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Peace to the planet. I go by the name of Charlemagne the God, and this summer I'm bringing my show back to Comedy Central with a new title and a new podcast. It's called hell of a week. But don't worry, every Friday I'll be keeping that same, calling out the ******** energy, and I'll have some of the biggest names in comedy, politics and entertainment with me. So if the news is terrorizing your timeline and causing your anxiety to rise high and gas prices, don't worry, we got you. Listen to hell of a week with charlamagne the God on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm dua lipa. And I'm thrilled to be back for the second season of my podcast tulipa at your service. Alongside me and my guests lists and recommendations, the show features conversations with some of my biggest inspirations working across entertainment, politics, activism and much, much more. So please tune in and join me on this very special adventure. Listen to Dua Lipa at your service starting Friday 23rd of September on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Ebony K Williams, host of Holden Court, and I'm so excited to announce that Holden Court has a brand new home at interval presents. That's right, we're back and better than ever. Season 2 is here and we're bringing you the same in-depth legal analysis and cultural commentary that you know and love. Listen to Holden Court on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. So y'all, let's hold court. Hello friends. I am Robert Evans and this is behind the ******** 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 gainfully 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 Caulkins. Yep. Lifestyle website. David is Macaulay Culkin's personal biographer. Yeah, 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 Moammar Gadhafi. Great name. What do you know about Moammar Gadhafi? Great name. That's 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. Yeah. Yeah. Gaddafi is a solid last name. 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 scientists used it to make a time machine instead. Really, really screwed over the Libyans there. Yeah. They were very angry. Yeah. Doc brown. Yeah. And that's that's the extent of my knowledge. Well, yeah. Moammar was the leader of Libya for 40 years. He was executed in the street in 2011 by a partisan mob. And that's that's that's what I would I would guess most people listening right now know about Moammar Gadhafi. The more detailed story, which we're about to get into, is the tale of probably the craziest person to ever run a country. And not not like Hitler crazy, where you have like, this very cohesive idea about the world and history, and you're trying to, like, make this, like, like crazy. As in he probably, I don't even know. Like, I don't even know how to. I'm just going to read you 21 pages about the guy. Oh, delightful. OK, 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 the 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 1,000,000. That basic story is played out a lot of times throughout history, but never quite like it did during the reign of Moammar Gadhafi. 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, Gadhafi actually based the Libyan state entirely on his fevered fantasies now momar Mohammed Abu. In your Kadafi was born in 1941, or perhaps 1943, in the little hamlet of tents near a town called Cert, 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. Seems like a running theme, having listened to the show. They like to, they like to make their own history. Yeah, you never really know anything about these. They're all they're all a little like Houdini, like they they really, they like the razzle dazzle there. Or like the Joker who is actually. Kind of a good way to look at Moammar Gadhafi. When I say he's crazy, he's he's like Heath Ledger's Joker. OK, yeah. So yeah, like Hitler had a plan. Yeah. Momar was just he just was going to see what happens. Yeah, he had a plan, but it was not. Not wasn't a great plan. Wasn't a great plan. It kept changing. It was, yeah, we'll get into that. I'm getting ahead of myself. So he was a better one, which are like 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 ray from Star Wars, because Libya had been an Italian colony right up until World War Two, when it became a battleground between the Axis and the Allies. O as a child, Kadhafi 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 his early childhood. So yeah, like Ray from Star Wars, right? Something to Simon Pegg in a yeah, big costume. Exactly. Exactly, yeah, Simon Pegg does come into this story a number of times. I thought it would, yeah. Now, aside from occasionally rooting through crash Dukas and P51 Mustangs, Gaddafi's early life was basically the same as the life of a Libyan. Born 1000 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 Quran. So that's, you know, young. It sounds kind of. Awesome. You know it. Getting your education. But 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 from Omar Gaddafi, it would be to have that wandering priest had been a wandering karate master then it's a very different story. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Changed a lot of history. Yeah. So in 1954, young Moammar Gadhafi convinced his dad to let him go to school. Which is something he has in common with Saddam Hussein, having like, beg his family to let him learn how to read and stuff. 