Qaddafi vs. the World Beats LSE
Published 10th March 2011 in The Beaver, the newspaper of the LSE Students’ Union
(online version here)
LSE’s director is gone. All that’s left is it’s reputation.
The department didn’t get the memo
The Autumn of the Patriarch, by Gabriel García Márquez, is an incredible novel. The protagonist has been the dictator of his small Caribbean country for the past 200 years, and in long, unpunctuated, paragraphs, the corrosive nature of absolutist rule on the man’s psyche, and the populace he rules, is brought to bear on the reader. Libya, a small Arab country rich in oil and sparse in people, has been led by Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi since 1969. And a worse embodiment of that book’s message could not be imagined. One only has to watch Qaddafi’s visage change over the years from an austere soldier in uniform to a hideous comic book supervillain, alternately covered in garish lounge robes or cutout clip-on medals, to see a picture of derangement.
