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[Editor's Note: Learn about a key aspect of our economic system that perhaps is not emphasized enough in its importance. After the collapse of the Bretton Woods agreement and the gold standard, a scheme to prop up the U.S. dollar was devised and sold to the Arab nations by the Nixon administration. In 1973 Henry Kissinger was sent over to negotiate this deal with the Saudis in which it was agreed that Saudi Arabia would trade her oil only in US dollars. In return the Saudis received weapons and protection from the United States. The OPEC nations by 1975 had followed suit...]
FOR THE DETAILS, READ JERRY ROBINSON'S POWERFUL NEW ARTICLE SERIES HERE
Governments historically have used war propaganda (often in the form of atrocities ascribed to the targeted enemy) on their own people in order to make a case for and gain public support for going to war. A litany of lies once again was fed to us via the corporate news media in order to justify the NATO invasion of Libya. Have we forgotten that fabricated stories involving WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction), post-9/11 anger and the good old cliche of bringing democracy to Iraq were used to manipulate us in to going to war with another sovereign country who had not attacked us?
One of the big lies told to the public via the corporate media was that black African mercenaries were being used by Gaddafi to commit genocide against the Libyan people. According to the CounterPunch article titled "The Top Ten Myths in the War Against Libya":
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Patrick Cockburn summarized the functional utility of the myth of the “African mercenary” and the context in which it arose: “Since February, the insurgents, often supported by foreign powers, claimed that the battle was between Gaddafi and his family on the one side and the Libyan people on the other. Their explanation for the large pro-Gaddafi forces was that they were all mercenaries, mostly from black Africa, whose only motive was money”. As he notes, black prisoners were put on display for the media (which is a violation of the Geneva Convention), but Amnesty International later found that all the prisoners had supposedly been released since none of them were fighters, but rather were undocumented workers from Mali, Chad, and west Africa. The myth was useful for the opposition to insist that this was a war between “Gaddafi and the Libyan people,” as if he had no domestic support at all—an absolute and colossal fabrication such that one would think only little children could believe a story so fantastic. The myth is also useful for cementing the intended rupture between “the new Libya” and Pan-Africanism, realigning Libya with Europe and the “modern world” which some of the opposition so explicitly crave.
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In reality, real genocide has occurred against the black Africans living in Libya by the admittedly Al-Qaeda controlled rebels. Black Libyans have been rounded up en-mass with no proof they have done anything wrong and in many cases they have been dragged from their homes and summarily executed, with the excuse being that they must be mercenaries who supposedly were used by Gaddafi to attack his own people.
