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

Episode Date: July 12, 2018

Robert is joined again by David Bell and they continue discuss the insane life of the controversial former leader of Libya, Muammar Qaddafi.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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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. And today is part two of our epic two-parter on Momar Gaddafi, the colonel, the dictator of Libya, and one of, if not the craziest people to ever run a country. In part one, we went through how Momar got into space, and one of, if not the craziest people to ever run a country. In part one, we went through how Momar conquered all of Libya over through the existing government

with the help of a bunch of friends he made in high school. We talked about his Amazonian bodyguards. We talked about his crazy theories on how the world ought to run, and how the start of his brutal repressive state kind of went against everything that he claimed in his rhetoric to want for the world. So, now we are getting in to more about Momar Gaddafi. This episode is going to include how he spent his fabulous oil wealth, how he became maybe the richest man on earth,

and how he delivered probably the craziest speech ever delivered at the United Nations. And all of this is going to feature a little cameo from a guy you may have heard of, Donald Trump. So, let's get into it. Now, the entire oil and gas industry of Libya was under Colonel Gaddafi's personal control. He managed that part of the country very hands-on. By the time of his death in 2011, he was thought to have amassed a fortune squirreled around the world of over $200 billion, which put him way ahead of Jeff Bezos at the time.

He was probably the richest man in the world when he died. It's hard to say because he had a bunch of money in all sorts of places. Libya was making something at its height like a billion dollars a day in oil revenue. And a lot of that went to fund projects, but yeah. Like, he was treating his people a little better than Jeff Bezos. You could argue that. They all had healthcare. The Libyans did have a better healthcare plan than Amazon employees.

So, Gaddafi spent a huge amount of Libya's wealth supporting terrorist and revolutionary groups around the world. There was no real through line between them other than that they were all rebelling. He supported the IRA, the Basque Separatists in Spain, Iraqi Kurds. He was actually the only Arab leader to support the Iraqi Kurds. He backed the Sandinistas, the Red Brigades in Italy and Japan, Carlos the Jackal, numerous groups across Africa. Almost every bomb used by the IRA during the height of their terror in the 80s and 90s

was believed to have been made using syntax explosives shipped out of Libyan ports. He was the man for international terrorism. So, if terrorists were indie films, he's like Harvey Weinstein. He is. He is the Harvey Weinstein of terrorism. Right. You nailed it. Yeah, he's the Harvey Weinstein of terror. Harvey Weinstein is kind of the Harvey Weinstein of terror.

The IRA is his Ben Affleck? Yeah. Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah, okay. There we go. I apologize, IRA. You guys deserve better than to be compared to Ben Affleck. That's not fair.

The IRA has better tattoos. Yeah. Oh yeah, for sure. And they're better at music. I don't know if Ben Affleck has a band, right? He has to. He has to have a terrible band. I bet he plays a guitar every now and then at a party.

Okay. So, Gaddafi also supported a bunch of legitimate governments across Africa, sending the money and even troops to help them in their wars. In return, he convinced almost 30 African nations to cut off contact and diplomatic ties with Israel. Colonel Gaddafi's greatest African coup was convincing Jean-Banel Bokassa, the emperor of Central Africa, to convert to Islam. Gaddafi personally handled his conversion ceremony and gave him $1 million as a gift.

This money and Gaddafi's money in general was sorely needed by Bokassa because he had almost bankrupted the Central African Republic with an outrageously expensive $80 million coronation ceremony. Oh my goodness. We're going to talk about Bokassa someday. There's like Roman eagles made out of gold and a giant throne. That detail is just brilliant. Bokassa converted back to Christianity.

The religion of 80% of his people three months later. It wasn't a lasting victory there. Libya occupies an awkward geographical and cultural position. It's part of Africa, but its population is Arab. Gaddafi initially hoped he might be the leader of a vast Arab resurgence across the Middle East and North Africa, but he quickly alienated everyone else in the Arab world. So once that door was closed, he decided to try his hand at uniting Africa instead. So he had two options he figured.

He was either going to unite Africa or the Arab world. That was his goal. Why? Because Libya was too small for him. He wanted to be a world leader. And he looked at the Middle East and he was like, no, they're not going to go for it. It was more like as a kid, he was really into Gamal Nasser, who was like the president of Egypt, who was like an Pan-Arab nationalist, basically reuniting the Ottoman Empire kind

of deal. And that was Gaddafi's dream for a while, but all of the other Arab leaders came to hate him. Okay, yeah. He was like, okay, those guys hate me. I'm going to go somewhere where I haven't burnt bridges as much. So his best buddy was Idi Amin, and he was friends with Bokassa. Right.

Idi Amin. He must be a fun guy to hang out with. Yeah. He gave soldiers to Idi Amin, which didn't end well for him, because his army was not good at being an army at any point in this, which is Gaddafi's? Yeah, they were terrible. Yeah, so it's like a shitty gift. It's a shitty gift.

I mean, it was better than Idi Amin's army. Okay. Yeah. Did he give armies often and people would have to pretend to like it and then give the army to someone else, like re-gift the army? He kind of gave armies to a couple of people, and then they got badly beaten, and then he didn't have much of an army left, and there were international sanctions against him, so he couldn't give away his army anymore, because he was running low on tanks.

