright manner all the same.

“How long have you been in LA?” he asked.

“Just over a year.”

“Did you come here with savings?”

I nodded.

“Any left?”

At this I could not help but squirm. I had no savings left; they’d all been used up to meet living expenses and keep me afloat between jobs.

“LA’s economy relies on people wanting to get into the industry coming here with savings. Once their savings are depleted they’re forced to work any job they can get to survive. It works like a charm.”

Shit, he was depressing me. He was right but all the same he was fucking depressing me.

“Where do you live?”

“Hollywood.”

“Studio apartment?”

I nodded again.

“Extras drive beat-up cars, wear cheap clothes and live in shitty apartments,” he said, laughing like a man for whom cynicism was a narcotic.

“What’s your story?” I asked, pushing back.

“My story’s the same as yours and everyone else’s. I came here from St Louis nine years ago. Now I’m stuck here doing this shit.”

“But…,” I began to say.

“We’re all losers man, that’s all there is to it. Losers.”

“Come on now, you’re going too far. We’re not…”

“I mean, just take a look at this fucking guy,” he cut in again.

I turned my head and looked to where he was pointing. Roughly twenty feet away an old guy, an extra, was shuffling along carrying a cheap-looking wardrobe bag under one arm while eating a muffin from craft service from the hand of his other. He looked a pitiful sight.

“Only difference between him and us is thirty years,” Bill said.

Was he lying?

End.

‘A Fine Madness’ is currently available from Amazon, or from wherever you get your books.

The conventional wisdom that politics should be kept out of sport, that sport and politics do not mix, is a myth. It is a myth propagated by an establishment for whom any form of political engagement except that which involves passively entering a voting booth to put your ‘X’ in the appropriate box, is deemed a threat to the status quo.

In truth sport and politics are two sides of the same coin and always have been.

And when it comes to the world of sport there is no more an institution rooted in the cause of the oppressed than Celtic Football Club in Glasgow. Formed in 1887/88 as the brainchild of Brother Walfrid — an Irish Catholic cleric — to raise money to feed and minister to the material needs of poverty-stricken Irish immigrants in the West of Scotland, Celtic Football Club existed back and does now as a political and cultural institution as much as it does a sporting one.

Back when the club was established, the assimilation into mainstream Scottish society of its Irish immigrant community was blocked, thus forcing it to create parallel social structures and cultural organisations of its own for the purposes of survival. Celtic FC came into being as part of this process.

Out of this history derived a concrete identity and set of values that generations of Celtic fans have embraced, upheld, represented and carried with pride. Aligned with the republican and nationalist community in the North of Ireland — and with their bitter Glasgow rivals Rangers FC associated with Ireland’s loyalist and unionist community — Celtic supporters are typically among the most politically aware and conscious of any demographic in society.

This brings us to the furore that has been whipped up over the possibility of Robbie Keane being appointed as the club manager. Keane, himself an Irishman, enjoyed a storied career as a player with Tottenham Hotspur (Spurs) for most of his career, while also enjoying spells at Inter Milan, Leeds United, Liverpool, LA Galaxy, and also Celtic, where he spent a period on loan from Spurs back in 2010.

Playing career aside, it is Keane’s decision to take up the reins at Israeli side Maccabi Tel Aviv in 2023 as manager that has stoked the current controversy. Maccabi, like Celtic, is no ordinary football club. But whereas the Celtic fanbase is proud of its anti-racist and anti-fascist identity, its Maccabi counterpart is and has long been both racist and fascist. Indeed in 2025, Maccabi received a one match suspended ban by UEFA in response to the anti-Arab racist chanting of the club’s fans.

That Robbie Keane would remain in post in the Maccabi dugout at a time when the genocide in Gaza was at its height in 2024; this is an indictment — one that makes him unfit to manage a club of Irish heritage, given Ireland’s own history of oppression, colonisation and genocide.

