Part One: Qaddafi: His Bizarre Sci-Fi Stories, Childhood Hate Crimes and Amazonian Bodyguard Fetish

Muammar Qaddafi was probably the craziest bastard to ever steer a nation. In Episode 11, Robert is joined by David Bell (www.patreon.com/GamefullyUnemployed) and they discuss the insane life of Libyan Dictator, Muammar Qaddafi.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Mmm, Hello friends, I am Robert Evans, and this is
Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you everything
you don't know about the very worst people in all
of history. Now, my guest today is a personal friend

(00:20):
of mine, former roommate, UH, current and former colleague, David
Christopher Bell. Hello, Robert. David is a writer, a podcaster,
one of the two heads of the Gamefully Unemployed Network,
which you can find on Patrion Dave. Anything else you
want to introduce about yourself? No, you got it right.
I also have been writing for bunny Ers dot Com,
which is mcaulay culkins uh lifestyle website. David is McCauley

(00:44):
Culkin's personal biographer. Yeah. Now, I am his spiritual guru
though fantastic. He's also been taking care of my cat
for months, which I feel like readers should know. Great cat,
really solid cat. UH. Now, today, David, we are going
to talk about a gentleman and a scholar UH named
momark At Daffi. Great name. What do you know about

(01:05):
momarkt Daffi, great name. That's pretty much I was thinking
about this a lot since you asked me to be
on this. Momar is like a great name, solid name right, Yeah,
Kaddafi is a solid last name. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. Um,
he did stuff in Libya and it didn't well for him.
It did not Yeah, that's about it. I know his
country once uh asked a scientist to make him a

(01:27):
bomb in ve and the scientists to make a time
machine instead. Um, really really screwed over the Libyans there. Yeah,
they were very angry. Yeah, Doc Brown. Yeah, and that's
a that's the extent of my knowledge. Well, yeah, Momar
was the leader of Libya for forty years. Uh. He
was executed in the street in two thousand eleven by
a partisan mob. And that's uh, that's that's what I

(01:49):
would I would guess most people listening right now know
about Momarkadaffi. Um. The more detailed story, which a bit
we're about to get into, is the tale of probably
the craziest person to ever run a country, and not
not like Hitler crazy, where you have like this very
cohesive idea about the world and history and you're trying
to like make this like like crazy. Isn't he Probably

(02:14):
I don't even know, Like I don't I don't even
know how to. I'm just gonna read you twenty one
pages about the guy. Uh. So you know, we live
in a time with political extremes right now in the
United States. That fact is obvious enough that even saying
it is like yielding to cliche. And in times like these,
extreme men with extreme plans and very little relevant experience
can wind up in charge of the destiny of millions.

(02:36):
That basic story has played out a lot of times
throughout history, but never quite like it did during the
reign of Momarkadafi. He was a dictator and, like Saddam Hussein,
a writer as well. But while Saddam used his novels
to imagine a fantasy world far away from a rax
troubled reality, Kaddafi actually based the Libyan state entirely on
his favored fantasies. Now. Momar Mohammed Abu Minya Kaddafi was

(02:56):
born in nineteen forty one or perhaps nineteen forty three,
in a little hamlet of tents near a town called
Certain in the deserts of western Libya. No one knows
exactly when he was born, because he lied about every
aspect of his past, and also probably lied about his
birthday so that he could join the military. Seems like
a running theme. Having listened to this show. They like
to they like to make their own history. Yeah, you

(03:17):
never really know anything about these they're all they're all
a little like Kudini, like they really they like the
razzle dazzle there, or like the joker who was actually
kind of a good way to look at Momar Kaddafi
when I say he's crazy, he's like Heath Ledgers joke. Yeah.
So yeah, like Hitler had a plan. Yeah, Momar was
just he just was gonna see what happens. Yeah, he

(03:39):
had a plan, but it was not wasn't a great plan.
It kept changing. It was yeah, we'll we'll get into that.
I'm getting ahead of myself. Uh so he was a
better one. Um which are like sort of wandering nomadic
desert people, kind of the original Arabs. Uh. He was
the only son of a goat hurder named Abu Minyar
and his wife Ayesha. Neither of Aaddafi's parents could read.

(03:59):
He had three older sisters, but otherwise the fictional figure
his childhood most resembled would probably be Ray from Star Wars.
Because Libya had been an Italian colony right up until
World War Two, when it became a battle ground between
the Axis and the Allies. So as a child, Kadafi
and his family would wander the desert, finding empty mm
O casings, pieces of downed planes, destroyed tanks, and like

(04:20):
taking scrap off of them and selling it like that
was his his early childhood. So yeah, like Ray from
Star Wars basic to Simon Pagan, Yeah, costume exactly exactly. Yes,
Simon Pegg does come into the story a number of times. Yeah. Now,
aside from occasionally rooting through crash stucas in p. Fifty
one Mustangs, Kadafi's early life was basically the same as

(04:42):
the life of a Libyan born a thousand years earlier.
His family mostly lived in tents around an oasis. His
early education was given by a wandering priest who taught
him to memorize versus of the Koran. So that's, you know,
young sounds kind of awesome. No, do your education, but
wandering anything like I'm picturing something very probably way more
like magical than what it actually was. It was probably

(05:06):
more boring. But yeah, I mean, I wish, I wish
if I could change one thing in time for Momar Kadaffi,
it would be to have that wandering priest had been
a wandering karate master, and then it's a very different story. Yeah. Yeah,
changed a lot of history. Yeah. Uh So. In nineteen
fifty four, young Momar Kadafi convinced his dad to let
him go to school, which is something he has in
common with Saddan Hussein, having to beg his family to

(05:28):
let him learn how to read and stuff. Yeah. I
just want to learn. Um. The school was so far
away from his home that he had to live in
town while he attended classes. He slept at a mosque
every night and went back home on the weekends, walking
fifteen miles each way. That sucks. Yeah, that's really rough.
That's less. I I like the wandering priests like he
comes to you. I don't wanna. I don't want to

(05:49):
travel that much to learn. You have to commute every
week to get to school. No, no, I would not
have gone to school under the circumstances. So school was tough,
but it gave Momar a chance to develop his first, last,
and greatest love. Ranting about politics. In nineteen fifty two,
the Egyptian government had been overthrown by a group of
Arab nationalist army officers headed by a guy named Gamal
Abdul nas Kadafi fell in love with NASA's politics, which

(06:11):
is like Arab panner of nationalism. All the Arab states
need to form one new country again like there was
in the days of the Ottoman Like, that's the idea
that Kadafi loved as a kid. Um. So he started
memorizing NASA's speeches and reciting them to other kids at school.
Rather than beating him up, his classmates started carrying around
a small wooden stool so he could stand on it
and speak. Um. That's Kadafi's version of the story. That

(06:35):
doesn't sound like children. It doesn't sound like kids. Having
been a child, I think we would have thrown rocks
at him. Yeah, but who knows. He was a charismatic guy.
The fifties and sixties were a time of growing and
exploding and rest across Africa at the unjustnice of colonialism.
Kadafi organized protests, including a general strike every second of
December to protest against the Balfour Declaration, which was that's

