In 1884 the von Bismarck gathering had as its prime directive ‘stamp out slavery’ – read ‘humanitarian intervention’ – while the real agenda was the allotment of vast parcels of resource-rich land to Caucasian imperial wizards.

In 2011 the Ban Ki-moon gathering had as its prime directive ‘humanitarian intervention’, which is no different from the von Bismarck principle, the re-allotment of vast parcels of resource-rich land to Caucasian imperial wizards.

The ‘first scramble’ resulted in 127 years of abject misery and bone-grinding poverty for the people of Africa, with a few brief years in between where we the noble savages struggled and challenged their hegemony over our very lives, but to no avail, and now the time has come for us to renew the original contract with Elijah Muhammad’s ‘Devil’. Thus the 21st-century contract negotiations began in the same manner with which the 18th-, 19th- and 20th- century negotiations were performed – the culling of Africans.

If I were tasked to create a stage performance of events in North Africa, I would use the 407-year-old fantasy piece ‘The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus’ as a guide and select my key actors in the following order:

- Dr Faustus
Gaddafi (or almost any other African Union leader), all who have attempted to consort with The Devil at some time or the other
- Faustus’ soul
Libya - 41.5 billion barrels of oil and 144 tonnes of gold (or for that matter the population and the resources of almost any other African country – except those that produce only cabbages and sugarcane – like Swaziland. These we get to keep as a reminder of Caucasian generosity)
- Mephistopheles
Ban Ki-moon (this one is definitely Stockholmed)
- Understudy for Mephistopheles
Obama (same as Ban Ki-moon), Sarkozy (grand dragon) or Merkel (übermensch) or Berlusconi (brown shirt) – a rather long list
- The Contract (actually contractors)
NATO, insurgents, BP, ENI, Total…
- The Devil (Mephistopheles’s boss)
Global finance and military–industrial complex
- Score and subtitles written and conducted by mainstream media
- Gretchen
The emasculated left suffering from Stockholm Syndrome much like the Mephistopheles caste members.

This is a rather ugly and predictable piece of real-life theatre, for we know how this story starts and we definitely know how it ends – the Devil eventually owns us all, body and soul, so to speak. The very fires of hell have been ignited in Libya by imperial interests and through the very gates of hell stream the salivating demons in the form of NATO and their genocidal insurgents, to commit a Rwanda-type massacre of all who stand in the way of the United Nations ‘humanitarian intervention’ and IMF–World Bank ‘economic progress’. What is currently happening in Libya is no fantasy story. It is a situation that ultimately speaks to the fate of all of Africa, for if Libya falls the rest of Africa will soon follow.

WHY LIBYA?

The arrival of the so-called ‘Arab spring’ presented America and its lascivious mongrels within NATO with the perfect opportunity to engage in creating a permanent foothold on the continent of Africa, having over the past few years attempted to do so through AFRICOM and not quite succeeding. The African Union was not quite getting into the spirit of the NATO-for-darkies deal, thus impeding America’s first order of business, that of getting unconditional buy-in from most if not all of the current African heads of state.

While having their command and control centre based in Djibouti, effectively covering the Gulf of Aden as well as the Horn of Africa, they still urgently need an effective centre of control that actively blankets the Arab Maghreb Union, (Tunisia, Algeria, Niger, Chad, Sudan, Mauritania, Morocco) and – no surprises there – Libya fits the bill, but for a few small niggardly obstacles like:

- Jamahiriya (state of the masses)
- Absence of foreign debt
- Central bank
- 144 tonnes of gold in said Central Bank
- 41.5 billion barrels of oil still in the ground
- The highest living standards index in Africa
- Foreign direct investments in Europe totalling $200 billion.

Americas answer to these vexatious impediments is destroy the Jamahiriya by bombing it back to the stone-age, and seize their gold and oil as reparations for a war they did not start, privatise the state-owned Central Bank and make the Libyans indebted to the usurious IMF–World Bank–BIS nexus for loans to rebuild infrastructure deliberately destroyed by NATO in pursuit of ‘humanitarian intervention’, a process which will begin before the people of Libya have had time to even grieve for their dead. We must give the marauding Americans this, their twisted minds have a certain functional logic – cruel, cold, evil and frightening, but functional, and at the end of the day they will get what they came for – your land, your resources and your soul.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez was absolutely spot on when said, ‘The drama of Libya isn't ending with the fall of Gaddafi's government. It's beginning; the tragedy in Libya is just beginning.’ What this means for the rest of Africa is that it shows the impunity with which imperialism strides through our lands and lays waste to anything and everything that stands in its way, even the so-called authority of our leaders in the African Union.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Nicholas H. Tucker is a member of the Socialist Party of Azania.
* Please send comments to editor[at]pambazuka[dot]org or comment online at Pambazuka News.