So I'd like to enlighten folks a little bit more about Libya. The 2011 intervention was, of course, an act of catastrophic imperialism that set us back decades, ruined the country, and continues to have ramifications for our overall development, but it's worth noting that Libyan socialism was suffering a steep crisis even before that. After the disarmament of unconventional weapons that we had undergone in 1999 as a response to the excruciating effects of international sanctions, the country was further disciplined through brutal IMF supervisory regimes that conditioned reintegration into the global economy on a series of "consultations" like Article IV's back-rolling of subsidies, the laying off of hundreds of thousands of public jobs (most Libyans were employed in the public sector to one extent or another), and then obviously the entry of foreign consumer products into the country because of low import taxes, creating a visible strata of transnational, nouveau riche Libyans who strutted around urban centers with their luxury cars, fashionable clothes, perfumes, and other products that were put out of the reach of an increasingly precarious Libyan population. The discrepancy between the new economic reality and the increasingly hollow rhetoric of the Green Book, whose legitimacy rested on revolutionary redistribution and public service, had gradually eroded ideological loyalty. This is not entirely Gaddafi's fault (or the Jamahiriyya's fault in general), but after the Cold War isolated socialist countries, they had little in the way of trade or development but to succumb to these pressures, but the effect had already come about. The feeling of relative deprivation that Libyans suffered, coupled with the influence of increasingly visible foreign media and standards of living, mobilized people into rebellion. NATO was just the instrument that turned this rebellion from a domestic matter into an opportunity for global capitalists, but the festering had begun long before they stepped in, and in fact the IMF, the World Bank, and the Washington Consensus in and of themselves are to blame more than the UNSC or NATO.
This is exactly why I admire the PRC and Vietnam; contrary to "anti-revisionist" whining, those countries managed to navigate and avoid the exact pitfalls that my Libya plummeted headfirst into. It's largely not our fault, of course, as our conditions were very different, but it's definitely worth watching and learning instead of bible-thumping the quotations of Mao Zedong and misreadings of Lenin.
