Gaddafi and the desecration of the dead
It’s hard to escape the grisly death photos and videos of Gaddafi. A flamboyant figure who was photographed often during his long and very public life, his well-earned enemies have made sure that his death has been especially well-documented, too.
But I haven’t looked at the photos, other than an unavoidable glance as one or the other image pops up on my screen. I feel very uneasy about them. I would have preferred that he met his end in a process similar to what happened to his fellow tyrant, Saddam Hussein.
My reluctance to gaze on Gaddafi’s dead face or to watch people mistreating his corpse has nothing to do with any admiration for the man. I have little doubt that he’s perpetuated many murders and kept the people of Libya under his brutal and capricious yoke for four decades, and that their rage at him is justified.
However, the moral stature of a culture and its people are judged by many things, and one of them is the way the bodies of the dead are treated, even the most hated and reviled dead on whom they understandably wish to wreak revenge. What happened to Gaddafi’s body does not bode well for the future of Libya (but then, not a whole lot does, although I’d be happy to be proven wrong on this):
A video on al-Jazeera shows Gaddafi wounded, but alive. The network quoted a fighter saying that he begged for help. ”Show me mercy,” he was said to have cried. There was little of that, in the video at least.
One fighter is seen pulling his hair and others beating his limp body. Two fighters interviewed by al-Jazeera said someone struck Gaddafi’s head with the butt of a gun…
In one, broadcast by al-Jazeera, his body is half naked and bleeding on a pavement. Even more dramatic is a video posted on YouTube. Jubilant fighters surround his corpse, which appears to have been washed. Clearly visible is a gunshot wound to his forehead.
Plus there’s this (warning: graphic footage at the link, of the type I’ve been talking about):
His bloodied corpse – eyes half open, a bloodied mouth and blood on his head – was displayed on live television and beamed all around the world yesterday.
TV footage also showed Gaddafi’s corpse being dragged through a Libyan street.
Dragged through a Libyan street—when I was a child and read the Iliad, one of the most memorable and terrible images in the entire book was what happened to Hector’s body after his death:
Achilles, choosing with his eye a vulnerable part where the armor leaves the neck uncovered, aimed his spear at that part, and Hector fell, death-wounded. Feebly he said, “Spare my body! Let my parents ransom it, and let me receive funeral rites from the sons and daughters of Troy.” To which Achilles replied, “Dog, name not ransom nor pity to me, on whom you have brought such dire distress. No! trust me, nought shall save thy carcass from the dogs. Though twenty ransoms and thy weight in gold were offered, I should refuse it all.”
So saying, the son of Peleus stripped the body of its armor, and, fastening cords to the feet, tied them behind his chariot, leaving the body to trail along the ground. Then mounting the chariot he lashed the steeds and so dragged the body to and fro before the city.
Later in the story there is quite a bit more dragging of the body around, but you get the general idea. It is not a passage that reflects well on Achilles, despite the fact that he was the victor and a hero (although flawed and impulsive). Hector was also a hero, as well as the more sympathetic of the two.
Of course, Gaddafi should not be considered a hero of any sort; au contraire, he was a villain. But that really is not the point. This issue is not Gaddafi at all, nor anyone in particular—it’s about how a society behaves. There is a word for this sort of thing, and that word is “barbaric.”
Speaking of European involvement in Libya… did Italy descend into barbarism after 1945?
Gaddafi was even worse than Mussolini. I do think Libya’s new (dis)order will be even worse than Gaddafi was, but this treatment of Gaddafi’s body is one of the few things that has happened in Libya this year that doesn’t particularly worry me.
Matthew Walker: Yes, I thought about Mussolini too, but I think that was much more of an isolated incident than something typical of Italian society. But the treatment of Gaddafi reminds me of many such incidents in the Muslim and/or Arab world; it seems to be the way enemies in general are treated, when people get a chance (see this and this, for example).