Not great. So yeah, if you go searching through the wild woollies of the internet for documentaries about Momar Gaddafi, you will find a number of very positive takes, many of which are homemade by guys in their rooms. Oh no. There is a reason behind this, though, because a lot of his legacy in Africa was positive. He established a $5 billion fund that invested in legitimate businesses across the continent. The Guardian claims he did more than any other leader to establish the African Union.

So it's not all negative. Again, with Gaddafi, it's always a mix of things. Right. Again, it's him. He's the problem. He is the problem. If he wrote everything he wanted to have done down, and then they just put him somewhere where he couldn't hurt anybody.

Yeah, in the desert. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe that's why he went to the desert that one time. There was a lot of times. He just never stayed there, which is the problem. Right. He should have stayed there.

If he just said, hey, there should be an African Union. And then once everyone was like, yeah, that is a good idea, and he fucked off to the desert, he never would have been murdered in the street. He was like, and I'm out. And I'm out. Like George Cassin's in the Seinfeld episode, where he tells the one joke. That would have been a better way to Gaddafi. But instead, he did all of this shit.

So he was popular, though, in a lot of parts of Africa outside of Libya, even when he wasn't popular inside of his own country. But to the West in the 1980s, Muammar Gaddafi was the goddamn boogeyman. In 1986, a bomb went off in a Berlin discotech. Several people died. Ronald Reagan called Gaddafi a mad dog, and he was portrayed as sinister and a deadly figure pulling strings around the world, which is like half true. He may have been involved in the discotech bombing, probably was to some extent.

Maybe he didn't know about it. Again, the way Harvey Weinstein sort of has his hand in every indie film or production he did. Like Gaddafi, probably. Somewhere. There's some money in there. He probably Weinstein'd a bunch of different reactions. Sanctions were in place on Libya during the Reagan administration, which cut the nation's

revenue by a third overnight. This was the start of the dark times for Muammar Gaddafi. On April 15th, 1986, 18 US bombers took off from the UK and dropped 60 tons of bombs on a Libyan airfield, a naval academy, and Muammar Gaddafi's Bob Alazizia compound. Several civilians were killed in the bombing. Gaddafi claimed his four-year-old daughter, Hannah, was also killed. This is the first time the world heard about his daughter. And it's hard to say what's true.

Reporters from multiple major outlets have attempted to track down the truth of Hannah. We don't know. But basically, the possibilities are she's either dead. Right. She's a practicing doctor, not real, or two different people. That's a hell of a thing to be of one of those things. Yeah. After his regime fell, they found her room and her passport, but never her.

And there was some evidence in the room that she may have been working as a doctor in Libya, but nobody knows what happened. Wait. Yeah. So they found her passport. That must mean she existed. Yeah, in a bedroom. Well, but he gets to issue passports.

Okay, so is this, again, going back to Seinfeld, is this like a Seinfeld-esque thing where he does a lie and then has to continually back it up to the point that he's making passports for this fake dead person? It is obviously totally possible that when NATO bombed his home, his daughter died in the bombing, because they bombed his home. It's also totally possible that the guy in charge of the government faked having a daughter or faked his daughter dying and then hit her from the world under a different name. How old was she in the passport?

She was like two years older than he claimed she was. Okay. So what would be the other he's like? Yeah. It's very hard to tell what happened with Hannah. Whatever happened to her, the bombings actually were kind of a PR coup for Gaddafi. He built a massive statue at the bomb site to commemorate the attack, and he would, for years afterwards, hold press conferences and meet with dignitaries in front of it.

The statue is called Golden Fist Clenching an American Airplane, and it is a statue of a golden fist crushing an American airplane. Oh my God, I want the statue. It's an amazing statue. Yeah. Oh my God. It could also be like a tribute to King Kong. It could be.

There's a lot of things that statue could stand in for. Oh, it's so good. It's amazing. Now Gaddafi's actual military response to the U.S. bombing was to fire two missiles at an American Coast Guard base on an Italian island and miss both missiles landed in the ocean. Yeah. Which maybe he just wanted to fuck with the ocean.

Yeah. Oh yeah. Because he hates the ocean. Yeah. If you remember from part one, Momar Gaddafi's terrified of the ocean. Rightfully so. Rightfully so. So the wonderful book, Libya, the Rise and Fall of Gaddafi, argues that Reagan's obsession

with Gaddafi actually helped the colonel. He'd been widely unliked before this point, after the bombing he could credibly claim to be a leader of Arab and African resistance to the Western imperialist powers. That said, the sanctions increasingly fucked up life for Momar Gaddafi, and mainly for the people of Libya. Their anger made Gaddafi worry that at some point they may take their rage out on him, so he announced a bold reform package. First off, he abolished the people's councils and the revolutionary committees, and he claimed

that all of Libya's problems had been the fault of those assholes. Because you know, he's not in charge. Oh right. So he threw them all under the bus. He threw them all under the bus. Good step one. To drive this point home, on March 3, 1988, 19 days before I was born, Momar Gaddafi gathered a bunch of supporters and foreign diplomats at the Furnash Prison in Tripoli.

He got into an enormous bulldozer and then drove it into the jail's massive gate to break it down. Unfortunately, the bulldozer could not break the gate of the jail, so Gaddafi backed up and rammed the prison wall until it collapsed. Outwards, onto the crowd of diplomats and supporters, then a sewage pipe ruptured and shit spilled into the street. That's like something that would be on the Simpsons. That's like something Homer Simpson would do.