(06:58):
the thing where Britain was like, there's going to be
in Israel, and then there was an Israel was yeah,
you're not a fan of Israel. Yeah. It's important to
note that Our number one source on the life of
young Kadafi is yeah, adult Kadafi. Um. It's also important
to note though, that everybody that's been interviewed from his
childhood in early life says that he was like electrifying
to listen to, very charismatic, good looking young guy. There's

(07:20):
older pictures I saw of him. I quickly, yeah, went
on Wikipedia, and he seems like a good looking guy.
He was a handsome fellow. He looked good in the uniform.
Yeah yeah, yeah, his his dressing. We'll get into his
fashion choices a little later. His his sense of style
really evolved over the years. So yeah, it's not hard

(07:40):
to imagine that young Kadafi might have actually been an
anti colonial rabble rouser and popular speaker. Now when he
grew up, one of his earliest memories is just being
terrified of the sea because the Libyan people for the
last three thousand years had just been invaded by an
endless series of empire. So like that was a thing
that he was scared of. He hated the ocean and
he loved the desert with him on that. Yeah, yeah,

(08:03):
you are very on the record. Ocean it doesn't want
us there. We have no reason to be there. Yeah,
you can't drink it, you can't breathe in it. It's
there's nothing there for us. Stay out of the ocean
filled with monsters. Momarkadafi would not disagree with you on
any point there. Yeah, so far, I'm getting along. Um So,

(08:23):
when he was a kid, or when he when he
had been a little little kid, the Italians had been
in charge of his country. Uh, and you know they
had invaded in nineteen eleven and killed his grandfather. Then
they'd carried out a brutal anti insurgency operation against Libyan
civilians in ninety nine. They put two thirds of Libya's
population into concentration camps. A lot of them died, we
don't know how many. But yeah, that's just we just

(08:45):
did an episode about concentration. Yeah, is it just yet
one more country that in Europeans? Very em good God,
it's easier to pick the countries that didn't ever have
a concentrate camp in them, because there's like three. Um So. Yeah.
Under Italian rule, Libyans couldn't receive anything beyond an elementary

(09:08):
school education. Most of that education was dedicated to civilizing
these savages with Italian values, which I assume are mostly
based around Macaronian plumbing. I'm kissing, kissing your fingers when
something is good, Yes, yes, And I can say that
because my family is Italian. That is of our culture. Yeah,
I'm pretty Italian. When this caused unrest, you know, they're

(09:28):
not letting them get educated or talk thing. Dictator Benito
Mussolini tried to charm the Libyans by declaring himself the
Protector of Islam was one of his titles. Ah. He
had a sword made in Tuscany and engraved by Libyan
Jewish goldsmiths that he claimed was the Sword of Islam.
When he declared himself Protector of Islam, Benito gave himself
the sword in a huge ceremony. Just the whitest man

(09:54):
thing to do. Yeah, like that is that is peak
colonial as him. Oh yeah, that's that's top notch. It's
really really something I'm doing, that Italian KISSI finger thing
I just described. So yeah. Uh so Libya gained its
independence from uh well, I mean obviously the Italians. It

(10:15):
was taken over by the Italians in World War Two
by the Allied forces. Uh. The new United Nation gave
Libya it's independence in nineteen fifty one, the Western Powers
appointed a king named Address to rule over the country
because they trusted him to be their man in Libya. Uh.
It just banned political parties and was sort of repressive,
but his heart wasn't really in ruling. He didn't really

(10:36):
care about being king. Okay, yeah, um. So Libya's new
National Assembly wrote their first constitution that same year. Libya
had never been a country before nineteen fifty one, so
there wasn't any precedent for them being united. It had
just been like there's some cities on the coast that
kind of kept to themselves and people in the desert
who kind of kept to themselves. It was just a place.

(10:56):
It was just a place that's charming. I didn't know
we could have that. Well, yeah, I mean it had
been parts of other countries, a bunch of but yeah,
and nobody had said like, you're you're part of this
empire now. You're part of this empire now. But it
was never like the people in the desert in the
middle of Libya had never viewed themselves as the same

(11:17):
thing as the people in Benghazi or Tripoli, and for
that matter, the people in Tripoli and Benghazi didn't consider
themselves all part of there was no I'm fucking Tripoli,
it was they just had no history of being a thing. Yeah,
so no one could agree where the capital would be,
so they decided to rotate capitals every two years, between
Tripli and Benghazi. This meant that every two years the

(11:38):
whole federal government in diplomatic corps had to pack up
and move across thousands of miles of brutal desert. So
they chose the least convenient let's just do this the worst,
the worst way, which makes our pick of d C
as the American capital seem less dumb, where there's like,
let's just pick a swamp in the middle of everyone,
Like a lot of people died of malayre you. But

(12:00):
it's smarter than switching capitals. And we committed, and yeah,
we stuck to it. Yeah I'm sure now like now
that we expanded the country and stuff, there's some better candidates,
but no, we're sticking to d C. Yeah, now it's
got history. Um okay. So for his part, King Addris
did not want to be king. He refused to put
his face on the money or have any landmark other

(12:21):
than the airport named after him. So this was like
a hobby. It was like just he was king, but
he was like, I'm not really into it. He was
like a high up leader in one of the cities,
and the British were like, he had a lot of
power in a region and he was friendly to the West,
and the West was like, if we make this guy king,
he'll let us take oil out and he'll let us

(12:43):
keep air Force bass and in return we'll train up
his army and we'll have British soldiers. They're protecting his reign.
But the king didn't really give a ship about He
didn't He liked running his area, the city he was in,
but he had no ambition to run all of Libya. Um.
So yeah, he refused to have anything but the airport
named after him. He spent most of his time at home,

(13:05):
Uh and his sort of absence from the public sphere
opened up opportunities for young, ambitious, politically minded men, young
men like Momar Kadafi. Uh Kadafi was not happy with
the status quo in his country. As a strict Muslim,
he was outraged that foreigners lived there, brought alcohol into
Libya and partied. As a teen, he led his fellow

(13:25):
children to smash the windows of a hotel that had
a bar in it. Uh King andres kept the company
open to American and British basis. Kadafi had nothing but
contempt for this and for westerners. Here's an anecdote about
him from Allison parjetors Libya, The Rise and Fall of Kaddafi,
which was one of the major sources for this podcast quote.
One target for his invective was the English school inspector
Mr Johnson, whom Kadafi dismissed as no more than an

(13:47):
agent of imperialism. On one occasion, Kadafi refused to stand
up when Mr Johnson entered the room and, in a
provocative gesture, waived a key chain bearing the image of
President Naser at the haughty inspector. Upon being ordered to
leave the room, Kadafi coldly told the inspector, you are
the one who should leave for good, not this room,
but the whole country. Damn. Yeah. How old was he?
It's like sixteen or something. Yeah, it's a classic teenager. Yeah. So.

