Behind the Bastards - Part One: Qaddafi: His Bizarre Sci-Fi Stories, Childhood Hate Crimes and Amazonian Bodyguard Fetish

Episode Date: July 10, 2018

Muammar Qaddafi was probably the craziest bastard to ever steer a nation. In Episode 11, Robert is joined by David Bell (www.patreon.com/GamefullyUnemployed) and they discuss the insane life of Libyan Dictator, Muammar Qaddafi. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space. With no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello friends, I am Robert Evans and this is Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history. Now my guest today is a personal friend of mine, former roommate, current and former colleague David Christopher Bell. Hello Robert. David is a writer, a podcaster, one of the two heads of the Gamefully Unemployed Network, which you can find on Patreon.

Dave, anything else you want to introduce about yourself? No, you got it right. I also have been writing for BunnyEars.com, which is Macaulay Culkin's lifestyle website. David is Macaulay Culkin's personal biographer. No, I am his spiritual guru though. Fantastic. He's also been taking care of my cat for months, which I feel like readers should know. Great cat, really solid cat.

Now today, David, we are going to talk about a gentleman and a scholar named Momar Gaddafi. Great name. What do you know about Momar Gaddafi? Great name. That's pretty much, I was thinking about this a lot since you asked me to be on this. Momar is like a great name. Solid name, right? Yeah, Gaddafi is a solid last name too.

Gaddafi, yeah, yeah, yeah. I know he did stuff in Libya and it didn't end well for him. It did not. Yeah. That's about it. I know his country once asked a scientist to make him a bomb in 1985 and the scientist used it to make a time machine instead. Really screwed over the Libyans there.

Yeah, they were very angry. Doc Brown. Yeah, and that's the extent of my knowledge. Momar was the leader of Libya for 40 years. He was executed in the street in 2011 by a partisan mob. That's what I would guess most people listening right now know about Momar Gaddafi. The more detailed story which we're about to get into is the tale of probably the craziest person to ever run a country.

Not like Hitler Crazy where you have this very cohesive idea about the world and history and you're trying to make this, like Crazy isn't he probably, I don't even know. I'm just going to read you 21 pages about the guy. Oh, delightful. Okay. So, you know, we live in a time of political extremes right now in the United States. That fact is obvious enough that even saying it is like yielding to cliche. And in times like these extreme men with extreme plans and very little relevant experience

can wind up in charge of the destiny of millions. That basic story is played out a lot of times throughout history but never quite like it did during the reign of Momar Gaddafi. He was a dictator and like Saddam Hussein, a writer as well, but while Saddam used his novels to imagine a fantasy world far away from Iraq's troubled reality, Gaddafi actually based the Libyan state entirely on his fevered fantasies. Now, Momar Mohammed Abu Minyar Gaddafi was born in 1941 or perhaps 1943 in a little hamlet of tents near a town called Sert in the deserts of western Libya.

No one knows exactly when he was born because he lied about every aspect of his past and also probably lied about his birthday so that he could join the military. That seems like a running theme having listened to this show. They like to make their own history. Yeah, you never really know anything about these guys. They're all a little like Houdini. They really like the razzle-dazzle there. Or like the Joker who is actually kind of a good way to look at Momar Gaddafi when I

say he's crazy. He's like Heath Ledger's Joker. Oh, okay. Yeah. Hitler had a plan. Yeah. Momar was just going to see what happens. Yeah.

He had a plan, but it wasn't a great plan. It wasn't a great plan. It kept changing. We'll get into that. I'm getting ahead of myself. He was a Bedouin, which are sort of wandering nomadic desert people, kind of the original Arabs. He was the only son of a goat herder named Abu Minyar and his wife Aisha.

Neither of Gaddafi's parents could read. He had three older sisters, but otherwise the fictional figure his childhood most resembled would probably be Rey from Star Wars. Because Libya had been an Italian colony right up until World War II when it became a battleground between the Axis and the Allies. So as a child, Gaddafi and his family would wander the desert finding empty ammo casings, pieces of downed planes, destroyed tanks, and like taking scrap off of them and selling it.

Like that was his early childhood. So yeah, like Rey from Star Wars basically. Right. Like Simon Pegg in a big costume. Exactly. Yeah, Simon Pegg does come into the story a number of times. I thought he would. Now aside from occasionally rooting through Crash Stuka's and P-51 Mustangs, Gaddafi's

early life was basically the same as the life of a Libyan born a thousand years earlier. His family mostly lived in tents around an oasis. His early education was given by a wandering priest who taught him to memorize verses of the Koran. So that's, you know, young Gaddafi. That sounds kind of awesome. No, it does, right? Young education by a wandering anything.

Like I'm picturing something very, probably way more like magical than what it actually was. It was probably more boring, but yeah, I mean, I wish, I wish if I could change one thing in time for Momar Gaddafi, it would be to have that wandering priest have been a wandering karate master. Mmm. And then it's a very different story. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. It changed a lot of history. Yeah. So in 1954, young Momar Gaddafi convinced his dad to let him go to school, which is something he has in common with Saddam Hussein, having to like beg his family to let him learn how to read and stuff. Right.

Yeah. I just want to learn. The school was so far away from his home that he had to live in town while he attended classes. He slept at a mosque every night and went back home on the weekends, walking 15 miles each way. That sucks. Yeah.

That's really rough. That's less. I like the wandering priest. Like he comes to you. Yeah. I don't want to travel that much to learn. Yeah. Have to commute every week to get to school.

No. No. No. So school was tough, but it gave Momar a chance to develop his first, last and greatest love ranting about politics. In 1952, the Egyptian government had been overthrown by a group of Arab nationalist Army officers headed by a guy named Gamal Abdel Nasser. Gaddafi fell in love with Nasser's politics, which was like Arab pan-arab nationalism.

All the Arab states need to form one new country again, like there was in the days of the Ottoman. That's the idea that Gaddafi loved as a kid. Right. So he started memorizing NASA's speeches and reciting them to other kids at school. Rather than beating him up, his classmates started carrying around a small wooden stool so he could stand on it and speak.

That's Gaddafi's version of the story. Okay, I was about to say, that doesn't sound like children. That doesn't sound like kids. Having been a child, I think we would've thrown rocks at him. Yeah. Yeah. But who knows, he was a charismatic guy. The 50s and 60s were a time of growing and exploding unrest across Africa at the injustice of colonialism.

Gaddafi organized protests, including a general strike every second of December to protest against the Balfour Declaration, which was, that's the thing where Britain was like, there's gonna be an Israel and then there was an Israel. Okay. That's what that was. Yeah, he's not a fan of Israel. Okay. Yeah. It's important to note that our number one source

on the life of young Gaddafi is, yeah, adult Gaddafi. It's also important to note though that everybody that's been interviewed from his childhood in early life says that he was like electrifying to listen to. Very charismatic, good looking young guy. There's older pictures I saw of him. I quickly went on Wikipedia and he seemed like a good looking guy.

