by BAR executive editor Glen FordAn American delegation of activists and journalists travel to Libya for a World Conference of Green Book Supporters, and an audience with Colonel Mouammar Khadafi. “What possible use could a political work linked in western minds to the struggles of robed Bedouins have for inhabitants of the wealthy, hi-wired North?” Plenty, it turns out. “'Direct democracy,' as the Green Book describes it, is of more than passing interest to citizens of the Belly of the Beast, where corporations have the legal rights of persons and money is deemed constitutionally entitled to all the 'free' speech it can buy.”
Encounters with Colonel Khadafi and the Green Book
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
“The world’s number one proponent of the Green Book believes the Libyan formula for socialism is entirely applicable to the United States.”
The highway that runs from Tripoli’s airport to the rocky Mediterranean shore is punctuated every few hundred yards by small rectangular signs in Arabic, English and French: “Africa – One People,” “Africa is Life,” “Yes for the United States of Africa,” “Africa is Development.” Certainly, Libya’s capital is development, a metropolis of 1.7 million that in places seems mainly comprised of buildings either under construction or in some stage of demolition – a new city thrusting out of the old.
Eleven Americans were on their way to Colonel Mouammar Kadhafi’s “house,” actually a large walled military compound not far from the city center. Headed by former Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, the U.S. delegates were among 400 guests of the Universal Association of Green Book Supporters, holding their First World Congress in late October. Colonel Khadafi, leader of Libya since the revolution of 1969 and chief promulgator of the Green Book, had agreed to speak to us.
McKinney had addressed the Green Book World Congress the night before. “Colonel Khadafi should be highly commended,” said the Green Party’s 2008 presidential candidate, “for honoring our ancestors - the framers of true democracy - by reaching out from Africa to the entire world. We would like to thank him for this opportunity to discuss his thoughts as presented in the Green Book.”
In the United States, the Green Book is known just widely enough to evoke derision and eyeball-rolling among the smug and comfortable classes. What possible use could a political work linked in western minds to the struggles of robed Bedouins have for inhabitants of the wealthy, hi-wired North?
“The rich have no right to the wealth they control.”
The American delegation to Tripoli offered some answers. “The universal principles of the Green Book, although widely associated with the conditions and challenges facing developing nations, are equally applicable to the needs of the people of the United States at this period of profound crisis for finance capital.”
McKinney continued:
“The finance capitalist class, through its control of U.S. economic and political institutions, has in the past year effectuated the largest - and speediest - transfer of wealth in the history of humankind…. We categorically reject all claims by capital to our national resources and credit, and declare that corporate power is antithetical to the people's power. We, instead, put our full faith and credit in the people.”
On basic socialist principles of people’s sovereignty over the national wealth – the fundamental conviction that the rich have no right to the wealth they control– the Green Book speaks plain truth to Harlem and every other gentry-besieged, bankster-bedeviled community in the United States. And every conscious witness to U.S billion dollar elections can testify, as did the American delegation in Libya, that “the ‘multi-party’ systems instituted and spread by western governments have indeed become a means to plunder and usurp the people's autonomy and authority.”
“Direct democracy,” as the Green Book describes it, is of more than passing interest to citizens of the Belly of the Beast, where corporations have the legal rights of persons and money is deemed constitutionally entitled to all the “free” speech it can buy.
Under the Colonel's Tent
The 400 guests from 91 countries were gathered under a huge tent, its beige folds billowing high above their heads. Seated in the front row in straight-backed chairs arrayed on carpet the color of sand, were Cynthia McKinney and a few lucky members of her delegation. Colonel Khadafy sat at a plain table near the entrance, dressed in a white suite and green shirt, bareheaded, his voice low and rumbling.
The first order of business, said Khadafi, his words relayed by the English translator speaking through the guests' headsets, was to observe a moment of silence in memory of the thousands of Libyans deported by Italian occupation forces in October, 1911, never to return to their homeland.