Celtic supporters have, in consequence, long embraced the Palestinian struggle against occupation and apartheid as their own. It is an affinity based on a shared experience of colonial oppression and the religious, cultural, and racial bigotry upon which it rests. Laid bare, Israel is a settler colonial state that exists at the negation of the Palestinian people, whose existence has over many long decades been reduced to a living hell.

Aside from an occupation that has been extant since 1967, the same year Celtic FC were making history in Europe. Aside from the theft of evermore Palestinian land and resources, the expansion of illegal settlements, economic embargo, hundreds of military checkpoints making free passage impossible, and the erection of an apartheid wall. Aside from all that the Palestinians have been subjected to numerous full scale military assaults over the years, utilising the most lethal and destructive weaponry in existence.

And all this prior to the wholesale destruction of Gaza and the slaughter of thousands, including children, in response to the Palestinian resistance operation that took place on October 7 2023.

The idea that those who carry Palestinian flags are motivated by anything other than the desire to express solidarity with those suffering injustice and oppression, that instead it is antisemitism and racism which drives such people, is utterly grotesque and deserving of nothing but unalloyed contempt.

It is not Israel’s Jewish character that is the issue, as those who attempt to delegitimise the Palestinian struggle and those who support it continually maintain. Rather it is Israel’s apartheid character that is the issue, and where better to demonstrate resistance to apartheid than in a packed football stadium alongside thousands of others.

More than a national flag, the Palestinian flag has taken on the mantle of a symbol of defiance in the face of colonial oppression and apartheid, both of which the Ireland to which Celtic FC is historically and culturally rooted has experienced in its long tortured history.

Sport does not exist in a vacuum and the struggle for justice cannot and should not be parked outside a football stadium for ninety seconds much less ninety minutes. It is why the idea that Robbie Keane could even be considered as the club’s manager is tantamount to spitting on the club’s history and values.

In response, the Celtic ultra fans group, the Green Brigade, issued the following statement:

“Celtic was founded by a community shaped by the legacy of genocide, displacement and famine. Our club’s roots lie in solidarity with those who suffered injustice and oppression. We cannot forget where we came from, nor turn our backs on those facing genocide today.

Amen.

End.

MacDonagh and MacBride

And Connolly and Pearse

Now and in time to be,

Wherever green is worn,

Are changed, changed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.

William Butler Yeats’ epic poem (excerpted above) on the Easter Rising of 1916 — Easter, 1916 — immortalised an event that still today possesses all the elements of a Greek tragedy, and which over one hundred years later stirs strong emotions.

The audacity and courage, bordering on insanity, of just 1200 combined Irish Republican Brotherhood and Irish Citizen Army Volunteers, unleashing an armed rising in Dublin against the the might of the British state has rarely been equalled.

Making the event even more astounding is the fact that when it took place, Britain controlled an empire covering a quarter of the globe and had a million men under arms. Most of those men, conscripts, were participants in and victims of the mass slaughter that was unfolding in Europe at the time in the First World War.

The inalienable right of an occupied people

What was inarguable over a century ago, and remains so to this day, is that the right of an occupied people to rise up against their occupation is inalienable. In this regard the Irishmen and women who took up arms on Easter Monday 1916 stand as testament to the spirit of emancipation and rebellion that resides within all but remains suppressed in most, beneath the crushing weight of the ideological chains of the status quo.

Those chains are enforced and renewed every minute of every day as we go about our daily lives, during which the received truths of the dominant ideology scream at us from every advertising billboard, every TV show, movie, and news broadcast.

It is why events such as the Easter Rising in Dublin, the Bolshevik Revolution that followed soon thereafter — why every revolution or rising there has ever been — are so rare and occur only when a group of men and women emerge who are ready, able and willing to break those chains and embark on an unknown fate, propelled forward by a stronger truth than the one spoon-fed to them from the day they are born.

Pearse and Connolly

Two of the key players who drove the Irish Easter Rising of 1916 — Patrick (Padraig) Pearse and James Connolly — were men who had this particular quality in common, despite forming one of the most unlikely partnerships there has ever been in a national liberation or revolutionary struggle.

