Muammar Gaddafi

African Revolutionary Writers, Part 8c

Colonel Gaddafi as he was

Muammar Gaddafi

Muammar Gaddafi led a small group of junior military officers in a bloodless coup d'état in Libya against the pro-Imperialist King Idris on 1 September 1969. By the grace of God he is still the leader of that country. In fact, he is the longest-serving national leader of any country in the whole world at this stage.

Libya is a large African country on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, West of Egypt and East of Tunisia, by now much more developed than before.

Gaddafi and Mandela

Muammar Gaddafi’s 1975 “Green Book”, and especially the part on “Democracy”, is a very useful text for discussion in study circles, because it does not take bourgeois democracy for granted, but interrogates it, criticises it severely and to a considerable extent, rejects it.

Gaddafi is certainly an African Revolutionary Writer. In the other, much more recent piece for the New York Times linked below, Gaddafi sets out a plain case for the “One-State Solution” in Palestine, which is the same in principal as South Africa’s one-state solution (“One person one vote in a unitary state”).

Muammar Gaddafi recently

Muammar Gaddafi is a wise man and a humble Muslim man of great energy, in spite of the sorrows that he has personally had to bear. He is loved by the revolutionaries of Africa.

Since the first version of this introduction was written, Libya has been bombed and invaded by forces of Britain, France and the USA. One of Gaddafi's sons has been killed and one of his grandchildren. This on top of the daughter killed in the raid organised by Reagan and Thatcher in 1986. The Wikipedia entry on Muammar Gaddafi has been re-written to conform with Western propaganda.

We have touched on the question of Libya before in this series, in the item on Ruth First, which in turn is linked to a download from First's book on Gaddafi's Libya. 

Please download and read the text via this link:

Muammar Gadaffi, The Green Book, Part 1, on Democracy, 1975 (6000 words)

Muammar Gaddafi, The One-State Solution, 2009 (939 words)

Further reading:

C L R James, The Hegelian Logic, 1948 (3692 words)

Angela Davis, Women, Race and Class, C13, Work and Housework, 1981 (7011 words)

Huey P Newton, Speech at Boston College, 1970 (6283 words)