Robert Snefjella
Premeditated criminal violence has been around for a long time.
Deliberate criminal violence has motive, involves planning, and is cruel and harmful. The motive often involves the attempt at some real or imagined gain, or forceful seizure. Surprise attacks are favored.
Because the evil of such violence is obvious if in clear view, criminals usually attempt to hide such acts, or to obscure their crime with lies. Secrecy and dishonesty are generally indispensable basic tactics for the success of violent criminality. An exception historically is the criminal violence of those who rule tyrannically; their crimes are sometimes brazen, ‘in your face’.
Wars of aggression are criminal violence on a massive scale. During the period after the 2nd WW, the last seventy five years that is, there have been lots of those. There is as yet no effective justice served to those who wage wars of aggression. Once a war has been initiated, one can surrender, or fight back, and hope for the best. Prevention is the best cure.
Curiously enough, wars of aggression are often undertaken by countries that are members of the United Nations, and who are sworn to refrain from wars of aggression. The very words United Nations are of course misleading, as the member nations are not united, but in any case, they are all supposed to “refrain from … the threat or use of force against … any state.” (part of UN Article 2.4)
When intending or conducting a war of aggression, apart from the prerequisite war machines and logistics and soldiers, a basic disinformation template is habitually deployed: The public in the aggressor countries are subjected to propaganda, a blizzard of lies and distortions and spin, with tactical censorship of unhelpful info. The intent of preparatory and ongoing propaganda is to program the ‘home team’ to at best support, or at least not oppose, the impending or actual war of aggression.
The leader of the designated target country will be denounced repeatedly as a monster, and accused of a compendium of personal defects, dastardly intentions, and vile deeds. The country itself will be subject to serial vilification by the intended predators, and usually, whatever can be done will be done to weaken the intended prey. Then, as preface to launching the war, one or more incidents will be staged, or declared, the now proverbial ‘false flag event’, and this will be used to ‘galvanize’ the aggressor’s public, and ‘justify’ the ‘response’. Public fear, anger, desire for revenge, and ‘war fever’, will all be cultivated. But a further effort to dignify and even sanctify the criminal violence is often employed. Sometimes even prior to the atrocities, but usually after the fact, outstanding perpetrators of atrocity will be ceremoniously honored. Warmonger Obama’s Nobel Prize for Peace is an example of the former. This entire process will call forth the fullest repertoire of the human capacity for hypocrisy and emitting falsehoods and sanitizing evil with simulated sincerity.
I’ve chosen Libya as the particular focus for the rest of this article. Its history and present circumstances are illustrative and instructive pertaining to the general observations above.
At the time of its founding in 1954, Libya was a very poor and very large (17th largest on Earth) monarchy with a population of just over a million people. In 1959 the great blessing and curse of oil was discovered in Libya, and the corporations moved in. Libya became ‘significant’ in planetary corporate, financial and power politics calculations. King Idris III of Libya was no hindrance to the flow into corporate pockets of the considerable profits to be made from the Libyan oil. The people of Libya remained poor.
In 1969 a young Colonel, Muammar Gaddafi, led a bloodless coup in Libya, and soon thereafter nationalized the oil: the profits now flowed towards the Libyan people and state.
This nationalization occurred after a post 2ndWW period of extensive de-colonization in many parts of Earth, and no immediate savage response was unleashed against the Libyan people. But the Powers That Be were not amused, and began a perpetual process of covert and overt hostile acts.
In the decades that followed, Libya was subjected to calumny, subversions, attacks, sanctions and the like, but even so made great general progress in many respects. To jump forwards a bit, by 2010 Libya had achieved really remarkable progress, leading the UN’s human development index for Africa. Many other counties could only dream of what Libya had achieved. But before getting into that, let’s retrace our steps back to 1986, and examine just one episode of the denigrating depictions and criminality that Libya so frequently faced.
We learn from former Mossad agent and whistleblower Victor Ostrovsky, in his book The Other Side of Deception, that in 1986 the Israelis surreptitiously set up a transmitter near Tripoli in Libya and used this device, called Trojan, to transmit false terrorism messages. The Americans were duped into thinking that they were listening in on Libyan terrorism plots. A terrorist attack in Berlin was duly blamed on Libya, and ‘the world’s policeman’, at that time led by acting United States President Ronald Reagan, ‘took action’. In April of 1986 over a hundred American planes dropped tens of tonnes of bombs on various locations in Libya. Some reports have given the number of people killed at over a hundred, and unknown numbers were wounded by the attack.