That's amazing. Oh my god, that's great. Eventually. So, Yackety Sacks has still been playing over it. It never stopped. Yeah, it never stopped. That was the Libyan national anthem for 40 years. Holy crap.

400 prisoners eventually rushed out through the hole in the wall. Momar Gaddafi announced, peoples don't triumph through building prisons and raising their walls even higher. To the stunned silence of his country. Half of whom were buried in rubble. Oh no. Gaddafi opened up his country to a small amount of privatization. People were allowed to run personal businesses.

Hotels started to open up in Tripoli. Things actually seemed like they were moving forward in a positive direction. But then, on December 21st, 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 went down over Lockerbie, Scotland after a terrorist bomb detonated on board. 270 people died, including 11 on the ground. In 1990, the Lockerbie bombing was credibly linked to Momar Gaddafi's Libya, a computer chip in the bomb detonator matched detonators found previously on Libyans who'd been arrested in Senegal.

Gaddafi denied any wrongdoing and anything to do with the bombing. He refused to hand over the accused bombers. He said, the evidence against Libya is less than a laughable piece of a fingernail. Which is weird. No, it's weird. Yeah, it's weird to compare that to a fingernail. I mean, it's like the same size, the chip. The chip, yeah, I guess, maybe that's what he was going after.

I don't know. Yeah. It's a weird thing to say. It's one of those things I have to assume. Something you say when you're guilty, when you don't know how to defend yourself. Yeah, so the 1990s were a bad decade for Momar Gaddafi's regime. Libya spent most of that time under a strangling set of international sanctions. Gaddafi also had to fight off an Islamist uprising that threatened to topple his regime.

He spent years doing that. There was like a brutal little almost civil war between the Islamists and the Gaddafi regime. The economy collapsed due in part to sanctions and in part to the war and also in part to expensive projects like the Great Manmade River Scheme. So Gaddafi believed that all great peoples need a great river. Libya does not have many great rivers or any great rivers, naturally, but it does have the largest underground reserves of fossil freshwater.

So Gaddafi's plan was to pipe water from underneath the deserts to the coastal cities. This was an enormous engineering task. The largest irrigation plan ever carried out, 1600 miles of pipe. It's an enormous fucking thing. It took up 15% of the government's budget during the years that it was under construction and it was under construction for a very long time. This is, again, something that actually turned out to be a good idea because now that it is complete, it currently provides something like 70% of Libya's freshwater and supports

a huge amount of their agriculture. I mean, a river is water that hasn't been corrupted by the ocean, becoming the ocean. He just keeps trying to get his people away from that fucking ocean. But it took a long time to finish this man-raid river and during the 90s, it was just incredibly expensive when they didn't have a lot of money to spare. This is his big dig. They had the big dig in Boston where they had construction for a decade and it was awful and everybody hated it.

It sounds like Gaddafi's big dig. Oh, I was going to say it sounds like Gaddafi's Boston. I'm not an East Coast guy. Have you been to the East Coast? Yeah. Yeah, I've been to the East Coast. Terrible. Where?

Like the East Parts. I feel like you need to give it another shot. No, I actually, I liked Boston the one time I was there. Oh, okay. It's like a lovely city. It's all right. I wasn't there during the big dig unless I was, but I wasn't driving. Yeah.

Yeah. No, I enjoy the East Coast unless it's the summer, in which case I don't. Y'all summers are the worst. Yeah, the winters are also kind of the worst. I'm fine with winter, but I come from Texas, so if it's hot outside, I expect there to be air conditioning, and no one on that coast is figured out AC. At least that's the way it seems when you travel. Right.

There's also mosquitoes, and that's kind of a deal breaker. Yeah. You got to deal with those in the South too, so I guess I don't notice that so much, but I'm not a summer guy. Anyway, let's talk about Monmart Gaddafi some more. So yeah, Libya's government, during this sort of giant slump in the 1990s, tried a number of different tactics to fix the economy. In 1994, he established a tourism secretariat and dedicated the nation's gorgeous coastline

to tourism. This, again, is not a crazy idea. Libya's a beautiful country, especially around the coast. The problem is that, of course, Libya was still subject to massive international sanctions, and alcohol was illegal, both of which kind of put a damper on a vacation destination. Yeah, you need the booze. You need the booze. Like, if you can't offer anything else, you need the booze there.

Yeah, it's okay if there's not a lot of variety in the food, but I need to be able to drink on the beach. Yeah, like if I went into the convenience store and it was just Italian suits and milk powder, I'd be like, well, okay, there's vodka, so I can make this work. I can have a vacation. Yeah, I can have a good time, but if there's no alcohol, then it's like, what am I going to do? Yeah, what are we even, why am I even here?

Yeah. At one point, a journalist asked the head of Libya's National Tourism Agency who would want to go there for vacation, the head of the tourism agency answered, perhaps Reformed Alcoholics. Excellent. Come dry out in Libya. Been drinking too often. Hit rock bottom.

Come to Libya. He also said, and then there are those who like adventure. Which I'm going to guess 90% of people who like adventure also drink. Yeah, and I think people, when they say I like adventure, they mean like zip lining. And then drinking margaritas afterwards. So like Saddam Hussein, by the mid 1990s, Gaddafi seemed to have soured on being a dictator. He turned to the warm embrace of writing and in 1993 published a collection of short stories titled Escape to Hell.

