“Because it bothers me, and I couldn’t sleep.  And I kept thinking about it…”

– Lieutenant Columbo, murder detective

This book is not an ode to Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, nor is it a lament for his passing.  Despite his anti-imperialist trappings, Gaddafi was a self-serving dictator.  He called himself a socialist but stifled the self-activity of his people.  He called himself a Pan-Africanist but was a racist.   

My goal in this book is to study the 2011 imperialist aggression against Libya from the perspective of a detective investigating the murder of the Libyan leader. Put simply, this is a study of naked, imperialist aggression.

So, a reader might ask: Why write a book about the aggression against Libya seven years after it happened?  Isn’t that ancient history?

Quite the contrary.  It is our present; it is our reality, the latest in a long line of Western, imperialist meddling in the affairs of weaker nations – especially those whose leaders are deemed antithetical to the interests of empire.  A study such as this is important because, as socialists and anti-imperialists, we need to know everything we can about the methods and the machinations of the imperialist beast.   Know thine enemy, to paraphrase one ancient philosopher. [1] 

The manuscript for this study began life as a script for a documentary film I wanted to make about the intervention.  But I realised halfway through that I still had not figured out how the conspiracy to invade Libya was planned and executed.  And those were details I needed to include in the film. Like most on the political left, I had surmised it was a conspiracy.  But where was the proof?  “It is quite a three-pipe problem”, as that good fellow, Mr Sherlock Holmes, would have put it.  

Was my film going to say, “It was a conspiracy but, sorry mate, we can’t prove it”?  There were enough of those on YouTube already!

So, I abandoned my unfinished script to “the gnawing criticism of the mice”.  That was a few years ago.  But I kept thinking about it.  Then it dawned on me, while watching an episode of the classic Columbo detective series, that one could study the imperialist assault on Libya as if investigating a murder – in the manner of the lovable lieutenant.  He invariably identified his prime suspect almost immediately but was always challenged in figuring out how they did it.  The game, so to say, resided precisely in the process of unmasking their modus operandi.

Eureka! moment

And that was the exact position in which I found myself:  I harboured an impregnable suspicion that Gaddafi’s killing was the result of a plot by imperialism and its Libyan running dogs.  But how did they do it?  If I could figure that out, I reasoned, I would know how the imperialist conspiracy to effect regime change in Libya was planned and executed. 

Not long after that, while reading my old copy of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, I was suddenly thrust into another Eureka! moment: Why not attempt to use Marx’s method to investigate the Libyan leader’s murder? The notion seemed rather fanciful, but I was dead serious.  It was a long shot, but I reasoned that there was no harm giving it a go.  It was the method Marx used in Das Kapital, that seminal investigation into the origins, operation and development of the capitalist mode of production.  If it was good enough for that veritable intellectual force of nature, it had to be good enough for this humble admirer.  The result of that investigation, dear reader, is this book.

As I progressed with my investigation, using historical materialist dialectics (Marx’s method) as my framework of analysis, the various elements in this conspiracy and their interconnections and interactions became increasingly clear.  Using dialectical logic, I was able to prove that the so-called Arab Spring uprisings which erupted in that arid North African terrain seven years ago tantamount, essentially, to the faithful execution of an elaborate and ultimately successful plot to murder Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. 

Yes, you heard that right.  The Arab Spring was essentially a plot hatched in the citadels of imperialism to kill Gaddafi, remove Syria’s Bashar Al-Assad and reshape the map of the gigantic oil barrel that is the Middle East.  (The scope of the present work will not permit us to explore the Syrian case or the geopolitical motives and calculations of Western imperialism.) 

You may or may not be surprised by the claim that the Arab Spring was the opening gambit in a plot to kill Gaddafi.  If you are, then you need to read this book, to find out exactly what happened and how it happened.  You will discover why everything you thought you knew about the Libya intervention and the so-called Arab Spring was a big, fat lie.  If you already knew this (or thought that you did), then you also need to read this book – to ascertain whether what you thought you knew correlates with what actually happened.

