Conspiracy theories have existed since the beginning of time, but they have found a newfound prominence in the last decade as a result of the terrorist attacks of 9/11.  In the words of journalist Jonathan Kay, conspiracies are more than just fun and games, but “threaten to turn the country into a sort of intellectual Yugoslavia – a patchwork of agitated cults screaming at one another in mutually unintelligible tongues. It’s a trend that every thinking person has a duty to fight.” Kay, a managing editor for Canada's National Post, is the author of a new book, “Among the Truthers: A Journey Through America’s Growing Conspiracist Underground.” I recently interviewed him for "The Blender," RFE/RL's weekly podcast, about the variety of theories, Donald Trump, and whether promoters of conspiracies are just in it for the money. The full transcript of our interview is below.

RFE/RL: Can you tell us now, this is the 10th anniversary of 9/11, would you say that 9/11 conspiracy theories are more or less prevalent than in the initial aftermath of the attacks?
 
Jonathan Kay: It’s an interesting question. 9/11 conspiracy theories didn’t really peak until late 2003 and early 2004 and the reason for that is the Iraq War. A lot of people felt deceived that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and they started asking themselves, “what else have we been misled about?” And this led to a natural increase in 9/11 conspiracy theories and so 2004, 2005, 2006 there was a lot of conspiracism. The election of Barack Obama in 2008, I’d say marked the point where the conspiracy theories started to turn downward. Every conspiracy theory needs a good villain; it’s like a Hollywood movie. And you had Bush and Cheney and Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld in the White House, they were kind of natural villain figures for conspiracy theorists. Obama didn’t fit the mold as well and since 2009 you’ve seen, I’d say, a downward trend in 9/11 conspiracy theories. At the same time, conspiracy theorists have shifted to other conspiracy theories like conspiracy theories about the Federal Reserve and so forth and of course you have “Birther” conspiracy theories about Barack Obama’s birthplace.
 
RFE/RL: Is there something that connects all conspiracy theories? You have conspiracy theories on the right; you have ones on the left. Is there a thread ideologically or psychologically that connects different conspiracy theorists even though they may have different politics?
 
Kay: Yes, they share the same basic structure, which is that there is some central, overarching puppet master that is controlling all world events in secret that is highly evil and that is creating wars and depressions and human suffering in general in order to advance some kind of sinister agenda. And the prototype for this in the modern era is the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” which, as your listeners will know, is a debunked, anti-Semitic hoax that became popular in the early part of the 20th century. And in that conspiracy theory, the Jews were the evil doers and they were creating wars and depressions and revolutions all over the world so they could cement their hold on the globe. And in the last century what we’ve seen is this basic narrative, this basic structure of the conspiracy theory has remained constant. The only thing that’s changed is the protagonist that’s changed. So instead of the Jew you sometimes will get Catholics, the Vatican, Dan Brown-type conspiracy theories. Of course you get “the neocons” and the Mossad and the Zionists have a starring role. You get the new world order conspiracy theorists. You get old-fashioned conspiracy theorists who focus on the Illumaniti and Freemasons. But, in general, the basic structure is there’s going to be this world takeover by some evil, sinister group and they will use events like 9/11 in order to further their purpose

Interview With Jonathan Kay

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RFE/RL: Is there an element of truth in any of these conspiracy theories? Let’s take the 9/11 conspiracy theory. Is there anything that these people say that is in some small sense accurate?
 
Kay: Many things they say are accurate. If you interview conspiracy theorists they will often point you to a lot of highly accurate information. They will in some cases cite mainstream news articles. In the case of 9/11 they’ll talk about the Project for a New American Century back more than a decade ago where right-wing Americans were looking to reshape the world to make it a safer place. The problem is how they stitch these things together. It’s one thing to say, accurately, that the Americans did want to get rid of Saddam Hussein. Regime change in Iraq was the foreign policy of the United States going back to the Clinton era, that’s true. It’s another thing to then say, well, then they of course slaughtered thousands of Americas as a pretext to then go attack Iraq. So, all conspiracy theories, with some few exceptions, have little tiny grains of truth at the base of them. What happens is those grains of truth are expanded in an obscene way to create Hollywood-style fantasies about great conspiracies.
 
RFE/RL: You talk in your book about one of the reasons why you think conspiracy theories have prominence in America, or what drives them in America, is a libertarian ideal of individualism that’s been supposedly perverted over a history of 250 years, and increasing government control and mechanization and whatnot. How does that differ from the environments that give rise to conspiracy theories in other cultures?
 
Kay: Sure, as you say in the U.S. one of the sources of conspiracy theories, especially on the right, is this comparison of the world the founders lived in, the 18th century, with the world we live in today. And it’s true that, as a result of industrialization and higher population density and urbanization and security threats and all that sort of thing, the government has just by necessity become a greater presence in our life. And libertarians in particular look at that and say this is part of a conspiracy to take away our freedoms. There is no comparable trend in Europe. Europe, which has more of a feudal history, it’s simply taken for granted that some central authority is going to take care of things for a lot of people so there’s that huge political culture gap between the two societies which makes conspiracies about big government just much more popular in the United States.
 