But we also learn from former CIA official and whistleblower John Stockwell in his book The Praetorian Guard that Gaddafi and Libya were deliberately demonized preceding the bombing. The American people were repeatedly polled to make sure they had been primed sufficiently to accept or cheer an attack on Libya. Stockwell notes that Reagan harbored a visceral personal animosity towards the accomplished Libyan leader. Stockwell cites author Lloyd DeMause in the book Reagan’s America as describing Reagan’s reaction to the 1986 bombing of Libya as “exultation”. Given Reagan’s background as actor, was the exultation feigned or genuine? In any case, it is reminiscent of American Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s cackling approval of the brutal murder of Gaddafi in 2011. Serious personality and spiritual disorders do not seem a hindrance to political prominence.
Ostrovsky notes that the bombing of Libya by Israel’s useful idiot the United States also elicited self-congratulatory glee in Israel.
By 2010, as noted, Libya had created an extraordinary national success story, despite the never ending animosity and subterfuge from so many directions.
And here we introduce to our narrative two outstanding, truly honorable, brave citizens of the United States. JoAnne and Jimmy Moriarty were American business people who had developed an effective technology and substances to clean up oil spills and oil messes, and furthermore, their technology could increase oil production efficiency. They had first gone to Libya on business in 2007, and made several trips there for the following four years, developing their business.
Much of the information that follows is gleaned from one of their films and many interviews and lectures they have given over the past several years, including an interview they granted me, as well as from their website libyanwarthetruth.com. In the midst of the NATO 2011 war upon Libya the Moriartys went to Libya as part of a fact-finding commission, and they became trapped in Libya for over 100 days.
They witnessed night after night NATO bombing of civilian housing and infrastructure, and the weapons used included the use of ‘illegal’ weapons such as horrific fuel air explosives. The bombing continued for months, and along with critical infrastructure and civilians, even targeted hospitals and schools. Many tens of thousands of heavily armed mercenaries were brought into the country from ships. The mercenaries committed atrocities, mass murder and mass rape along with mutilation and beheadings. The country was left in ruins and hundreds of thousands of Libyans were killed or wounded. Many fled the country.
The Libya that the Moriartys experienced prior to the NATO and mercenary war upon it had been one of the most hospitable and successful countries on Earth, and they had grown to deeply admire and love the country and the people. The vast majority of then nearly six million Libyans, by 2010, were happy participants in a unique and independent and quite incredible experiment in societal and political development.
Many development projects were underway in housing and infrastructure and agriculture in a society that was not debt based. Mortgages were paid at the rate of 10% of income, and completed in twenty years. Marriages received a 46,000 dollar marriage gift, and births were rewarded by several thousand dollars. Gasoline and transportation was extremely inexpensive, and health care and education were free. The latter included expenses paid for health care or education out of country.
Women were emancipated, literacy was very high, and religious extremism discouraged.
The bank of Libya was independent of the western private banking cabal, and Libya had built up savings worth hundreds of billions of dollars. By 2010, Libya was making preliminary steps towards establishing a gold based currency and alternative credit and financial system for Africa, with the intent of facilitating beneficent, not parasitic, financial help for the many financially-beleaguered countries of Africa.
Muammar Gaddafi had stepped down from power in 2006, and taken up the role of wise elder statesman in the country. As a reflection of Gaddafi’s personal political philosophy, elements of direct democracy had been woven into Libya’s political proceedings.
The Moriartys were captured by the mercenaries while on their fact-finding commission during the NATO bombardment and learned from an Arab speaker that their captors had slated them for execution, dismemberment, and burning of their remains. They just managed to escape Libya by the skin of their teeth, thanks to good luck and some friendly people. Upon returning ‘home’ the Moriartys first turned with naiveté to any US government official they could manage to contact, in order to tell them what was actually happening in Libya. But they were rebuffed at just about every turn, and those who appeared to respond with friendly overtures usually turned out to be “poisonous snakes in the grass”, in the words of the Jimmy Moriarty. They are wiser today.
