From YouTube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIiRvbC3Tb4&feature=related
Adam Curtis writes: "I have found a sort of fly-on-the-wall documentary made in 1976 which follows Muammar Gadaffi around as he goes about ruling Libya. The documentary makes it clear how repressive and brutal Gadaffi's regime is. How he has locked up and tortured thousands of his opponents.
But then it takes a fascinating turn. The interviewer asks Gadaffi to explain why he has sent Libyan troops to fight with the Palestinians against Israel, and why he has sent in Libyan agents to try and overthrow President Sadat of Egypt.
In response Gadaffi launches into an explanation that countries like Libya have a duty to intervene in other nations where the ordinary people are being oppressed by autocrats or oppressive governments - and help free them. That includes helping to liberate Egypt and Tunisia. But it also means, he says, that politicians like him are justified in intervening in Northern Ireland to help the Provisional IRA. Because they are oppressed by the British government. They too are victims."
What defines winner and loser? What defines right and wrong?
For the left, the greatest concern is to instigate change that will level
The last question is striking, and prophetic"
"You came to power in a coup. Do you ever fear that the same thing could happen to you?"
The documentary fades to nothing. Past has become prologue. Gadhafi is not only out of power, but out of commission permanently.
Visual media has a pernicious tendency to raise superficial assumptions, like the BBC documentary from 1976, which depicted Gadhafi as a cold and calculating, but calm leader, a man with family and a simple daily schedule.
Nothing could have been further from the truth. The liberal media has a terrible habit of generalizing the minute domestic moments of an individual, then acting as these snippets into a person's private life expose the truth without compromise.
Gadhafi was a cold-blooded murder, a man who oppressed his own people and harassed nation-states around the world.
The inherent bias of visual media was also prominent in the last moments of his death 42 years later.
The world witnessed a decrepit old man pulled from a culvert, pushed and jostled by angry rebels, then hoisted onto the hood of a jeep and carted around in abject humiliation. In its immediacy and superficiality, it was certainly a pitiful sight, one that would engender even a degree of compassion.
Yet this footage evaluated in the wake of Gadhafi's 42 years of terror and tyranny provides the proper context for this sudden humiliation and demise. This man reap what he sowed, no matter how brutal and illegal to watching eyes, no matter how cruel to our surface sensibilities.
This innate limitation of press and media to discount political and historical context is damaging, one that leads many astray, enough to praise Gadhafi as a glorious leader who ushered in a people-power socialism, yet to discount the records, accounts, testimonies of the millions whom he slaughtered, marginalized, or forced into exile.
The same limitation-bias persists to this day with cult figures like "Che" Guevara, whose stirring rhetoric never matched with his abject hatred of humanity and bloodthirsty quest for power at any cost. Yet because of these ongoing ideals held in place with surface-media, generations are enthralled with lofty rhetoric, and ignore the private correspondence which puts to shame any hope in madmen who claim to be saviors.
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