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 I I like the wandering priests like he comes to you. I don't wanna. I don't wanna travel that much to learn. You have to commute every week to get to school. No, no, I would not have gone to school under those circumstances. 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 is like Arab panner of nationalism. The Arab states need to form one new country again, like there was in the days of the Ottoman. Like that's the idea that Kadhafi loved as a kid, right? So we started memorizing Nasser 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. It's Gaddafi's version of the story, OK? I was about to say. That doesn't sound like children. It doesn't sound like kids. Having been a child, I think we would have 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 unjustness of colonialism, Gaddafi organized protests, including a general strike every 2nd of December to protest against the Balfour Declaration, which was that's the thing where Britain was like, there's going to be an Israel and then there was an Israel. OK, that was. Yeah. You're not a fan of Israel? 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 her life says that he was like electrifying the listen to very charismatic, good looking young guy. There's older pictures I saw of him I quickly yeah, 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 his dressing well, we'll get into his fashion choices a little later. His 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 3000 years had just been invaded by an endless series of empires. So like that was a thing that he was scared of. 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. I'm extremely anti ocean. It doesn't want us there. We have no reason to be there. Yeah, you can't drink it, you can't breathe in it. It's there's nothing there for us. Stay out of the ocean. You filled with monsters. Momar Gaddafi would not disagree with you on any point there. Yeah, so far I'm getting along. So when he was a kid or when he when he had been a little little kid, the Italians had been in charge of his country and you know, they did 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 2/3 of Libya's population into concentration camps. A lot of them died. We don't know how many, but yeah, that's just we just did an episode about concentration camps recently. Yeah, yeah. Is it just yet one more country that Europeans? Very Epson. Good God. It's easier to pick the countries that didn't ever have a concentration camp in them because there's like 3. So, yeah, under Italian rule, Libyans couldn't receive anything beyond an elementary school education. Most of that education was dedicated to civilizing the savages with Italian values, which I assume are mostly based around macaroni and plumbing and kissing. 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. Yeah. When this caused unrest, you know, the not letting them get educated or talk thing dictator Benito Mussolini tried to charm the Libyans by declaring himself. The protector of Islam 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, yeah. Like that is that is peak colonialism. Oh yeah, that's that's top notch colonialism. It's really, really I'm doing that Italian kissy finger thing I just described. So good. So Libya gained its independence from, well, I mean, obviously the Italians. It was taken over by the Italians in World War Two, 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 are 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. That's charming. Like, I didn't know we could have that. Well, yeah. I mean, it had been parts of other countries, a bunch of. But just gave a **** about it. Yeah. And nobody had said, like, you're 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. And for that matter, the people in Tripoli and Benghazi didn't consider themselves all part of. There was no, I'm from ******* 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, 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. Like, a lot of people died of malaria, but it's smarter than switching capitals, right? And we committed, and yeah, we 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. It was like just he was king. But he was like, yeah, I'm not really into it. He was like. 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 **** about 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 Moammar Gadhafi. Gaddafi 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 a bar in it. King Idris kept the company open to American and British bases. Gaddafi had nothing but contempt for this and for Westerners. Here's an anecdote about him from Alison Pargeter's Libya, the rise and fall of Gaddafi, which was one of the major sources for this podcast quote. One target for his invective was the English school inspector Mr. Johnson, whom Gaddafi dismissed as no more than an agent of imperialism. On one occasion Gaddafi refused to stand up when Mr. Johnson entered the room and in a provocative gesture, waived a key chain bearing the image of President Nasser at the haughty inspector upon being ordered to leave the room. Gaddafi 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? Was like 16 or something. Yeah, he's your classic teenage rebellion teenager. Yeah, so Gaddafi'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 schoolchild, he organized them into a revolutionary cell to overthrow the king. This is when he's in like the equivalent of high school