Pearse was a teacher, poet, barrister, writer, and champion of native Irish language and culture. From a very early age he developed a romantic attachment to Irish history, both real and mythic, which combined to imbue him with the belief that a ‘blood sacrifice’ was necessary to awaken the Irish people to strike for their freedom. An idealist and a romantic to his core, he seemed to inhabit the dream life of a man whose overwhelming purpose was the achievement of immortality. This he reveals in his prodigious writings:

Blood is a cleansing and sanctifying thing, and the nation that regards it as the final horror has lost its manhood… there are many things more horrible than bloodshed, and slavery is one of them!

James Connolly, on the other hand, was forged by the crushing poverty of a childhood spent in late 19th-century Edinburgh, where as the son of Irish parents he lived amid the squalor of a disease-ridden slum, home to the city’s Irish community, a community which as in cities across Scotland was scorned by the indigenous population as an alien presence contaminating society with their ‘alien’ religious beliefs and supposed backward culture.

The poverty Connolly experienced and witnessed sparked a political and ideological awakening. It saw him evolve into a committed trade unionist, socialist and Marxist. It was while serving in Ireland as a British soldier in his early years, where he saw first hand the racist and dehumansing properties of colonialism in full flow, that he became consumed with the objective of winning the Irish working class to the cause of revolutionary struggle.

As well as a brilliant organiser and natural leader, Connolly was an important thinker and theorist. His work around the National Question in particular, one of the more difficult questions for those committed to proletarian solidarity across national borders, remains a significant contribution to the Marxist canon:

If you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organisation of the Socialist Republic your efforts would be in vain. England would still rule you. She would rule you through her capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers, through the whole array of commercial and individualist institutions she has planted in this country and watered with the tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs.

Can anyone, when surveying the Republic of Ireland today, doubt the veracity of those words?

It seems strange, given his background and politics, that a man committed to mass action of the Irish and international working class as the agency of revolutionary change, should embrace the desperate tactic of an armed uprising by a tiny minority against the British state.

The reason can be found in Connolly’s devastation at the sight of thousands of Irish working class men enlisting to fight in the trenches of the First World War under British arms — the very same British arms that were holding his beloved Ireland in colonial subjugation:

This war appears to me as the most fearful crime of the centuries. In it the working class are to be sacrificed so that a small clique of rulers and armament makers may sate their lust for power and their greed for wealth. Nations are to be obliterated, progress stopped, and international hatreds erected into deities to be worshipped.

It was this that propelled him on the desperate course that unfolded on Easter Monday 1916, hoping it would raise the consciousness of the Irish working class to follow their example and rise up against the British State. This turn to ‘action preceding consciousness’ on Connolly’s part dovetailed with Pearse’s commitment to a ‘blood sacrifice’ in Ireland’s cause, responsible for two of the most unlikely of allies joining forces to make history.

Aftermath

The aftermath of the six days of fighting that ensued, and which ended in the rebels surrendering in response to the overwhelming firepower of the British, proved as dramatic as the Rising itself. Those involved were initially vilified by their fellow Dubliners, who blamed them for causing the destruction of large parts of the city.

While being marched off into captivity through a Dublin city centre large parts of which had been reduced to rubble as a result of the prodigious use of artillery by the British forces, they were harangued and pelted, especially by women whose husbands and sons were at that moment fighting in the trenches in France, and who were in receipt of war pensions from the British Government in consequence.

But popular sentiment soon fell in behind the rebels as their leaders were executed one after the other without proper trial or due process. In the end 15 were executed by firing squad, including the seven signatories of the Irish Proclamation — Pearse, Connolly, Thomas J Clarke, Sean Mac Diarmada, Thomas MacDonagh, Eamonn Ceannt, and Joseph Plunkett.