(14:11):
Kadafi's activism earned him a small but dedicated following other boys,
Rather than convinced them to sell drugs for him like
a decent American school child. He organized them into a
revolutionary cell to overthrow the king. This is when he's
in like the equivalent of high school. Recruits in the
Kadafi's group had to be Arab nationalists and weren't allowed
to drink alcohol or quote run after women. Kaddafi recounted,

(14:32):
we used to meet under a palm tree near the
seb Off Fortress using a light we had made with
our hands. Under this light, I used to give my
lessons in secret revolutionary organizations. Wow. Yeah, they're like they're
like the straight edge kids in high school, um, who
are like fun the government, but they're actually like planning
to distrib the government. They're they're way more active and

(14:58):
it's they they stick with it, you know. Yeah. I
mean you gotta respect that I gave up most of
the stuff I was believed in as a teenager when
I was sixteen. Yeah, this is like his junior high
school band. But he keeps keeps it rolling. And also
he really does doesn't he commitment? It's important? Um so

(15:18):
uh in nineteen oh, yeah, none of the young revolutionaries
in Kadafi's cell were allowed to do anything fun while
there was a government to overthrow nightclubs and gambling were
banned for the members. Secrecy had to be total. Everyone
was required to be all in for the revolution. In
nineteen sixty one, Kadafi attended a protest in Seba, the
town where he went to school. He gave a speech
attacking the British and American military bases in Libya. It

(15:40):
was apparently an aggressive enough speech that the regime had
him expelled from school entirely. This was a mistake. It
only made Kadafe more dangerous. He left his family behind,
walked to the coastal town of Misrata, and enrolled in
school there. Then he started to recruit more young students.
By the time he was an adult and old enough
to join the military academy young Momart, Kadafi had built
revolutionary cells in five cities. As a newly minted adult,

(16:04):
he went to military school in Benghazi. Since the Libyan
military at this point was basically just a Western puppet,
his training was conducted mostly by a British soldiers. Kadafi
refused to earn to learn English. One of his teachers,
They're a guy named Colonel Ted Law, described him as
inherently cruel. He claims Kaddafi murdered a fellow cadet, probably
for being gay. This is a quote from that book Libya.

(16:25):
The terrified cadet, his hands and feet bound, was dragged
to a firing point where Kadafi in a group of
other students began shooting at him before Libyan officer finished
him off with a Kuda gras while the others laughed. So, okay,
so I no longer like him, You're no longer on
yet the turning point, right, because until this moment he
didn't no hate crimes um crime free. Until this part.

(16:47):
Kadafi's whole story is like that. There will be two
things he'll do in a row. And you're like, okay,
I agree with what you said. There's real self starters
in the murders, and then yes, murder someone for being gay.
That's that's real fucked up dai. Yeah, yeah, you're listening.
Kadafi's lost the David Bell vote at this yas good
to know, uh So Kadafi discipline was violent for everybody

(17:10):
in the military school. At one point, Kadafi got in
trouble for not keeping his mouth shut, and he was
forced to crawl in his hands and knees over gravel
wearing a backpack filled with sand in the hot desert
sun so military schools rough for everybody, but roughest for
the gay kids who get executed. H Throughout the whole period,
Kadafi continued to work through work towards his revolution. He

(17:30):
and his fellow cadets viewed the military as their gateway
into power. But there was a problem. They were all
just a bunch of cadets who would when they graduated
to be low ranking officers. Known with any real power
or knowledge wanted a thing to do with them. Their
operational security was very bad, bad enough that the CIA
had started to hear about them by nineteen sixty seven.
The CIA did not take Kadafi seriously because he just

(17:51):
seemed like a dumb kid. So the West continued to
suck out Libya's oil to you and use it as
one big airstrip. Kadafi later recalled, our souls were in
revolt against the back hardness enveloping our country and its land,
whose best gifts and riches were being lost through plunder,
and against the isolation imposed on our people in a
vain attempt to hold it back from the path of
the Arab people and from its greatest cause. So Uh

(18:12):
Kadafie graduated military school, so did the kids he'd grown
up with and turned into the members of his revolutionary cell. Uh.
They named themselves the Free Unionist Officers Movement, and at
first their ability to overthrow the government did not seem
to be very good. It's they were as good a
naming themselves as they were overthrowing the government. Um. They
tried to hold meetings, but it was difficult to get

(18:34):
everyone in the same place at the same time. Most
of them didn't have cars, so it's like having a band.
It is like yeah, yeah, having a band when you're
all teenagers. Uh. They tried to get some senior officers
on board with their plan, but none of those people
wanted anything to do with them, and so for a
while their revolutionary activities were mostly limited to stealing ammo
and hidling, hiding it under piles of rocks and inside trees.

(18:56):
There's one story one of the guys in Khadafi's group
who went on to be his secretary of defense. Basically
when he was a kid, had to his mom had
to hide a bunch of AMMO that he'd stashed in
the sewers because the police came looking for him. So like,
that's the level of these guys are on were like
their moms are helping them hide bullets. Um adorable, Yeah,
it is, it's cute. Um. Kadafi and his revolutionaries tried

(19:18):
to schedule the overthrow of the government in early nineteen
sixty nine. This got called off because of a concert.
Um oh man. They set a new date, but this
one got sucked up because someone in the military found
out and put you know, the king on warned, warned
the king. Um Kadafi and several of his friends were questioned,
but nothing came of it. So the history of their

(19:39):
revolution is basically an endless prate of near missus h.
There was the time that Kadafi was driving back to
Benghazi with a friend who got so into reciting verses
from the Koran that he didn't see a giant cow
had stepped in the middle of the road. The car
rammed the cow, which somehow survived, but the car was totaled.
So this is like a team comedy. Yeah, yeah, it's
like a team comedy about trying to overthrow the government.

(20:00):
The occasional hate crime. Yeah, with sprinkling the occasional hate
So basically American pie, just that movie. Yeah, Kaddafi's childhood
was a lot like a Libyan American Libyan pie, which
I think is baklava. Okay, yeah, seem right, yeah yeah.
Uh So it turned out that all their many failures
had helped him. Um. Colonel Aziz Shinnib, the third in

(20:20):
command of the Libyan army, later said that he and
his fellow senior officers knew about Kadafi's group and their
plans and just ignored them. We always thought it was
rubbish that Kaddafi and his group would never be able
to do anything, which is not an unfair thing to
assume based on what we've heard so far. Eventually, though,
Kadafi and his revolutionary friends got their ship together enough
to set a totally for real this time coup date

(20:41):
September one, nineteen sixty nine. So we're going to get
into that coup and of course the madness that came after.
But first we have to sell some products and services.
And you love things that I love the purchase, yeah, yeah, receipts,
items just object objects in general. Well, the objects that

(21:03):
are about to come on in through your earbuds are
objects that if you buy them, it will support the show.
So there, there we go, and we're back. We're talking
about Momar Kadafi. We just got through his childhood, the
formation of his revolutionary cell, and the setting of their

(21:23):
final date to overthrow the king of Libya. I do
want to note at this point, you know, there's a
number of sources for this, including that great book Libya,
a documentary from the BBC called Mad Dog about Kaddafi UH,
and a bunch of others. So you can find all
the sources for this podcast on our website, behind the
Bastards dot com. I always encourage people to check up
on us and read further. Um. So the date has

(21:47):
been set, the coup has been planned for September one,
nineteen sixty nine. UH. Kadafi distributed plans for the revolution
to all of the members in his revolutionary group. UH.
He handed them out in envelope sealed with at wax.
How how big is this group at this point? I
think it's dozens and dozens of people. Yeah, it's a
sizeable group. They're all over the country, not like hundreds

