Goodby to Gaddafi

EXTRACT: In Libya, the masses have exploded into life - and revolution - against colonel Muammar Gaddafi and his ‘Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya’, the latter word being a neologism first coined by Gaddafi in his screwball, three-volume The green book (1975) and literally meaning ‘state of the masses’. Well, as we can see daily on our TV and computer screens, the Libyan masses have risen up almost as one against the state and the ‘Guide of the First of September Great Revolution’ or ‘Brotherly Leader and Guide of the Revolution’ - to repeat just two of Gaddafi’s official honorifics.
With events unfolding at lightning speed, changing by the hour, in Libya we are presented with a near textbook or classic revolutionary situation - where the masses refuse to be ruled in the old way, and the rulers are unable rule in the old way. Determined to overthrow Gaddafi’s cruel dictatorship, which has kept itself in power through terror and intimidation - like the regular showing of public executions on television - the masses initially revolted in Benghazi, Libya’s second city. Inevitably, though Benghazi is separated from Tripoli by hundreds of miles, the revolutionary uprising has yet to spread to the capital. When Tripoli falls, the Gaddafi regime is dead.
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