The eponymous story appears to be written from the perspective of a dictator fleeing his own unhappy people. It's like he knew. It's like he knew. I'm going to start reading from Omar Gaddafi short stories, which I should have plugged at the end of the last episode because this is really the best thing we got here. This sounds wonderful. So when we get back, we're going to just dig right into Omar's oeuvre.

But first, buy things, products. Yeah, everything. 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 Bullitt. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into

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ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. 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.

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And we're about to get into the part of the story I'm most excited about where we talk about Moe Marchedofi's career as a short story. This sounds delightful. So the collection was of course called Escape to Hell, which was the title of a story in it about a dictator fleeing his own people. I'm just going to read one selection from Escape to Hell. Sorry, I was about to say that sounds like a John Carpenter movie. It does.

And the hell in this is the desert. He's talking about how he hates being in charge so much that he wants to escape to hell the desert because it's nicer than being around his people. He fucking loves the desert. I mean, he's a better one. He's people or desert people. It makes sense. Hates the ocean.

Hates the ocean, loves the desert. Who can stand against the crushing current and the blind and gulfing power? How I love the liberated masses on the march. They are unfettered with no master singing and merry after their terrible ordeals. On the other hand, how I fear and apprehend them. I love the masses as much as I love my father. Similarly, I fear them no less than I fear him. In a Bedouin society, where no government system exists, who can deter a father from

persecuting any of his children? Yes, how much they love him and how much they fear him at the same time. That is how I love and fear the masses, exactly as I love and fear my father. He knew what was coming. And there's a great, there's a line in there where he talks about like how all he knew how to do was tear down the old government and he didn't know how to do stuff like be a plumber. Right.

He didn't expect things to work. But he's like, dude, you're the one who stayed in power. So yeah, at this point, he's like Tony Soprano, like that's all he can do. And he sort of knows eventually it's, you know, it's gonna come back to bite him on the ass. There's an end to this road. Yeah, exactly. And he forgot how to use the brakes.

Yeah. He calls these all short stories, but they are really just collections of rants with no cohesive plot structure or characters. Dave for almost one story, suicide of the astronaut, which I am convinced might be the greatest thing ever written in any language. That sounds like a great band. It is a great name for a band and it's a great short story. And Dave and listeners, I don't have any option but to read the story in its entirety, every

single word of it. I have no choice in the matter. I could no more cut out my own tongue than I could keep Colonel Gaddafi's brilliance hidden from the world. Are you ready, David Bell, for suicide of the astronaut? I don't know if I'll ever be ready, but yeah, do it. Having traveled far and wide in giddy outer space, and since budgets can no more support the great expense of outer space programs, and now that man has landed on the moon but

found nothing much except that the two astronauts have exposed the wild guesses and vain hypotheses of scientists that there were seas and oceans on the moon, which led to the competition to own them and designate names for them by the insolent great powers who nearly went to war on Earth for the sake of dividing the moon's natural resources, especially the marine ones, and having roamed around the planetary system taking pictures of all the planets, and after giving up hope of finding intelligent life or any suitable place for living there, man returned to the Earth frustrated and suffering from giddiness, vomiting in fear of perdition. That's the first sentence.

Holy shit. Okay. Hold on. I need to unpack that. So this story takes place after that. This is a side note. This is like, so you know how we went to the moon and we found all this fucking, all of the oceans and stuff.

And we almost went to war over the moon. Yeah. Well, you could forget about all that. We're done with space. We're done with that. Okay. Next sentence. He has now realized the fact that the Earth is unique and incomparable as a source of

life, which in simple words means food and water, and that which is indispensable to life is secured by the atmosphere of the Earth, et cetera. Thus man had to return to the Earth from his outer space escapade. All right. All right. Paragraph two. Back on the Earth, the astronaut took off his spacesuit and put on his familiar one, which is suitable for walking and living on the Earth.

Now that his mission with the space corporation had come to an end, he began to look for an earthly job. He applied for one at a carpentry workshop, but he failed the test because he lacked the essential know-how of what he thought was a simple trade. Also, he had a go at the lathe workshop at a blacksmith's forge, building and plumbing. He even tried painting and whitewashing. He had not studied fine art or music or weaving as they had nothing to do with his scientific specialization.

The space corporation. This is a Neil Breen film. Some people, most people won't know what that means, but a few people do. This is a bad B-movie plot. Yeah, it is. It's amazing that he thinks an astronaut would have trouble getting a job anywhere, because I've had to hire people on a number of occasions in my life, and I know that if anyone had walked in and said, I was an astronaut and was in space, that would be the end of

the interview. Oh yeah. If the word astronaut is on a resume, you'd get it. You got it. If they can't do anything, I just have them there all day to be like, so what's space like? I assume anyone who can be an astronaut can pick up any other skill. We decided when we were in elementary school, collectively, that the best job is astronaut,

which means any job less good than an astronaut an astronaut can do. Oh yeah, for sure. Even if you're a surgeon, they'll pick it up. Being an astronaut is basically being really smart, but in space. Anything they can do, if they can do it in space, they can handle it here. I assume an astronaut can do anything. But Momar Gaddafi assumes he can't get a job at a woodworking shop. This is the future where we were already on the moon and stuff.

This is like the Ridley Scott astronauts. These are the space trackers. I'm pretty sure he's imagining it. Did he just watch aliens and then write this? It's extremely possible. This might be in that cinematic universe. Are you saying that Momar Gaddafi's suicide of the astronaut is in the alien's cannon? It might be.