He was a handsome fellow. He looked good in a uniform. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, his dressing, we'll get into his fashion choices a little later, his sense of style really evolved over the years. So yeah, it's not hard to imagine that young Gaddafi might have actually been an anti-colonial rabble rouser

and a popular speaker. Now, when he grew up, one of his earliest memories is just of being terrified of the sea because the Libyan people for the last 3,000 years had just been invaded by an endless series of empire. So like, that was a thing that he was scared of. He hated the ocean. He hated the ocean and he loved the desert.

I'm 100% with him on that. Yeah, yeah, you are very on the record about hating the ocean. I'm extremely anti-ocean. It doesn't want us there. We have no reason to be there. You can't drink it. You can't breathe in it.

There's nothing there for us. Stay out of the ocean. You are. It's filled with monsters. Momar Gaddafi would not disagree with you on any point. Yeah, so far, I'm getting along with Momar. So when he was a kid or when he had been a little, little kid, the Italians had been in charge of his country. And they'd invaded in 1911 and killed his grandfather.

Then they'd carried out a brutal anti-insurgency operation against Libyan civilians in 1929. They'd put 2 thirds of Libya's population into concentration camps. A lot of them died. We don't know how many. But yeah, we just did an episode about concentration camps recently.

Yeah, I listened to it. It was very good. Is it just yet one more country that Europeans go very camps in? Good God. It's easier to pick the countries that didn't ever have a concentration camp in them because there's like three.

So yeah, under Italian rule, Libyans couldn't receive anything beyond an elementary school education. Most of that education was dedicated to civilizing these savages with Italian values, which I assume are mostly based around macaroni and plumbing. And kissing your fingers when something's good. Yes, yes.

And I can say that because my family is Italian. That is 100% of our culture. Yeah, I'm pretty Italian too. When this caused unrest, the not letting them get educated or talk thing, dictator Benito Mussolini tried to charm the Libyans by declaring himself the protector of Islam. That was one of his titles.

He had a sword made in Tuscany and engraved by Libyan Jewish goldsmiths that he claimed was the sword of Islam. When he declared himself protector of Islam, Benito gave himself the sword in a huge ceremony, which is the whitest man thing to do. Oh yeah. Like that is peak colonialism.

Oh yeah, that's top notch colonialism. It's really, really something. I'm doing that Italian kissy finger thing I just described. So good. Yeah. So Libya gained its independence from, well, I mean, obviously the Italians. It was taken over by the Italians in World War

II by the Allied forces. The new United Nation gave Libya its independence in 1951. The Western powers appointed a king named Idris to rule over the country because they trusted him to be their man in Libya. Idris banned political parties and was sort of repressive, but his heart wasn't really in ruling. He didn't really care about being king.

OK. Yeah. So Libya's new National Assembly wrote their first constitution that same year. Libya had never been a country before 1951, so there wasn't any precedent for them being united. It had just been like, there's some cities on the coast that kind of kept to themselves and people in the desert

who kind of kept to themselves. It was just a place? It was just a place. Yeah. That's charming. I didn't know we could have that. Well, yeah, I mean, it had been parts of other countries a bunch of, but they always gave a shit about it.

Yeah. And nobody had said like, you're part of this empire now. You're part of this empire now. And but it was never like the people in the desert in the middle of Libya had never viewed themselves as the same thing as the people in Benghazi or Tripoli. OK. And for that matter, the people in Tripoli and Benghazi

didn't consider themselves all part of it. There was no I'm fucking Tripoli. It was they just had no history of being a thing. Yeah. So no one could agree where the capital would be. So they decided to rotate capitals every two years between Tripoli and Benghazi. This meant that every two years, the whole federal government

and diplomatic corps had to pack up and move across thousands of miles of brutal desert. So they chose the least convenient way to do this. Let's just do this the worst. Yeah. Worst way possible. Which makes our pick of DC as the American capital seem less dumb, where there's like,

let's just pick a swamp in the middle of everyone. Yeah. Like a lot of people died of malaria, but it's smarter than switching capitals. Right. And we committed and yeah, we stuck to it. Yeah. I'm sure now, like now that we expanded the country and stuff,

there's some better candidates. But no, we're sticking to DC. Yeah, now it's got history. Yeah. OK, so for his part, King Idris did not want to be king. He refused to put his face on the money or have any landmark other than the airport named after him. So this was like a hobby?

Like he was king, but he was like, I'm not really into it. He was like a high up leader in one of the cities. And the British were like, he had a lot of power in a region. And he was friendly to the West. And the West was like, if we make this guy king, he'll let us take oil out and he'll let us keep Air Force bases. And in return, we'll train up his army

and we'll have British soldiers there protecting his reign. But the king didn't really give a shit about it. He didn't he liked running his area, the city he was in, but he had no ambition to run all of Libya. So yeah, he refused to have anything, but the airport named after him, he spent most of his time at home. And his sort of absence from the public sphere

opened up opportunities for young, ambitious, politically minded men, young men like Momar Qaddafi. Qaddafi was not happy with the status quo in his country. As a strict Muslim, he was outraged that foreigners lived there, brought alcohol into Libya and partied. As a teen, he led his fellow children to smash the windows of a hotel that had a bar in it. King Idris kept the company open to American and British bases.

Qaddafi had nothing but contempt for this and for Westerners. Here's an anecdote about him from Allison Pardjader's Libya, the rise and fall of Qaddafi, which was one of the major sources for this podcast. Quote, one target for his invective was the English school inspector, Mr. Johnson, whom Qaddafi dismissed as no more than an agent of imperialism. On one occasion, Qaddafi refused to stand up

when Mr. Johnson entered the room and, in a provocative gesture, waved a key chain bearing the image of President Nasser at the Hadi inspector. Upon being ordered to leave the room, Qaddafi coldly told the inspector, you are the one who should leave for good, not this room, but the whole country. Damn.

Yeah. How old was he? It's like 16 or something. Yeah, he's like a teenager. Class of teenage rebellion, eh? Class of teenager, yeah. So Qaddafi's activism earned him a small but dedicated following of other boys.

Rather than convince them to sell drugs for him, like a decent American school child, he organized them into a revolutionary cell to overthrow the king. This is when he's in the equivalent of high school. Recruits into Qaddafi's group had to be Arab nationalists and weren't allowed to drink alcohol or, quote, run after women.