(22:09):
though I don't think hundreds, but it's there's no I
never found like an exact number of how many people
were involved. So the coup had been postponed and delayed
so many times that a lot of key members of
the conspiracy did not believe it. When they got their letters,
they thought it was a trap. So Kaddafi spent the
last moments before starting the coup driving all around Libya

(22:31):
convincing his men that yes, we're still planning to overthrow
the king. So the whole thing was a comedy of
errors mixed with a ship show, right, But he really
wanted it to work. He really wanted to take aside
from that hate crime. Like this is like an underdog
story almost. It really is of like these group group
of chuckle fox trying to have a revolution and this

(22:51):
one guy who's like, really he just wants to overthrow
the king and they're not good at it, but everyone
else is so bad at everything that it works out,
Which was again, this all has to start with aside
from the hate cross side from I can't really just
like throw away the hate crime. No, no, there will

(23:12):
be more hate crimes as the story lengthens. So revolution
day comes on the day one of his men there
were radio stations they were supposed to take over in
Tripoli and Benghazi. The guy who was supposed to take
over the Tripoli radio station um and occupy it, couldn't
find it, so several other revolutionaries helped him find it,
and once they got there, they were shot at mistakenly

(23:35):
by the soldiers who thought they were Israeli's invading the country.
A tank commanded by one of the conspirators caught on
fire while it was filled with explosives and AMMO. The
driver barely managed to disconnect a wire in time to
stop it from exploding. Well, all this went down, Kadafi
was tearing us through the desert and a jeep to
take over the Benghazi radio station. They came to a
fork in the road, and here's a quote from the

(23:55):
book Libya on what happened next. Kadafi took the left
turn as planned, expecting the train of vehicles to follow him. However,
in the excitement of the moment, the other drivers went
hurtling down the right fork. He later recounted, I had
stopped my jeep to await the rest of the column
when I suddenly saw all the other vehicles tearing like
demons towards the main road. Then it dawned on me
that the entire guard units barracks were streaming along in

(24:17):
one direction, and that the drivers, in their enthusiasm, were
following one another without worrying much where they were supposed
to be going. So this entire revolution could have been
scored to Yaka exactly and then it litt it. Okay,
that's probably all I can say before we get pulled
for your infringement. Yeah, but it worked. The revolution worked

(24:37):
despite not really knowing what they were doing. It just
happened that the king was out of the country when
this went down. None of the officers were prepared to
defend a coup, and the Libyan military was not really
a functional service at this point, so Kadafi and his
young friends wound up overthrowing the government with very little
bloodshed or fighting. Uh So let that. Yeah, I mean

(25:02):
there's a lot of there's a lot to say about
like leadership that start where it's just so dumb and
like it can't possibly get better from here, when like
there was like all every condition had to be perfect
for them to do this, and it was basically everybody
else's fault. It sounds like it was everybody else's fault.
A minimally competent government and military would have stopped this

(25:24):
in seconds. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Nobody was good at their job.
This is like like the apocalypse now of revolutions, where
everything goes wrong and yet it somehow works out. Yeah,
exactly exactly. And yeah, I think it's a good lesson.
Other than the hate crime, there's a great lesson in
this for kids, which is that you can sometimes succeed
in rebelling against the state if you just show up. Yeah, yeah,

(25:47):
which okay uh. At six thirty am on September one,
nine Libyans with radios woke up to the sound of
moll Mark Hutoffi's voice for the very first time, People
of Libya, in response to your own you will fulfilling
your most heartfelt wishes and answering your incessant demands for
change and regeneration, and your longing to strive towards these ends.

(26:08):
Listening to your incitement to rebel, your armed forces have
undertaken the overthrow of the reactionary and corrupt regime, the
stinch of which has sickened and horrified us all. From
this day forward, Libya is a free, self governing republic.
She will advance on the road to freedom, the path
to unity and social justice, guaranteeing equality to all her citizens,

(26:28):
and throwing wide in front of them the gates of
honest employment, where injustice and exploitation will be banished, where
no one will count himself master or servant, where he
will be free brothers within a society in which, with
God's help, prosperity and equality will be seen to rule us.
All one exhausting thing to hear. Yeah, just get up

(26:49):
the morning, there's been a revolution. I only had my
fucking coffee. This is such a bullshit. Who is this guy?
You want? So the forty year reign, if Momar Kadaffi
had begun, well, I really expected it to be something

(27:09):
more grand than what you've described, just a bunch of
dumb kids who got lucky. Uh. If you were a
regular Libyan at this time, you might have felt optimistic.
The Western powers hadn't exactly done any good for the
regular people, and the king had clearly sucked, So maybe
you'd figure new he's an outsider, you know. Yeah, I
mean I have similar feelings right now. If we got

(27:30):
read donned, part of me would be like, okay, let's
try this alright, because yeah, like a bunch of people
parachuting in like, oh, can't do they have Like how
much worse could it be? Do they have healthcare? Like?
Can I go to the doctor now? Yeah? Um? So
you know. The bad news about the new regime was

(27:51):
that Kadafi and his crew were a bunch of young
men in their twenties and early thirties. They had very
little experience of any kind. None of them had better
than a high school education. Um. One of mom Marketoff's
first sex in power was to promote himself to colonel
and declare himself commandant of the Libyan army. Um. This
makes him part of my favorite historical tradition, which is
the fact that almost no one who's been called colonel

(28:12):
in all of history has actually been a colonel. It's
just something people call themselves. Can we be colonels? Yeah,
that's that's all it takes. You're a colonel. Now, colonel,
I'm putting it on on a business card. You gotta
get a cool hat. That is a requirements. You gotta
get a sick ass hat to start calling yourself colonel.
But I can do that. Yeah. So yeah, Kaddafi promotes

(28:34):
himself to colonel. He's in charge of the Libyan army.
Now you know, what would you do, Dave, if when
you had been a teenager you and your friends had
suddenly been in charge of the whole country. I feel
like there'd be a point where I'd realize something over
my head. Um, well, you're a humble man, that's true.
I wouldn't be a humble man if I successfully because
I was a terrible person as a teenager. Yeh, teenagers

(28:55):
are generally terrible. They're all monsters, and like I was
all into punk rock and like, yeah, anarchy take it
all day. So if I was in a position where
I took over the government, I probably think I was
real hot ship yeah, and be like, yeah, I'm going
to run things away. I want to and have just
the worst ideas. But I would never grow out of it.