So far, I see no reason not to say that. All right, fair enough. We'll see where it goes. Let's start with paragraph three. So he had to leave the city of frustrated failure and set off for the countryside, where he looked for work as a farmhand in order to support himself and his family. One of the farmers asked if he was attracted to the earth by which he simply wanted to know if the astronaut liked farming.

But the astronaut answered, the attraction of the earth decreases as we go up, and our weight also decreases gradually until we get to the point of weightlessness. Then in there, we get free of the earth's attraction or gravity, as we call it. But soon afterwards, we get attracted by another planet, and our weight begins to increase gradually and so on. I hope I have answered your question. Hold on. So, the astronaut was asked, how do you like the earth, and he thought that the guy was

asking him, how weighed down by gravity to the earth would you say you are right now, which would be an insane interview question. That's amazing. The farmer showed signs of someone who did not comprehend and looked as if he wanted more explanation, and the astronaut, hoping to impress the simple farmer in order that he would take him on as a farmhand, went on parading his space knowledge. The volume of the earth is about 1320 times less than that of Jupiters, and that 12 years on the earth equal to one year on Jupiter, and that Jupiter spot is big enough to hold

the earth in its center. You may also be interested to know that Saturn is 744 times bigger than the earth, yet is only about 95 times heavier than the earth. So we know now why this astronaut can't get a job. We figured that out. Yeah. He's literally talking about as far from farming as you can get. Just keeps giving space facts.

Okay, so I think I understand the point of, I don't know if we want to talk about this at the end, I think I understand what Momar is trying to say. Well let me continue with the astronauts rant. Sure. The diameter of the earth is about 50 times bigger than that of the moons, and its volume is about 80 times bigger than that of the moons. The pull of the earth's gravity is 6 times greater than that of the moons. The earth is about 150 million kilometers away from the sun, whose light takes 8 minutes

to reach the earth at the speed of 300,000 kilometers per second. The volume of the earth is about 1,300,800 times smaller than that of the sun's, and the mass of the earth is also… 332,958 times smaller than the mass of the sun whose density is 30 times bigger than that of the earth's. The earth comes third in distance from the sun. Mercury is the nearest planet to the sun, Venus comes next, and then the earth, etc. Venus is about 42 million kilometers away from the earth, which is about 400,000 kilometers

away from the moon. Is space rain, man? Yeah. If you had a car that ran at 100 kilometers per hour, it would take you 146 days to get to the moon, but if you had no car and decided to walk to the moon, it would take you 8 years and 100 days to get there. I think I have answered the question fully now. As you see, I am well informed in matters concerning the earth.

As soon as he had heard this last repetition of the word earth, the farmer became aware of himself and closed his mouth, which had been wide open during the whole story of the astronauts' journey from one planet to another, from the time he left earth until he returned home. The farmer did not comprehend much, but he too felt dizzy because he fell under the spell and felt that he was also coming home from a space journey, with no tangible gains concerning his farm. What mattered to him was the distance between one tree and the other, and not the distance

between the earth and Jupiter. He was also interested in the volume of the yield of his farm, and not in the volume of Mercury. He felt very sorry for the begging, pathetic astronaut and had the desire to give him some alms, but he was unable to take him on as a farm hand. And so, having lost all hope of finding any breadwunning job on earth, the astronaut decided to commit suicide. Wow.

That's the story. That's the end. What? No, he didn't even learn how he carried that out. So he's writing this like a fable, basically. Yeah, I think that was the goal. Yeah. Oh my God.

He should have written movies. He should have written movies. He probably could have gotten something made. No, I would watch a 90-minute adaptation of Suicide Safety Astronaut. If there are producers listening to this show, I will make sure that script gets written. Roll an emmerich, probably. He can do this. So he's trying to say, I mean, it's pretty clear what he's trying to say, right?

I think so. I think the point, this feels, it felt obvious, but maybe it's not, is that he's basically, I think about people like Elon Musk, who is like, we're going to space and we're sitting here like, hey, we need clean water and affordable housing. If the Hashiigan doesn't have water, they can drink. Yeah. So what he's saying is the idea that we go to space and we want to acquire this sort of knowledge, but it's useless to the practicalities of actually living and farming, and the idea

that an astronaut's job is essentially useless once we learn that there's nothing out there for us, that the earth is the thing we should be taking care of and working on, and the most useful skills are it's down to just growing food. I think that's what he's trying to say in a really dumb story. In a really dumb story, and I'm not going to get on a rant about space programs here. I'm one of those people who thinks that we're going to get killed by a rock if we don't get better at space. Yeah.

I think it's good to explore space. Absolutely. I just think that our expenditures on the space program are not why America does not have good social programs. Like, if someone with the charisma of Kennedy could start a program that's just like, everybody gets water! Yeah. We want to be Star Trek, but Star Trek started with Earth.

They were like, let's figure this shit out. Let's make sure no one's starving. Yeah. And then maybe we can start going into space and figuring that out. Yeah. That's a reasonable message. Gaddafi's is insane. Yeah.

I mean, sorry. Technically, Star Trek started because there was a third world war, and then Cochran invented the warp drive, and Vulcan saw it. No, and we'll be doing a whole episode on Zephyr and Cochran, for sure, 100%. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So that's the suicide of the astronaut.

