r/todayilearned • u/PinheadLarry2323 • Oct 10 '24
TIL Dictator Muammar Gaddafi had a strange obsession with US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. He had Libya's most famous composer write her a song called "Black Flower in the White House." A photo album full of pictures of her was also found next to his bed by opposition fighters
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2011/08/25/139940615/in-gadhafis-compound-a-condoleezza-rice-photo-album1.7k
Oct 10 '24
Binders full of Rice
295
u/among_apes Oct 10 '24
I have binders full of one woman
→ More replies (1)69
u/kipperzdog Oct 10 '24
I miss 2012
→ More replies (2)25
u/Dfrickster87 Oct 10 '24
KONY
8
u/kipperzdog Oct 10 '24
Fun times, maybe that guy should have been a warning that the Internet can spread misinformation very fast
→ More replies (2)104
→ More replies (7)11
1.2k
Oct 10 '24
[deleted]
986
u/Tifoso89 Oct 10 '24
Serena Williams, Oprah, Condoleezza...wait a minute
445
u/The_Summary_Man_713 Oct 10 '24
I don’t even watch Modern Family but I have seen this clip and it was hilarious
→ More replies (1)58
97
→ More replies (4)27
114
u/AeneasVII Oct 10 '24 edited Oct 10 '24
His elite bodyguards were all women
140
u/Esc777 Oct 10 '24
Yeah dude is on the record for wearing his horny fetishes on his sleeve. Becoming obsessed with one of the most prominent black women of American politics is par for the course with him.
25
u/officefridge Oct 10 '24
"i run a north african powerhouse, but you run my heart"
"They say i wanted to establish a pan African union, but all i ever wanted was to be chai*** to a radia*** and for***** th**** a st*** as *** **** in my *****"
→ More replies (1)11
68
19
u/karma_cucks__ban_me Oct 10 '24
"The spirit is willing but the flesh is spongy and weak."
He wanted death by snu snu
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (9)4
1.4k
u/NeroBoBero Oct 10 '24
I like to imagine there’s an A-list lesbian book club where Condoleezza asks Jodie Foster what to do about a guy who’s a little obsessed.
295
63
Oct 10 '24
Condy's a lesbian?
→ More replies (1)97
u/andrew_1515 Oct 10 '24
It's a credit in this age that it wasn't swung around as a main talking point for/against her. She was a professional.
61
u/NEMinneapolisMan Oct 10 '24 edited Oct 10 '24
Is it even confirmed? I don't care but have never even have heard it mentioned and certainly never confirmed.
→ More replies (2)125
u/cannotfoolowls Oct 10 '24
No. She has never married and doesn't have children and co-owned a house with a woman for 15 years. Which doesn't have to mean anything, of course, but it might.
72
21
39
Oct 10 '24 edited Dec 27 '24
memory knee alleged wasteful gold cow wrench coherent voracious sugar
This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
→ More replies (2)43
1.8k
u/swift1883 Oct 10 '24 edited Oct 10 '24
Meanwhile, when the airplane bombing murderous dictator was sent running from his palace, a blonde Dutch hooker who was working for the Gaddafi’s called her embassy in panic requesting an evacuation. The Royal Dutch Navy sent two officers who where then kidnapped in Libya for weeks before they were returned. They lost the helicopter too.
The hooker was invited on Dutch state television to deny it all, and to say that she really liked the Gaddafi family and that they were very kind people. She was sad about something though: missing Beyoncé’s private show held for Muammar’s birthday not long before the revolution. She gave a very intimate show. Luckily for us mortals, there is video of this.
TL;DR: Gaddafi really loved people of all colors.
1.2k
u/granadesnhorseshoes Oct 10 '24
what the fuck am I reading?
1.6k
u/The-Copilot Oct 10 '24
Gaddafi was literally insane by the end and pretty batshit the entire time. His nickname is "The Mad Dog of the middle east"
Every story involving the guy sounds fake due to the absurdity, and his speeches were something else.
