Somewhere in Tripoli tonight a man is facing an almighty reckoning. The ghosts of 42 years of repression have come to hunt Colonel Gaddafi out his bunker, proving yet again how fragile a hold on power the most brutal dictators have. Hard but brittle, the façade crumbles when enough people expose it for what it is, a façade. As Eugene O’Neill’s Emperor Jones put it “Ain't talking big what makes a man big, s'long as he makes folks believe it?” Talking big – if by big we mean Mad - is what Gaddafi was good at; I’m not so sure about thinking big. The hunted dictator holed up in a castle of sand powerlessly waiting for the tide to come in is a compelling subject for the dramatist, from Shakespeare to O’Neill, but I don’t think the Colonel is all that interested in reflection. Not that he isn’t smart in his way, but while I haven’t read The Green Book, I imagine it’s a piece of self-serving incoherent Mein Kampfism. The question he now faces is how to go out, as a Hitler or a Mussolini? Detached from reality in Romantic self-pity, Hitler had no interest in life after the Reich and committed the suicide he should have carried when he lived in the obscurity from which he should never have emerged. Mussolini on the other hand was different, however much he enjoyed being Il Duce, he was also a man, and an Italian man at that. The dictatorship hadn’t worked out but if he could just make it to South America, there would always be skirts to chase. It didn’t work out; he was nabbed just outside Milan and strung up with piano wire. Colonel Gaddafi was behind some of the worst atrocities of the last thirty years, was directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of people in Ireland by paying for the IRA to become Europe’s number one terrorist organisation and his rule in Libya was a particularly noxious blend of corruption, personality cult and indoctrination. But the people were also kept on their toes by a taste for the surreal that would rival Vic and Bob. That’s one of the problems with tonight’s events. Hitler remains entirely odious, but it’s now possible to joke about Mussolini, and Gaddafi? Who hasn’t had a laugh about Gaddafi? Whether it was farting at interviews, making clearly illogical pronouncements (Libya is the only democracy on the whole planet) and, let’s face it, baiting America in the eighties, for most of us Gaddafi was an entertaining nutter. If everything goes according to plan, democracy will emerge and a Libyan Enda Kenny will take the helm, and there may be moments when we miss Gaddafi on the world stage, just for entertainment value (Hugo Chavez just isn’t quite mad enough for me). So will his end be the final act of a lifelong nutter? Instead of a Hitler or Mussolini, will he choose the MacBeth route of fatalistic defiance “Why should I play the Roman, and die on mine own sword? While I see lives the gashes do better on them.” The rebels have clearly won, but a word of advice, if any of them hear the words “Say Hello to my Little Friend!” in the Bab Al-Aziziyah compound, duck.