recruits into Gaddafi's group, had to be Arab nationalists and weren't allowed to drink alcohol. Our quote run after women, Qadhafi recounted. We used to meet under a palm tree near the Suthoff 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, they're like the the straight edge kids in high school. Were like, **** the government, but they're actually, like, planning to distract the government. They're they're way more active. Yeah. And it's they they they stick with it. Yeah. I mean, you got to respect that. I, I gave up most of the stuff I I was believed in as a teenager when I was 16. Yeah, this is like his junior high school band. Yeah. But he keeps keeps it rolling. And also, yeah, he really does, doesn't he? Commitment. It's important. So, uh, in 19? Oh yeah, none of the young revolutionaries in Gaddafi'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 Gaddafi attended a protest and Seba the town he 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 been expelled from school entirely. This was a mistake. It only made Gaddafi more dangerous. He left his family behind, walked to the coastal town of Misrata 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 Muammar Gaddafi 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 a British soldiers Gaddafi refused to earn to learn English. One of his teachers there, a guy named Colonel Ted Lau, described him as inherently. Cruel. He claims Gaddafi murdered a fellow cadet, probably for being gay. This is a quote from that book, Libya. The terrified cadet, his hands and feet bound, was dragged to a firing point where Gadhafi and a group of other students began shooting at him before Libyan officer finished him off with a coup de grace while the others laughed. So, OK, so I no longer like him. You're no longer on. Yeah, have to pay the turning point, right? Because until this moment. He didn't. No hate crimes, hate crime, free until this part. Gaddafi's whole story is like that. There will be two things he'll do in a row and you're like, OK, I agree with what you said or yeah, real self starters in the murders and then yes, to murder someone for being gay. That's that's real ****** ** Gaddafi. Yeah, yeah, I know. You're listening. So Gaddafi's lost the David Bell vote at this? Yeah, that's good to know. So Gaddafi discipline was violent for everybody in the military school. At one point Gaddafi got in trouble for not keeping his mouth shut and he was forced to crawl on his hands and knees over gravel wearing a backpack filled with sand in the hot desert sun. So. Military schools. Rough for everybody, but roughest for the gay kids who get executed. Throughout the whole period, Gaddafi continued to work through 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, to be low ranking officers. No one 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 Gaddafi. Seriously? Because he just seemed like a dumb kid. So the West continued to suck out Libya's oil to use and use it as one big airstrip, Gaddafi later recalled. Our souls were in revolt against the backwardness and developing 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 Gaddafi 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. It's 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, yeah, 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. Demo and hiding, hiding it under piles of rocks and inside trees. There's one story, one of the guys in Kadafi's Group who went on to be his Secretary of Defense. Basically, when he was a kid, had to his mom had to hide a bunch of ammo that he'd stashed in the sewers because the police came looking for him. So, like, that's the level these guys are on. We're like, their moms are helping them hide bullets. Horrible? Yeah, it is. It's cute. Gadhafi and his revolutionaries tried to schedule the overthrow of the government in early 1969. This got called off because of a concert. Oh man, they set a new date, but this one got ****** ** because someone in the military found out and put, you know, the king on warned, warned the king. Gaddafi 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 Gaddafi was driving back to Benghazi with a friend who got so into reciting verses from the Koran 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 team comedy? Yeah. Yeah. It's like a team comedy about trying to overthrow the government. Yeah. Would be occasional hate crime. Yeah. Sprinkled with the occasional hate crime. So basically American Pie. Just that movie. Yeah. Gaddafi's childhood was a lot like a Libyan American, Libyan pie, which I think is baklava. OK. Yeah, it would seem right. Yeah. Yeah. So it turned out that all their many failures had helped them. Criminal Aziz Shanab, the third in command of the Libyan army, later said that he and his fellow senior officers knew about Gaddafi. Group in their plans and just ignored them. We always thought it was rubbish that Gaddafi and his group would never be able to do anything, which is not an unfair thing to assume just on what we've heard so far. Eventually though, Gaddafi and his revolutionary friends got their **** together enough to set a totally for real this time coup date September 1st, 1969. So we're going to 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 the purchase. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Receipts. Hmm. Items. Just objects. Yeah. Bjects and general. Yeah. 