The Mussolini incident also happened almost 70 years ago. Times have changed since then; for example, consider that lynchings (and subsequent body mistreatment) were routine in parts of the US through the early decades of the 20th century, but there is now extreme public disapproval of that sort of thing. It represents societal change—for the better, I’d say.
I had the same thought, Neo-neocon: this says something about the society that does not bode well for its future–and therefore for ours. My concern is not so much about what those who captured him then did to him; it is more about what seems to be the wide-spread approval by that society of what the captors did.
On a related subject, I have been following with utter horror the stories coming out of China about a two-year-old girl who was run over by a truck after she wandered into a city street; surveillance video (heartbreakingly graphic) shows what happened next, while the child lay in the street for an extended period of time, as 17 or 18 passersby walked or rode around her, barely even stopping to glance at her, and another truck ran over her.
The truckdriver who hit her first knew he had hit her (you can see him stop on the video after his front wheels hit her, and then start up again, driving the rear wheels over her as he takes off). He explained to reporters that he did not stop because the fine he would have to pay for killing her was much less than the medical bills he would have to pay if she survived. Barbarism, indeed. Despite his preferences the child did survive for a few days, but today’s news reports say she has died.
To China’s credit, the country is beside itself over this, and there is a national discussion going on about how to change a general cultural attitude apparently prevailing in that country that you should not help people in trouble because if you do, you are likely to be blamed — not for helping them negligently as sometimes happens here, but for causing the accident itself. One person was quoted explaining this as follows: “Why would you help, if you aren’t guilty?” The articles I’ve seen on this attitude describe another recent incident in China in which a lot of people did nothing to help a woman drowning in front of them — until an American tourist jumped in to save her — and a government campaign DISCOURAGING people from helping elderly people who fall.
The ramifications of such an attitude for China’s growing power in the world are chilling.
On a much different plane I also found it very hard to look at the pictures of all the dead animals scattered about on the farm in Ohio. Whether you want to see such things or not today’s media makes it very difficult to always avert your eyes quickly enough. It’s sensational so they are going to bombard us with it, like it or not.
Life has been cheap in China for a very long time.
What happened in Italy and much later in Romania did not portend a debased society.
As for changes of morality and process of law…
Libya is at least a century behind the West — and the Duck of Death is a big reason why.
That he turned down repeated offers of exile — like to South Africa — meant that this was the only outcome possible.
That he was a patron of terrorist fronts of every stripe — made him as debased as Adolf Hitler, Mao, and Stalin.
He can hook up with his peers in Hell.
One final note: al-Reuters reports that his final protection detail was entirely mercenary — and black to boot.
No wonder the Duck has entirely poisoned race relations — for generations I suspect.
The next phase will see a mass expulsion of all non-Arabs.
And let’s not forget the ‘Zardoz’ injection of weapons across the Mahgreb.
What could possibly go wrong?
What about Hillary’s jubilant comment? “We came, we saw, he died”. There’s been many Americans with similar distasteful comments.
I kind of get Libyans. WTF is happening to Americans?
I read the new Libyan government IS looking for a civilized way of disposing of the body. This does bode well for the future, especially when compared to the desecration of the body that occurred to one of Iraq’s former military dictators and other signs of an amoral society, like what is happening in Egypt. In fact, on the face of it the current Libyan government looks like it is trying to actually establish some sort of government under law rather than emotional whim. We’ll see how well they stand up to the Islamists.
Another observation, although the cards are stacked against democracy in the Middle East the information age is on freedom’s side in the long run. Any Islamist victory anywhere would be dependent on denying modern social science and substituting hate propaganda, a nifty trick in the internet age. In short trying to replay the same sh*t as the nationalist tyrants but in the name of Islam. Doubtless after the revolution goes bad we’ll see its children complaining that this is not what was wanted, as they are arrested and executed for blasphemy, rather than treason as is traditional. Probable result, 50-70 more years of failure, and then maybe democracy.
Mr. Whatsit–Unfortunately, what you describe in China is the result of a government whose very intent is to lessen the importance of the individual while focusing on the collective good. The random individual means nothing.
