I appeared on Press TV today in a pre-recorded Agenda programme due to go out on Saturday/Sunday. The subject was Libya, so everything we said probably will be well out of date by then.

Press TV, for those unfamiliar with it, is Iran’s official international TV station and so steeped in, hem, controversy. The Agenda programme is led by Yvonne Ridley, a British journalist who was captured by the Taleban and was so impressed that she took up Islam in a serious way.

I previously appeared on her programme last year and had to take up with her the TV station’s bizarre description of the Battle of Trafalgar as ‘infamous’.

My co-guests this time round were the notoriously genial right-wing extremist Bruce Anderson and Mohamed Abdul Malek who leads Libya Watch: see his recent Guardian article denouncing Gadaffi here.

This being Press TV there was rather too much focus on ‘British hypocrisy’ and ‘Western hypocrisy’ in relations with Libya, largely to the exclusion of Eastern, African, Mandelan, Chinese, Russian and above all Arab hypocrisy, a point I tried to make in a friendly way.

Afterwards I realised that I should have used the argument that Tony Blair had met Gaddafi once or twice, whereas Arab leaders must have met him some 5000 times in his forty years of stupid rule, so they must be at least 2000 times more hypocritical than the UK.

Mr Mohamed Abdul Malek made a very favourable impression, talking with passionate reason about the history of his country. He argued that there was a Libyan identity going far beyond historic ‘tribal’ ties and that the situation had now gone too far for Gadaffi to survive.

Mr Malek said one stirring thing, namely that as a Libyan he sensed a surge of national pride in the fact that Libyans at last were rising to try to bring down their oppressor and themselves feeling new-found pride. This is an important aspect as world leaders try to work out how to ‘react’ – should not they ‘do something’ to help the Libyans in their bloody struggle?

Maybe there are some things we can do. And maybe we should not do most of them.

Because now and again in history moments come along when people have to look at themselves and decide what they want to be: slaves, or something else.

Once again, it’s all about the sanction of the victim:

I saw that there comes a point, in the defeat of any man of virtue, when his own consent is needed for evil to win—and that no manner of injury done to him by others can succeed if he chooses to withhold his consent.

I saw that I could put an end to your outrages by pronouncing a single word in my mind. I pronounced it. The word was “No.”

Hence this:

Assorted leaders and media folk are ‘appalled’, expressing their ‘mounting concern’ at the level of violence in Libya. The situation is said to be ‘unfortunately’ getting worse.

Is this the right tone? Should we not be urging the people of Libya to do whatever it takes to fight back against the grotesque clique and assorted mercenary gunmen who already have been turning their heavy weaponry against protesters?

Should we be ‘concerned’ that the regime is using so much cruelty? Or should we express our pride in and support for the Libyan protesters, whose defiant heroism is now so intense that these extreme methods are all the Ghaddafi regime has to offer?

Hang on. What are you saying? Isn’t it easy or even shameful for you to sit far away and egg on poor unarmed people to charge at the regime’s bayonets in what might be a doomed act of defiance? Innocent people will die.

Yes.

But imagine if we were taken over by the Nazis, and the public en masse started to fight back, with hundreds or even thousands of people killed. Would we want the rest of the civilized world to ‘urge restraint’ and/or ‘call for a new political process’?

I hope we would want well-intentioned outsiders to egg us on. Since it is better to die fighting for freedom than live in a cowed, sullen way indefinitely under slavery.

Go it, Libya. Just say "No".