Qaddafi recounted, we used to meet under a palm tree near the Cebhoff Fortress using a light we had made with our hands. Under this light, I used to give my lessons in secret revolutionary organizations. Wow. Yeah. They're like the straight edge kids in high school

who are like, fuck the government. But they're actually like. Planning to destroy the government. They're way more active. And they stick with it. Yeah, I mean, you got to respect that. I gave up most of the stuff I was believed in as a teenager when I was 16.

Yeah, this is like his junior high school band. Yeah. But he keeps it rolling. And also. He really does, doesn't he? Commitment, it's important. So in 19, oh yeah, none of the young revolutionaries in Qaddafi's cell were allowed to do anything fun

while there was a government to overthrow. Nightclubs and gambling were banned for the members. Secrecy had to be total. Everyone was required to be all in for the revolution. In 1961, Qaddafi attended a protest in Seba, the town where he went to school. He gave a speech attacking the British and American military bases in Libya.

It was apparently an aggressive enough speech that the regime had him expelled from school entirely. This was a mistake. It only made Qaddafi more dangerous. He left his family behind, walked to the coastal town of Maserata and enrolled in school there. Then he started to recruit more young students.

By the time he was an adult and old enough to join the military academy, young Momart Qaddafi had built revolutionary cells in five cities. As a newly minted adult, he went to military school in Benghazi. Since the Libyan military at this point was basically just a Western puppet,

his training was conducted mostly by British soldiers. Qaddafi refused to learn English. One of his teachers there, a guy named Colonel Ted Lau, described him as inherently cruel. He claims Qaddafi murdered a fellow Qaddafi, probably for being gay. This is a quote from that book, Libya. The terrified Qaddafi, his hands and feet bound,

was dragged to a firing point where Qaddafi and a group of other students began shooting at him before a Libyan officer finished him off with a coup de gras while the others laughed. Okay, so I no longer like him. You're no longer on, yeah. That's the turning point, right?

Because until this moment, he didn't, no hate crimes. He was hate crime free until this part. Qaddafi's whole story is like that. There will be two things he'll do in a row and you're like, okay, I agree with what you said. Yeah, we're like, oh, he's a real self-starter. Then the murders. And then, yes, murder someone for being gay.

That's real fucked up Qaddafi. Yeah, yeah. I know you're listening. So Qaddafi's lost the David Bell vote at this point. Yeah, no. That's good to know. So Qaddafi, discipline was violent for everybody in the military school.

At one point, Qaddafi got in trouble for not keeping his mouth shut and he was forced to crawl in his hands and knees over gravel wearing a backpack filled with sand in the hot desert sun. So military school's rough for everybody, but roughest for the gay kids who get executed. Throughout the whole period,

Qaddafi continued to work towards his revolution. He and his fellow cadets viewed the military as their gateway into power, but there was a problem. There were all just a bunch of cadets who would, when they graduated, be low-ranking officers known with any real power or knowledge wanted a thing to do with them. Their operational security was very bad,

bad enough that the CIA had started to hear about them by 1967. The CIA did not take Qaddafi seriously because he just seemed like a dumb kid. So the West continued to suck out Libya's oil and use it as one big airstrip. Qaddafi later recalled, our souls were in revolt against the backwardness

enveloping our country and its land, whose best gifts and riches were being lost through plunder and against the isolation imposed on our people in a vain attempt to hold it back from the path of the Arab people and from its greatest cause. So Qaddafi graduated military school, so did the kids he'd grown up with and turned into the members of his revolutionary cell.

They named themselves the Free Unionist Officers Movement and at first, their ability to overthrow the government did not seem to be very good. They were as good at naming themselves as they were at overthrowing the government. They tried to hold meetings, but it was difficult to get everyone in the same place at the same time.

Most of them didn't have cars. So it is like having a band. It is like having a band when you're all teenagers. They tried to get some senior officers on board with their plan, but none of those people wanted anything to do with them. And so for a while, their revolutionary activities were mostly limited to stealing ammo

and hiding it under piles of rocks and inside trees. There's one story, one of the guys in Qaddafi's group who went on to be his secretary of defense basically, when he was a kid, his mom had to hide a bunch of ammo that he'd stashed in the sewers because the police came looking for him. So that's the level these guys are on, where their moms are helping them hide bullets.

That's adorable. Yeah, it is, it's cute. Qaddafi and his revolutionaries tried to schedule the overthrow of the government in early 1969. This got called off because of a concert. Um... Oh, man. They set a new date, but this one got fucked up

because someone in the military found out and put, you know, the king on warrant, warranted the king. Qaddafi and several of his friends were questioned, but nothing came of it. So the history of their revolution is basically an endless parade of near-misses. There was the time that Qaddafi was driving back

to Benghazi with a friend who got so into reciting verses from the Quran that he didn't see a giant cow had stepped in the middle of the road. The car rammed the cow, which somehow survived, but the car was totaled. So this is like a teen comedy right now. Yeah, it's like a teen comedy about trying to overthrow the government.

Yeah, with the occasional hate crime. Yeah, with the occasional hate crime. So basically American pie, just that movie. Yeah, Qaddafi's childhood was a lot like a Libyan American pie, Libyan pie, which I think is baklava. Okay, yeah. It would seem right.

Yeah. So it turned out that all their many failures had helped him. Colonel Aziz Shinneb, the third in command of the Libyan army, later said that he and his fellow senior officers knew about Qaddafi's group and their plans and just ignored them. We always thought it was rubbish that Qaddafi

and his group would never be able to do anything, which is not an unfair thing to assume based on what we've heard so far. Eventually though, Qaddafi and his revolutionary friends got their shit together enough to set a totally for real this time coup date, September 1st, 1969. So we're gonna get into that coup and of course the madness that came after,

but first we have to sell some products and services and you love things that- I love things. Purchase, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, receipts and items. Just objects. Objects in general.

Well, the objects that are about to come on and through your earbuds are objects that if you buy them, it will support the show. So there we go. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler

was all that stood between the US and fascism. I'm Ben Bullock. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts.

We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler, and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring, and mind blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads, or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans,

this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space.