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Now we're sharing this research with you for the first time ever in a book format, you can pre-order stuff they don't want you to know now. It's the new book from us, the creators of the podcast and video series. You can turn back now or read the stuff they don't want you to know. Available for pre-order now, it's stuff you should read books.com or wherever you find your favorite books. You love movies or maybe just Anita? Some recommendations on what new movies to watch next time you sit down in front of the TV? Well, I have the podcast for you. Hey, this is Mike D from movie Mike's movie podcast. Your go to source for all things movies and no matter the genre what you're into, whether it be comedies, romance, action, sci-fi, horror, superhero movies, I cover it all. I'm no critic, I'm just a guy who loves movies. Each episode explores a different movie. Topic plus spoiler free reviews on the latest new movies in theaters and on streaming. And yes, they're always spoiler free so you don't have to worry about anything getting ruined for you. Plus interviews with actors, directors, and writers covering the behind the scenes of your favorite movies. I also keep you in the know with all the latest movie news and movie trailers. Listen to new episodes of movie Mikes Movie podcast Every Monday on the Nashville podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio App Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And we're back, we're talking about war 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, you know, 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. So you can find all the sources for this podcast on our website, behindthebastards.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 1st, 1969. Gaddafi distributed plans for the revolution to all of the members in his revolutionary group. He handed them out an envelope sealed with red wax. How how big is this group? At this point, I think it's dozens and dozens of people. OK, yeah, it's a sizable group. They're all over the country. Not like hundreds, though. I don't think hundreds. But it's there's no, I've never found like 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 **** show, right? But he really wanted it to work. He really wanted it to work. Take aside from that, hate crime like this is like an underdog story, almost. It really is. I was like these group group of Chuckle ***** trying to have a revolution. And this one guy who's like, really, he just wants to overthrow the king. Yeah, and they're not good at it. But everyone else is so bad at everything that it works out, right? Which is, again, this all has to start with aside from the hate cross side, so, like. Can't really just, like, throw away the hate crime? No, no, there will be more hate crimes as ohkay lengthens. So Revolution Day comes on the day one of his men. There were radio stations they were supposed to take over in Tripoli and 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. Exploding while all this went down, Kadafi was tearing us 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. Gaddafi 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 Gary Eunice barracks. 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 yackity. So yeah, exactly. And then it didn't. OK, 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 could Daffi and his young friends wound up overthrowing the government with very little bloodshed or fighting. So let that. Yeah, I mean. Hmm. There's a lot of, 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, 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? OK at 6:30 AM on September 1st, 1969, Libyans with radios woke up to the sound of Moammar Gadhafi's voice for the very first time. People of Libya, in response to your own free will, fulfilling your most heartfelt wishes and answering your incessant demands for change and regeneration, and your longing to strive towards these ends. Listening to your incitement to rebel, your armed forces have undertaken the overthrow of the reactionary and corrupt regime, the stench of which has sickened and horrified us all. From this day forward, Libya is a free, self governing Republic. She will advance on the road to freedom, the path to unity and social justice guaranteeing equality to all her. Citizens and throwing wide in front of them the gates of honest employment, where injustice and exploitation will be banished, where no one will count himself, master or servant, where he will be free brothers within a society in which, with God's help, prosperity and equality will be seen to rule us all. One exhausting thing to hear. Yeah, on the radio. Just getting good morning. Look at **** we have to do. What now? There's been a revolution. I only had my ******* coffee. This is such ********. Who is this guy? Do you want to go to work? So the 40 year reign of Moammar Gadhafi had begun. Well, I really expected it to be something more grand than what you've described. It was 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 I have similar feelings right now. If we got red donned, part of me would be like, OK, let's try this. Yeah, like a bunch of people parachuting in like, OK, do they have like, how much worse could it be? Do they have healthcare? Like do could I go to the doctor now? Yeah, so, you know, 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 Moammar Kadafi's first sex and 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 I. Can we be colonels? Yeah, that's that's all it takes. You're a