During the military court martial held in his prison cell prior to being shot, a wounded James Connolly said the following:

Believing that the British government has no right in Ireland, never had any right in Ireland, and never can have any right in Ireland, the presence, in any one generation of Irishmen, of even a respectable minority, read to die to affirm that truth, makes the government for ever a usurpation and a crime against human progress.

As for Pearse, to his executioners he declared:

You cannot conquer Ireland; you cannot extinguish the Irish passion for freedom. If our deed has not been sufficient to win freedom, then our children will win it by a better deed.

Pearse was proved right. His sacrifice and that of the others who were executed lit the flame of Irish resistance to British rule, which ended with the formation of the Irish Free State in 1922 after a bitter guerrilla war lasting three years, followed by a brief civil war between former comrades over the terms of the Anglo-Irish Treaty enshrining the partition of six counties in the North, which remained and still remain to this day under London rule.

As Yeats wrote in his poem, with the Easter Rising of 1916 a terrible beauty had indeed been born.

End.

Thank you for taking the time to read my work. If you enjoy my writing and would like to read more, please consider making a donation in order to help fund my efforts. You can do so here. You can also grab a copy of my book, ‘This Boxing Game: A Journey in Beautiful Brutality’, from all major booksellers, and my fiction novels ‘Gaza: This Bleeding Land’ and ‘The Ocean’ from same.

The Irish Easter Rising of 1916. When a terrible beauty was born was originally published in An Injustice! on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

On October 20, 2011, Libya’s Muammar al-Gaddafi was brutally murdered by a mob of NATO-backed ‘rebels’, after first being beaten and violated in the most barbaric fashion. History leaves no doubt that not only was the Libyan leader murdered on this day, but so was Libya itself.

The regime-change crew who dominate Western governments have a long indictment sheet against their names. Since 9/11 they have wrought havoc and human misery on a grand scale in their determination to reshape and own a world that has never been theirs to own. The former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria — and currently with Venezuela in its malign crosshairs — this is the miserable legacy of nations that speak the language of democracy while practising the politics of domination.

Of the aforementioned victims of Western imperialism, there is a strong argument to be made that Libya’s destruction in 2011 constitutes an especially grievous crime. After all, in 2010, the year before this North African state experienced its ‘revolution’, the United Nations Development Programme considered Libya a high development country in the Middle East and North Africa.

In concrete terms this status translated to a literacy rate of 88.4%, a life expectancy of 74.5 years, the advance of gender equality, and various other positive indicators. In addition, Libya enjoyed 4.2% economic growth in 2010, and could boast of foreign assets in excess of $150 billion.

Compare this record to Libya in 2025, where according to a report by Human Rights Watch, ‘Migrants and asylum seekers, including children, [are] arbitrarily detained in facilities controlled by armed groups affiliated with both governments or smugglers and traffickers, suffering inhumane conditions, torture, forced labor, and sexual assault.’

The impact of the chaos that has engulfed the country since Gaddafi was overthrown and murdered can be measured by the flood of Libyans who have attempted the perilous journey across the Mediterranean with the objective of reaching Europe. In the process untold thousands have perished.

How Libya’s turmoil unfolded

UN Security Council Resolution 1973, passed in March 2011, marked the end of the Arab Spring and the beginning of the Arab Winter. The mass and popular demonstrations that had succeeded in toppling Tunisian dictator Ben Ali and is Egyptian counterpart Hosni Mubarak were not replicated in Libya.

Instead, in Benghazi, where the anti-Gaddafi movement was centred, Islamists predominated. There was no nationwide mass movement in Libya, such as those that swept across Tunisia and Egypt, and no popular support for toppling a government and leader who presided over a society that enjoyed the highest standard of living of any in Africa.

Loyalist Gaddafi forces were defeated by NATO not the opposition forces emanating from Benghazi. Indeed, it was at the point at which the country’s armed forces were approaching Benghazi, preparatory to crushing the uprising, that NATO intervened — based on the lie of protecting civilians when in truth it was intent on regime change in order to protect investments.

