Beyond the legacy of Sadatism

Matteo Gladio 

Source: Al Mayadeen English

It has long been a strategy of the Western political and intellectual apparatus to reduce the entire political history of countries of the global South to the whims and desires of a single man.

It would normally be advisable to argue that deriving a political analysis from the individual personalities of political leaders can be a distractive tool, a strategy often adopted to avoid discussing the structural conditions that define the material and ideological conditions of a country. For instance, it has long been a strategy of the Western political and intellectual apparatus to reduce the entire political history of countries of the global South to the whims and desires of a single man. For more than forty years, if we were to take the case of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, Western media did everything they could do to pin all the political contradictions of the country into the figure of Mu’ammar Qaddafi. Calling him out as “a cancer or the mad dog of the Middle East," was a rhetorical strategy aiming to present Libya as ruled by an authoritarian and power-hungry leader brutally repressing his people. 

By turning politics into a treatise about human Arab monsters, the objective of the strategy was to avoid discussing the progressive policies adopted by Libya since its 1969 al-Fateh revolution or to ignore the decades-long imperialist assault on the country via international sanctions, funding of opposition groups, and direct bombings. One could say that the strategy was so effective that, when 2011 came, NATO had its ground paved already to carpet bomb Libya under the pretext of "democracy". Qaddafi is just one example in a long list of NATO-led bombings, including Syria, Yugoslavia, Iraq, and so on.

However, when a closer look at the nature of political leaders is accompanied by a structural and historical reading tracing their emergence, it can also become a useful tool to diagnose the political vitality of a country and its society. It is my contention that a juxtaposed reading of the nature of current political leaders in Western society vis-à-vis those leading the current fight against the Zionist entity reveals a political and cultural resurgence of the Arab and Muslim world; one that has, in fact, set the Palestinian homeland toward its path of liberation thanks to strategic vision of these unique leaders. There is no doubt that the legacy of Sadatism, which is the legacy of surrender, capitulation, and treason that Arab rulers pursued since Camp David, is being questioned.