Saturday,
November 03,
The
ANNOTICO Report
This
Report from a British Newspaper is the Height of Atmospheric
Hypocrisy.
The
mercurial dictator of
Popham incredibly ignores not only Britains
Imperialism and Colonization over the Entire globe, including the Northern
Hemisphere, out posts in
Starting from the relative top of Africa to the bottom, the countries that were
under British control in Africa alone were at one time or another were; Egypt,
Gambia, Togo land, Sudan, Sierra Leone, Gold Coast, Nigeria, Cameroon,
Somaliland, Uganda, Kenya, Tanganyika, Northern Rhodesia, Bechuanaland, Nyasa
Land, South West Africa, Rhodesia, South Africa
The "Scramble for Africa", a phrase used to
describe the sometimes frenzied claiming of African territory by half a dozen
European countries that resulted in nearly all of Africa becoming part of
The Berlin West
Africa Conference (November 1884-February 1885) involved representatives of 14
European countries and the
The
"Scramble" involved European armies using modern weapons to crush
opposition and install authority over the continent's inhabitants. The largest
colonialists were
On
the eve of the Scramble,
For Popham to be so harsh, especially when
Scramble for
Gaddafi
turns Screenwriter for $40m Epic About Italian Invasion
The mercurial
dictator of
Thirty years ago
with his little Green Book and his
"Third Universal Theory", he proposed himself as the Mao Zedong of
the
But today
A series of
impressionistic sketches he has written evoking his country as it was on the
eve of invasion by Italy in September 1911 placid, rustic, traditional and then as it roused itself to fight to
expel the foreigners, is to become the basis for a film costing at least $40m
(?19.1m) which begins shooting in Libya next year.
Aimed principally
at a non-Arab audience, and entitled Dhulm Years of Torment, it will tell the story
of
To the other
European powers, it was hard to take
Instead, after
quick early success,
In his treatment
for the film, Gaddafi describes the beauty of his land before the coming of the
new Romans. "Tripoli ... a string of white buildings painted with the
local lime ... Behind it stretches the deep blue sea, its light waves
shimmering, and much clearer in the distance the wide open horizon..."
Seen from the
other side of the
Dhulm ("injustice" in
Arabic), will tell the story of the invasion and the long Libyan resistance
through the eyes of those who experienced it, based on real people. One of the
main characters is an extraordinary journalist called Francis McCullagh from Dungannon in Co
Tyrone, who really deserves a biopic all to himself. In October 1911, his zest
for action unsated, he crossed the
Dhulm is not Col Gaddafi's
first venture into film. In 1980 his regime paid $30m to make Omar Mukhtar: Lion of the Desert, an epic about Omar the Bedouin
schoolteacher who became the legendary leader of the Libyan resistance, and
fought on well into his seventies until he was captured by the Italians and
hanged in front of 20,000 of his Bedouin followers. Lion had an improbably
glittering cast, including Anthony Quinn as Omar, Oliver Reed as the Italian
commander who tries to track him down and Rod Steiger
as Mussolini. But Arabs were deeply unpopular at the time of its release in
1983 thanks to Opec's price
rises and other factors (including Gaddafi himself), and the film sank without
trace.
Is the world
readier now to hear
Yet the first
stumbling block is
But it is time
Italy made the effort and the rest
of us, too: not merely to recognise the suffering
inflicted, to understand better what this country went through, and how the
bitterness of a people subjected to such treatment can fester for generations
without a full accounting. But also to understand and deal with the delirious
joy that accompanied the rape of
Begun on the cusp
of the First World War, the Libyan invasion incubated the bacillus of Fascism.
And the horror of it was meat and drink to
Now of course we
know different. "It was one of the ugliest forms of colonialism,"
says Mr Rassi, "with a
scale of brutality that is unimaginable, covering the whole population. Yet
very little is known about it. It is easy to understand why."
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