Gaddafi’s crime in the eyes of the West was not that he was an authoritarian dictator — how could it be when their closet ally in the region was then and remains now Saudi Arabia?

No, Gaddafi’s crime in their eyes, as revealed in a tranche of classified Clinton emails, released by Wikileaks in January of 2016, was his intention of establishing a gold-backed currency to compete with the euro and the dollar as an international reserve currency in Africa. In this regard the then French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, and then US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, were key actors in pushing for NATO intervention.

The Libyan rebels

Western news footage of the rebels in 2011 was largely made up of disparate groups of men driving around in pick-up trucks, some with assault weapons and heavy machine guns mounted on them them, firing salvos into the desert. They lacked discipline, cohesion or organisation, and instead appeared to embody the very definition of ‘rag-tag’.

One political commentator who agreed with that analysis was the estimable Patrick Cockburn. Writing in August 2011, he argued persuasively: ‘Gaddafi may fall, but it looks increasingly that, if he does, it will be at the hands of a rag-tag collection of militias ever more dependent for success on being backed by tactical support from Nato aircraft. Given that the rebels lack a coherent leadership or a united military force, the outcome is unlikely to be a clear-cut victory. Even if victorious, the rebels will depend on foreign support at every level to exert authority over this vast country.’

US foreign policy expert and academic, Michael MacDonald, noted how ‘America’s European and Arab allies publicly pressured the United States to intervene in support of insurgents that were fighting Muammar Gaddafi.’

The question of why those European and Arab allies of Washington would do so is even more important when we consider that a proposal for a peaceful resolution to the conflict, drawn up by the African Union, was instantly dismissed both by the rebels fighting the regime and their backers in the West.

Gaddafi’s role

Gaddafi’s role as a founding member of the AU is crucial here. His staunch support for the aims and objectives of the organisation from its inception with the Sirte Declaration of 1999 — when African heads of state meeting in the Libyan city under the banner of its forerunner the OAU (Organisation of African Unity), put out the call for the establishment of an African Union. Their primary objective in doing so was to accelerate the ‘process of integration in the continent to enable it to play its rightful role in the global economy while addressing multifaceted social, economic and political problems compounded as they were by certain negative aspects of globalisation.’

This pan-African founding principle of the AU is the reason that its attempt to intervene in the Libyan conflict in 2011 was rebutted. For Western governments and Western ideologues, Africa and Africans in the 21st century still constituted the lowest rung in the ladder of status and importance when it came to resolving crises enveloping their own continent and region.

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Here we discern the rotten residue of centuries of colonialism, underpinned by racism, which holds that universal cultural values are Western cultural values and that civilisation and the West constitutes two sides of the same coin.

Given Gaddafi’s commitment to pan-Africanism as an antidote to the super- exploitation and immiseration suffered by the continent over generations of colonialism and imperialism, and with one of the primary goals of the AU closer integration of African states, the organisation was not considered an impartial actor in the conflict. This is confirmed by the details of the AU proposal itself, which in the eyes of a West that was by then committed to the objective of regime change, contained the fatal flaw of neglecting to include the non-participation of Gaddafi and his sons in Libya’s future.

Impartial?

But, then, what is the definition of impartial when it comes to regime change? Taken from the perspective of the sovereign government of an African state being removed at the behest of NATO military intervention, unleashed on the back of a UN Security Council resolution which, as explored, was wilfully manipulated to topple the Libyan leader and his government, preparatory to him being murdered at the hands of a mob, impartiality has no place. It certainly had no place in the actions of NATO, which, as seen, focused its efforts on attacking pro-government forces in order to ensure a victorious outcome for the various armed factions arrayed against them.

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This was an analysis confirmed by Barack Obama in thewide-ranging interview he gave with Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic magazine in 2016 on his foreign policy record, with particular emphasis on the challenges his administration had faced in the Middle East.