The vantage point of the murder detective

Aside from the fact that this murder-conspiracy theory is the only one that is in perfect accord with the objective reality of what unfolded on the ground, treating the Western intervention in Libya as a murder plot against its then leader enables us to look at this episode of blatant imperialist aggression from a different perspective – that of a murder detective.

And the vantage point of the murder detective has paid off handsomely; combined with the methodology of materialist dialectics, we have been able to decipher exactly how the murder-conspiracy unfolded, providing a unique insight into the true nature of the Arab Spring and how it functioned as cover for regime change in Libya. 

It brings to mind that scene from Dead Poets Society, where Robin Williams’s character, Mr Keating, states that standing on his desk allows him to look at things in a different way?  Well, our desk in this novel study of imperialist skulduggery has been the Marxian methodology of materialist dialectics.  And, as a consequence, we have quite literally been able to see what many others could not see.  Unlike the traditional murder mystery, whose goal is to unmask a dastardly killer, we already know the identities of those who committed the dastardly deed; we also have an inkling as to motive – to protect Western economic interests.  Our task will be to shine a spotlight on exactly how they did it.

It is now seven years after the Libyan counter-revolution, but the mechanics of that imperialist operation are still shrouded, if not in secrecy, then certainly in ignorance.  This book will finally put an end to that – through the simple device of positing the intervention as a murder mystery and then attempting to solve it using historical materialist dialectics.

In that sense The Dialectic and the Detective: The Arab Spring and Regime Change in Libya could not have come at a more opportune time. 

Dialectical Investigation

At its most basic, dialectical materialist methodology perceives matter as a unity of contradictory opposites in a constant state of motion; and views phenomena as interconnected and functioning parts of a larger unit or organism.  As a tool of scientific investigation, it will enable the investigator to strip away what Marx calls “the outward appearance of things” to reveal their “essence”, their inner core. [2]  Marx deployed it to very devastating effect in Das Kapital, his seminal study of capitalism.  And, quite naturally, it has proved more than adequate to expose the barbarity and the skulduggery of the imperialist intervention in Libya and the subsequent murder of Muammar Gaddafi under the smokescreen of the so-called Arab Spring.

The Dialectic and the Detective has not conjured up any “magical secrets” out of thin air. We leave such antics to bourgeois theorising. The material contained herein – or rather, the raw data – was already in the public domain.  What we have done is posed the right questions and deployed an appropriate methodology to tease out the answers; or, as Marx, the master dialectician, would put it, smashed the “mystical shell” in order to expose the “rational kernel”. 

In the process of this dialectical investigation, we have turned the spotlight on the intricacies of a well-planned and executed conspiracy which had remained hidden these past several years.  Before the publication of this book, the common perception of the so-called Arab Spring was that it was a rebellion against domestic despotism.  However, by judicious deployment of the Marxian dialectic, we have proved that it was nothing of the kind.  We show in these pages that the Arab Spring was anti-imperialist in nature.

To parody Marx, previous perception of the Arab Spring had it standing on its head.  What we have accomplished in these pages is to stand it right-side up.  Because of the reified appearance of phenomena, we were unable to crack the mystical shell for many years. It was only after finally going back to our books and studying and applying the master's method meticulously like a devoted pupil, that we were able to finally get at the rational kernel.

Read for yourself, and find out why the mainstream, bourgeois and imperialist media and academia, got it so spectacularly wrong! 

One incidental bonus of reading this book is that it renders the dialectical method so accessible that even a baby could apply it to get a firmer grasp of social or historical events and processes.

* This is introductory chapter of the second edition of my book The Dialectic and the Detective: The Arab Spring and Regime Change in Libya. The book proved that the so-called Arab Spring was a smokescreen created by the imperialist powers to remove Gaddafi and Syria’s Assad. It is available on Amazon.

Notes

[1] Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese general, philosopher and writer is quoted as saying: “Therefore, I say: know your enemy and know yourself, and in one hundred conflicts you will naturally prevail.”

[2] K Marx, Capital Vol III, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch48.htm