Colonel now, Colonel Bell, putting it on on a business card. You got to get a cool hat. That is a requirement. That's fine. You gotta get a sick *** hat to start calling yourself Colonel. Yeah, but 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 would be a point where I realized I'm in over my head. Well, you're a humble man. That's true. I wouldn't be a humble man if I successfully, because I I was a terrible person as a teenager. Yeah. Teenagers are generally terrible. No, they're all monsters. And, like, 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'd probably think I was real hot ****. Yeah. And be like, yeah, I'm going to run things away. I want to and have just the worst ideas. Yeah. But I would never grow out of it. And I. I assume that's similar to a lot of people like this is if you go through your life never being told, hey, cut the **** you just stay a teenager your whole life. Yeah. If by the time you're barely wear, a normal person will be out of college, you run the country, you don't grow up. Yeah, yeah, and that's a little Joffrey. Yeah, he's yeah, he's he's he's a little got some Joffrey going on. So one of Gaddafi's first acts was to ban all political parties. In 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 as it was, right? Yeah. So at first a revolutionary Council took control of the country with Moammar 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 and like this country and said, like all the experts and elitists, they don't know how to run this place. I'm gonna yeah, even though I have very little experience and then they by some insane. A A way they they became running the country. Yeah. Yeah. And it became very evident that they don't know how to do that. Yeah. And then they attack the people around them who they had previously reported in order to deflect blame from the fact that they just don't know how to run. Yeah. I can't imagine such a thing. No. This is the only time it's ever happened. So Gaddafi developed your 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 scheduled meetings for 2:00 AM because he was a night owl, because he was in his 20s, right? Yeah, 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. We don't know his exact ******* but he was very young guy. But there's a reason, like in this country where like you have to be like 35 years to be president, like there's a there's a very clear reason and also a reason no 35 year old has ever been elected because you're still probably not. It's still not ready. I'm nearing 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. It was fun. Was that we were, like, have that weird keg? Yeah, like, yeah. Yeah. That was fun. Yeah. Yeah. I shouldn't be president as what I'm getting. Or we should both be president. Well, now there's a different idea. Would be my pence. Yeah, I'll be your pence. Fantastic. Our producer Sophie is shaking her head angrily. We're gonna do it, which she does regularly, and we're gonna make America OK. I'm pretty OK. Just OK. Yeah. 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 is totally reasonable. Reaction was to hide in the desert for a week. During another argument, he threatened to leave and fight with the Palestinians and Jordan. Hold on. Gaddafi here in the desert for Gaddafi hid in the desert. That's such a non dictator thing. Like I thought you were gonna 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 it is. Amazingly passive aggressive way to run a country. It's incredible. Ohy goodness. So by 1970. Three things weren't going great with the new Libya. Gaddafi was so disenchanted with ruling that he decided to resign and **** 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 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 Koran. So Qadhafi promised at the end of this speech that he was going to take the Libyan people to paradise in chains if he had to. Umm, that's a that's exhausting. It sounds really tiring, like you're working in the desert. It's anything you do if you live in the desert is probably exhausting, right? And like you've just gotten over the fact that a new government's. Taking over and then some guys like, I'm gonna drag you to paradise and chains and all the laws are different today. It's like, that really doesn't sound like Paradise, buddy. *** **** 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, Qadhafi 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 analysis, such as were later deformed the basis of his third universal theory. So Gaddafi described his 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, yeah. 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 where the People's Congresses, everyone was supposed to take part in them debating and voting on policies, the people's congressmen 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 Moammar Gaddafi. None of the people's Congresses were allowed to talk to each other about anything. They had to go through this, like, line of things that always ended up at Gaddafi. So no decisions could actually be implemented without Gaddafi 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 should all just govern ourselves and and figure it out. And then I make the decision. An idea to 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. We're A-Team. So we hated sports teams. Yeah. I mean, I'm not a big sports ocean sports. I'm either. Yeah, but people like sports. Yeah, people like sports. We need sports. Yeah, people like sports. Nobody likes watching someone else eat. Yeah, like, but we know people. Well, now there's and there's those videos. Yeah, we figured out was just wrong. The Green Book also bans being a landlord. Uh, 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 inherently crazy. Yeah. I'm not totally against. It's really that that coming boiling down to and I make the decision and that's where it all gets ****** **. 