Counterpunch | It is September 2020. Americans are focused on an election between an
Orange Fascist criminal and an old-school right-wing Democrat war
criminal. Where Donald Trump projects chaos and disorder, Biden projects
stability, order, and a return to normalcy. If Trump is the virus, then
surely Biden is the cure.
It is September 2020. Libya prepares to enter its eighth year of
civil war. Slave markets like the one in Bani Walid are as common as
youth literacy centers were in Gaddafi’s Libya. Armed gangs and militias
wield power even in areas nominally under government control. A warlord
regroups in the East as he looks to Russia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and
the United Arab Emirates for support.
It is September 2020 and the US-NATO war on Libya has faded to a
distant memory as other issues like Black Lives Matter and police murder
of Black youth have captured the public imagination and discourse.
But these issues are, in fact, united by the bond of white supremacy
and anti-Blackness. The Libya once known as the “Jewel of Africa,” a
country that provided refuge for many sub-Saharan African migrant
workers while maintaining independence from the US and the former
colonial powers of Europe, is no more. In its place is a failed state
that now reflects the kind of vicious anti-Black racism forcefully
suppressed by the Gaddafi government.
Libya as the global exemplar of the exploitation and disposability of the black body.
Squint a little and you can see President Joe Biden getting the old
band back together. Hillary Clinton welcomed into the Oval Office as an
influential voice, someone to give words to the demented thoughts of the
living corpse serving as Commander-in-Chief. Derek Chollet and Ben
Rhodes laughing together as they buy another round at their favorite DC
hangout, toasting to the re-establishment of order in Washington. Barack
Obama as the éminence grise behind the political resurgence of the liberal-conservative dominant structure.
But in Libya, there is no going back, no fixing the past to escape the present.
Perhaps the same might be true of the United States.