And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union,

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And we're back. We're talking about Mohar Gaddafi. We just got through his childhood, the formation of his revolutionary cell and the setting of their final date to overthrow the king of Libya. I do want to note at this point, there's a number of sources for this, including that great book,

Libya, a documentary from the BBC called Mad Dog about Gaddafi and a bunch of others. You can find all the sources for this podcast on our website, ionthevastruits.com. I always encourage people to check up on us and read further. So the date has been set. The coup has been planned for September 1, 1969. Gaddafi distributed plans for the revolution

to all of the members in his revolutionary group. He handed them out in envelopes, sealed with red wax. How big is this group at this point? I think it's dozens and dozens of people. Yeah, it's a sizable group. They're all over the country. Not like hundreds, though. I don't think hundreds, but I never

found an exact number of how many people were involved. So the coup had been postponed and delayed so many times that a lot of key members of the conspiracy did not believe it when they got their letters. They thought it was a trap. So Gaddafi spent the last moments before starting the coup, driving all around Libya, convincing his men that, yes, we're still

planning to overthrow the king. So the whole thing was a comedy of errors mixed with a shit show. Right, but he really wanted it to work. He really wanted it to work. Again, aside from that hate crime, this is like an underdog story, almost, of these group of chuckle fucks trying to have a revolution

and this one guy who's really. He just wants to overthrow the king. And they're not good at it, but everyone else is so bad at everything that it works out. Again, this all has to start with, aside from the hate crime. Aside from the hate crime. I can't really just throw away the hate crime.

No, no, there will be more hate crimes, is the story lengthens. I assume so. So Revolution Day comes. On the day one of his men, there were radio stations they were supposed to take over in Tripoli in Benghazi. The guy who was supposed to take over the Tripoli radio station and occupy it couldn't find it.

So several other revolutionaries helped him find it and once they got there they were shot at mistakenly by the soldiers who thought they were Israelis invading the country. A tank commanded by one of the conspirators caught on fire while it was filled with explosives and ammo. The driver barely managed to disconnect a wire in time to stop it from exploding.

While all this went down, Qaddafi was tearing ass through the desert in a jeep to take over the Benghazi radio station. They came to a fork in the road. And here's a quote from the book Libya on what happened next. Qaddafi took the left turn as planned, expecting the train of vehicles to follow him.

However, in the excitement of the moment, the other drivers went hurtling down the right fork. He later recounted, I had stopped my jeep to await the rest of the column when I suddenly saw all the other vehicles tearing like demons towards the main road. Then it dawned on me that the entire Gar-Yunus barracks were streaming along in one direction

and that the drivers and their enthusiasm were following one another without worrying much where they were supposed to be going. So this entire revolution could have been scored to Yaqidi's sense. Yeah, exactly. And then it did it did it did it did it did it did. Okay, that's probably all I can say

before we get pulled for copyright infringement. Yeah, but it worked. The revolution worked, despite not really knowing what they were doing. It just happened that the king was out of the country when this went down. None of the officers were prepared to defend a coup and the Libyan military was not really

a functional service at this point. So Qaddafi and his young friends wound up overthrowing the government with very little bloodshed or fighting. So let that yeah. I mean, there's a lot to say about like leadership that start where it's just so dumb and like it can't possibly get better from here

when like there was like all every condition had to be perfect for them to do this. And it was basically everybody else's fault. It sounds like. It was everybody else's fault. A minimally competent government and military would have stopped this in seconds. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Nobody was good at their job. This is like the apocalypse now of revolutions where everything goes wrong and yet it somehow works out. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And yeah, I think it's a good lesson other than the hate crime. There's a great lesson in this for kids,

which is that you can sometimes succeed in rebelling against the state if you just show up. Yeah. Yeah, which, okay. At 6.30 a.m. on September 1st, 1969, Libyans with radios woke up to the sound of Momar Gaddafi's voice for the very first time. Mm-hmm.

One exhausting thing to hear on the radio. You're just getting up in the morning. Like, oh, we have to do what now? There's been a revolution. I only had my fucking coffee. Yeah. This is such bullshit. Who is this guy?

Do you want to go to work? So the 40-year reign of Momar Gaddafi had begun. Well, I really expected it to be something more grand than what you've described. Just a bunch of dumb kids who got lucky. Yeah. If you were a regular Libyan at this time, you might have felt optimistic.

The Western powers hadn't exactly done any good for the regular people, and the king had clearly sucked. So maybe you'd figure new blood is good. He's an outsider, you know? Yeah. I mean, I have similar feelings right now. If we got red dawned, part of me would be like, OK, let's try this.

All right. Let's give it a shot. Let's give it a shot. Yeah, a bunch of people parachuting in like, oh, OK. Do they have like... How much worse could it be? Do they have health care? Could I go to the doctor now?

Yeah. So the bad news about the new regime was that Gaddafi and his crew were a bunch of young men in their 20s and early 30s. They had very little experience of any kind. None of them had better than a high school education. One of Momar Gaddafi's first sacks in power was to promote himself to Colonel and declare himself commandant of the Libyan army. This makes him part of my favorite historical tradition,

which is the fact that almost no one who's been called Colonel in all of history has actually been a Colonel. It's just something people call themselves. Can we be colonels? Yeah, that's all it takes. You're a Colonel now. Colonel Bell. I'm putting that on a business card.

You got to get a cool hat. That is a requirement. That's fine. You got to get a sick-ass hat to start calling yourself Colonel. Yeah, I can do that. Yeah. So yeah, Gaddafi promotes himself to Colonel. He's in charge of the Libyan army now.

You know, what would you do, Dave, if when you had been a teenager, you and your friends had suddenly been in charge of the whole country? I feel like there'd be a point when I'd realize something over my head. Well, you're a humble man. That's true. I wouldn't be a humble man if I successfully, because I was a terrible person as a teenager.

Teenagers are generally terrible people. No, they're all monsters. And I was all into punk rock and like, yeah, anarchy. Take it all down. So if I was in a position where I took over the government, I probably think I was real hot shit and be like, yeah, I'm going to run things the way I want to and have just the worst ideas.

Yeah. But I would never grow out of it. And I assume that's similar to a lot of people like this, because if you go through your life, never being told, hey, cut the shit, you just stay a teenager your whole life. Yeah. If by the time you're barely where a normal person will be out of college, you run the country,

you don't grow up. Yeah. Yeah. And that's- He's a little joffering. Yeah, he's got some joffery going on. So one of Gaddafi's first acts was to ban all political parties and all political activity outside of the government itself.

This was not a big deal because the king had banned that sort of thing too. In 1972, he made party politics a crime punishable by death, which doesn't sound as bad of a decision right now as it was. Right. Yeah. So at first, a revolutionary council took control of the country with Momar sort of at its head.

There was great excitement among the population, but it quickly became clear that the new leaders knew even less than the old ones. Gaddafi immediately turned on his friends, attacking them for their incompetence and telling his comrades they didn't understand anything. He would insult his colleagues in front of their staff and cancel decisions as soon as they were made.

This started before the regime was even a month old. So this is like if someone came along in like this country and said like all the experts and elitists, they don't know how to run this place. I'm gonna, even though I have very little experience. And then by some insane way, they became running the country. And it became very evident that they didn't know how to do that. Yeah.