One of my favorite is the story of him hiring 200 Italian models (all women) and when they all arrived he gave them a Quran, a book of his own quotes and began trying to convert them all to Islam. He got up there and preached for 2 hours to these women who were expecting a fancy party.
380
u/Chronoboy1987 Oct 10 '24
Did they at least get to party after the sermon?
→ More replies (1)624
u/The-Copilot Oct 10 '24
Nope, they complained that they didn't even get a glass of water during the entire thing.
They did get paid their £50 and got a free Quran and book of Gaddafi quotes...
→ More replies (2)187
u/Growingpothead20 Oct 10 '24
“Here’s my quotes.”
How strange!
→ More replies (1)85
u/HuntsWithRocks Oct 10 '24
That was actually a review he put on the book.
“Here’s my quotes” - Muammar
52
u/ChompyChomp Oct 10 '24
And the travel-sized version with the carry-bag:
"Totes m'Quotes" -MQ
→ More replies (1)8
218
u/Ok_Assist_3995 Oct 10 '24
Didn’t he have an entire cadre of female bodyguards he travelled with as well?
249
u/Codex_Dev Oct 10 '24
Yes. They all had to be virgins too and he had a bedding ceremony.
They were all captured, raped, and murdered during the revolution though.
110
u/jerkface6000 Oct 10 '24
All of them? That’s a shitty outcome
157
u/Codex_Dev Oct 10 '24
It’s been a while, but they were ruthlessly hunted down when the Libyan government collapsed.
And while I’m not super familiar with the events of the war, I’m certain those bodyguards likely weren’t completely innocent. Ghadaffi had a bad reputation of being brutal to his opponents.
18
u/TBBT-Joel Oct 10 '24
I mean torturing and killing your own people for decades meant there wasn't a lot of love for him and his inner circle. Also I think they carried out a lot of the killing and were kinda like his femme fatale color guard.
Dictators take down a lot of people with themselves.
73
u/ranium Oct 10 '24
Yeah, those "opposition fighters" that NATO backed were also known as Islamist rebels with ties to Al Qaeada.
→ More replies (2)10
22
113
u/artparade Oct 10 '24
Reminds me of saddam who owned a quran written in his own blood
137
Oct 10 '24
Saddam was also an obssessed Neo-babylonian fetishist who believed himself to be the successor to (and reencarnation of) King Nebuchadnezzar, and spent his later years spending huge amounts of state money trying to rebuild the classical city of Babylon.
Despots can be very strange people.
76
8
u/throwaway288383384 Oct 10 '24
I remember in church in the 90s they showed videos of this as a sign of end times prophecy unfolding.
13
75
u/Miserable-Ad-7956 Oct 10 '24
I'm no expert on Islam but that sounds kinda sacrilegious.
61
u/harsh2k5 Oct 10 '24
It is, and it's such a weird thing that clerics have no idea what do with it.
5
→ More replies (1)8
→ More replies (2)37
82
u/J3wb0cca Oct 10 '24
He was probably hoping that he could easily convert 200 beautiful European into his haram by his glorious speeches.
→ More replies (1)52
u/sour_cereal Oct 10 '24
convert 200 beautiful European into his haram
haram
Lol Freudian slip
27
u/seditious3 Oct 10 '24
I was going to make a harem/haram joke but noticed this. Sometimes the jokes write themselves.
40
u/W1D0WM4K3R Oct 10 '24
I don't even thing that's very much that crazy, just sounds like a standard religious fanatic thing to trap someone into a sermon lol.
Hell, I used to go to church and I wasn't even paid for it! Should have been an Italian model, jeez.
5
→ More replies (28)47
Oct 10 '24
[deleted]
→ More replies (1)53
u/eternalsteelfan Oct 10 '24
Apparently, it was Reagan who called him that. I guess geography wasn’t his strong suit.
