Let's take stock.
So far, the playbook has shown you how to seize power, crush your rivals,
brutalize your people into submission,
and replace objective truth with your version of reality.
Now it's time to realize the true promise of tyranny,
by reinventing your country into the utopia
you always dreamed it could be.
The more dangerous and interesting tyrants
are really convinced they are creating a better world.
Think your country needs a new national flag? No problem.
Feel like implementing a brand-new education system
with you as the main subject? Why not?
The playbook provides all the tools you need
to create your perfect society,
and no one committed to this quite like Muammar Gaddafi,
who made the complete transformation of the Libyan nation his life's work,
no matter who... or what... got in his way.
This mad dog of the Middle East has a goal of a world revolution.
Follow his example and you'll discover
how you too can create an enduring heaven on Earth,
with you as its guiding light.
Muammar Gaddafi's eccentric vision transformed his countrymen's lives
in ways that were good, bad, and weird.
Gaddafi is a bit of a tragic, uh, figure,
somebody who really started off wanting to change the society around him,
and in the end started to believe in his own stories.
He was famously corrupt and greedy,
he had all kinds of affectations of dress and manner.
He visited foreign countries and would sleep outside in a tent.
And yet, despite his quirks,
this revolutionary and fashion icon managed to stay in power for 42 years.
Before we look at how Gaddafi remade Libya in his own image,
there are a few things you should know.
I have all the solutions here.
Muammar Gaddafi's parents were illiterate Bedouin nomadic people.
The environment was very, very difficult indeed.
Libya was one of the poorest countries in the world.
The only means of changing one's status was to join the military,
and Gaddafi did precisely this.
Gaddafi saw the Western-backed monarch, King Idris, as extremely corrupt.
It was virtually a bloodless coup,
really because there were no institutions in Libya
that were organized well enough to really stand up for the king,
to protect the king.
Gaddafi began probably as a sincere reformer.
He wanted to modernize an entire nation.
He was hailed as a kind of liberator
across the Arab world and the African world.
But ultimately, he was not interested in liberating anyone.
He was interested in enslaving them.
Gaddafi's lesson really does hold the promise and peril
of building a new society.
If you want yours to succeed, it's going to need some ground rules,
and it's your job to lay them down.
As the creator of your new society,
you're more than head of state.
You're the parent of your nation. And to truly show your love,
you'll need to guide your flock with a firm hand.
Authoritarian rulers exercise rule
by limiting the rights the public enjoys.
The leaders often claim that this is in the best interest
of the state, of the people.
After all, tyrants know best.
Upon taking power in 1979,
Ayatollah Khomeini revoked Iran's divorce law
and lowered the marriage age for girls to as young as seven.
Under Hitler, the Nazis instituted a strict anti-smoking policy,
inspired by the Führer's personal distaste for tobacco.
While Turkmenistan's dictator Saparmurat Niyazov
banned the use of lip-synching at concerts in 2006
and banished dogs from the country's capital
due to their unappealing odor.
Like all other dictators, Gaddafi knew he had to repress civil liberties,
so he prohibited free speech and rights of assembly.
He would make up the rules as he went along.
Following Islamic law,
Gaddafi banned alcohol and shut down all night clubs.
Hiring domestic servants,
being a doctor or lawyer in private practice,
and even hailing a cab were also forbidden...
while prohibited domestic acts like adultery
could earn the offenders lashings and loss of limbs.
Gaddafi also banned trade unions, workers' strikes,
and cracked down on the true enemy of his new society: foreign chickens.
Gaddafi says that Libyans must grow their own food.
A country's not free if it eats from overseas,
and he says, "Let's start with chicken."
"All Libyans must grow their own chicken."
But liberating people from store-bought poultry
only gets you so far.
By 1976, he realizes that the people, uh, don't really share this vision that he has
of how a country should be ruled.
He turns increasingly autocratic. Elections disappear.
The positions of power are increasingly occupied by loyalists of the regime.