And then they attacked the people around them who they had previously supported in order to deflect blame from the fact that they just don't know how to run a country. Yeah, I can't imagine such a thing. No, this is the only time it's ever happened. So Gaddafi developed a reputation for making meetings like setting up meetings and then making everyone else in the council wait for hours before he showed up.

Often he wouldn't even show up. He would regularly schedule meetings for 2 a.m. because he was a night owl. Because he was in his 20s, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is all a thing just a 20 year old person would be doing. We don't, he might have been a little older than that because we don't know his exact fucking, but he was very a young guy.

But there's a reason like in this country where like you have to be like 35 to be president. Like there's a very clear reason. And also a reason no 35 year old has ever been elected because you're still probably not. You're still not ready. I'm near in that age and it's like no way. No, sir.

Yeah. No, no, just a couple of years ago, we were driving to our apartment and you guys were in the back of a truck and I kept slamming my foot on the brake just to make you fly forward because it was fun. Wait, was that when we were like, had that weird keg? Yeah.

Like, yeah, yeah, yeah. That was fun. Yeah, yeah. I shouldn't be president is what I'm getting. Yeah, or we should both be president. Well, now there's a different idea. You could be my Pence. Yeah, I'll be your Pence.

Fantastic. Our producer, Sophie, is shaking her head angrily. We're going to do it. Which she does regularly. We're going to make America okay. Pretty okay. Just okay. I feel like those hats will sell too.

So, Gaddafi became famous for going AWOL for days at a time whenever he got angry. He would threaten to resign if anyone argued with him about anything. At one point he decided that all members of the revolutionary council ought to wear military uniforms and carry pistols at all times. One of his friends in the council didn't like this rule

and showed up to a meeting in street clothes. Gaddafi's totally reasonable reaction was to hide in the desert for a week. During another argument, he threatened to leave and fight with the Palestinians in Jordan. Hold on. He Gaddafi hid in the desert? Gaddafi hid in the desert for a week.

That's such a non-dictator thing. Like, I thought you were going to say he's like had him eaten by dogs or something. He got upset and just went off. Did his friend have to like go find him and apologize? I feel like that's probably what happened. Come up to him in like a tent in the desert like, hey man.

Look, I'm wearing my uniform. I got a gun. I don't really know why, but here it is. What an amazingly passive aggressive way to run a country. It's incredible. Oh my goodness. So by 1973, things weren't going great

with the new Libya. Gaddafi was so disenchanted with ruling that he decided to resign and fuck back off to the desert, but for real this time. He told his comrades on the revolutionary council that he would announce his resignation to the people of Libya on April 16th.

But surprise. Gaddafi had no intention of resigning. Instead, he announced the popular revolution, an entirely new domestic program that no one else in the government had been warned about. They all found out about it at the same time as the people of Libya during the speech. Under this program, Gaddafi urged the repeal

of all existing laws and their replacement by revolutionary enactments, the weeding out of anti-revolutionary elements by taking appropriate measures against perverts and deviators, the staging of an administrative revolution to destroy all forms of bourgeoisie and bureaucracy, the arming of the people

in order to make a people's militia, the staging of a cultural revolution to get rid of all imported and poisonous ideas contrary to the Quran. So Gaddafi promised at the end of the speech that he was going to take the Libyan people to paradise in chains if he had to. That's exhausting.

Yeah, it sounds really tiring. Like you're working in the desert. Anything you do if you live in the desert is probably exhausting. Right. And you've just gotten over the fact that a new government's taken over, and then some guys are like,

I'm going to drag you to paradise in chains, and all the laws are different today. I was like, that really doesn't sound like paradise, buddy. God damn it. So this would all be a pretty full plate for most world leaders, right? But Gaddafi wasn't done innovating. He started to work on what he called

the third universal theory, which was a new political theory he believed was destined to sweep not just Libya, but the entire world. Here's how one member of his inner circle recalled the brainstorming process for creating this universal theory. Quote,

Whenever new intellectuals arrived, Gaddafi would tell me to invite them to visit him. Then as we talked, he would take notes. He would ask them how to remedy this or that problem. The trouble for him was that he couldn't digest their ideas he didn't have a basic scientific approach. When he himself offered an opinion, he came out with immature and confused analyses,

such as were later to form the basis of his third universal theory. So Gaddafi described this theory as a middle way between communism and capitalism, destined to replace them both. Capitalism, he said, led to sin and degeneracy. It was far too individualistic to be healthy. Communism treated human beings like property of the state,

and that wasn't good either. So he needed to find a middle way. Eventually, Gaddafi codified all of his thoughts about how the world ought to be run into his magnum opus, the Green Book. In it, he argued that democracy could not flourish in republican systems, such as society was destined to ignore the will of huge chunks of the population.

Accurate so far. Instead, the state should be abolished entirely, and the people should take charge of their own lives and rule themselves directly. So far, nothing he said is inherently crazy sounding, but the system he set up didn't actually work that way. The lowest level of the new government were the people's congresses.

Everyone was supposed to take part in them, debating and voting on policies. The people's congressmen's congresses would funnel their decisions up to a general people's congress, which was kind of like a parliament or our congress. Their decisions would be passed up to a general people's committee, which was basically a presidential cabinet which would then implement the decisions.

But here's the catch. The actual center of decision making was just Momar Gaddafi. None of the people's congresses were allowed to talk to each other about anything. They had to go through this line of things that always ended up at Gaddafi. So no decisions could actually be implemented without Gaddafi's sign-off,

and he mostly just did whatever seemed good to him at the time and ignored the congresses. Right, so it was basically like, man, we shall just govern ourselves and figure it out, and then I make the decision at the end. And then I decide what we do still, yeah. The Green Book was filled with other fun stuff besides blueprints for the government, quotes like this.

Sport is like praying, eating, and the feeling of warmth and coolness. It is stupid for crowds to enter a restaurant just to look at a person or group of persons eating. It is stupid for people to let a person or group of persons get warmed or enjoy ventilation on their behalf. It is equally illogical for the society to allow an individual or team to monopolize sports

while the people as a whole pay the costs of such a monopoly for the benefit of one person or a team. So we hated sports teams. Yeah, I mean, I'm not a big sports... I'm not a big sports guy either. But people like sports. Yeah, people like sports. We need sports. Yeah, people like sports.

Nobody likes watching someone else eat. Yeah. But we know people like... Well, now there's those videos. Yeah, we figured it out. So Gaddafi was just wrong. Yeah. The Green Book also bans being a landlord.

No one has the right to build a house additional to his own and that of his heirs for the purpose of renting it because the house represents another person's need and building it for the purpose of rent is an attempt to have control over the need of that man, which not an inherently crazy idea. Yeah, I'm not totally against it.