(29:17):
And I assume that's similar to a lot of people.
Like this is if you go through your life never
being told hey, cut the ship. Um, you just stay
a teenagerer your whole life. Yeah, if by the time
you're barely where a normal person will be out of college,
you run the country. Uh, you don't grow up? Yeah, yeah,

(29:38):
And that's it's a little Joffrey. Yeah, he's yeah, he's
he's he's a little got some Joffrey going on. Uh. So.
One of Kadafi's first acts was to ban all political
parties and all political activity outside of the government itself.
This was not a big deal because the king had
banned that sort of thing too. Uh In nineteen seventy two,
he made party politics a crime punishable by death. Um,

(30:00):
which doesn't sound as bad of decision right now as
it as it was. Yeah. So, at first a revolutionary
counsel took control of the country, with Momar sort of
at its head. There was great excitement among the population,
but it quickly became clear that the new leaders knew
even less than the old ones. Kadafi immediately turned on
his friends, attacking them for their incompetence and telling his

(30:22):
comrades they didn't understand anything. He would insult his colleagues
in front of their staff and canceled decisions as soon
as they were made. This started before the regime was
even a month old. So this is like if someone
came along in like this country and said, like all
the experts and elitists they don't know how to run
this place. I'm gonna even though I have very little
experience and then they buy some insane away they became

(30:46):
running the country. Yeah, and it became very evident that
they don't know how to do that. Yeah, and then
they attack the people around them who they had previously
supported in order to deflect blame from the fact that
they just don't know how to run. Again. I can't
imagine such a thing. No, this is the only time
it's ever happened. Um so uh Kadafi developed your reputation

(31:07):
for making meetings, like setting up meetings and then making
everyone else in the council wait for hours before he
showed up. Often he wouldn't even show up. He would
regularly schedule meetings for two am because he was a
night owl. Because he was in his twenties, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
this is all a thing just a twenty year old
person would be doing. We don't he might have been

(31:27):
a little older than that, because we don't know his
exact but he was very a young guy. But there's
a reason, like in this country where like you have
to be like thirty five to be president, Like, there's
a there's a very clear reason and also a reason
no thirty five year old has ever been elected because
you're still probably not. I'm still not ready. I'm nearing
that age and it's like, way, no, sir, Yeah, no, no.
Just a couple of years ago, we were driving to

(31:49):
our apartment and you guys were in the back of
a truck and I kept slamming my foot on the
break just to make you fly forward. Fun was that
when we were like, had that weird keg? Yeah? Yeah
that was fun. Yeah. Yeah. I shouldn't be president, is
what I'm getting. Or we should both be president. Well,
now there's a different idea. You could be my Pence. Yeah,

(32:11):
I'll be your puns fantastic. Our producer Sophie is shaking
her head angrily. We're gonna do it, which she does regularly.
We're gonna make America. Okay, pretty okay, just okay. I
feel like those hats and sell too. So. Kadafi became
famous for going a wall for days at a time
whenever he got angry. He would threaten to resign if
anyone argued with him about anything. At one point, he

(32:33):
decided that all members of the Revolutionary Council ought to
wear military uniforms and carry pistols at all times. One
of his friends in the council didn't like this rule
and showed up to a meeting in street close. Kadafi's
totally reasonable reaction was to hide in the desert for
a week. During another argument, he threatened to leave and
fight with the Palestinians in Jordan's hold on Kadafi hid

(32:54):
in the desert, in the desert, that's taking a non
dictator thing, like I thought you're gonna he's like had
him eaten by dogs or something. He got upset and
just went off. Did his friend have to like go
find him an apologize. I feel like that's probably what happened.
Come up to him like a tent in the desert, like,
hey man, I get a gun. I don't really know why,

(33:15):
but here it is. What an amazingly passive, aggressive way
to run a country. It's incredible. Oh my goodness. So
by nine seventy three things weren't going great with the
new Libya. Kaddafi was so disenchanted with ruling that he
decided to resign and funck back off to the desert,
but for real this time. He told his comrades on
the Revolutionary Council that he would announce his resignation to

(33:36):
the people of Libya on April sixteen, but surprise, Kadafi
had no intention of resigning. Instead, he announced the Popular Revolution,
an entirely new domestic program that no one else in
the government had been warned about. They all found out
about at the same time as the people of Libya.
During the speech. Under this program, Kaddafi urged the repeal

(33:56):
of all existing laws and their replacement by revolutionary enactments.
The weeding out of anti revolutionary elements by taking appropriate
measures against perverts and deviators. The staging of an administrative
revolution to destroy all forms of bourgeoisie and bureaucracy. The
arming of the people in order to make a people's militia,
the staging of a cultural revolution to get rid of
all important and poisonous ideas contrary to the Koran so

(34:20):
Kadafi promised at the end of the speech that he
was going to take the Livian people to paradise in
chains if he had to. Exhausting. It sounds really tiring,
like you're working in the desert. It's anything you do
if you live in the desert is probably exhausting, and
like you've just gotten over the fact that a new

(34:41):
government's taken over. And then some guys like I'm gonna
drag you to paradise and chains and all the laws
are different today. It's like that really doesn't sound like
paradise by God damn it. Um. So this would all
be a pretty full plate for most world leaders, right um.
But Kadafi wasn't done innovating. He started to work on
what he called the Third Universal Theory, which was a

(35:02):
new political theory he believed was destined to sweep not
just Libya, but the entire world. Here's how one member
of his inner circle recalled the brainstorming process for creating
this Universal theory. Quote, Whenever new intellectuals arrived, Kadafi would
tell me to invite them to visit him. Then as
we talked, he would take notes. He would ask them
how to remedy this or that problem. The trouble for
him was that he couldn't digest their ideas. He didn't

(35:25):
have a basic scientific approach. When he himself offered an opinion,
he came out with immature and confused analyzes, such as
were later to form the basis of his Third Universal Theory.
So Kadafi described his theory as a middle way between
communism and capitalism. Destined to replace them both. Capitalism, he said,
led to sin into generacy. It was far too individualistic
to be healthy. Communism treated human beings like property of

(35:47):
the state, and that wasn't good either, so he needed
to find a middle way. Eventually, Kaddafi codified all of
his thoughts about how the world ought to be run
into his magnum opus, The Green Book. In it, he
argued that democracy he could not flourish in republican systems
such as society, was destined to ignore the will of
huge junks of the population. Accurate so far. Instead, the

(36:09):
states should be abolished entirely, and the people should take
charge of their own lives and rule themselves directly. So far,
nothing he said is inherently crazy sounding, but the system
he set up didn't actually work that way. The lowest
level of the new government were the People's Congresses. Everyone
was supposed to take part in them, debating and voting
on policies. The People's Congressmen's Congresses would funnel their decisions

(36:29):
up to a General People's Congress, which was kind of
like a parliament or our congress. Their decisions would be
passed up to a General People's Committee, which was basically
a presidential cabinet which was then implement the decisions. But
here's the catch. The actual center of decision making was
just Momar Kadafi. None of the People's Congresses were allowed
to talk to each other about anything. They had to

(36:49):
go through this like line of things that always ended
up at Kaddafi, So no decisions could actually be implemented
without Kadafi's sign off, and he mostly just did whatever
seemed good to him the time and ignored the congresses.
So it was basically like, man, we should all just
govern ourselves and and figure it out, and then I
make the decision and I decide what we do. Still, yeah,

(37:11):
the green Book was filled with other fun stuff besides
blueprints for the government, quotes like this, 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 group of persons eating. It is
stupid for people to let a person or group of
persons get warmed or enjoy ventilation on their behalf. It
is equally illogical for the society to allow an individual

(37:33):
or team to monopolize sports while the people as a
whole pay the costs of such a monopoly for the
benefit of one person or a team. So we hated
sports teams. Yeah, I mean I'm not a big sports sports,
but people like sports. Yeah, people like sports. We need sports, Yeah,
people like sports. Nobody likes watching someone else eat. Yeah,