So it becomes more and more a classical dictatorship.
And while many Libyans seem fine
to embrace Gaddafi as their absolute leader,
there were pockets of resistance.
As Gaddafi's repression expands,
student demonstrators take to the streets in protest,
demanding that their freedoms be restored.
It's a moment of crisis for the regime.
Gaddafi has a choice: uphold the people's will or his own.
On April 7, 1976, he makes the obvious decision.
Gaddafi sends his army into the cities of Tripoli and Benghazi
to crush the protests.
Many who were detained are later released.
Others are not so lucky.
To make an example of those that dared speak out against the regime,
a number of them are accused of being traitors.
On the first anniversary of the protests,
two students, Omar Dabob and Muhammed Ben Sa-oud,
are hung for their participation, with a special guest in attendance.
From this day forward, Gaddafi declares April 7th a national holiday.
And what better way to celebrate each year
than by rounding up his opponents across the country?
It's a new annual tradition to make clear
that from now on, the leader is the law, and the law must be obeyed.
Laying down the rules is a start,
but revealing the true promise of your new society
will require even bolder action,
so think big.
Tyrants have great projects.
This is one of the ways they can achieve immortality,
as a daily reminder of their greatness.
Pick your projects well,
and they can upgrade your nation and your image at the same time.
Hitler and the Nazis presented themselves
as the driving force behind the Autobahn highway system,
which promised Germans total mobility across the country.
Joseph Stalin greenlit the construction of the state-of-the-art Moscow Metro
that was heralded as a triumph of socialism when it opened in 1931.
While Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu
bulldozed one-fifth of the capital city of Bucharest
to build the Palace of Parliament.
It took 13 years to complete.
It cost three billion dollars and up to 3,000 workers' lives.
Too bad he was deposed and killed before construction was completed.
Gaddafi had grand ambitions of his own, and a key advantage to bring them to life.
Gaddafi had an oil-rich economy.
The money is just coming out of the ground and straight into his bank account.
After 1973, the price of oil quadrupled globally.
He made a tremendous amount of money,
and he was able to use that money for whatever he wanted to use it for.
In the name of Allah, we lay the foundation stone
for the Great Man-Made River.
Potable water had become scarce in Libya,
so knowing there were these enormous aquifers in the southern part of Libya,
Gaddafi set about exploiting those.
A man-made river that could one day even turn desert into farmland.
What better symbol of a new society
than making the desert bloom?
Gaddafi's plan was to drill into the Nubian fossil aquifer,
then transport the water from there to northern Libya
through giant pipes and dams.
It was massive.
Pipelines of enormous dimensions,
literally hundreds and hundreds of kilometers long.
It didn't come cheap,
but Gaddafi saw the project as his crowning glory
that would provide the majority of Libya's water for decades.
He even began calling it the eighth wonder of the world.
Sadly, the construction met with issues.
There were all kinds of problems with it.
Corruption was endemic,
so you saw lots of pipes exploding, et cetera, et cetera.
The Great Man-Made River took nearly three decades to complete,
and some experts believe the underground reserves will run out
before the end of this century.
But that will be someone else's problem.
The Great Man-made River Project was one of the very few ones
that was much appreciated by the Libyans.
It was this kind of prestige project that he could then portray as his own.
But people have short memories.
You need to make sure they never forget who's responsible
for the wonders they now enjoy.
How, you may ask.
I believe that children are our future, so teach them well.
Every dictator needs a population that can read, write,
so they can work at menial jobs producing money for the dictator.
What dictators don't want
is a well-educated population of people with ideas who can become rivals.
For your new society to succeed,
you have to start early.
In Libya, literacy and propaganda were twinned.
And Gaddafi's required reading list
for the nation's youth was just one title long,
written by... you guessed it, himself.
The Green Book was the Bible of Gaddafi's Libya.
Gaddafi would constantly cite from it.
Billboards had quotes from it.
They were kind of random thoughts,
but because they came from Gaddafi, nobody could question them.