This is a step up from the old practice of having a person literally pulled apart by tying their limbs to four horses or putting heads on pikes and parading them around for all to see. We have become much more civilized, but in the heat of passion and with a mob mentality gruesome deaths are not uncommon, evenin the West.
However, in the jihadi world, (And Libya is certainly a part of that) disemboweling and skinning alive have been practiced in recent times, (Afghanistan during the USSR occupation) but their current favorite is a slow and painful beheading. Not sure why Gaddafi wasn’t subjected to that. A severe beating followed by a bullet to the head seems to be quite merciful by jihadi standards.
Of course we were also slappped upside the head by reality when Somali jihadis dragged the bodies of our soldiers through the streets of Mogadishu.
Does anyone believe that they would be more merciful to an infidel? These gruesome photos give us more facts about the kind of enemy we face. They are not civilized by our standards and anyone who doesn’t accept that is whistling past the graveyard.
If we were going to do this to him, why didn’t we just set fire to his tents on Donald Trump’s lawn a couple years ago?
Reference China, considering that two generations ago Chinese were dying by the million of starvation, the great Proletarian Revolution was imprisoning and executing an indeterminate number that there should be a national self-critique over morality of any sort speaks well of the current China.
As for an American coming to the aid of a drowning woman, I’ve encountered this before, Americans act while others wait for permission, orders or instructions.
I suspect that there are two reasons for the Chinese callousness. First is that Confucian’s five cardinal relationships emphasize family and one-to-one relationships, so that altruistic help looks like meddling with other people’s family. The second is that since people are automatically suspicious of Good Samaritan behavior, there came the Peng Yu case which was described in the People’s Daily (English version) “Need to protect our Good Samaritans” from January. (I would put the URL, but that tends to prevent my comments from going through.)
The observation of “Lawrence of Arabia” (T. E. Lawrence) in an exchange with Sherif Ali is as apt today as it was in 1962 (and before):
Sherif: …You are angry, English. He was nothing. The well is everything. The Hasimi may not drink at our wells. He knew that. Sa’lam.
Lawrence: Sherif Ali, so long as the Arabs fight tribe against tribe, so long will they be a little people, a silly people, greedy, barbarous, and cruel, as you are.
Societal change for the better, commendable as it is, is one of those things which must be nurtured and rarely is. Grand strides in humanness forged over a century may, in just a short time, be lost in social engineering and multicultural experiments.
Societies, just as humans, revert to their lesser natures on the flimsiest of promises un-realized and the most rigid of ideologies imposed. From France and the Revolution, to Spain seventy-five years ago to present day Greece, and to whatever the result of the inimical natures of Western and Islamic societies holds in store, I am not holding out much hope that barbarity is on the wane, and rather see it in ascendency. In the age of You Tube, averting one’s eyes may be all there is to do but it will have to be done more and more.
JJ said:
“Of course we were also slappped upside the head by reality when Somali jihadis dragged the bodies of our soldiers through the streets of Mogadishu.
Does anyone believe that they would be more merciful to an infidel? These gruesome photos give us more facts about the kind of enemy we face. They are not civilized by our standards and anyone who doesn’t accept that is whistling past the graveyard.”
Was thinking exactly the same thing.
Wasn’t so long ago in the far off land of California.
http://articles.nydailynews.com/2011-06-01/news/29627457_1_suicidal-man-54-degree-water-california-man
What happened to Gaddafi’s body does not bode well for the future of Libya (but then, not a whole lot does, although I’d be happy to be proven wrong on this)
Itally seems none the worse for it….
but i guess you would then have to look at this wiki
List of posthumous executions
England made it i guess
Russia not so well…
dont know if that proves ya wrong though…
The articles I’ve seen on this attitude describe another recent incident in China in which a lot of people did nothing to help a woman drowning in front of them – until an American tourist jumped in to save her – and a government campaign DISCOURAGING people from helping elderly people who fall.