It's really that boiling down to, and I make the decisions. That's where it all gets fucked up. Yeah. It's great to say all these things like we should be reducing the amount of power one individual can hold over the another up until you demand to be in charge.

And maybe, I mean, people listening might have different opinions about this, but maybe even if he tried to do it right, it might not work out still. It might just be, you know, him dreaming, but like, yeah, the really, like, he didn't give it a chance here. No, he was always...

He was always, it sounds like a dictator. He was always wanting it to be about himself. And he always had to be the center of it. He couldn't stand, like, he was never going to let any council make a decision that he didn't agree with. He's Jaden Smith. Like, he has a bunch of... Nobody told him no.

He doesn't, yeah. I mean, he has a bunch of crazy ideas how the world should work, but he doesn't have, like, the background to actually understand how to implement that. Yeah, that's exactly what's going on here. So, it's also important to note, if you're one of the people for whom

the other stuff I've said from the Green Book sounds kind of good, that Gaddafi was also super misogynistic. I'm going to read this quote. I'm going to apologize to our producer first, because it's pretty bad, but it's important that we be balanced about who Gaddafi was. Yeah.

According to a gynecologist, women menstruates or suffers feebleness every month while man, being a male, does not. When a woman does not menstruate, she is pregnant. If she is pregnant, she becomes, due to pregnancy, feeble for about a year. Afterwards, woman breastfeeds the baby she bore. Breastfeeding means that a woman is so inseparable

from her baby that her activity is seriously reduced. She becomes directly responsible for another person whom she helps to carry out his biological functions, without which it would die. All these innate characteristics form differences of which man and women cannot be equal. Yeah. That's such a misunderstanding.

And it's one of those things. Like this person just launched a human out of their body. And it's possible. Yeah. Really freaking painful after carrying it for months. And then has to keep it alive. Yeah. Like, what a weakling.

And it's just like, no, you idiot. No, I mean, if anything, the conclusion to be, yeah, I mean, we can't be equal because men can't make human beings. But anyway, so again, you got to balance the shit out. Because if you read just the stuff about everyone should be equal, Gaddafi sounds like not the piece of shit that he was.

Right. I mean, here's going back to the only thing I know about Gaddafi is that he was murdered horribly in the streets by his people. I kind of assumed he did something to deserve that. Oh, and we are going to get into all of the somethings he did. So now the Gaddafi reign is up and running

and the utter madness is about to start. We have not even dug into the craziest of the crazy yet. But before we dig into that crazy, we have to dig into some ads. So get out your credit card, pull out a wad of cash, veer your car off of the road and pull out your laptop and prepare to order things. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks

in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup. Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the US and fascism. I'm Ben Bullock and I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records.

We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring and mind-blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup.

Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories.

But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space.

313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science.

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted

before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. Mo Marcadoffi has taken control. He has launched his second revolution in a couple of years and elucidated his plans for a perfect society in the Green Book.

Right. So yeah, now here we are. Mo Marcadoffi starts releasing his Green Book chapter by chapter rather than all at once. I think he was releasing it as he wrote it because he just didn't have the ability to delay his gratification by that much. And he said as he dropped the first chapter with the

establishment of this unique democratic experiment, all political theories in the world have collapsed. So Cadoffi changed Libya's name to the socialist people's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, which means like the people's Republic basically. And the flag was changed to the color green. Now, Cadoffi had no official role in this new people's state.

He was still in charge of the army, of course, but he was not technically in charge on paper. He demanded to be called leader of the revolution or brother leader, but he didn't actually have a job. So that whenever there was a problem, he could be like, I'm not in charge of Libya. It's these other guys. It's this council here that fucked up or it's this guy here

who fucked up. Don't get angry at me. I'm not in charge. So that was that was his whole tactic. It's a good racket. Yeah, solid racket. Good scam being in charge of the country and pretending you're not for 40 years.

Yeah. So Cadoffi is like, I don't actually have a job. It's not me who's in charge so that, you know, he can't be blamed for anything. Right. He's in charge. It's a good plan. It's like it's like if you were like president and you

were blaming like the arrival party or like, yeah, like a like a special deep state, yeah, all your problems. Yeah. Yeah. It's not unlike that if that were to ever happen. Yeah. Somewhere in the globe. Yeah.

And for all of his rhetoric about like freedom and liberty and stuff like that, the people of Libya were brutally repressed whenever they spoke out. One month after declaring the people state, some students protested in Tripoli. They were hung in front of their classmates and the executions were broadcast on state television. Cadoffi established a series of revolutionary

committees across the nation made up of loyal young men who got super high off of having a little bit of power. The official purpose of the committees where it was to protect the revolution and remove any obstacles to Colonel Cadoffi's vision. This had the dual advantage of helping Cadoffi solidify his power while freeing him from any possible blame because hey, it's not his fault if these kids hurt the

wrong people, which they did. They would just like rob people, take their stuff, throw them in prison, execute their own personal enemies. You know, the kind of things do when you let young people establish paramilitary committees. Right. Yeah. So Cadoffi was basically a master at outsourcing his

methods of oppression and control. When a TV news presenter in Tripoli became too popular for the Colonel's comfort, he ordered the people to take over the job of presenting the news. Random Libyans would line up every day for a chance to read the news live on television. That's amazing. TV got really weird under Momar Cadoffi.

Oh my God, that sounds like a blast. Oh yeah. For most of his reign, there was only one official channel, the state television channel, that ran like six or eight hours a day. One day, it broadcast hours worth of just a picture of army boots with the caption from a viewer to the broadcasting house.

Another day, it played hours of footage of a dirt road, shot out the moot window of a moving vehicle. For the most part, state TV broadcast speeches by Cadoffi and conferences where people talked about the brilliance of his green book. This is like public television. Yeah. Like where they'll be like six hours of old people dancing.

Yeah, it's like that, but he's the only one deciding what's going to be on it. So as it always does, repression in Libya bred dissent. Not all of those dissenters were arrested before they could flee Libya. Some of them made it out of the country. Cadoffi made use of an international network of assassins to murder political enemies who managed to make it to the

safety of a country like Britain. This did not always work out well for him. In 1984, there were a bunch of angry Libyan dissidents protesting in front of a Libyan government office in London. People inside of the office started shooting into the crowd, but they missed and hit and killed a British police woman named Yvonne Fletcher. Britain suspended their diplomatic relations with

Libya as a result of the shootings. Cadoffi was known to demand that his assassins bring back all or part of his murdered enemies. He would often keep the corpses of his murdered foes and refrigerators. A member of his inner circle said that he did this to see them once in a while, to speak with them when they were dead. He kept some corpses stored this way for more than 20 years.