But you can't let a few bad reviews
get in the way of your nation's future.
Kids would be taking tests on Gaddafi's Green Book,
on what he said and what it means.
Now that's smart lesson planning.
The genius of Gaddafi's education system
wasn't just what it taught the children of Libya,
it was also what it didn't.
In this new Libyan society, no history before Gaddafi's reign was taught,
because what's the point of learning about the bad old days?
No geography. Don't want people thinking about the world or the way out.
No foreign languages. Don't need them.
And since Gaddafi saw units of measurement as symbols of Western oppression,
he banned the metric system.
So maybe it wasn't all bad.
But sometimes, despite all your careful planning,
your little ones still don't learn what you want them to.
That's why Gaddafi liked throwing in the odd face-to-face lesson,
just to make sure his message hit home.
In the summer of 1984,
thousands of school children in the city of Benghazi
were told they were going on a very special outing.
The students were loaded into buses
and transported to the city's open-air basketball stadium.
But what they were about to see was a whole different ball game.
The main attraction: Al-Sadek Hamed Al-Shuwehdy.
The accused has confessed to terrorist activities.
A 30-year-old engineer,
recently returned from studying in the US.
The audience was told they would be witnessing a trial,
but he was already condemned.
As the crowd realizes what is about to happen, some beg for mercy.
Others celebrate.
But something goes wrong.
The condemned man doesn't die.
Out of the crowd, a woman emerges.
Her name: Huda Ben Amer.
And with a firm tug, Huda finishes the job.
She became known as Huda the Executioner.
This act of helping the state to murder an innocent victim
jump-started her political career,
and she actually became Minister of Sports and Tourism.
What a fitting reward
for serving as a role model for the youth of the nation.
Especially the little girls.
But Huda's shining example also shows
how powerful, and even deadly, one woman can be.
That's why, on the path to building your new society,
you need to give the fairer sex extra attention.
All the major dictators in modern history have been men.
As a group, they see women as necessary,
but they also see women as dangerous.
The authoritarian mindset responds to the restoration of a hierarchy
in which men sit atop of the social order.
But Gaddafi wanted to be seen as a modern tyrant,
building the perfect society for all of his people.
In principle, Gaddafi argued that, uh, women should be equal to men.
And so throughout his reign,
he tried to, at least symbolically, uh, promote women.
And what better symbol of female promotion than this?
He had this weird bodyguard of women.
Almost like something out of a James Bond film.
Libya, when Mr. Gaddafi come, became free.
Before, the woman, uh... not free.
They accompanied him abroad.
Gaddafi was expert at manipulating media.
He knew exactly what would get into photographers
and get into the TV screens.
But behind closed doors,
things weren't quite as ready for prime time.
Many people didn't know. Those bodyguards were what some people call a harem.
New members of the Amazonian guard were recruited
during Gaddafi's travels throughout the country.
He was partial to beautiful, young women, some no more than 14.
Scouts from his current guard were always on the lookout for fresh faces.
New recruits would be invited to a private reception to meet the leader.
If a woman received a pat on the head, she had been chosen,
and soon... she would disappear.
And whether she wanted to or not,
she'd become what Gaddafi called a "virgin of the revolution,"
duty-bound to serve her leader.
These women were often abused and raped by Gaddafi.
Sometimes girls were allowed to go back to their families,
but in a traditional Muslim society, many times they were shunned.
Gaddafi abused thousands of women for years in this manner.
Yah!
It was all part of Muammar's vision for his perfect world,
where the greatest honor was to be of service to Libya,
and thus to him.
Gaddafi was the nation.
Dictators have a completely proprietary view of the nation.
They own its... wealth. They own its people.
Their bodies are... are his to do what he wants.
If you're Muammar Gaddafi, it might now seem
that you've got everything you need for your new society.
Money, loyal subjects,
concrete symbols of your greatness, exciting job opportunities.
But now is no time to rest on your laurels.
