Gaddafi’s 'peculiar' theories baffle readers
“Women are female while men are male”: Green Book
During his 42-year-old rule, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi has come up with a set of theories that enabled him to introduce himself as a thinker and a man of letters and that gave the world an insight into what kind of a person the world’s oldest ruling head of state is.
Placing himself in a position similar to that of Adam Smith and Karl Marx, Gaddafi formulated the Third Political Theory, which he explained in his famous Green Book. In his theory, Gaddafi gives people the right to rule not through elections as is the case with the world’s democracies, but through holding popular conferences.
The Green Book also includes a social section that deals with the difference between men and women and is summarized in a now famous phrase that has become the passing ‘joke’ among Arab youths on social networking website: “Women are female while men are male.”
In another book called Death, Gaddafi tries to find out whether death is male or female and finds it most likely that it is male.
“It is a must to determine the gender of death and to know whether it is male or female,” wrote Gaddafi. “If death is male, we have to fight it till the last breath, but if it is female, we have to surrender to it all the time.”
Gaddafi wrote about revolutions and anticipated the imminence of several of them, but has never predicted that one of those will be against him.
“The tyranny of one person is the mildest kinds of tyranny,” Gaddafi wrote in his book Running away from Hell. “A person can be deposed by the people or even by another person. What I worry about is the tyranny of the people.”
To avoid the tyranny of the people, Gaddafi added in the same book, the individual should not suppress the people and should give in to their will.
“How I love the freedom of the people and the way they break their chains and become without a master. I love people like I love my father and I fear them like I fear him.”
Gaddafi’s other books include Earth Earth, The Village the Village, and The Suicide of an Astronomer.
(Translated from the Arabic by Sonia Farid)
If death is male, we have to fight it till the last breath, but if it is female, we have to surrender to it all the timeLibyan leader Muammar Gaddafi