In a world of Reagans, choosing to be a Gaddafi
Or: How I found peace through truth and socialist resistance
Blog posing is not my strong suit, but here I am with a Gaddafi blog cataloguing an obsession, so it's only proper to discuss my experiences with Gaddafism and how I ended up here. I can start with a simple word:
A name I was deeply familiar with, despite having been born under his VP’s presidency.
A name that I was taught meant strength, wisdom, and most importantly, unrestrained American power. A venerated folk hero in my sleepy Southern town, his portrait still hangs in my uncle’s office, his biographies sit on my mother’s shelves. I watched his funeral with my parents, my mother weeping as Nancy took the flag from her husband’s casket. I was encouraged to read ‘Dutch’, and then listened as my parents told me that it wasn’t the best portrait of the man who made America what it is today. Too critical, after all, Reagan was the best thing that ever happened to our country in recent memory.
And for most of my young life, I believed them.
As children we are not immune to propaganda, we are the product of the political climate in which we are raised. Pulling away from that ideology in search of the truth can come at a steep price, and for many it comes at the cost of losing people we once loved and trusted. People whose words shaped our ideologies, our worldview, our places in the community. Sometimes pulling away feels like mourning a death.
The problem is that I ask questions. A lot of them in fact. In 2011 I had more questions than my cup usually holds. Things didn’t make sense the way I wanted them to. It just didn’t add up to the narrative I was given. I carried these doubts for five years, alongside a quiet admiration for a particular man. An admiration that I knew would upset my family (and partner’s) staunch Reaganite sensibilities, so I pushed it aside and focused on life, I focused on college…
In 2017 I decided to finally start finding answers.
Sometimes in life we’re met with a decision. Choose truth or choose peace. Peace means accepting the status quo, bending the knee to the voices that shout down at you, that call you crazy, that tell you that you’re delusional for not believing what Fox News barks out every evening over your mother’s pork chop supper. But what they don't tell you is that Truth brings freedom, freedom in knowing that despite the hardships, you choose to stand up for what is right, what is just. That freedom brings a deep, spiritual peace in a way empty platitudes never could.
In Gaddafi I found that freedom.
To my family choosing Gaddafi meant choosing the ‘terrorists’ and ‘foreigners’, over my country, over my people. It meant opposing everything that they had worked so hard to teach me, running from their cult of personality into the arms of a man who they deemed to be a dangerous ‘mad dog’. By maintaining the belief that Reagan was not a 'bad' person, but that he was acting on the behalf of something that was inherently evil, an imperialist, Zionist force which sought to destroy all that opposed it, made me a political pariah to those closest to me.
Years later there is a quiet acceptance now, shrouded in a veil of suspicion amongst those who know. The sort of side eyed dismissals that you would expect from a family member discussing an outsider, not relations between a parent and child. My relationship with my partner ended altogether, because opening up to others about my love for Muammar ended up showing me just how toxic my romantic situation was at the time. My ex still curses his name like it’s poison.
This is the essence of resistance. Never bending the knee, never choosing comfort over the truth. For me it’s a quiet resistance, in my home country, and now my newly adopted one, the name Gaddafi still invokes strong negative emotions. It’s something that I’m not ashamed of, but am very careful about disclosing.
I serve my truth by living my life, by loving, and by keeping his memory alive. And I am not alone. Knowing this simple fact is one of the most beautiful aspects of being a Gaddafist: I am never alone. I’m bound to my brothers and sisters across continents, languages and religions through our shared loyalty to him. We never walk alone, even if we can’t outwardly show it just yet. One day when the period of the masses comes to fruition, history will look back on him favorably, and I’m privileged to have upheld his truth through the darkest of days for Libya, for Europe, for America, and for the rest of our world.
In the meantime, whenever I sit in my uncle’s office, Reagan smiles down at me while I carry a photo of Muammar on a necklace beneath my blouse. It’s a silent declaration:
You are here, I am with you. We will be victorious in the end.
