The Mind Of Muammar

 What can we learn from reading the Libyan dictator's Green Book?

By Christina Larson
This commentary was published in Foreign Policy on 05/04/2011

Since Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi's Green Book was published in three installments -- in 1975, 1976, and 1978 -- every Libyan child has had to study it in school; but many, perhaps most, Libyans make fun of it in secret. Western analysts have tried to tease out the book's logic on governance, searching for clues to the intellectual influences on Libya's eccentric strongman, but this is perhaps an overly optimistic endeavor. As Diederik Vandewalle, a professor at Dartmouth College, expert on Libya, and editor of Qadhafi's Revolution 1969-1994, puts it: "A lot of it is pretty convoluted; it's not a book so much as a collection of aphorisms."

In the early 1970s, shortly after he came to power in a 1969 military coup, Qaddafi began to give speeches laying out his ideas on "Arab socialism," or how he thought the ideal Arab state should be governed. Libya at the time was very much a divided, tribal society, Vandewalle explains; but ideas of pan-Arabism were beginning to take hold in the region, following Gamal Abdel Nasser's 1952 ascension to power in Egypt. Qaddafi's 1970s speeches also included, as his book does, recurrent themes of what Vandewalle terms "anti-Westernism, the value of Arab society, and prescribed roles that people in a society should play."

Whose thinking directly influenced Qaddafi's writing? There are very few external references in the text. Qaddafi, who spent his childhood near the small desert settlement of Sirte, studied at a Muslim elementary school and later under a private tutor before enrolling in the Libyan military academy in 1961. "A lot of Western intellectuals once tried to put a gloss on him," says Vandewalle, "finding passages that to them appeared to reference earlier works and asking, 'Is this a reference to Rousseau?' But that's silly. Qaddafi has never been a very well-read man. He was not very well-educated. The Green Book is pure homespun ideology."

With that, dear reader, we present to you some of the Green Book's greatest hits. Najla Abdurrahman, an FP contributor and Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University, whose parents emigrated from Libya and who has spent much time back in the country observing Libya from the ground up, has provided some contextual information about life in Libya today. No doubt the country has changed over the past four decades, but Qaddafi's required reading hasn't.

Qaddafi on democracy:

"The mere existence of a parliament means the absence of the people, but true democracy exists only through the participation of the people, not through the activity of their representatives. Parliaments have been a legal barrier between the peoples and the exercise of authority, excluding masses from power while usurping sovereignty in their place...

"The Green Book presents the solution to the problem of the instrument of governing. It indicates for the people the way to pass from the eras of dictatorship to the eras of genuine democracy. This new theory is based on the authority of the people, without representation or deputation. It realizes direct democracy in an orderly and effective form. It differs from the older attempt at direct democracy, which could not be applied in practice and which was frivolous."

Although seen in the West as a ruthless autocrat, in Qaddafi's own mind he is an avatar of an idealized form of mass democracy, eschewing the confusing bureaucracy of a representative system. The official Arabic title of the Libyan state includes the term jamahiriya -- a word that Qaddafi made up, which he says comes from the word for "republic." A rough translation of jamahiriya would be something akin to "state of the masses." As such, Qaddafi insists that he has no official position in Libya; he claims that he stepped down from power in 1977 and that the people rule themselves.

Few in Libya, perhaps not even his close clique of hard-line supporters, believe Qaddafi's assertions, but as Abdurrahman points out, his leverage as unofficial supreme leader is hard to contest, given that he controls the country's military and, until recently, virtually every facet of life in the country.

Qaddafi on free speech:

"The natural person has freedom to express himself even if, when he is mad, he behaves irrationally to express his madness. The corporate person is also free to express his corporate identity...

"Any newspaper owned by an individual is his own and expresses only his point of view. Any claim that a newspaper represents public opinion is groundless."

Before Qaddafi came to power, several independent newspapers existed in Libya. All have since been shut down. For many years, there was only one state-run TV station in Libya, which aired, as Abdurrahman relates, mainly soap operas and historical dramas featuring people riding horses, living in tents, and singing in the desert -- reflections of Qaddafi's idealized notion of a pre-modern Bedouin society. (When official guests come to visit, Qaddafi insists on meeting them not in his palaces, but in a tent in the desert.) Of course, "that is not at all what Libya is like today," Abdurrahman says; those who can afford satellite dishes try to pick up international channels instead.

A few years ago, Qaddafi's son, Saif al-Islam, started a second TV station airing somewhat more contemporary programming, but his father later had it shut down. Saif did succeed in starting and keeping alive two newspapers, but despite initial optimism about them in the West, the papers hardly publish any news critical of the government.

Qaddafi on gender:

"The physical structure, which is naturally different between man and woman, leads to differences in the functions of their different organs which lead in turn to differences in the psyche, mood, nerves, and appearance. A woman is tender. A woman is pretty. A woman weeps easily. A woman is easily frightened. In general woman is gentle and man is tough by virtue of their inbred nature. To ignore differences between man and woman and mix their roles is an absolutely uncivilized attitude...