Freaky, given that this summer the Seattle area had a “don’t try to help” campaign– and the local “super hero” was just railroaded into having his identity revealed; he would’ve been kangaroo courted if there hadn’t been video and it hadn’t hit the local news so hard.
Even well trained soliders occasionally lose their cool and are less than genteel to their captured prisoners, and as this (if properly described) was a rebel army, then there were loose cannons all over the place.
Putting their main nemisis in the midst of them, well…perhaps that he wasn’t torn apart is more amazing.
I agree that China’s harsh government, long brutalizing history, and the other factors cited by the various thoughtful commenters above must be the reasons for the general cultural resistance to helping those in trouble. But this was a toddler. I would have thought that the impulse — no, need — to help a hurt helpless baby was hard-wired into humanity, or most of us anyway.
My work includes plenty of Family Court and criminal cases so I know that this country, like the rest of the world, crawls with people perfectly willing to kick, starve, neglect and murder children. Nonetheless, here, such people are a small minority. Most people would act without thinking to help a child, even if they’d hesitate to intervene in other situations. Not long ago, while driving, I saw a small child running apparently alone toward a busy street, and mine was not by any means the only car that suddenly paused, with driver ready to leap out and intervene, before the mother appeared in time to grab him. That’s what is so chilling about that Chinese video — person after person after perfectly normal-looking person, strolling calmly past the injured baby — in one case a parent holding the hand of a child, who does not even appear to try to protect the child from seeing the wounded baby at their feet — none of them apparently turning a hair. Can any society really stamp humanity out of every heart to THAT extent? I’m still reeling.
Achilles was not a “hero”. He was an over-muscled, petulant teenager with superior hand-eye coordination. A glory hound. He fits the Bronze Age version of hero. Not ours. Were he in my platoon–had I had a platoon so many years ago–I’d have figured out a way to transfer him to someplace else.
Desecration of a corpse is of little interest to me except in context. Happen a lot? Not much? Social approval? Disapproval?
Considering the fear Libyans had had to live with, and, indeed, cultivate to survive, the likelihood the first guys on the scene, after fighting for weeks, would be measured is pretty slight.
It’s the larger context.
You say the word is “barbaric”. I say it is “cathartic”.
Mrs. Whatsit@0726:
“Can any society really stamp humanity out of every heart to THAT extent? I’m still reeling.”
My experience of China is limited to three weeks of traveling around the country – mostly large cities. So, this is an impression.
The Chinese are so numerous and life for most, even today, is a daily struggle. Found myself in crowds where it was necessary to squeeze through restricted entrance ways. Amazingly, I found that if I did not use my weight and elbows, I got shoved backwards and out of the way. I found that they are used to pushing and shoving each other to get ahead. There is little in the way of manners or kindness toward strangers as we know them.
To travel around Beijing is to feel like you are drowning in a sea of humanity. People in motion in every kind of conveyance (trucks, autos, buses, motor bikes, mopeds, bicycles, motorized carts, etc.) with traffic jams, crawling traffic, drivers all trying to edge into line then work their way out, numerous near misses, lots of honking of horns. Chaos that somehow works. Those who are mannerly get no where, however.
It is a society where people are so numerous and where they are competing for space, food, and survival. Manners or helping others as we know it takes a back seat. Altruism seems in short supply.
My impressions may not be the explanation, but the story did not surprise me.
What is especially illuminating is that Libya’s acting PM Mahmoud Jibril has continued to insist that Gaddafi was ‘killed in crossfire’. The Libyans are saying the same about the death of Gaddafi’s son Muatassim. Yet he was filmed after his capture in perfect health smoking a cigarette. Shortly after that, videos emerged of his slaughtered body.
For more on this and the ramifications see:
http://edgar1981.blogspot.com/2011/10/arab-lies-elephant-in-room.html
Something to keep in mind– the notion that all people are fully people, that being a “Good Samaritan” is a good thing, is pretty dang unusual in a cultural view. Humans are tribal– the idea of pushing the edge of the tribe out to include all people was a really revolutionary notion.