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. Yeah, up until you demand to be in charge and maybe. I mean, people listening might have different opinions about this, but like, maybe even if like, if he tried to do it right, it might not work out still. It might just be, you know, him dreaming. But like, yeah, there 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 counsel make a decision that he didn't agree with. He's Jaden Smith, like he has a bunch of. They told him no, he doesn't. Yeah. And he has a bunch of crazy ideas how the world should work, but he doesn't have like, the background to. Yeah. To actually understand how to implement that. Yeah. It's like 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 it's. Pretty bad, but it's important that we be balanced about who Kadhafi 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, like, pregnant. 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 half has to keep it alive. Yeah, what a what a weakling. And 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, Oh my God. Anyway, so again, you gotta balance this **** out because if you read just the stuff about everyone should be equal, Qadhafi sounds like not the ***** ** **** that he was, right. I mean, he'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 Qadhafi 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 add-ons. 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. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. 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Seriously, you'll make your wallet very happy at Mint Mobile. Com slash behind. So by now we imagine that you've seen the theories on Tik T.O.K. You maybe even heard the rumors from your friends and loved ones. But are any of the stories about government conspiracies and cover ups actually true? The answer is surprisingly or unsurprisingly, yes. For more than a decade, we hear at stuff they don't want you to know have been seeking answers to these questions. Sometimes there are answers that people would rather us not explore. Now we're sharing this research. With you for the first time ever in a book format, you can pre-order stuff they don't want you to know now. It's the new book from us, the creators of the podcast and video series. You can turn back now or read the stuff they don't want you to know. Available for pre-order now, it's stuff you should read books.com or wherever you find your favorite books. You love movies or maybe just Anita? 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Listen to new episodes of movie Mikes Movie podcast Every Monday on the Nashville podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio App Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And we're back. Moammar Gadhafi 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. So yeah, now, now here we are, Muammar Gaddafi 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 Gaddafi changed Libya's name to the socialist people's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, which is means like the the People's Republic basically, and the flag was changed to the color green. Now, Gaddafi had no official role in this new people 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 as this Council here that ****** ** or it's this guy here who ****** **. Don't get angry at me. I'm not in charge. So that was that was his whole tactic. A good racket. Yeah, solid racket, good scam, being in charge of the country and pretending. Not for 40 years, yeah. So Gaddafi 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 if you were like president and you were blaming, like, the rival party or like, yeah, like a like a special deep state for 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. Broadcast on state television. Hmm. Uh. Gaddafi 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 Gaddafi's vision. This had the dual advantage of helping Gaddafi 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. Established paramilitary committees, right? Yeah, yeah. So Gaddafi 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 Moammar. 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 6 or 8 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 Rd shot out the moot window of a moving vehicle. For the most part, state TV broadcast speeches by Gaddafi and conferences. Where people talked about the brilliance of his green book. This is like public television. Yeah, like the where? Yeah, where they'll be like 6 hours of old people dancing. Yeah, it's like that, but he's the only one deciding to be on it. So, as it always does, repression in Libya bread dissent. Not all of those dissenters were arrested before they could flee Libya. Some of them made it out of the country. Gaddafi 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 the 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. Gaddafi 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 in 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. Things have taken a turn with Moammar. Yeah. I mean, OK, there's there's been a hate crime. There's been a hate crime. And he was described as cruel. But this, this is now Hannibal Lecter territory. Yeah, we have it. It ramps up, you know? Yeah. Yeah. And this is like a thing you see with 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. 