Good God. Yeah. Life changing, right? Yes. That's wonderful. So by the late 1990s, it was clear to Momar Gaddafi that Libya's only option was to make nice with the West and convince them to lift sanctions. This started in 1998 when Gaddafi finally handed the Lockerbie bombing.

That was the plane that got blown up until 270 people. He handed the suspects in that bombing over to be tried under Scottish law in a neutral international court. This was a start, but it took three years for things to really ramp up, and it wasn't until the 9-11 terror attacks that Colonel Gaddafi got his big break. So September 11, 2001 was the best day ever for three groups, Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, all of the whales in the world, and Momar Gaddafi. Despite being an observant Muslim himself, Gaddafi had been fighting Islamist terrorists

and trying to warn the world about them for years. So when 9-11 happened, he publicly condemned it, and he told the world, like, this is what I've been warning you about for a long time, I'm against those guys, too. He arranged a blood drive to help the victims of 9-11. He declared the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan an act of self-defense, and at this point, the Bush administration was eager for a foreign policy win. So they decided to start talking with Gaddafi about opening Libya back up to the world and dropping the sanctions.

This wound up leading to, in 2003, Libya renouncing its plans to build nuclear weapons. Western corporations, particularly oil and gas companies, were hugely excited for the possibilities that Libya represented, because there's a shitload of oil inside Libya. And in general, it seemed to be a major coup for the Bush administration. It later came back to bite them in the ass. It seemed like it vindicated their policy, like, because we fucked with Saddam Hussein and murdered him, then that's why Gaddafi gave up his nukes, so clearly fucking with one dictator might make the others better.

But of course, then America and other Western countries intervened to get Gaddafi killed in 2011, which provided a very good reason for North Korea and Iran to not give up their nuclear weapons programs. So that said, I'm not going to condemn anybody who tries to stop a country from getting nukes because we got enough of those, and that did work in the short term. Did you say all the whales? Whales love 9-11. Yeah, it's a well-documented fact.

It's another ocean thing. This is another reason to stay away from the ocean. Well, the actual reason that you can read up on this, I'm not just making a joke, scientists who listen to whales, you can tell the stress levels in the whales based on the kind of songs that they sing, and they notice that in the weeks after 9-11, their stress levels plummeted to the fact where they weren't stressed out at all, they were super happy. They're all like, we did it! Fuck 9-11!

Yeah. You know, and it turned out that what it is is that the sonar and whatever equipment on planes that it uses to communicate with air traffic, that stuff, whales can hear it, and it's like, whales always have a headache because there's always planes everywhere. We are the noisy upstairs names of whales. And for like a week or so after 9-11, there was no more noise, so 9-11 was the best thing ever for whales. Right.

Yeah, and Gaddafi. Yeah. It was like an anti-ocean podcast, which I had not intended when I started writing it. Yeah, well, I'm sure over time it'll gradually shift to being mostly that, too. Yeah. Yeah. The Ocean as a Bastard. Yeah.

Mm-hmm. So, we're going to talk about the rest of Mo Mar Gaddafi's western rehabilitation of his image tour and his trip to speak to the United Nations in New York City, Gaddafi in New York City. It's like a fucking crocodile dundee, but with Mo Mar Gaddafi. Yeah. A straight to DVD sequel. Yeah.

Yes. So, we're going to get to that, but first, the products. 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 U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. 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.

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.

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podcasts. And we're back from products. Let's continue talking about Momar Gaddafi. When we left off he just sort of agreed to give up his nuclear weapons, 9-11 had brought him closer to the United States, and this whole western rehab tour culminated in 2009 with a trip to New York City to speak in front of the United Nations. Now this was not as simple as it might sound, true to his Bedouin roots, Gaddafi brought an enormous tent with him wherever he traveled.

His initial plan was to erect a new jersey on a piece of land owned by the Libyan Embassy. But the State Department said, no, you can't put up a giant tent. There's a ton of people with guns in America and they might just shoot you. It was one of those. There's way too many. Yeah, I can see that request coming in them being like, he wants to what? A tent? Oh god, no.

Does he not know everyone has a rifle? And there's angry people about it, yeah. So he tried next to find a large enough plot of open land in New York City for the tent, but everyone he asked turned him down because he's a violent dictator. Only Momar Gaddafi was able to find one friend in America who would rent him some land, Donald J. Trump. Oh shit. Mr. Trump rented him a large plot of land in Westchester County.

Here is how a 2009 Guardian article described the erection of the tent. Workers were seen yesterday erecting a tent and satellites in the glamorous neighborhood of Bedford on an estate owned by Trump. Local officials tried to stop them, saying it was illegal to build a temporary residence without a permit. An ABC News helicopter filmed a large tent on the 113 acre, seven springs estate with rugs and patterned wall hangings. Green and yellow fabric lined the walls in a pattern dotted with images of small brown

camels, according to a local newspaper website image. Last night, a State Department official told AP the tent might be used for entertaining by Gaddafi, but he would not be sleeping there. And here is a picture of Momar Gaddafi's tent. Okay, why? Oh my god. Why didn't this come up during the election? Oh, it did, David.

It did? Oh, it sure did. It seems like if someone's running for president and someone's running against him, and that person running against him says, he let Momar Gaddafi camp in his backyard. I feel like that's enough, right? How did we get here? That is too big a question for this podcast. I know.

