Whatever happens next in Libya (and some people really ought to stop telling themselves and others that they can see around corners and into the future) the death of Moammar Qaddafi is the end of a terrible era for millions of people. That man built by the far the most suffocating and terrifying police state I have ever seen up close and in person.
Here is Walter Russell Mead in The American Interest.
History will not shed any tears over the Loon, and neither will I. He was an example of the worst type of ruler history sometimes throws up: an empowered, murderous, psychopathic clown. He was a sick joke; it is a measure of the moral and political degradation of “third worldism” that his fellow thugs like Robert Mugabe, Hugo Chavez and dictators and kleptocrats without number considered him a member of the club, ignored his flagrant sins, and prostituted the name of justice by hailing him as a progressive, revolutionary leader who was making our world a better place.
There is a lot of scum in this world that calls itself cream; we live in an era when the most vicious evil, hatred and oppression portrays itself as an angel of light — and finds plenty of deluded ideologues, hate-crazed ‘resistance’ movements, and plain old fashioned thugs willing to further the deception.
The Great Loon wrecked his country in the service of his twisted ambitions and an incoherent philosophy; he believed the flatterers and toadies who told him that he was wise. His relations and his allies pillaged the country. He persecuted the innocent, oppressed the poor, slandered the just.
Sadly, he deserved the death he received — just as Saddam Hussein deserved the humiliation and mockery of his last moments on earth. Forty years of comfortable prison in the Hague would not have been just recompense for his crimes; for a man whose vanity and ambition turned a country into a concentration camp, death is a just sentence, however served.
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