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 could 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 murder somebody in a crime of passion because he's the dictator. It morphs into keeping corpses. That fridge, right? 20 something he has. He has a support system. Yeah, he has way more resources to be a terrible ****. Yeah, it's it's just what happens when you have power mixed with. Whatever the hell is going on inside Mommy'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 it's just banning us. I have a fridge in my heart that I keep people in. Yeah, yeah. I don't like squash. And we. Yeah, we have people in our lives to tell us to cut the **** 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 henchman 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, qadhafi's staff would show her **** 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, Secret World, and obviously the BBC is one of the NATO nations that helped depose Gaddafi. So 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 like, they found the rape room. There's like, pictures of it and stuff. So it's hard to say how much of everything is true, but it seems like most just the rape room is horrifying. Yeah. If 10% of this is true, it's it's awful. Yeah, exactly. And that's kind of where I land on this. Yeah. Yeah. So Nouri al, Miss Mari Kadafi'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 and bodyguards. Ahem. For his pleasure, some of the women he used were tossed out on the street, basically. But others claim 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 and Tripoli shot dead. The only explanation given was Brother Leader has decided that camels have no place in a modern society. I don't disagree with that one. Yeah, no, yeah, yeah. They don't have any place in modern society. I don't like camels. They're terrible. They're ******* ********. That doesn't justify the other horrible thing. No. Yeah. Yeah. Again, there's there's things. Beliefs that align with my beliefs in terms of ocean and camels, yeah. But I at this point, I think it's safe to say that I would not like Muammar Gaddafi. Yeah. 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 Moammar Gaddafi had Anwar Sadat, the president of Egypt, murdered. Some of his former insiders allege this. And Gaddafi 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, you get. There's there's a lot that needs to be expanded going on in that sentence. Yeah. I wish there was more. I wish Gaddafi had spoke at length about how he thought World War Two ended, but I have not found that. Yeah, I bet that's a really special yeah, conversation. It does seem like he thinks Hitler survived into the late 40s at least, so that's fun. For the first half of Gaddafi's reign, basically all private enterprise was banned by the government. Gaddafi 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. The 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? OK, you alright? Hold on. You boil down the Italian suits to get into their tastiest components. Again, the Italian chef. Kicking, kissing fingers. Pull that down. It's nice and soft. You add the tea. I wanna say you bought it with the tea. Yeah. That feels right. I think you strain it from the tea. Yeah. And then mix it with what's the last one? Milk powder. Dutch milk powder. OK. 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. You cut it up. Yeah. Yeah. I assume Italian suits are made out of pasta. Yeah. Yeah. Fantastic. Of this was, you know, that 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 ******* with people, he's quoted as having said, sometimes we make items disappear to force people to work harder and produce them, which is * **** ****. That's a **** **** ****. 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, that's. I mean, they're they're creating a situation where I feel like, what are you gonna do? Yeah, if you're managing that supermarket and you're like, oh God, like, 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, yeah. It's 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 **** show and in some ways was more functional than the King's government that had come before it. Qadhafi did establish a successful social safety net, were known 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. OK. So yeah, he had this ideology and some of it throughout this we've said like, well, he's not. Completely, yeah. 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, OK, the state's going to provide a bunch of **** for people and we have more oil than almost anyone in the world. Yeah, that can work. Other countries have done that for ******* 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 that's a pretty good run. It's a good for a maniac. Yeah, for a ******* 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 an A real. This is like he's just asking to be overthrown. Yeah. Point yeah. The moment you start like a whole generation of people that you just torture and teach them how military science. Yeah, you're, you're you're you're begging for them to overthrow you. Yeah, in retrospect, you can see the, the short sightedness. Yeah, that's like, it's like having, having like a dog. That you that you like only let