Specifically, on Libya, Goldberg reveals how ‘privately, he [Obama] calls Libya a “shit show,” in part because it’s subsequently become an ISIS [Daesh] haven — one that he has already targeted with air strikes. It became a shit show, Obama believes, for reasons that had less to do with American incompetence than with the passivity of America’s allies and with the obdurate power of tribalism.’

While Obama may have had a case when it came to the role that British prime minister David Cameron and French president Nicolas Sarkozy played in making the case for intervention in Libya, his own responsibility for the disaster that befell the country cannot be so conveniently abdicated.

Step forward AFRICOM

But this alone failed to answer the question of why the US would allow itself to become embroiled in yet another military intervention in the region at a time when the fallout from the disasters of its prior interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq had yet to run their course, and moreover evinced no sign of doing so anytime soon? In locating the answer to this question we must turn to the establishment and role of the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM).

On its website, under the heading ‘Mission’, a single, short paragraph outlines the purpose of AFRICOM as one of six US Defense Department geographic global commands which in the 21st century are entrusted with the task of maintaining the ‘full spectrum dominance’ of US military power.

United States Africa Command, in concert with interagency and international partners, builds defence capabilities, responds to crisis, and deters and defeats transnational threats in order to advance U.S. national interests and promote regional security, stability, and prosperity.

Reading this we are bound to ponder the question of what gives the United States the moral or ethical right to establish an ‘Africa Command’ in the first place? How deep must be the well of imperial arrogance in Washington to believe it has such a right? It also leads us to ponder what the reaction would be in Washington or London or Paris if China or Russia were to establish and operate an ‘Africa Command’? Or even more pertinently, imagine a world in which a United States of Africa established a ‘North America Command.’ It surely goes without saying that until we start imagining such a world we shall forever remain prisoners of the accomplished fact.

Despite the establishment of Africom in 2007, in 2011 its headquarters remained far removed from Africa in Germany at Kelley Barracks in Stuttgart to be precise. Washington’s only permanent military base on the African continent four years after AFRICOM was brought into being was at Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, a facility which started life as a US Marine Corps base in 2003 before being handed over to US CENTCOM (US Central Command) in 2006, after which it was reassigned in support to US Africa Command in 2008.

Exploring the motives behind the formation of AFRICOM, we cannot overlook the centrality of the struggle for the control and domination of natural resources that has long been the driver of the chaos and conflict in the Middle East and throughout the Global South. In this regard, the fact that AFRICOM was the brainchild of a group of oil industry lobbyists in conjunction with a group of US congressmen in Washington in 2002 tells its own story.

Oil

Under the auspices of the African Oil Policy Initiative Group (AOPIG), said lobbyists produced a white paper arguing the case for why the US government should prioritise securing a foothold in Africa, especially West Africa from where the US at the time derived an increasing percentage of its oil imports.

In 2002 the AOPIG projected that by 2015, 25 percent of all US oil imports would emanate from sub-Saharan Africa, compared to the 16 percent it was importing in 2002. Time would prove this projection wholly inaccurate. In fact, rather than the percentage of US oil imports from Africa increasing to a quarter of its total needs, US oil imports from West Africa would decrease rather than increase due to the growth of the US domestic fracking industry and the production of shale gas as an alternative energy source.

However, though oil may have been one factor in Washington’s strategic thinking when it came to Africa back in 2002, it was by no means the only factor. One man who was never in any doubt as to the nature of Africa’s importance to Washington was Gaddafi himself.

Addressing the fifth Summit of the African Union in 2005, the Libyan leader said: ‘They are the ones who need Africa — they need its wealth. Fifty percent of the world’s gold reserves are in Africa, a quarter of the world’s uranium resources are in Africa, and 95% of the world’s diamonds are in Africa. A third of chrome is also in Africa, as is cobalt. Sixty-five per cent of the world’s production of cocoa is in Africa. Africa has 25,000km of rivers. Africa is rich in unexploited natural resources, but we were [and still are] forced to sell these resources cheaply to get hard currency. And this must stop.’