Eight year ago the United States made peace with Kaddafi, and put paid to the history between our two countries, including the Lockerbie bombing. The best and the brightest hailed this peace as a wonderful vindication of Bush’s foreign policy. U.S. officials including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Sen. John McCain, and President Obama had friendly meetings with Kaddafi over the years, speaking of their desire to advance the two countries’ bilateral relationship.
Kaddafi never violated his agreements with us and never became a threat to us or our allies. He spoke in the warmest terms of the United States and of Obama. Yet the instant that people whom we chose to call democrats rose up in rebellion against him, our ideology and what we perceived as our political self-interest required that we side against him. We attacked his country, bombed his military and his government, bombed his residence, drove him from power, and now we have killed him.
I will not become a moral relativist and make the despicable statement, which some on the anti-war right and the European New Right have made in the past, that the U.S. is as immoral as the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, there is now significant and terrible overlap between the behavior of the U.S.S.R and the behavior of the United States. We are not a moral state; we are not a state under the rule of law. We are, as Solzhenitsyn said of the Soviet Union, an ideological state, a state that will do anything, violate any agreement, betray any ally or friend, tell any lie, cover up any truth, in order to advance its ideology and its power that is associated with that ideology.
In betraying and killing a foreign leader with whom we had made peace, we have taken on terrible karma. I tremble to think of how that karma will manifest itself against us in the years to come.
Good grief…
This tyrant is on a par with the worst despots in history.
He turned down every manner of negotiated exit.
He could’ve had a pile of gold sent to South Africa and lived high and mighty to the end of his days.
He flatly turned such offers down.
And America, the West, did not kill him. Instead, he received the very coin he’d been spending upon the Libyan people all these decades.
This clown had been a patron of every terrorist front you’d care to mention.
And, obviously, he threatened the Europeans with a revival of said operations — and then he embargoed his oil from them. His oil — the light, sweet stuff — is/was irreplaceable.
Obama had to sell oil from our SPR to stabilize the oil markets. Heavy, sour crude from KSA didn’t fit the bill. So the king pulled 1,000,000 bbl per day off of the market.
KSA no longer has any swing power in light, sweet crude oil.
The Duck of Death started everything — not us.
And the leading combatant power was FRANCE. First in just about everything.
I also had a bad feeling for Libya’s future after watching the mobs deal with Gaddafi.
A second line of thought is regarding the reaction of our ‘allies’ – those relying on our military support/equipment – in the middle east (first and foremost the Saudis). If I were in their shoes I would be very worried at the speed with which Obama turned from words of friendship etc, to outright betrayal when it suited his day to day political fortunes.
Without the military force that we employed against him, his government would not have fallen and he would not have been captured and killed by the rebels. We did not directly kill him. But we were indispensable accessories in his killing. An accessory to a murder shares the guilt of the murder.
Timing is everything. Qaddafi was not killed in retaliation for his attacks on American servicemen in Berlin in 1986, or the downing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie in 1989. He was not killed for his central role in the USSR’s terror networks going back to the 1960s and 1970s. He was killed after coming over to our side of George Bush’s “war on terror” in the final phase of a civil war in Libya in which his regime fought al Qaeda affiliates.
Horrific as it sounds, Qaddafi was killed because we and our NATO allies joined the other side — the al Qaeda affiliates.
Glen H: barbarism is very often cathartic.
Stop re-writing the facts.
He started an economic war and threatened asymmetric warfare against the Europeans.
We, America, got involved to bail out France, Britain and the banking system.
We ultimately had to support the underclass of Libya.
Classic mission creep.
As for supporting the islamists — we’re trying to figure out who is who — and keep them out of power.
I figure it will be an epic fail.
The Wan is going to install the muslim brotherhood where it can do the most damage.
And the Duck of Death was killed because even in extremis he refused to enter exile as a fabulously wealthy ex-despot with so much blood on his hands it’s hard to scope.
The NY Times is reporting that he stole record amounts from the national accounts – – leaving millions in destitution.