It's just, oh my god. Yeah, what a tent, right? Yeah, it's a pretty good tent. It's a pretty good tent. We'll have the picture up on our website. It looks like a barbecue-type tent. Like, there's nothing in it, though. I don't think they'd finish setting it up yet.

Okay, it looks like it would be a good place for like a wedding or something. Yeah, I'm legitimately jealous of the tent. Nobody's going to claim that Momar Gaddafi did not have good taste in tents. So the town was furious about this and banned Gaddafi from putting up his tent. The whole incident caused an outcry that forced the Trump organization to respond. They said that the land was, quote, least on a short-term basis to Middle Eastern partners who may or may not have a relationship to Mr. Gaddafi. We are looking into the matter.

Mr. Gaddafi never got to stay in the tent. In 2016, then-Candidate Trump bragged about the whole affair. Don't forget, I'm the only one. I made a lot of money with Gaddafi, if you remember, which a lot of people made money out of Momar Gaddafi. Why is that a brag? How did he make that a brag? I think he was a big fan of Death of the Astronaut, so he probably just kind of psyched to have

his favorite author in town. That's true, yeah. But the colonel did get to give his speech at the United Nations, and my God, what a speech it was. He was scheduled to speak for 15 minutes. He spoke for more than 90. Nice. Oh.

And now we're going to hear the whole speech, right? No. But we're going to get into the cliff's notes. He had himself announced as, quote, leader of the revolution of the socialist people's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, president of the African Union and king of African kings. Wow. Yeah, that's a hell of a title. Yeah, that's a bold title.

It wasn't until 17 minutes into the 15 minute speech that he hit on his main point, urging that Africa be given a seat on the Security Council, which is not an unreasonable demand. He also complained that permanent seats on the Security Council were unfair and undemocratic, which is also reasonable. Then he demanded the UN be relocated to Libya, which is a little bit less reasonable. Again, he's the problem. He's always the problem. After that, Qaddafi went sort of off the rails with a list of rapid-fire demands that were

half reasonable, half bug-fuck nuts. He demanded thorough investigations into the deaths of Martin Luther King Jr. and JFK. So that had just been bugging him for a while. It's just been bugging him forever. He just wanted to know. He proposed Israel and Palestine be merged into a single state called Israstine. Okay, so what's happening here? You ever see the scene in the movie Armageddon when they have the demands?

It's the first time he's gotten this much of an audience, so he's like, 15 minutes. No, I'm going to go for 90. I guess I might see this. Yeah, it's like a film student stuck in an elevator with Spielberg. He's just going to throw every pitch he's got out. I love it. It starts with, yeah, Israel and Palestine should be one country, which a lot of people would be like, oh yeah, wouldn't that be nice if that were Israstine?

That's not what anyone would call it. He supported the Taliban's call to establish an Islamic state. He demanded war crimes trials for the invasion of Iraq. He demanded $7.7 trillion in reparations for Africa, which honestly seems kind of lowball on it. And he insinuated that swine flu was a biological weapon. Insinuate? He just threw that in as a seasoning?

He just dropped that in there. It was a whirlwind. And I'm going to say right now, probably the greatest speech the UN has ever seen. The whole event earned Colonel Gaddafi a spread in Vanity Fair titled, Colonel Gaddafi a Life in Fashion. Wow. I'm going to read you their fucking introductory paragraph. Since completing his transition from international pariah to statesman, Colonel Momar Gaddafi,

the longest serving leader in both Africa and the Arab world, has brought color in his own eccentric panache to the drab circuit of international summits and conferences. Drawing upon the influences of LaCroix, Liberace, Phil Spector for hair, Snoopy and Idi Amin, Libya's leader, now in his 60s, is simply the most unabashed dresser on the world stage. We pay homage to a sartorial genius of our time. I'm going to show you a picture of him standing next to President Barack Obama, and Barack Obama is not fucking having it, and it's amazing. This will be up on the website.

Oh my god. You owe it to yourself to see it. How would you describe his outfit, David? Oh, he's like a Star Trek alien or something. He's like a TNG Star Trek alien, where they had 30 minutes to pick it out, just like sequence and color. You never want your fashion to be described as Snoopy and Idi Amin. And Barack Obama's body language in this is amazing.

He's just like, I got to get away from this guy as soon as possible. Yeah. It's weird to see a picture of a president rethinking their career. Yeah. You don't find that often, but this is the moment. Of course, not long after Gaddafi's visit to New York City in 2011 came the Arab Spring. This brought about a revolt against Gaddafi. The revolt started in the eastern city of Benghazi because of the arrest of an activist

who was organizing a protest march, basically. The revolt spread quickly throughout the country as Gaddafi's forces arrested and murdered dissidents. The whole time Gaddafi seemed baffled at what was happening. After all, Libya was, quote, the state of the masses, it was the people's state, and the people couldn't rise up against themselves. He wasn't in charge, of course. What were they doing?

Unfortunately for Gaddafi, NATO sided with the rebels and created a no-fly zone that grounded the Libyan Air Force. Gaddafi was kind of winning up until that point. His hard-corded Western friends abandoned him, so his Western charm tour came to nothing. The African nations he'd supported also all abandoned him, as did his fellow Arab leaders. NATO moved on from a no-fly zone to launching air attacks against the Libyan army and sending in advisors to train the rebels. After a very bloody year of fighting, the capital of Tripoli was taken.