So here we see that in 2011, even though access to African oil may not have been a key factor when it came to Washington’s motives for supporting regime change in Libya, the continent’s extensive mineral deposits undoubtedly were. Add to this the threat posed by China’s growing presence in Africa, providing an alternative source of investment to that provided by the West — one that did not come attached with the kind of punitive terms that characterised Africa’s relationship with the IMF and World Bank in the 1980s and 90s — and things become clearer.

China’s growing footprint in Africa

Regarding the specifics of China’s presence in Africa, writer and author Martin Jacques describes a ‘distinctive Chinese model of development, characterised by large-scale, state-led investments in infrastructure and support services, and aid which is less tied to the donor’s economic interests and less overwhelmingly focused on the extraction of minerals as in the case of the West.’

China, it should not be forgotten, also had a longstanding policy of not involving itself in the internal affairs of other states, unlike its Washington and Western counterparts — no surprise given Beijing’s historical experience at the hands of colonialism and imperialism.

Further evidence of Africa’s importance to Washington lay in the Obama administration’s establishment of the “Young Africans Leadership Initiative” (YALI) in 2010. Sold as “a long-term effort to invest in the next generation of African leaders and strengthen partnerships between the United States and Africa,” YALI was a classic example of soft power projection with the objective of cultivating future African leaders and high achievers with a pro-US bent and worldview. Where in bygone centuries missionaries decamped to Africa intent on spreading the word of God, today the intent is to to spread the word of ‘democratism’, which is not to be confused with democracy, and promote US and Western cultural values.

The mainstream media narrative of the conflict in Libya implied that Gaddafi, along with a few diehard loyalists and African mercenaries, was pitted against a risen people struggling to emancipate themselves from tyranny.

But as Hugh Roberts wrote in an LRB (London Review of Books) piece in November 2011: ‘The idea that Gaddafi represented nothing in Libyan society, that he was taking on his entire people and his people were all against him was another distortion of the facts. As we now know from the length of the war, the huge pro-Gaddafi demonstration in Tripoli on 1 July, the fierce resistance Gaddafi’s forces put up, the month it took the rebels to get anywhere at all at Bani Walid and the further month at Sirte, Gaddafi’s regime enjoyed a substantial measure of support.’

Endgame

At the beginning of 2011, Gaddafi’s leadership in Libya was caught in a whirlwind of events that were outwith his control. The country had been plagued by the same crisis of youth unemployment that was endemic across a region in which expectations cultivated by a sharp increase in educational attainment could not be matched by economic and career opportunities.

Yes, there was corruption, mismanagement of resources, and a grievous lack of economic diversification. But such maladies were not confined to Libya. Moreover, any rendering of post colonial countries and societies, such as Libya, must take as their starting point the role of colonialism in retarding said countries’ social, political, and economic development. As Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, already mentioned, once reminded his critics: ‘Those who would judge us merely by the heights we have achieved would do well to remember the depths from which we started.’

The key factor in the uprising that erupted in Benghazi was the contagion effect of the popular revolution that had taken place across Libya’s eastern border in Egypt, which proved the catalyst required by disaffected social forces in Libya’s second city to seize the opportunity to try and emulate it.

As for those staunch opponents of Muammar Gaddafi and his leadership, there was no doubting the fact that his overthrow and murder at the hands of NATO-backed rebels did not usher in the liberal democracy of which David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy had prematurely boasted when they visited Benghazi as the ‘revolution’ approached its climax. Instead it pushed the country into an abyss of extremism, factionalism and civil conflict.

Muammar Gaddafi’s murder and Libya’s destruction at the hands of NATO was indeed a crime of the ages.

End.

Thank you for taking the time to read my work. If you enjoy my writing and would like to read more, please consider making a donation in order to help fund my efforts. You can do so here. You can also grab a copy of my book, ‘This Boxing Game: A Journey in Beautiful Brutality’, from all major booksellers, and my fiction novels ‘Gaza: This Bleeding Land’ and ‘The Ocean’ from same.