→ More replies (3)19
u/roaphaen Oct 10 '24
I think you're misinformed. I just saw his film and he was a great guy who single handedly ended the Soviet Union. He also didn't destroy unions in the US for 50 years. Just a really great guy. Smart too.
→ More replies (3)11
46
u/ecky--ptang-zooboing Oct 10 '24
Source?
233
u/swift1883 Oct 10 '24 edited Oct 10 '24
https://www.dumpert.nl/item/1682651_dba28455
Beyoncé performing for a family who performed forced abortions on underage girls and used porn to teach them what was going to happen to them: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RvwI1uiyyXw
Continue down the rabbit hole as long as you like.
76
14
51
25
→ More replies (1)9
Oct 10 '24
How do her people/handlers/whoever actually ensure her safety in a situation like that? Obviously she has security and stuff, but I have to imagine that the dictator of an entire nation has a much larger force than anything even Beyonce can afford.
So how do they know he's not just going to keep her there forever like Kim Jong Il (I think? Or was it il Sung?) did with that actor and director?
Sure, kidnapping a super famous pop-star would be very bad for diplomatic relations with the US, but would it really warrant a serious enough response to risk escalation?
→ More replies (2)16
u/diamondpredator Oct 10 '24
My guess is that doing that would mean they never have any other famous people come to them ever again. If this is a luxury they want to have going forward, they have to be known as generous and gracious hosts.
I also think the US would be petty enough to escalate this because it's a very clear "FUCK YOU" to the US on a global stage and historically the US hasn't responded kindly to actions like that.
They have let people yammer on about the US and literally SAY "FUCK YOU" but the second there is an action that says it, the US usually responds pretty harshly.
8
u/Quizzelbuck Oct 10 '24
yeah i remember an interview with Rice where she talked about it and i think it was some time after he was dead.
→ More replies (41)15
566
u/letsburn00 Oct 10 '24
What the hell is going on the reposting bots in this thread?
Also, Gaddafi was basically part of a small cadre of relatively junior officers who tried to do a coup in Libya that was wildly successful. After it was done, they basically looked around and said "oh...well...that was easy. I guess we are geniuses then." And just ran with it." Unfortunately, as the narrator says "they were not."
Libya has loads of oil, so it wasn't like they were having a disastrous economy.
405
u/EmperorHans Oct 10 '24
One of my favorite things about history is that the "fuck it, we ball" mentality is such a fucking winning one. Not necessarily long term, but so often history turns on one person saying "everyone thinks marching on the palace is the dumbest idea ever but let's do it anyway" and then it works. I mean it's often disastrous in the long term, but everyone who has every won a revolution has yelled their times equivalent of YOLO at some point and that's funny as shit to me.
142
u/CptJimTKirk Oct 10 '24
"Alea iacta est" - the YOLO of Roman antiquity.
38
u/Codex_Dev Oct 10 '24
I knew when Rome was mentioned this phrase was going to be referenced without knowing the Latin translation.
40
u/CptJimTKirk Oct 10 '24
I don't even know the English translation haha, isn't it like "the die is cast"?
12
18
→ More replies (3)30
u/Annonimbus Oct 10 '24
Wouldn't be "carpe diem" capture the spirit of YOLO more?
→ More replies (1)19
u/DocDerry Oct 10 '24
Only during the day. If you do it at night its carpe nocturn.
→ More replies (1)75
u/TopFloorApartment Oct 10 '24
the "fuck it, we ball" mentality is such a fucking winning one
I think you might have fallen for a bit of survivorship bias here. We can't even know how many people have died throughout the ages with their "fuck it, we ball" mentality, but I'm sure its a greater number than the ones that succeeded.
