Quite a decent tabloid anti-hagiography of the louche Bedouin spiv Gaddafi on BBC4 tonight. I was riveted although of course I knew most of it and they left some out. I was briefly seduced by his apparent originality after his coup back then, but he soon revealed himself as eccentric verging on barmy and soon after that a bit of a mass murderer too. He occupied a hell of a lot of my time and attention for many years in one way or another.
I didn't know he was a serial abuser of young Libyan girls but it doesn't surprise me. Although anyone from a desert tribe will have a genealogy and pretensions to a sort of aristocratic lineage, basically he was an ignorant guy who couldn't make anything dangerous or in the end positive with the technology and politics available to someone with all that money. He could finance wars and supply weapons, and he could try to take over on that basis. Naturally people resisted and took against him.
Mao Tse-Tung was another rough peasant from nowhere who through brains and cunning acceded to colossal power and unlimited wealth. He too used to summon peasant girls to his bed sometimes several at a time. When I read this I was disinclined to believe it - thought it cunning US propaganda - but I have been told authoritatively that it is probably more or less true.
I knew Gaddafi had patronised Idi Amin because when I went to Uganda shortly after Amin's downfall my hotel room still had a Gideon's Koran, not Bible (Amin, who came from a cannibal small tribe in the southern marches of Sudan, converted to Islam during Gaddafi's state visit presumably for a suitcase of dollars). Doubtless the Bible has been reinstated by now.
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