Who’s not seen Japanese mayhem movie classic RoboGeisha?

 

It’s all about young ladies who get captured by a wicked arms corporation which turns itself into a giant robot and tries to drop an H-bomb down Mt Fuji to make the Japanese people ‘rise up’. Quite why they would rise up and against whom is not fully explained. The babes get modified into geisha robots with razorblade ankle-socks and boobs squirting acid. They even get long scary bottom-swords, despite the fact that it is not very efficient to try to kill someone with such a weapon when bending over and looking the wrong way.

 

Amidst all this family amusement are wry observations on family life (two of the robos are sisters). A group of homely grandparents confront the evil corporation to try to get their grand-daughters back. At one point a granny appeals to her grand-daughter to forsake her robo-ways, only to be attacked. Ending any hope of family reconciliation granny blasts the luckless girl: “Bad people must be killed!”

 

Talking of the need to kill Bad People, yesterday BBC Radio Five Live disgraced itself. As the news and images of Gaddafi’s bloody death started to circulate on the Internet BBC presenters scrambled to find an angle different from the obvious one, namely that at long last a repulsive dictatorship had been toppled and that this was a Good Thing. 

 

Easy! “Some people" were finding the images of dead Gaddafi “disturbing". Was this an act of "vengeance"?

 

Think about the subliminal insinuations going on here. The very questions posed are leading us to the notion that the moral content of the historic collapse of the Gaddafi regime is defined by the sensibilities of Western middle-class people who don’t like looking at dead bodies. And/or that vengeance itself is something disreputable and unworthy, to the point of calling into question the whole uprising against Gaddafi and (of course) Western support for it. Cameron lied, Gaddafi died!

 

Thus different Twitter and other voices are now being heard expressing revulsion or concern at the way Gaddafi died. Surely he should have had a fair trial? If this is the new Libyan-style democracy, God help Libya! Oh, and we aren’t so ‘democratic’ either – we sell arms to tyrants!

 

Not all of this is objectionable or ill-intentioned: see Jack of Kent’s thoughts which look at the rather different angle of how far it is right to publish ‘death porn’ in the UK media. Lively comments that follow, especially from patsogood: To ask that the image of Gaddafi’s corpse be hidden from view as a matter of “taste” – something to be waved away like an unappetising entree – is an exercise in moral feebleness and evasion. .

 

What however is malevolent about much of this whole line of thought is that it is detached from any sense of process, of cause and effect and how societies develop over time.

 

Gaddafi had 40 years of almost unchallenged personal power and latterly huge oil revenues. He could have used some of that power to impart to Libyans core principles of fair trials, fairness, moderation and equity. Instead he peddled brutality, vulgarity and stupidity on a colossal scale, at the same time helping all sorts of terrorist groups to murder people elsewhere.

 

The costs of this sort of behaviour compounded up over a long time, not least in the way Libyans themselves looked at what he represented. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that every Libyan will have had a family member unlawfully brutalised by the Gaddafi regime at some point in the past 42 years.

 

When ordinary Libyans confronted him with massed demands for a change of course, Gaddafi reverted to violence again, and in a last gesture of defiance or self-delusion decided not to try to flee into exile. He chose to kill Libyans to try to stay in power. Making a last stand he was killed himself.

 

How precisely that finally happened is essentially irrelevant and unimportant. It says precisely nothing at all about how Libya will develop in the years to come. Yes, it would be bad if anyone the new government disliked was summarily shot. Is that really likely to happen? No.

 

Take the supposedly worst-case scenario, namely that a direct order for his death came from the Libyan leadership to those who had captured Gaddafi. What in fact is so bad about that? Maybe the new Libyan leadership took the view that after all the horror it would be much better for Libya to end the Gaddafi story there and then, rather than go through laborious Milosevic-like wrangling over international or national justice and a trial dragging on over months if not years.

 

Yes, the images of Gaddafi were ‘disturbing’ to people in the UK who have had the good fortune to go through life seeing almost no victims of violence. But there are different levels of ‘disturbing’ going well beyond the BBC chattering classes’ imagination. Think about the impact on the relatives of Gaddafi’s victims if they had had to watch him on trial for months on end, spitefully trampling on the memory of those victims as his preening human rights defence lawyers earned millions.

 

In short, BBC radio presenters creepily dwell on the ‘disturbing’ way Gaddafi met his end as if to show they ‘care’ or are graciously reminding us all of higher civilised values, they show only their contempt for Libyan suffering – and their stunning ignorance of the world outside their cosy studios.

 

Gaddafi was lucky to be polished off with a swift bullet or two. Had the RoboGeishas got to him it would have been far, far worse:

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