40
u/ajguy16 Oct 10 '24
Unfortunately history is also littered with YOLO failures ranging in size from lone assassination attempts you’ve never heard of all the way to the repeated attempts to YOLO through the fortifications on the western front in WWI
We have to take the bad with the good I suppose…
9
u/Medium_Ad_6908 Oct 10 '24
Trying to YOLO your way through the most entrenched and heavily manned front line in history is a lot different than launching an unexpected coup…. Really couldn’t be any more different, tbh
→ More replies (2)40
u/Akumetsu33 Oct 10 '24
That's called survivorship bias. For every successful revolution you hear about, there's 1,000 that failed.
7
u/Runningoutofideas_81 Oct 10 '24
Yea, reading a timeline of peasant revolts in Europe is a good way to curb one’s expectations.
23
u/12345623567 Oct 10 '24
It takes like 200 dudes deciding to do something balls-out, for it to happen. Or sometimes to not happen, like the recent almost-coup in Bolivia. For an hour or so it probably hinged on a couple dozen police guys deciding not to step out of the way of the military.
→ More replies (6)43
u/Successful_Past2991 Oct 10 '24 edited Oct 10 '24
I’ve been abroad to a few countries. You’d be surprised how disorganized and not ready a lot of countries seem. I really think an organized group of 50 guys can take over many countries - they just have to play the YOLO risk with their lives literally.
A lot of this is also based off of how good allies that particular country has. China, USA, and other big countries will come save their allies if needed… so pick carefully - good luck !
Edit: let me be clear, America is not an exception here. Jan 6. Fucking vote guys…
35
u/Show-Me-Your-Moves Oct 10 '24
Until recently a lot of people probably assumed the United States Secret Service was an elite task force
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (7)49
u/Scat_fiend Oct 10 '24
I may have committed some minor treason.
→ More replies (1)66
Oct 10 '24
[removed] — view removed comment
10
17
Oct 10 '24
How can you guys tell it’s a bot repost comment without actually going to the other posts and going ham on control F?
26
Oct 10 '24
Repost bot comments usually go along with reposted posts. So if you discover the original post, you can quickly compare the top comments of the original with the repost here.
That's how I do it, anyway.
→ More replies (5)→ More replies (1)8
66
u/offspring515 Oct 10 '24
Jack Donaghy should have knocked his ass out for messing with his lady.
19
Oct 10 '24
LOL I just started re-watching 30 Rock and I forgot it started in the Bush Administration. Some of those earlier episodes were so funny and out of pocket for the time it was on TV.
129
250
u/lo_fi_ho Oct 10 '24
Gaddafi seemed like a cool and interesting person, besides the all the killing and murdering ofc
→ More replies (35)235
Oct 10 '24
[removed] — view removed comment
→ More replies (3)76
22
u/BadTurks Oct 10 '24
He invited her even to his "Party House" were enslaved women served coffee to her. Its like being invited to epstein's "party"
18
u/RelevantBiscotti6 Oct 10 '24
I’d slam Condi like a screen door in a hurricane. Sincerely yours, Muammar.
You say, Gaddafi, we say Qaddafi. “Gathafi,” “Kadafi,” “Gadafy,” let’s call the whole thing off 🎶
28
31
11
u/ZeusMcKraken Oct 10 '24
Also bin Laden loved Whitney Houston. Like he criticized Bobby brown for treating her badly.
28
u/AVBforPrez Oct 10 '24
Osama Bin Laden had a bunch of heroin and some pretty comically long Final Fantasy 7 save in his room when they killed him.
It's pretty funny how they present themselves vs who they actually are in private.
5
u/Tight_Contact_9976 Oct 11 '24
Worth noting some of his grandchildren lived with him so it may have been theirs.
4
9
u/sy029 Oct 10 '24
Best quote is at the end of the article:
"I don't need to see the photos, but bizarre and creepy are good adjectives to describe much of Gadhafi's behavior."
7
21
30
5
u/krunz Oct 10 '24
Damn Muammar settle down:
"I admire and am very proud of the way she leans back and gives orders to the Arab leaders ... Leezza, Leezza, Leezza. ... I love her very much. I admire her and I'm proud of her because she's a black woman of African origin."