Oh, dear. Things have taken a turn with Momar. Yeah, I mean, okay, there's been a hate crime. There's been a hate crime. And he was described as cruel, but this is now Hannibal Lecter territory. Yeah, it ramps up, you know? Yeah, and this is like a thing you see with dictators.

Like when we talk about these guys being pure evil, most of them really weren't until they would have some dark moments, but they're dark moments that might make them like a criminal. They always feel like they have something to prove. Yeah, and power. Yeah, but like in the sense that they would kill someone and then vent at their corpse for 40 years.

Yeah. Like they couldn't, they can never walk away from a disagreement or that's what it sounds like. They like this guy, if this guy's never in charge of Libya, he's the dude where somebody insults him and it burrows into his heart for years and he starts a fist fight over it or maybe even murders somebody in a crime of passion because he's the dictator, it morphs into keeping corpses

in a fridge for 20 something years. He has a support system. Yeah. He has way more resources. Yeah. Could be a terrible dick. Yeah, it's just what happens when you have power mixed with whatever the hell is going on inside.

Momar's head inside. When you mix power, when you mix unlimited power with the weird damage that we all have inside of us. Everybody has their version of keeping their political enemies in a fridge. Right, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, maybe just banning us.

I have a fridge in my heart that I keep people in. Yeah. Yeah, I don't like squash in it. Yeah. We have people in our lives to tell us to cut the shit, which is something he does not have. Yeah, it's like anything that you feel strongly about, if you were a dictator, you could turn into something terrible.

Yeah, and that's what Gaddafi did. He also had a secret rape chamber in his compound. Yeah. He would, yeah, that is where he would violate women that his henchmen abducted for him. I say women, but that's not accurate. He would visit schools and pick out girls and indicate which one he wanted by patting her on the head.

His men would pick the girl up after school and bring her to him. One teacher recalled during a BBC documentary, the girl they wanted, they would simply take her and treat her like a rag doll in their hands. They had no conscience, no morals, not an ounce of mercy, even though the girl might be 15 or 16 years of age, a mere child.

If the child was a virgin, Gaddafi's staff would show her porn movies until she understood what he wanted. He was apparently turned on by violence. It's hard to know how much of all of this to believe, exactly because these particular interviews came from a BBC documentary called Mad Dog, Gaddafi's Secret World. Obviously, the BBC is one of the NATO nations that helped depose Gaddafi.

It's one of those things where, and they're interviewing actual Libyans, but those Libyans are people with a grudge against the administration. They definitely found the rape room. There's pictures of it and stuff. It's hard to say how much of everything is true, but it seems like most of this.

Just the rape room is horrifying. If 10% of this is true, it's awful. Yeah, exactly. That's kind of where I land on this. Yeah. Yeah, so Nuri al-Mismari, Gaddafi's former chief of protocol, also claimed that he molested young boys in addition to young girls.

Quote, he had his own boys. They used to be called the services group. All of them were boys in bodyguards, a harem for his pleasure. Some of the women he used were tossed out on the street, basically, but others claimed they were sent to mental institutions, so no one would believe them. So yeah, it's dark now.

It's horrifying. Yeah, the colonel's rule was idiosyncratic, by which I mean he turned on a dime and demanded insane things from his followers. At one point he ordered all of the camels in Tripoli shot dead. The only explanation given was, brother leader has decided that camels

have no place in a modern society. Yeah. I don't disagree with that one. Yeah, no. Yeah. They don't have any place in modern society. I don't like camels. They're terrible.

They're fucking assholes. That doesn't justify the other horrible things. No, yeah. Again, there's things, beliefs that align with my beliefs in terms of ocean and camels. Yeah. But at this point I think it's safe to say

that I would not like Mo Mar Qaddafi. Yeah. I would not get along with him. It's just that even a rapey clock is right twice a day. Exactly. Yeah. So it's possible that Mo Mar Qaddafi had Anwar Sadat, the president of Egypt, murdered.

Some of his former insiders alleged this and Qaddafi did claim after the relationship soured that Sadat had been, quote, an agent of Hitler since 1948, which there's a lot to unpack in those few words. Because he's very specific that Sadat became an agent of the Nazis after 1948, which. Yeah, there's a lot that needs to be expanded.

There's a lot going on in that sentence. Yeah. I wish there was more. I wish Qaddafi had spoke at length about how he thought World War II ended, but I have not found that. Yeah. I bet that's a really special conversation.

It does seem like he thinks Hitler survived into the late 40s at least. So that's fun. For the first half of Qaddafi's reign, basically all private enterprise was banned by the government. Qaddafi and his people decided what could be imported. They ran state supermarkets to distribute these goods to their citizens.

In 1986, a journalist found that the main floor of one such supermarket had only ghee, which is butter with the milk fat removed, and powdered milk. In 1987, another foreigner reported that the markets in two cities held nothing but Dutch milk powder, Italian suits, and Chinese tea. Oh, yeah.

You can really live on that stuff. You can have. What would you do with Dutch milk powder, Italian suits, and Chinese tea? Hold on. You boil down the Italian suits. To get into their tastiest components. Again, the Italian chef kissing fingers.

You boil that down to its nice and soft. You add the tea, I want to say. You boil it with the tea. Yeah, that feels right. I think you strain it from the tea and then mix it with what's the last one? Milk powder, Dutch milk powder. Okay, so you don't strain it all the way,

but you add the milk powder and it thickens, like mac and cheese. That's basically macaroni. Yeah, and you cut it up. Yeah. Yeah, I assume Italian suits are made out of pasta. Mm-hmm, yeah. Yeah, fantastic.

Some of this was, some of the absence of goods in the supermarkets was a result of sanctions, which we will get to later. But a decent amount of it was just Gaddafi fucking with people. He's quoted as having said, sometimes we make items disappear to force people to work harder and produce them, which is a dick move.

That's a real dick move. It's also true that the entire Libyan government was hilariously corrupt. Public supermarkets were regularly burned down by their managers so that the managers could steal all of the goods inside before lighting them on fire and then sell the goods on the black market. So.

Yeah, I mean, they're creating a situation where I feel like, what are you going to do? If you're managing that supermarket and you're like, oh, God. This is just milk powder? Yeah, I'm just burning this place to the ground. Yeah, I have trouble like anyone who's worked in a place like a grocery store has wanted to just burn it down.

Yeah, it's a very burnable structure. Yeah, it's hard to blame anyone for doing that. So it's important to note that the Libyan state under Gaddafi was not a total shit show and in some ways was more functional than the king's government that had come before it. Gaddafi did establish a successful social safety net when none had existed before.