Despite all this, and their own government’s subsequent success at destroying their livelihood, the Moriartys have continued their work of telling the truth about Libya and explaining current events in Libya. Go to their website for real current information about what is happening in Libya. They need support. The Moriartys have been granted the status of official spokespeople in the United States for the Tribes of Libya, and have remained in constant touch with the suffering, brave people of Libya since 2011.
In the words of Jimmy Moriarty: “Here’s what actually happened; here’s what we witnessed: A beautiful country destroyed, atrocities by the attackers; lies piled on lies.”
In a just world, Libya should have been respected and even honored, not preyed upon. Libya offered practical instruction to us all. Libyan cultural and political arrangements were unique and highly successful. They were a very peaceful society. Their form of Islam was moderate. They had built, and were further building, an admirable country.
The destruction of Libya was planned years previous to the actual war upon it in 2011. In 2007 General Wesley Clark, in an interview on Democracy Now, told us that he had been informed that Libya was among a whole series of countries in the Middle East and surrounding areas that would over the next several years be ‘regime changed’.
The western public was told that NATO was there to save the Libyan people from Gaddafi’s atrocities. A UN Security Council Resolution, based on lurid lies about the Libyan government and what was happening in Libya, established a no-fly zone over Libya. This no-fly zone was used to bomb and commit mass murder and mass maiming and mass destruction in Libya.
The so-called “Arab Spring” in Libya existed only in the fantasies and duplicities of mass media and propagandistic agents of government. There was no popular uprising in Libya. There was no civil war. The ‘peaceful protesters’ in the words of the western propaganda system were actually murderous orchestrated saboteurs. Lurid lies were told to the global public that Libyan soldiers were harming their own people and that Libya was a terrible place. There was however a supremely evil attack by external forces on Libya, a war of aggression, defined in International Law as the Supreme Crime.
In 2018 an investigation by a British Parliamentary Commission into the destruction of Libya found that the reports of Libyan and Gaddafi atrocities, prior to the NATO war upon Libya, were falsehoods. This confirmed Russian satellite surveillance of Libya in 2011, which saw no evidence for the lurid descriptions of Libyan atrocities invented to stoke ‘humanitarian’ war against Libya.
The mass media of the west set the stage for the atrocities through decades of demonizing propaganda; and they gave the NATO atrocities the supreme phony facelift, describing a murderous war of aggression and the destruction of Libya as the salvation of the Libyan people. This is eerily reminiscent of the doctrine of destroying villages and exterminating the villagers of Vietnam, in order to ‘save’ the villages.
We learned from Wikileak’s that then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in her emails indicated that one main motive for destroying Libya was to destroy the gold backed Libyan banking initiative, and thus in effect to destroy their financial independence.
Under pressure from sanctions and propaganda, Libya had in the years before being attacked eliminated much of their military. This was yet another vile tactic to make them easier prey for the planned predation.
Gaddafi had initiated a lawsuit on behalf of Africans, suing the colonial powers for trillions of dollars of compensation for their egregious exploitation and harm of Africa. This too was put to at least a temporary end by the destruction of Libya.
Now, in January of 2020, we have the very perpetrators of the destruction of Libya, meeting in Berlin to decide what to do about the Libya problem, without the Libyan people being asked or being present, let alone empowered there. And we have Turkey recently sending thousands more mercenaries into Libya in support of those trying to prevent Libyans from retaking full control of their country.
Despite so many obstacles, beginning from such a difficult place, over the course of two short generations a successful and unique modern societal arrangement was achieved in Libya by 2011. That was a wonderful admirable accomplishment. The destruction of lovely humane Libya, however, is not just about Libya and the horrific suffering of the Libyan people. It is symptom of much more extensive pathology.
The years-long planning of a war upon Libya, and the onset of the attack in 2011, and the many countries directly and indirectly complicit, and the absence of condemnation of it to this day, are yet again proof of a deeply pathological criminality dominating western political processes and societies. This pathological criminality is not being held accountable for its atrocities. Until now, it has not been effectively stymied, let alone overcome. And this pathology seeds dysfunction and danger in every direction, in all places it touches, including close to home. Can we not do better than to remain complicit with and subject to this?
Amazon employees in Turin, Italy participating in the climate strike on September 20