When there's a whole world out there
that's yet to learn of your path to national glory,
why keep it to yourself?
Becoming an absolute ruler is an impressive feat.
But creating a global movement? That's the stuff of legends.
Which is why our most ambitious tyrants love to spread their wings.
In 1940, Adolf Hitler installed a puppet regime
known as the Vichy government in occupied France,
which went on to strip citizenship from the nation's Jews
and send more than 70,000 to die in concentration camps.
After World War II, Joseph Stalin aggressively supported
the spread of Communist governments across Eastern Europe and the Baltics,
creating a buffer zone of countries friendly to him.
And China's Mao Zedong provided weapons, cash, and supplies to North Vietnam
as part of his plan to dominate Southeast Asia.
But for some tyrants, hooking up can be tough.
He tried very hard
to be the center of attention within the Arab world.
The leaders, they looked down upon him.
But no matter what the rest of the world thinks,
there are always going to be some groups
that will take you and your fat wallet into their hearts.
Gaddafi sponsored many, many separatist movements.
Across the globe,
anytime a revolutionary group needs some cash,
Gaddafi is there to provide.
The danger of allying with the wrong sort of friends, however,
is that people judge you by the company you keep.
It was around 2:00 a.m. in Berlin
when the bomb went off in the crowded La Belle discotheque.
Police say there were about 500 people inside,
many of them off-duty US soldiers. The bomb exploded...
These murderers could not carry out their crimes
without the sanctuary and support
provided by regimes such as Colonel Gaddafi's in Libya.
Gaddafi was a terrorist.
He wanted the respect of the world while he was terrorizing everybody.
We refuse to bow our heads in front of America.
Word to the wise:
terrorizing people at home is a lot easier than taking on the entire Western world.
No one can kill Americans and brag about it. No one.
When the Americans retaliated and bombed Libya,
it was truly a shock to him,
because he thought he was infallible.
As dawn shed light on the devastation
caused by the American bombing,
Washington said the targets were military bases or terrorist camps.
This fallacy came to a crashing halt.
Beginning of the end? Not so fast.
When you're sitting on one of the world's ten richest oil reserves,
you can afford the odd miscalculation.
But as you'll see,
the playbook will keep you in power only as long as you heed its lessons.
Muammar is going to find that out the hard way.
Gaddafi has a good thing going.
Wealth, power, impeccable fashion sense,
and a vision to create his ideal society.
But as the new millennium dawns,
the US goes to war against Saddam Hussein,
and life as a Middle Eastern dictator starts to feel like a dicey proposition.
Our war against terror... is only beginning.
When times get tough, the playbook insists
that you ruthlessly stick with your program.
Gaddafi chose a different path.
♪ 'Cause when friends are friends... ♪
He made changes in policy...
♪ It lasts forever ♪
...that he thought would curry favor in the Western world.
Free speech, freedom of assembly, free press.
He stopped torturing people.
Now, that's a nice thing to do,
but torture is a good way to deter people from opposing you.
What was the consequence?
These are the mechanisms by which people organize
and overthrow their governments.
It's quite inevitable.
These enlightened reforms will ultimately be seen
for what they really are: weakness.
Colonel Gaddafi, is your army deserting you?
I forgot your language.
They rose up against him, the Western world did nothing to save him,
and he was dead.
When he's finally cornered by rebels,
he says, "I haven't done anything. Why are you treating me this way?"
A fair question under most circumstances.
He killed my brother, my cousin. He killed my friends.
He burned my family's house.
Though you might say what doomed Gaddafi in the end
is that he abandoned the playbook, went soft, and paid the ultimate price.
Eventually, of course, um, he was hunted down and... and killed.
But take heart.
The playbook offers another path,
a gateway to achieving the ultimate tyrant's dream:
a regime without end.
The final chapter awaits in the hermit kingdom of North Korea,
where the Kim Dynasty has cracked the code to eternal rule.
Are you ready to become a god?