Everyone in Libya was guaranteed a home, healthcare, education, and a car all provided by the state and paid for by the billion dollars a day in oil revenue that poured through Gaddafi's hands. Okay, so yeah, he had this ideology and some of it throughout this we've said like, well, he's not completely wrong. It's like the ideology didn't necessarily not work.

He's a broken person. He's a broken person because like the idea of, okay, the state's gonna provide a bunch of shit for people and we have more oil than almost anyone in the world. Yeah, that can work. Other countries have done that for fucking close to a century now. Yeah, you can absolutely run a state that way

but not with a guy like Gaddafi in charge. Not for long. Well, actually for 40 years, but. Yeah, that's a pretty good run. It's a good run. For a maniac, yeah. Yeah, for a fucking nut. Speaking of schools, which were paid for by the oil money, in the 1980s Gaddafi replaced school uniforms

with military uniforms and mandated that all students take military science courses. Military officers took over for school administrators and for many teachers. They were authorized to carry out military punishments including forcing students to stand out in the desert sun for hours at a time, which is pretty sick, yeah. This seems like a real, this is like,

he's just asking to be overthrown at that point. The moment you start like a whole generation of people that you just torture that way. And teach them how military science while you're torturing them. Yeah, you're begging for them to overthrow you. Yeah, in retrospect, you can see the short side in this. Yeah. That's like, it's like having like a dog

that you like only let outside in like our dick tube but also attach like lasers to. It's exactly like that. It's like teaching your dog to understand the concept of slavery and then giving it a go. Right, yeah. Yeah, just generally, yeah, just telling an animal what the score is.

Not a great idea. Now, of course, David, no self-respecting tyrant would be complete without his elite bodyguard unit. Saddam had the Republican guard. Hitler had the SS. Mussolini had someone, the macaroni troopers probably. Yeah. We are really being rough on Italy.

We are, we wrote the status that we have Italian blood. And so that like released the floodgates. So it's fine. It's fine. It's a fine. And Mo Marca Duffy, of course, had the Harris al-Hass. In Europe, they were known as the Amazons, an all-female unit of elite highly trained bodyguards

who protected Mo Marca Duffy for more than 20 years. We got some pictures of these ladies. They're going to be up on the site, but just take a gander there. Oh, that's wonderful. They're all young. They're all conventionally attractive. A Bond villain type of thing.

It's exactly a Bond villain called the fucking Amazons. I mean, yeah, and there he is in the second picture of the fucking ridiculous Colonel's uniform next to that lady. Oh my God, those glasses. It's, he is a Bond villain. He's the most Bond villain that a dictator has ever been. He's like, well, I would say he's more like

an Austin Powers villain. He's a spoof of a Bond villain. He wears the Dr. Evil outfit from the first. There's a picture that we'll come to later where he's dressed like Dr. Evil. That's amazing. And this is like right after Austin Powers had come out. So it almost makes you think like,

did you just watch the movie? And dressed like Dr. Evil? Moe Mark Adafi? He might have. He might have watched it. He was like, oh, that's a pretty, that's a pretty smart outfit. Who do you guys get it going on?

So, Gaddafi got a lot of bad press for his all-lady bodyguards. The reality, you know, and a lot of the press was like how cool it was that he had how badass these women were. Right. Fucking awesome. Look at these badass, lady bodyguards.

Those pictures. The pictures are awesome. Yeah, they are awesome. The reality was less awesome. Most of the women were, most of the women in his bodyguard unit were press ganged into the job with very little choice as to whether to join. Girls were often sent to act as entertainment

for Gaddafi family parties and the whole thing sounds kind of gross and very exploitative. That said, some of his former guards when interviewed did report loving the work and loving Gaddafi. Okay. There's also evidence that they acted as sort of a secret state police within his inner circle.

I've also read reports that suggest the job was terrifying for most of the Amazons. One former bodyguard now in hiding was quoted by the BBC as saying, one night we were going to witness the execution of 17 students. They did not hang them. They shot them. We were forbidden to scream.

We were ordered to cheer. So again, this is going back to he's just asking for it. If you have personal bodyguards, you get the people who like want the job. You don't force someone to do that job. You don't want someone half assing that job. But if you're only going to have like comb the country for pretty girls and put them in uniforms

and teach them how to shoot, they're not necessarily going to love you. Yeah. Because you're just abducting them from their family. Exactly. It feels like the moment things get rough, they're just going to like quietly back away. Yeah.

And just, yeah. Find new employment. He's really asking for it. You should also, and I feel like this should go without saying, I don't support being gender discriminatory with your bodyguards. Very well, I'm sure.

But you don't pick your bodyguard entirely by how they look. Yes. That's not a good move. You pick your bodyguard by how good they are at guarding your body. Yeah. Yeah, even if you're trying to fire like the most badass looking people,

they could be cowards. Like you don't know. A resume is matter. That's important. Sit down and interview these people. One of the through lines in Gaddafi's regime is that there were no resumes. Yeah, I'm not surprised to hear that.

Because his resume, when he became in charge of the country, was guy. Yeah. So, we have, we've talked about some crazy stuff, and we have a lot more crazy stuff to get to. So much that this is going to be another two-parter,

because I wound up writing like 9,000 words on Momar fucking Gaddafi. So Dave, we're going to break for right now and come back on Thursday to tell the good people the rest of the legendary story of Momar Gaddafi. Excellent. When we get back, we're going to talk about what Gaddafi did

with all of his oil money, his career sponsoring insane amounts of terrorism, and the speech he delivered to the UN, which I'm going to go ahead and say is the greatest speech that anyone has ever delivered, maybe to anything. Oh, man. Oh, that's going to be fun.

Oh, that's exciting. All right, before we roll out, do you have any pluggables to plug? Yeah, I mean, find me at Twitter at Movie Hooligan. As you mentioned at the beginning of this, I am one of two people running a podcast and streaming network called Gamefully Unemployed. We have a Patreon right now.

It's patreon.com slash gamefully unemployed, G-A-M-E-F-U-L-O-Y, unemployed. So, yeah, check us out. We got tons of podcasts and we stream on Twitch and we're starting to roll out like videos and stuff like that. Yeah, they do really wonderful stuff, really fun podcasts. Is that Robert on?

Yeah, I'm on. I'm regularly on your D&D podcast, so you can catch me there as well, Gamefully Unemployed. You can find me at IWriteOK on Twitter. You can find this podcast at BastardsPod on Twitter. You can also find us on the internet at www.behindthebastards.com.

We will have all of the sources for this episode and all of the pictures that Dave and I have discussed today. So, we're going to be back on Thursday with more craziness from the life of Mo Markadofi, the craziest guy to ever wind up in charge of a country. But until then, please enjoy your lives, stay happy and check back in on Thursday. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series

that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse is like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys

or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science

and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow,

hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.