(37:53):
like but we know people. Well now there's and there's
those videos avidus So Kadathi was just wrong. Um. The
Green Book also bans being a landlord. No one has
the right to build a house additional to his own
and that of his heirs for the purpose of renting it,
because the house represents another person's need, and building it
for the purpose of rent is an attempt to have

(38:14):
control over the need of that man, which not inherently crazy.
I'm not totally against. It's really that that coming boiling
down to and I make the decision and I that's
where it all gets sucked up. Yeah, it's great to
say all these things, like we should be reducing the
amount of power one individual can hold over the another
up until you demand to be in charge. And maybe,

(38:36):
I mean people listening might have different opinions about this,
but like maybe even if like if he tried to
do it right, it might not work out. Still, it
might just be you know, him dreaming, but like that, Yeah,
they're really like he didn't give it a chance here.
He was always he was always it sounds like a dictator.
He was always wanting it to be about himself and

(38:57):
he always had to be the center of it. He
couldn't stand. He was never going to let any counsel
make a decision that he didn't agree with. He's Jaden Smith, Like,
he has a bunch of he nobody told him no
he doesn't. Yeah, and he has a bunch of crazy
ideas how the world should work, but he doesn't have
like the background to, yeah, to actually understand how to

(39:18):
implement that. Yeah, it's like that's exactly what's going on here.
So it's also important to note, if you're one of
the people for whom the other stuff I've said from
the Green Book sounds kind of good, that Kaddafi was
also super misogynistic. Um, I'm gonna read this quote. I'm
gonna apologize to our producer first because it's it's pretty bad.
But it's important that we be balanced about who Kadafi was.

(39:42):
According to a gynecologist, women menstrates or suffers feebleness every month,
while man being a male does not. When a woman
does not menstrate, she's pregnant. If she is pregnant, she
becomes due to pregnancy feeble for about a year. Afterwards,
woman breastfeeds the baby she bore. Breastfeeding means that a
woman is so inseparable from her baby her activity is
seriously reduced. She becomes directly responsible for another person, whom

(40:05):
she helps to carry out his biological functions, without which
it would die. All these innate characteristics form differences of
which man and women cannot be equal. That's such a misunderstanding.
And it's one of those like pregnant, Like this person
just launched a human out of their body and yeah,
really freaking painful after carrying it for months and then

(40:29):
has has to keep it alive. What a what a weakling?
AND's it's like, no, you idiot, No, I mean, if anything,
the conclusion to be yeah, I mean we can't be
equal because men can't make human beings. But oh my god. Anyway,
so again you got to balance this ship out because
if you read just the stuff about everyone should be equal,

(40:50):
Kadafi sounds like not the piece of ship that he
was right. I mean, here's going back to the only
thing I know about Kadafi is that he was murdered
horribly in the streets by his people. I kind of
assumed he did something to deserve. Oh, and we are
going to get into all of the some things he did.
So now the Kaddafi rain is up and running in
the utter madness is about to start. We have not

(41:12):
even dug into the craziest of the crazy yet. But
before we dig into that crazy, we have to dig
into some ass. So get out your credit card, pull
out a wad of cash, vier your car off of
the road, and pull out your laptop and prepare to
order things. And we're back, mom Marca. Dafi has taken control.

(41:40):
He has launched his second revolution in a couple of
years and elucidated his plans for a perfect society in
the Green Book. Um so yeah, now now here we are,
mom Marca. Dafi starts releasing his Green Book chapter by
chapter rather than all at once. I think he was
releasing it as he wrote it. Um, because he just
didn't have the ability to delay his gratification by that much.

(42:04):
And he said, as he dropped the first chapter, with
the establishment of this unique democratic experiment. All political theories
in the world have collapsed. So Kadafi changed Libya's name
to the Socialist People's Libyan arab Jamahiria, which is means
like the People's Republic, basically uh and the flag was
changed to the color green. Now, Kadafi had no official

(42:26):
role in this new people state. He was still in
charge of the army, of course, but he was not
technically in charge on paper. He demanded to be called
Leader of the Revolution or brother leader, but he didn't
actually have a job, so that whenever there was a problem,
he could be like, I'm not in charge of Libya.
It's these other guys. It's this council here that fucked up,
or it's this guy here who fucked up. Don't get
angry at me. I'm not in charge. So that was

(42:49):
that was his whole tactic, solid being in charge of
the country and pretending you're not for forty years. Yeah,
So Kadafi's like, I don't actually have a job. It's
me who's in charge, so that you know, he can't
be blamed for anything. He's in charge. It's a good plan.
It's like, um, it's like if if you were like president,

(43:10):
and you were blaming like the rival party or like yeah,
like a like a special deep state all your problems. Yeah,
it's not unlike that if that were to ever happen
somewhere in the globe. Yeah. Um. And for all of
his rhetoric about like freedom and liberty and stuff like that,
the people of Libya were brutally repressed whenever they spoke out.

(43:31):
One month after declaring the people state, some students protested
in Tripoli. They were hung in front of their classmates,
and the executions were broadcast on state television. Kadafi established
a series of revolutionary committeees across the nation, made up
of loyal young men who got super high off of
having a little bit of power. The official purpose of
the committees were it was to protect the revolution and
remove any obstacles to Colonel Kadafi's vision. This had the

(43:53):
dual advantage of helping Kadafi solidify his power while freeing
him from any possible blame, because hey, it's not his fault.
If these kids hurt the wrong people, which they did,
they would just like rob people, take their stuff, throw
them in prison, execute their own personal enemies. You know,
the kind of things do when you let young people
uh established paramilitary committees. Yeah yeah, uh so. Kadafi was

(44:16):
basically a master at outsourcing his methods of oppression and control.
When a TV news presenter in Tripoli became too popular
for the colonel's comfort, he ordered the people to take
over the job of presenting the news. Random Libyans would
line up every day for a chance to read the
news live on television. That's amazing. TV got really weird

(44:36):
under mo market. Oh my god, that sounds like a blast.
Oh yeah. For most of his reign, there was only
one official channel, the State Television channel, that ran like
six or eight hours a day. One day it broadcast
hours worth of just a picture of army boots with
the caption from a viewer to the broadcasting house. Another
day it played hours of footage of a dirt road

(44:57):
shout out the moot window of a moving vehicle. For
the most part, State TV broadcast speeches by Kaddafi in
conferences where people talked about the brilliance of his green book.
This is like public television. Yeah yeah, well, they'll be
like six hours of old people dancing. Yeah, it's like that.
But he's the only one deciding who's going to be

(45:18):
on it so as it always does. Repression in Libya
bread descent. Uh. Not all of those dissenters were arrested
before they could flee Libya. Some of them made it
out of the country. Kaddafi made use of an international
network of assassins to murder political enemies who managed to
make it to the safety of a country like Britain.
This did not always work out well for him. In
nineteen eighty four, there were a bunch of angry Libyan

(45:38):
dissidents protesting in front of the Libyan government office in London.
People inside of the office started shooting into the crowd,
but they missed and hit and killed a British policewoman
named Yvonne Fletcher. Britain suspended their diplomatic relations with Libya
as a result of the shootings. Kadafi was known to
demand that his assassins bring back all or part of
his murdered enemies. He would often keep the corpses of

(46:00):
his murdered foes and refrigerators. A member of his inner
circle said that he did this to see them once
in a while to speak with them when they were dead.
He kept some corpses stored this way for more than
twenty years, things have taken a turn with Momar. Yeah,
I mean, okay, there's there's been a hate crime. There's
been a hate crime, um and he was described as cruel.

