No, Gaddafi did not come back to life and did no re-establish the "Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya" with all its baggage of supporting international terrorism. Now the situation has turned upside down. The Libyan newspaper The Tripoli Post reports in its article: Libyan PM Tells FDI Libya in London: “The State is Under Threat from Terrorism”. Bizarrely enough, Libya itself is now under the threat of terrorism.
Don’t you worry, tells us the shiny new Prime Minister, the great Libyan terrorist threat will be dealt with.
It would seem that a large number of Libyan militias seem to be unhappy with the Prime Minister, the Parliament and, in general terms, with belonging to… well.. Libya. They run their own territories, exert what they call justice and even run their own prisons. As such, they also feel obligated to fight a guerrilla war against Libya by bombing the odd Libyan government building and/or some other meaningful landmark such as the French embassy.
Meanwhile, the Libyan government counters that these evil, evil terrorists are disrupting economic activities in the oil fields and have… well… too many weapons. But not to worry. The new economic policy to be unleashed will safeguard the rights of all concerned. Furthermore, Libya is “reclaiming” their army (whatever that may mean) by training their personnel in off-shore places such as UK, France and Germany (for a price… we are sure). Libya is also dealing with the “corruption” issue that arose when Gaddafi was in power by building an economy based on efficiency and competitiveness. Don’t you worry, everything will be just fine. Be happy.
Meanwhile the reality is being buried under a ton of manure.
The truth is almost always very simple indeed. Militias want to run things their way. Politicians want to run them theirs. These points of view are both incompatible… and wrong.
The fact that they are incompatible is obvious, but why do we say that they are wrong? Because both sides are basing their decisions on the assumption that their people on both sides share their opinions. This is so because Libya is now a “Democracy” and the militias have selected their “Leaders”. Therefore, whatever the people at the top do, must automatically be what the people at the bottom want.
Error… error… error…. Does not compute!
You may have noticed that it is not the majority of the people on any side who are terrorists or state enforcers, but a few, a very small few characters that stand to make significant economic gains. If most people would be behind them, Libya would be in a state of war. Instead, it is in a state of “unrest” (hope you liked the politically correct term, yes, we did this just for your amusement).
So we have a small bunch of people killing each other but mostly killing other innocent people; all thanks to Democracy.
The problem is that all those people want different things because they are… well… different! What a surprise!
A superficial analysis would tell you that if a country has the right to self-determination, so do militias. After all, what is a country but a bunch of armed people, before it proclaims itself a country? There is no magic process to create a country. People just say they are, therefore they are. However, this does not work in the hypocritical world of high politics. A country is whatever the person in charge of that territory says it is, so, the views of the militia do not count and they are labeled as terrorists. Yes, it’s that simple.
But we need to dig deeper. Such a superficial analysis still leaves us with no solution. Even if Libya would be segmented into different mini-countries, people within those countries will still be dissatisfied with their leaders. This would be so because different people will still want different things. The only real solution to the problem is to bring down self-determination to a personal level. A country of one. That will finally solve the problem.
And do you know how do we call a country of one? We call it Absolute Austro-Libertarianism.
We have explained in our article Political Systems Lifecycle why Libyans (and any other country for that matter) need to burn through several political systems before they are ready to become Absolute Austro-Libertarians. That’s OK. We don’t expect the Libyan people to magically see the light and dissolve Libya. This is not what this article is all about.
This article is about providing light to an issue that every politician has a vested interest in obscuring because their job is on the line. We used Libya as an example, but we could have used any other country in the world. It would have worked-out the same.
The issue is not what kind of government one has, the issue is why do we have governments at all when patently don’t work.
Now go and explain this to your “elected representative” and be ignored. Or, you could explain this to your daughters and sons so that they may be prepared for what’s coming.
Or do nothing. It’s your choice. As usual.
Note: please see the Glossary if you are unfamiliar with certain words.