In 2008, Italy and Libya finally signed a treaty of friendship and cooperation, requiring the former colonizers to build a railroad link across the country, “pay compensation to the victims of Italian occupation, clear Libya of land mines and provide information on the fate of deportees.” The Italian agreement was part of a general settling of accounts with the West, which included normalization of relations with the U.S. in 2006 and financial settlement of the Lockerbie passenger jet bombing affair. Tripoli’s feverish building boom followed.
“The rulers’ claim to the national wealth is illegitimate, like any common thief’s.”
“The struggle of mankind was to get rid of oppression and to achieve happiness,” said Khadafi, citing one of the Green Book’s central tenets. But the Green Book is maligned and misrepresented. “The shortsighted people are those who say the Green Book is the book of Khadafi, the book of Libya, the book of Muslims… The Green Book doesn’t say that…They will not find the word Koran” in the Green Book.
All of which is, of course, true, but must be repeated, since Europeans and Americans have always preferred their own racist myths over reality when it comes to the formerly colonized.
Direct democracy, operating through people’s committees and popular congresses, is far superior to Western representative systems and constitutions which, Khadafi said, “are changed many times, whenever the rulers have an ax to grind.”
Khadafi’s socialism breaks with Marx on the issue of nationalism, which the Green Book considers “the real constant dynamic of history.” Yet there is elegance to his straightforward socialism.
In capitalist society, Khadafi informed his guests, the rulers control “trillions. Where did they get it from? This is the wealth of society.” The rulers’ claim to the national wealth is illegitimate, like any common thief’s. “You can break the windows and take the safe, but that doesn’t mean you have a right to do it.”
Tell that to the banksters that instructed the Obama administration to commit, by July of this year, $23.7 trillion of the national wealth to the resurrection of finance capitalism.
Under capitalism, Khadafi continued, “a small number of people control the wealth and make the others poor. The poor don’t have banks, or own the press. They don’t have a member of parliament. The rich create the parliament, they own the press. The poor are made redundant. This is injustice” - an elemental truth rooted in the experience of capitalism.
Europe and America, for five centuries the greatest tramplers of human rights on the planet, murderers of whole civilizations, masters of industrial-strength genocide and enslavement, appoint themselves arbiters and definers of human rights.
“The rich create the parliament, they own the press.”
“
They talk about human rights, but they cheat millions of people out of their human rights,” said the 67-year-old leader of 5.5 million Libyans, who is also chairman of the African Union. Human rights in places like Britain and the United States amounts to nothing more than “the right to express yourself when you are in pain. They [the rich rulers] have the right to steal, you have the right to protest.” Not the right to redress, or restoration of one’s patrimony and dignity – just the right to protest and cry out. “The Green Book,” said the Colonel, “is a method for emancipation. We should destroy capitalism.”The world’s number one proponent of the Green Book believes the Libyan formula for socialism, whereby oil revenues have begun to be distributed directly to citizens – starting with the poor – is entirely applicable to the United States. “The wealth of America should be divided among the citizens, equally” – an arrangement that sounded similar to the state of Alaska’s yearly oil revenue payout to citizens. “The wealth of society is the property of all Americans and should be distributed that way,” said Khadafi.
The American delegation’s Libyan interlocutor, a well-educated Black man named Abdurahmane who lives most of the year in Paris, explained that Libyans who have been phased into the redistribution program begin with a “portfolio” worth about $20,000 and receive about $1,000 in revenue a month. Libya’s relatively small population and healthy oil revenues have long afforded the nation one of the highest per capita incomes in Africa. But per capita income means nothing to the average citizen when the rich hoard everything for themselves. Libya makes per capita income (or wealth) actually mean something to the common people. Since when have Americans who call themselves socialists put forward a formula with such crowd appeal and simple elegance?
As Colonel Khadafi puts it, “Use simple language. Enlighten the workers.”
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at [email protected].
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