(46:21):
But this, this is now Hannibal elector territory. Yeah, we
have it ramps up, you know. Yeah, yeah, And this
is like a thing you see with with dictators. Like
when we talk about these guys being pure evil, most
of them really weren't until they would have some dark moments.
But they're dark moments that might make them like a criminal.
They always feel like they have something to prove, yeah,

(46:44):
and power. Yeah, but like in the sense that they
would kill someone and then then at their corpse for
forty years. Yeah, like they couldn't. They can never walk
away from a disagreement, or that's what it sounds like.
They like this guy. If this guy's never in charge
of Libya, he's the dude where somebody insults him and
it burrows into his heart for years and he starts

(47:06):
a fistfight over it, or maybe even murders somebody in
a crime of passion. Because he's the dictator. It morphs
into keeping corpses in a fridge from twenty something. He
has a support system. Yeah, he has a way more resources. Yeah,
the terrible dick. Yeah, it's it's just what happens when
you have power mixed with whatever the hell is going

(47:29):
on inside Momar's head, when you mix power, when you
mix unlimited power with the weird damage that we all
have inside of us. Everybody has their version of keeping
their political enemies in a fridge, right yeah, oh yeah, yeah,
maybe it's just banning a stony. I have a fridge
in my heart that I keep people in. Yeah. Yeah,
I don't like squash and yeah, we have people in

(47:51):
our lives to tell us to cut the ship, which
is something he does not have. Yeah. It's like anything
that you feel strongly about. If you were a dicta,
later you could turn into something terrible. Yeah, and that's
what Kaddafi did. Ah. He also had a secret rape
chamber in his compound. Yeah yeah, um he would. Yeah,

(48:13):
that is where he would violate women that his henchmen
abducted for him. I say women, but that's not accurate.
He would visit schools and pick out girls and indicate
which one he wanted by patting her on the head.
His men would pick the girl up after school and
bring her to him. One teacher recalled during a BBC documentary,
the girl they wanted, they would simply take her and
treat her like a rag doll in their hands. They

(48:34):
had no conscience, no morals, not an ounce of mercy,
even though the girl might be fifteen or sixteen years
of age, a mere child. If the child was a virgin,
Kadafi's staff would show her porn movies until she understood
what he wanted. He was apparently turned on by violence.
It's hard to know how much of all of this
to believe exactly, because these particular interviews came from a

(48:54):
BBC documentary UM called mad Dog Kadafi's Secret World UM.
And obviously the BBC is one of the NATO nations
that helped to post Kadafi, so it's one of those
things where and they're interviewing actual Libyans, but those Libyans
are people with a grudge against the administration. They definitely
like they found the rape room. There's like pictures of
it and stuff. So it's hard to say how much

(49:17):
of everything is true, but it seems like most horrified. Yeah,
if this is true, it's it's awful. Yeah, exactly, and
that's kind of where I land on this. Um. Yeah,
so Nori al miss Mari, Kadafi's former chief of protocol,
also claimed that he molested young boys in addition to
young girls. Quote, he had his own boys. They used

(49:38):
to be called the Services Group. All of them were
boys and bodyguards, a harem for his pleasure. Some of
the women he used were tossed out on the street basically,
but others claim they were sent to mental institutions so
no one would believe them. So, yeah, it's dark now. Yeah.
The colonel's rule was idiosyncratic, by which I mean he
turned on a dime and demanded insane things from his followers.
At one point, he ordered all of the Camel's and

(50:00):
Tripoli shot dead. The only explanation given was brother leader
has decided that camels have no place in a modern society. Yeah.
I don't disagree with that one. Yeah, they don't have
any place in modern society. I don't like camels. They're terrible.
They're fucking assholes. Um, that doesn't justify the other horrible things. No, Yeah, again,

(50:20):
there's there's things belief that aligned with my beliefs in
terms of ocean and Camels. Yeah. Um, but I at
this point, I think it's safe to say that I
would not like Momar Kadafi. Yeah, I would not get
along with him. It's just that even a rape clock
is right twice a day, exactly. Yeah. Um. So it's

(50:40):
possible that Momar Kaddafi had anwar Sadat, the president of Egypt, murdered.
Some of his former insiders alleged this, and Kaddafi did
claim after the relationship soured that Sadat had been quote
an agent of Hitler since which there's a lot to
unpack in those few words, because he's very specific that
Sadat became an agent of the Nazis after nineteen which, yeah,

(51:06):
you get. There's there's a lot that needs to be
expanded on in that sentence. Yeah. Um. I wish there
was more. I wish Kaddafi had spoke at length about
how he thought World War two ended, but I have
not found that. Yeah, I bet that's a really special Yeah.
It does seem like he thinks Hitler survived into the
late forties at least, so that's fun. Um. For the

(51:29):
first half of Kaddafi's reign, basically all private enterprise was
banned by the government. Kadafi and his people decided what
could be imported. They ran state supermarkets to distribute these
goods to their citizens. In nineteen eight six, a journalist
found that the main floor of one such supermarket had
only g which is butter, with the milk fat removed
and powdered milk. In eight seven, another foreigner reported that

(51:49):
the markets in two cities held nothing but Dutch milk powder,
Italian suits, and Chinese Teah. Yeah, you can really live
on that stuff? You can have? Would you do with
Dutch milk powder? Italians? Okay? Hold on? You boiled down
the Italian suits to get into their components again, the

(52:09):
Italian chef kicking, kissing fingers. Um, you boil that down
to it's nice and stuff. You add the tea. I
want to say it with the tea. Yeah, that feels right.
I think you strain it from the tea. Yeah. Um,
and then mix it with what's the last one, milk powder.
Dutch milk powder. Okay, so you don't straight it all
the way, but you add the milk powder and it
thickens like mac and cheese. That's basically macaroni. Yeah, and

(52:32):
you cut it up. Yeah. Yeah, I assume Italian suits
are made out of pasta. Yeah, yeah, fantastic. Uh. Some
of this was, you know that some of the absence
of goods in the supermarkets was a result of sanctions,
which we will get too later, but a decent amount
of it was just Kaddafi fucking with people. He's quoted
as having said, sometimes we make items disappear to force

(52:53):
people to work harder and produce them, which is a
dick move move. Uh. It's all so true that the
entire Libyan government was hilariously corrupt. Public supermarkets were regularly
burned down by their managers so that the managers could
steal all the goods inside before lighting them on fire
and then sell the goods on the black market. So yeah,

(53:13):
that's I mean, they're they're creating a situation where I
feel like, what are you gonna do? Yeah, if you're
managing that supermarket and you're like, oh god, like this
is just milk powder, Yeah, just burning this place to
the ground. Yeah, I have trouble, Like anyone who's worked
in a place like a grocery store has wanted to
just burn it down. Yeah. Yeah, it's a very burnable structure. Yeah,

(53:36):
it's hard to blame anyone for doing that. Um. So
it's important to note that the Libyan state Underdo was
not a total ship show, and in some ways was
more functional than the king's government that had come before it.
Kadafie did establish a successful social safety net when none
had existed before. Everyone in Libya was guaranteed a home, healthcare, education,