outside and like our **** to, but also attach like lasers too. It's exactly like that. It's like teaching your dog to understand the concept of slavery and then giving it, 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 s s, Mussolini had someone, the macaroni troopers probably, yeah, we are really being rough on Italy. We are. Well, we wrote the stylist that we have Italian blood and so that like released the floodgates. So it's fine, it's fine, it's fine. And Moammar Gadhafi, of course, had the hottest Al Haas in Europe. They were known as the Amazons, an all female unit of elite, highly trained bodyguards who protected Moammar Gadhafi 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 that's wonderful. They're all young. They're all like conventionally attractive bond villain type of thing. It's exactly the Amazon called the ******* Amazons. Yeah, and there he is in the second picture in his ******* ridiculous colonels uniform next to that Lady. Yeah, those glasses. It's he. He is a bond villain. He's the most bond villain that a dictator has ever. He's like, well, I would say he's more like an Austin Powers villain. Boo for the bond villain. He wears the Doctor Evil outfit from the first. There's a picture that will come to later where he's dressed like Doctor evil. And it's like, what's. And this is like right after Austin Powers to come out. So it almost makes you think, like, did you just watch the movie and dress like Doctor Evil? Momar kadafi. He might, he might watch him. He's like, oh, that's a pretty. That's a pretty smart outfit. Guys got it going on. Yeah. 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. That how ****** these women were, right? ******* awesome. But it's these ******. 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. Gross and very exploitative. That said, some of his former guards when interview did report loving the work and loving Gaddafi. There's also evidence that they acted as sort of a secret state. Released 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, so again, this is going back to he's just asking for it. You don't. 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 gonna 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 like because you're just abducting them from their family. It feels like the moment things get rough. They're just gonna like quietly back away, yeah, and and. Just yeah, find new employment, like. It's bad. He's he's really asking for it. You should also, and I feel like this should go without saying. I I don't support being gender discriminatory with your bodyguards. Women can bodyguard 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 even if you're trying to find like the most ****** looking people, they could be cowards. Like you don't know. Yeah, there's a resume is matter that's important. Sit down and interview these people. One of the through lines. Gaddafi's regime is that there were no resumes. Yeah, I I'm not surprised to hear that because his resume when he became in charge of the country was guy. So we have, we've, 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 9000 words on momar ******* 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 Moammar Gaddafi. When we get back, we're going to talk about what Gadhafi 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 plegables to plug? Yeah, I mean, find me at Twitter, at a movie hooligan. As you mentioned at the beginning of this, I am one of two people running a podcast and streaming network called Gainfully Unemployed. We have a Patreon right now. It's patreon.com/game fully unemployed, G AM EFULY 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 from Robert on. Yeah, I'm on. I'm regularly. And your DND podcast? Yeah, so you can catch me there as well. Gainfully unemployed, you can find me at I write OK on Twitter. You can find this podcast at ******** Pod 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 Moammar Gadhafi, 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. Peace to the planet. I go by the name of Charlemagne the God, and this summer I'm bringing my show back to Comedy Central with a new title and a new podcast. It's called hell of a week. But don't worry, every Friday I'll be keeping that same calling out the ******** energy, and I'll have some of the biggest names in comedy, politics and entertainment with me. So if the news is terrorizing your timeline and causing your anxiety to rise high in gas prices. Don't worry, we got you. Listen to hell of a week with charlamagne the God on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, I'm dua Lipa and I'm thrilled to be back for the second season of my podcast Dua Lipa at your service. Alongside me and my guests lists and recommendations, the show features conversations with some of my biggest inspirations working across entertainment, politics, activism and much, much more. So please tune in and join me on this very special adventure. Listen to Dua Lipa at your service starting Friday 23rd of September on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Ebony K Williams, host of Holden Court, and I'm so excited to announce that Holden Court has a brand new home at interval presents. That's right, we're back and better than ever. Season 2 is here and we're bringing you the same in-depth legal analysis and cultural commentary that you know and love. Listen to Holden Court on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. So y'all, let's hold court.