"Woman is female and man is male. According to a gynecologist, woman menstruates or suffers feebleness every month, while man, being a male, does not menstruate and he is not subject to the monthly period which is a bleeding. A woman, being a female, is naturally subject to monthly bleeding. When a woman does not menstruate, she is pregnant."

On paper, Libya's laws are fairly egalitarian, at least compared with many Arab states, as Abdurrahman points out. Women are allowed to drive and work; indeed, more women graduate from universities in Libya than men. Yet others forms of social restrictions and discrimination are firmly entrenched. According to an extensive report from Human Rights Watch, the Libyan government has established numerous so-called "social rehabilitation" facilities, where girls and women dubbed as vulnerable -- financially or morally -- have been held in detention for years without appeal.

For his own part, Qaddafi has long seemed obsessed with gender. He has spoken sporadically about women's "rights" over the years -- and also, confusingly, about their prescribed place in society. Apparently, he has also sought out experts on the female anatomy (one of the few explicit references to an outside source of any sort in the Green Book is "according to a gynecologist"). Famously, he surrounds himself with a corps of all-female bodyguards.

Qaddafi on race:

"The black race is now in a very backward social situation. But such backwardness helps to bring about numerical superiority of the blacks because their low standard of living has protected them from getting to know the means and ways of birth control and family planning. Also their backward social traditions are a reason why there is no limit to marriage, leading to their unlimited growth, while the population of other races has decreased because of birth control, restrictions on marriage, and continuous occupation in work...

"Now comes the black race's turn to prevail."

Qaddafi's views on race are confusing, to say the least. As Vandewalle points out, it was after Qaddafi felt rejected by leaders of other Arab countries -- who suspected he might be more than a loose cannon -- that he focused on forging allegiances with sub-Saharan Africa. Today, Qaddafi has much better ties with the African Union, which he chaired in 2009, than with the Arab League, which recently supported the U.N. Security Council resolution that authorized the intervention in Libya. At the same time, he has continued to express racist, highly stereotyped views of African people.

Of course, the mixed feelings are mutual: See Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni's essay for FP, "The Qaddafi I Know," for some interesting takes on the difference between black Africans and Qaddafi.

Qaddafi on equality:

"The skillful and industrious have no right to take hold of the share of others as a result of their skill and industry. But they can benefit from these advantages. Also if a person is disabled or lunatic, it does not mean that he does not have the same share as the healthy in the wealth of the society.

"The vehicle is a necessity both to the individual and the family. Your vehicle should not be owned by others. In the socialist society, no man or any other authority can possess private vehicles for the purpose of hiring them out, for this is domination of the needs of others.

"Land is no one's property. But everyone has the right to use it, to benefit from it by working, farming, or pasturing."

Qaddafi's economic ideas -- which bear shadows of Karl Marx, whether or not he ever read Marx -- revolve around the notion that no one should work for anyone else, a theme often returned to in the Green Book, because then the employers have power over the employed. Instead of wageworkers, all men and women should be partners. In theory, Qaddafi espouses hyper-utopian equality.

In reality, as Libya's unofficial leader, he has erected elaborate palaces for himself and his family, but done little to tend to the basic needs of the people or infrastructure of the country. The roads are bad; the schools are bad; the hospitals are bad. "There's so much neglect," says Abdurrahman. Many people in need of basic medical treatment travel abroad, even to countries with lower per capita GDP levels, such as Tunisia, because of the relatively superior health care there. Despite his prescriptions for a property-less society, in practice Qaddafi is known for confiscating farmland on a whim, forcing families to move and engendering seething resentment over generations. As for his notion that no one should own their own vehicles, the Libyan rebels in their pickup trucks have apparently not heeded this advice.

Qaddafi on spectator sports:

"Sport is like praying, eating, and the feeling of warmth and coolness. It is stupid for crowds to enter a restaurant just to look at a person or a group of person eating; it is stupid for people to let a person or a group of persons get warmed or enjoy ventilation on their behalf. It is equally illogical for the society to allow an individual or a team to monopolize sports while the people as a whole pay the costs."

Given the fact that Libya fields national and club soccer teams and Olympic athletes, this proclamation against the phenomenon of spectator sports -- of fans rooting for a team or cheering on star athletes -- seems puzzling. One explanation, suggests Vandewalle, may be that this is a kind of subtle anti-Western declaration, or perhaps another expression of Qaddafi's egalitarian notion of people participating in all forms of society equally.

Another potential explanation, which Abdurrahman suggests, is this: "Qaddafi is a jealous man; there are no celebrities in Libya -- no intellectuals, no well-known artists or athletes. Qaddafi craves absolute attention; you can see it in the things he says, the things he wears. He doesn't want to ever share the spotlight." Indeed, when Libya's soccer team does compete against other national teams, announcers are forbidden from reading aloud the Libyan players' individual names.

Christina Larson is a contributing editor at Foreign Policy and Schwartz fellow at New America Foundation.