Colonel Gaddafi went on the run, but his convoy was blown apart by NATO jets on a highway outside of his old hometown. Gaddafi was found by the rebels, wounded and hiding in a sewage pipe. He was shot dead on October 20, 2011. His corpse was displayed inside a freezer for several days. Oof. Yeah. Gaddafi-style display.

Yeah. You live by hiding your dead enemies in a fridge and you die by having your enemies put you in a fridge. Wow. So nothing in particular sparked this. I know the Arab Spring originated in Tunisia with the overthrow of the guy who was in charge of Tunisia at the time, who I think was a friend of Gaddafi's, and that sort of started the domino effect that convinced people in Libya it was time to start agitating for change.

And it was possible, when it started, he could have launched real reforms, because there's a long history that we got into some of this of Gaddafi saying there's going to be reforms, and then nothing happened. Right. It seemed like it was time, though. Yeah. It was time. He's like the drunk guy at a party where at certain point everybody's like, okay, you

gotta go. Yeah. If he had said, hey, you know what, I built that giant underwater river and now I'm gonna step down and try to forget all the people I had killed and just remember the river, that might have worked. Yeah. I mean, he did enough good that he could have hid behind it. Yeah.

But he did so much bad stuff. Yeah. And his repression of the rebellion was very brutal. A lot of people locked up. A lot of people executed huge numbers of people killed and bombed. And so, yeah, by the time the rebels got to his compound, there was no chance. They weren't just gonna shoot that guy straight off. This podcast is not the place to get into whether or not NATO intervention in Libya

was a good idea. It hasn't been a clean thing, obviously. But I do want to point out some numbers, one of which is that the 2011 civil war against that dethroned Qaddafi, there was an estimated 20,000 people dead from that. There was another civil war that started in 2014, and the estimate for that is about 10,000 dead. About 30, maybe 40,000 people dead as a result of the conflicts. And those deaths probably, I mean, it's one of those things.

If NATO hadn't stepped in, it's possible Qaddafi would have just stopped the rebellion cold in its tracks, and there wouldn't have been that many deaths. But it's also possible that it would have wound up like Syria, where more than half of a million people have died because there was no flystone established. So, it's hard to say whether or not Libya is better or worse off as a result of the intervention, but they do now have a sort of functioning democracy, and Qaddafi is out of power. It has not been a smooth transition to democracy, because again, when Qaddafi left power, there

were no political parties. There was no one who knew how to run anything in the country. Because the people who were in charge when Qaddafi died were people who had been his friends when he was a teenager, that had been running things the whole time. None of the younger people really knew how to do anything. They're like, it has been a messy road, they're doing their best. He didn't set them up for success, which is part of his point. That's tough, because it does seem like he had to go, but it's a tough thing to figure

out then. Yeah, it's not as when people say it was a mistake to intervene, it's not something that you can say that easily. I'm not going to say it was the right thing to do either, but it's a complicated thing. Really it's that, yeah, because again, anybody who has rape rooms, it should get involved. Something should be done. And he was a very repressive leader. He executed a lot of people, which we talked about in this sometimes, and made a lot of

people watch and televised a lot of executions. And they were pretty brutal. He would have a lot of people hung on television, so he was a bad dude and probably would have killed a substantial number of people if he'd succeeded in stomping down the revolution. Because he did. When there was that Islamist rebellion against him, he killed like 1,300 people in one massacre. So if he had had his way with the revolutionaries, there could have been more than 30,000 dead. It's hard to say.

It's hard to weigh that. How many deaths versus how many in this alternate reality didn't get involved. It's a bleak question. And he's a hard guy to weigh, because presumably in 100 years, we don't know what Libby is going to be like, but hopefully they still have that giant fucking underground river he built. So who knows? Do they still have the statue of the fist?

They do. It's in a war museum in the city of, I think, Miss Rata. They took it as like a trophy. For like, remember that time we overthrew the dictator? Here's a statue. Right. I mean, the river's cool, but that fist. That fist statue.

It's like a Banksy sculpture. I mean, that's wonderful. It is great. Yeah. Well, that is all the time we have for Momar Gaddafi today. Dave, thank you for joining me in this epic tale of whatever the hell we call Momar Gaddafi. Thank you for having me. Yeah.

This was a blast. All right. Well, Colonel Bell, you want to plug the things that you have to plug? Yeah, I'll plug things. Absolutely. You can find me on the Twitter at moviehooligan, where I tweet stuff. I'm also co-running a podcasting and a Twitch network called Gamefully Unemployed, G-A-M-E-F-U-L-L-Y. It's a, I guess, a pun.

We have a Patreon, patreon.com, slash gamefully unemployed. Check us out. Yeah. And you can find me on Twitter at iWriteOK, which is just two letters. You can find our podcasts, Twitter, and other social media stuff at atbastardspod. You can find us on the internet at behindthebastards.com, which is where the pictures and sources for this particular episode will be. You can also find my book on Amazon, A Brief History of Vice.

David himself appears in it. It's true. I don't want to go into too much detail, but there's a hospital visit involved. And a milkshake. And a milkshake. So if you want to see how those things are connected by my book, A Brief History of Vice. Other than that, I got nothing. Next week we'll be back with another bastard, or potentially several bastards, to talk about.

So please join us next Tuesday and every Tuesday from now until the end of time. I love, like, 60% of you statistically. 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 Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Alphabet Boys 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.