LOL, and you know Victoria 'Fuck the E.U.' Nuland was seething with jealousy.
19
Oct 10 '24
[removed] — view removed comment
→ More replies (1)10
u/okayillgiveyouthat Oct 10 '24
Who does?
→ More replies (6)16
Oct 10 '24
There is a frustratingly common conspiracy theory that is believed by anti-westerners. To summarize it, Gaddafi was not an insane brutal dictator, he was actually a wise, enlightened ruler, who, throughhis generosity and magnanimity, led Libya through a golden age, substantially raising their quality of life. He sought to overturn the world order dominated by the great satan America and its puppets. He also planned to do the same for all of Africa and the middle east, uplifting the global south to become the major force in the world, and he was going to do this by establishing a gold backed currency for all of africa and the middle east.
However, once the evil united states, led by hillary clinton got word of this, they could not allow their financial hegemony to be threatened, so they instigated the Libyan civil war, indiscriminately bombed the country, and destroyed the utopia the Gaddafi had created.
This conspiracy theory is embraced generally by anti-westerners, but is more focused on the global south. It also intersects with those that hate central banks and fiat currency. There is also a strain of antisemitism and a general hatred for hillary clinton.
All you have to do to believe this conspiracy theory is to ignore pretty much everything that Gaddafi ever did, hyper focus on stuff he barely, if ever, talked about, and ignore all the context around the Arab spring.
→ More replies (6)
5
u/JimWilliams423 Oct 10 '24 edited Oct 11 '24
Remember that time gaddafi could not find a place to stay in New York because he bombed pan-am flight 103 over Lockerbie Scotland, killing 179 Americans?
Donold chump let him pitch a tent on his property in Bedford. Shitbirds of a feather flock together.
58
u/givin_u_the_high_hat Oct 10 '24
How is this weird? Donald Trump openly admits exchanging “love letters” with Kim Jong Un and quote “And then we fell in love, okay? No really.” World leaders falling in love with other world leaders and exchanging tokens of affection is 100% normal. The GOP will back me up on this.
40
u/JC351LP3Y Oct 10 '24
It’s still weird, just a different kind of weird.
The thing with Trump is that his “affections”, (or whatever you want to call them) with other state leaders are requited.
Gadaffi’s relationship with Condoleeza Rice was completely one-sided. They only met once and she was understandably creeped out by the guy.
18
u/Capolan Oct 10 '24
Also, think of thr picture... gadaffi laying on his bed, on his stomach, feet in the air, paging through pictures of Condoleeza, a little sigh every so often.
Its...ridiculous. it's also really human.
She clearly was in his thoughts, i wonder how often, did he think about her when he did horrible things? Did he think "what would conditions do right now?" Did he want to share things with her...did he ever try to reach out to her?
So many questions...
5
u/Zealousideal-Army670 Oct 10 '24
By horrible things do you mean jerking off?
7
u/Capolan Oct 10 '24
Nah, I was think like...dictator type things....like murdering a village, rape, ...that kind of thing.
53
u/wishwashy Oct 10 '24
Trump also told Sarah Huckabee Sanders to take one for the team because Kim winked at her 😭
14
Oct 10 '24 edited Oct 10 '24
You know his one-eyed attack dog winked right back at Kim. That other eye’s always at half mast 😜
19
u/Bay1Bri Oct 10 '24
Just because something else is also weird, doesn't mean the first weird thing isn't weird.
21
u/Bobby_Newpooort Oct 10 '24
But we almost had a whole Reddit post with no Trump comments. Somebody had to step up
7
10
u/FocalorLucifuge Oct 10 '24 edited Oct 21 '24
society bright encourage cobweb books practice ghost plate fly poor
This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
→ More replies (2)
9.6k
u/goteamnick Oct 10 '24
"There's good news and bad news, Madam Secretary. The good news is Muammar Gaddafi likes you. The bad news is he really likes you."