(53:58):
and a car, all provided by the state and paid
for by the billion dollars a day in oil revenue
that poured through Kaddafi's hands. Okay, so yeah, he had
this ideology and some of it throughout this we've said like, well,
he's not completely ye wrong, It's like the ideology didn't
necessarily not work. He's a broken person. He's a broken

(54:19):
person because like the idea of okay, the state's kind
of provide a bunch of ship for people, and we
have more oil than almost anyone in the world. Yeah,
that can work. Other countries have done that for close
to a century now. Yeah, Um, you can absolutely run
a state that way, but not with a guy like
Khadafi in charge. Not for long, well actually for forty years.
But yeah, that's that's a pretty good run. Romaniac. Yeah,

(54:42):
for a fucking nut. Um, uh. Speaking of schools, which
were paid for by the oil money, in the nineteen eighties,
Kadafi replaced school uniforms with military uniforms and mandated that
all students take military science courses. Military officers took over
for school administrators and for many teachers. They were authorized
to carry out military punishments, including forcing students to stand

(55:04):
out in the desert sun for hours at a time,
which is pretty sick. Yeah, this seems like a real
This is like he's just asking to be overthrown at
that point. Yeah, the moment you start like a whole
generation of people that you just torture and teach them
how military side. So you're you're you're you're begging for

(55:25):
them to overthrow. Yeah. In retrospect, you can see the
short sightedness. Yeah. Uh, that's like it's like having having
like a dog that you that you like only let
out side and like our dick too, but also attached
like lasers too. It's exactly like that. It's like teaching

(55:47):
your dog to understand the concept of slavery and then
giving it right. Yeah, just generally, Yeah, just telling an
animal what the score is not a great idea. Um. Now,
of course, David uh no self respecting tyrant would be
complete without his elite bodyguard unit. Saddam had the Republican Guard,

(56:09):
Hitler had the s S. Mussolini had someone the Macaroni Troopers.
Probably we are really beating rough on Italy. We are well.
We wrote the stylus that we have Italian blood. Yeah,
and so that like released the flood games. So it's fine,
it's fine, it's a fine. And Momar Kadafi of course

(56:31):
had the horis Ajas. In Europe, they were known as
the Amazons, an all female unit of elite, highly trained
bodyguards who protected Momarkadafi for more than twenty years. We
got some pictures in these they're going to be up
on the site, but just take a gander there. Oh,
that's that's wonderful. They're all young, they're all like evntionally

(56:51):
attractive bond villain type of thing. It's exactly called the Amazon's,
I mean, yeah, and they're He is in the second
picture in his fucking ridiculous colonel's uniform next to that lady.
It's he. He is a bond villain. He's the most
bond villain that a dictator has ever. He's like well,

(57:11):
I would say he's more like an Austin Powers villa.
He's a spoof of a Bond villain. He wears the
Doctor Evil outfit from the first There's a picture that
will come to later where he's dressed like Dr Evil
and it's like, look, and this is like right after
Austin Powers had come out, So it almost makes you think, like,
did you just watch the movie and dressed like Dr Evil?

(57:32):
Market might he might watch and he was like, Oh,
that's a pretty that's a pretty smart. You guys gotta
go it on. Uh So. Kadafi got a lot of
bad press for his all lady bodyguards the reality, you know,
and a lot of the press was like how cool
it was that he had how badass These women were
fucking awesome. But the pictures are awesome, Yeah, they are awesome.

(57:52):
The reality was less awesome. Most of the women were
Most of the women in his bodyguard unit were press
ganged into the job with very little choice as to
whether to join. Girls were often sent to act as
entertainment for Kaddafi family parties, and the whole thing sounds
kind of gross, gross and very exploitative. That said some
of his former guards when interview did report loving the
work and loving Kaddafi Um. There's also evidence that they

(58:15):
acted as sort of a secret state police within his
inner circle. I've also read reports that suggest the job
was terrifying for most of the Amazon's One former bodyguard,
now in hiding, was quoted by the BBC is saying,
one night we were going to witness the execution of
seventeen students. That they did not hang them, they shot them.
We were forbidden to scream, we were ordered to cheer.
M So. So again this is going back to he's

(58:37):
just asking for it. You don't if you have personal bodyguards,
you get the people who like want the job. You
don't force someone to do that job. You don't want
someone half asking that job. But if you're only going
to have like comb the country for pretty girls and
put them in uniforms and teach them how to shoot,
they're not necessarily going to love you, like because you're

(59:00):
just abducting them from their exactly. It feels like the
moment things get rough, they're just gonna like quietly back away,
yeah and just yeah, find new employment. Like it's bad.
He's he's really asking for it. You should also, And
I feel like they should go without saying. I don't
support being a gender discriminatory with your bodyguards. Women can

(59:23):
bodyguard very well, I'm sure, but you don't pick your
bodyguard entirely by how they look. That's not a good move.
You pick your bodyguard by how good they are at
guarding your body Yeah. Um yeah. Even even if you're
trying to find like the most badass looking people, they
could be cowards. Like you don't know. Resume is matter? Um,

(59:44):
that's important. Sit down an interview these people. One of
the through lines in Kadafi's regime is that there were
no resumes. Yeah. I'm not surprised to hear that, because
his resume when he became in charge of the country
was guy. Um. So we have we've we've talked about

(01:00:05):
some crazy stuff and we have a lot more crazy
stuff to get to. So much that this is going
to be another two parter because I wound up writing
like nine thousand words on Momar Kadafi. Uh So, Dave,
We're going to break for right now and come back
on Thursday to tell the good people the rest of
the legendary story of Momar Kadafi. Um. When we get back,
we're going to talk about what Kadafi did with all

(01:00:28):
of his oil money, his career, sponsoring insane amounts of terrorism,
and the speech he delivered to the UN which I'm
going to go ahead and say is the greatest speech
that anyone has ever delivered, maybe to anything. Oh man,
that's gonna be fun. All right, before we roll out,
do you have any plug doubles to plug? Yeah, I

(01:00:48):
mean find me at Twitter at movie Hooligan. Um. As
you mentioned at the beginning of this, I am um
one of two people running a podcast and streaming network
called game Fully Unemployed. We have a Patreon right now.
It's patreon dot com slash Gamefully Unemployed g A M
E f U l O Y unemployed. So yeah, check

(01:01:10):
us out. We got tons of podcasts and we streamline
twitch and we're starting to roll out like videos and
stuff like that. Yeah. They do really wonderful stuff, really
fun podcast Robert. Yeah, I'm on. I'm regularly on your
dn D podcast, so you can catch me there as well.
Gamefully Unemployed you can find me at I right okay
on Twitter, you can find this podcast at Bastard's Pod

(01:01:33):
on Twitter. You can also find us on the internet
at www dot behind the Bastards dot com, but we
will have all of the sources for this episode and
all of the pictures that Dave and I have discussed today.
So we're gonna be back on Thursday with more craziness
from the life of Momarkadafi, the craziest guy to ever
wind up in charge of the country. Um, But until then, uh,

(01:01:56):
please enjoy your lives, stay happy, and check back in
on Thursday. M HM.