That he DEMANDED the el Duce treatment by his words and deeds goes unremarked. That’s why he lies dead. He refused to walk out the door.
Instead, he told all and every that he’d hunt down every Libyan ‘rat’ for rising up to claim freedom.
Deal with it.
Stop re-writng facts to support your opinion .
What Gaddafi’s Death Teaches the Middle East…And Should Teach the West
http://pajamasmedia.com/barryrubin/2011/10/20/what-qadhafis-death-teaches-the-middle-east-and-should-teach-the-west/?singlepage=true
blert
“The discovery of truth is prevented most effectively, not by the false appearance things present and which mislead into error, nor directly by weakness of the reasoning powers, but by preconceived opinion, by prejudice [in this case, by the Western notion that all people want a secular, liberal democracy], which as a pseudo a priori stands in the path of truth and is then like a contrary wind driving a ship away from land, so that sail and rudder [reality and those who present it] labor in vain.”
LOL, Neo, what part of “Islam is a barbaric religion” are you just now becoming aware of?
And why did it take this long?
I’m not going to shed a tear for the bastard. I would not have that happen to anyone, but it does not surprise me in the least. There is a measure of schadenfreude applicable, yes, but I’ll not feel remotely guilty about it in this case.
Much more so than Mussolini, Khadaffi was evil. I believe Il Duce had the best interests of his people at heart, no matter how misguided his means or ends. I believe Khadaffi had only his own personal aggrandizement at heart. Like Saddam, he sought power, and did everything possible to hold onto it, long after the time when he could have — and should have — stepped down with his ill-gotten wealth and died in his bed asleep.
It’s a shame the same could not and did not happen to Castro.
But then, the Cubans, from what I know, aren’t utter barbarians, either.
It’s been said that this visible example of what might happen may make tyrants hold on to their captive nations with even greater ferocity.
If they have any brains, it’ll make them more prone to boogie when the boogieing is good. And if they don’t have any brains, then they deserve it.
What’s this “we” shit?
Are you actually such a complete and total fuckwit that you think this is OUR responsibility?
Sorry for the language to anyone but the OC, but there are few words that carry the weight of my disdain sufficiently.
Then you are a fool. The state of barbarism is the native state of humanity and animals. That we have multiple entire generations of more than 1/3rd of the world who are horrified at such things and find them beyond the pale is a testament to the ascendancy of civilization.
The Left may well succeed in its societally suicidal efforts, and we may, indeed, lapse back into barbarism, but that is far from happening yet.
The biggest danger is not barbarism ascending but that we will become TOO civilized to respond with force to threats that can only be answered with force.
The reaction of all too many Americans to a war that cost so few lives that the PotUS could actually meet the families of about 10% of them is a much greater concern. When the entire war costs fewer American lives than many single BATTLES in history, and there is endless caterwauling and wailing, there lies the end of civilization and the resurgence of barbarism.
We are so inculcated in the Judeo-Christian meme of “Do unto others…”, that we forget that there are people for whom it does not comprise a societal basis. For the nations of the West, and their spinoff groups, it is a central basic meme. For many other nations it is not.
Anyone who is aware of the meaning of “necklacing” in the South African context would realize this. They seem to have embraced the idea, regardless of who first came up with it. Most people of the West would find it insanely barbaric, and it is.
IGotBupkis: I haven’t read this book yet, but it’s been highly recommended to me by someone who knows my reading tastes and interests. It maintains that human violence has declined over time. That thesis is counterintuitive; should be an interesting read.
What worries me far more than it (the lynching and subsequent treatment of the corpse of Colonel Khadaffi) is the acceptance and celebration of that lynching and defaming in the west.
That clearly shows we’ve sunk to the level of those barbarians ourselves (I’ve always known the barbaric nature of the north African and Arabic tribes).
It shows that either we’ve become so dhimmified that we can’t bear to even think of stating our disgust at the practice of Islamists, or that we actively support their acts. Either is extremely worrying to say the least.
Andrew McCarthy chimes in.
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/print/281414