Media Spectacle and Insurrection, 2011: From the Arab Uprisings to Occupy Everywhere by Douglas Kellner

Author:Douglas Kellner [Kellner, Douglas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History & Theory, Media Studies, Social Science, Popular Culture, Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781441185778
Google: TY7FAgAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 17017060
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: 2012-09-01T00:00:00+00:00

Qaddafi bloodied

The TNC said that Qaddafi had been killed in crossfire between the anti-Qaddafi forces and his loyalists, and that he had died in a vehicle taking him to a hospital in Misurata. However, the large amount of increasingly bloody video footage of Qaddafi released, played incessantly through the day and night on global cable networks, raised suspicions that Qaddafi was shot and killed by some of the young men who had captured him.71 There was some outcry concerning the circumstances of Qaddafi’s death, and the next day the TNC promised an investigation into how he had died. Global cable networks, however, focused on showing joyous Libyans celebrating the demise of Qaddafi’s regime and presenting discussions of the end of the Qaddafi era and what stood ahead for Libya.

At least one of Qaddafi’s sons, Mutassim, and many major figures in his regime had been gathered around him for Qaddafi’s last stand in Sirte, and were captured or killed, leading to TNC declarations that the Libyan revolutionary war was over and the Qaddafi regime was finished. Images circulated throughout the global media of rebels in Sirte tearing down Qaddafi posters and flags, and posting the new Libyan flag as a final symbol of the end of the Qaddafi regime. And Saif al-Islam was captured on November 19, 2011 with a group of aides in the south of Libya attempting to flee the country, ending threats that any members of the inner Qaddafi circle could rally opposition against the victorious TNC forces.

For NATO, the intervention had been a successful one and participants in the operation jockeyed for economic influence and diplomatic positioning with the new regime. Yet while the NATO Libyan intervention had ultimately been successful in overthrowing the Qaddafi regime, it was expensive and not as smooth and flawless as claimed. An article by C. J. Chivers and Eric Schmitt, “In Strikes on Libya by NATO, an Unspoken Civilian Toll,”72 indicated that an in-depth study by the New York Times indicated that a wide variety of air strikes hit civilian or Libyan rebel targets, killing from forty to seventy civilians and many rebels in friendly-fire accidents.

The NATO intervention had highlighted the dilemmas of liberal humanitarian war and revealed serious conflicts over military doctrine and strategy between NATO allies and within countries like the US. It was likely that there would be more liberal humanitarian interventions by the UN, NATO, and other powers in the years to come, but there was not yet consensus or an elaborated doctrine to legitimate such ventures which would probably be taken up on a case-by-case base in the future. I will end my narrative of the spectacle of the Libyan Uprising and revolutionary civil war at this point, and will turn in the next chapter to tell the story of the killing of Osama Bin Laden, the consequences of his death at the hands of a US commando unit, and further developments concerning media spectacle and terrorism during the Year of Media Spectacle as Insurrection, 2011.

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