In other countries, especially in the developing world, there’s a much different narrative for conspiracy theories which grows out of colonialism. Take a place like Iran, for instance. In Iran there is a very real history of the CIA and the British engineering real conspiracies in the 1950s to change Iran’s government around and in many African countries also and in Latin America, you have a colonial history where American corporations and politicians and spies really did conspire with local warlords and such to change governments and take away people’s freedoms. And modern conspiracies [are] an outgrowth of that. In some ways, I have more sympathy for conspiracy theorists in developing countries where they have that history than in a place like the United States which is an open society and it's much less credible, these conspiracy theories.
 
RFE/RL: You’ve met with a lot of conspiracy theorists in researching this book. To what extent do you think that they really believe what they’re saying, or is there an element, at least among some of these people, that they know what they’re saying is false, but they’re doing it for financial gain. Is there money to be made in this racket?
 
Kay: I thought there was money to be made in the racket until I actually interviewed a lot of these people and I was shocked how little money they have. A good example is this guy Richard Gage who is a former architect [and] who is one of the leaders of the so-called “9/11 Truth” movement. He lives out in California. He’s been a full-time 9/11 Truth activist since 2006, and here’s a guy who used to make a six-figure income as a commercial architect. He designed strip malls basically. And then in 2006 he gave that all up and decided he was going to travel all around the world and tell the truth about 9/11, as he saw it. And now he lives in a one-bedroom apartment. He gave up his home and his family and he makes most of his money from fairly meager speaking fees and DVDs.
 
You go to these 9/11 Truther conventions and there’s guys in the back selling DVDs for 10 bucks each. You don’t really get rich doing that. A lot of these people really live hand to mouth. The only two or three people, I think, who actually have embraced conspiracy theories for commercial gain, someone like, perhaps, allegedly, Alex Jones, who’s a prominent radio host out in Texas. He makes a lot of money because he syndicates his radio shows to a lot of people, and he sells a lot of merchandise. He’s one person, it’s possible, that he has those motivations. Jesse Ventura has had a TV special, that sort of thing. And another guy is Donald Trump. Donald Trump suddenly came out earlier in 2011 as this great, big Barack Obama “birther.” He wanted to see the birth certificate, and he was going to go to Hawaii and he was going to investigate this. And I think a lot of people were dubious about whether he actually believed Barack Obama was actually born in Kenya and I think a lot of people suspected that this was just a way to get attention and jump to the head of the pack of the GOP presidential hopefuls. And I actually believe that I don’t think he’s dumb enough to believe these birther conspiracies. I think he was just a clever marketer and figured this would be just a good way to market himself as a presidential candidate.

RFE/RL: Donald Trump is a relatively mainstream figure in terms of his prominence in the media. To what extent do you think conspiracy theories are relegated to the fringe of American life, intellectual life, and to what extent have they managed to seep into the mainstream discourse?
 
Kay: Well they used to be on the fringes. But if you look at the reason Barack Obama made public his long-form birth certificate was because he was looking at polling numbers and said, wait a second, if you’ve got 20 or 40 percent of Republicans who believe I wasn’t born in the United States, statistically, that’s no longer a fringe phenomenon. The 9/11 Truth phenomenon, I don’t think is a fringe phenomenon. It’s decreasing now, but you still have 10, 15, 20 percent of Americans who believe or suspect that 9/11 was an inside job. And I meet them all the time. You’re in a taxi or in a hotel and people just casually talk about it. It’s become part of the political culture. And the reason for this is, I think, the internet. Many of the people I interviewed, even fairly mainstream types of people, they just don’t have time to read newspapers or watch broadcast television and they get a lot of their news from email that their friends send them and they often fall into correspondence with people, “Hey check this out, you know, ask legitimate questions about how the Twin Towers fell, or whether vaccines cause autism and then they don’t educate themselves by reading books or listening to reputable radio broadcasts like this one, and it’s a real problem. People have insulated themselves from the mainstream media and are instead getting their information from dubious internet sources.
 
RFE/RL: What’s the danger of this in terms of conspiracy theories? They’re obviously fun for us to laugh at and make fun of these people. But do they represent a threat to liberal discourse in society?
 
Kay: Sure, and you’re already seeing this in the United States. I ask people, how can you have a legitimate conversation about foreign policy and domestic security if you think 9/11 was an inside job hatched by the United States government? How can you have a legitimate discussion about healthcare if you think that Barack Obama healthcare plan was just a big conspiracy to send your grandmother in front of a so-called death panel? Or if you think that Barack Obama is an illegal alien who’s trying to secretly institute some kind of Communist, Afro-centric, Shari'a plot in the United States. People who believe these conspiracy theories have basically opted out of reality. They live in an alternative universe and they’re not necessarily dangerous to the United States in that they’re going to create some kind of violent revolution, but they’re dangerous in the sense that they have eroded the marketplace of ideas in the sense that there’s millions of people you just can’t have a sensible conversation with. And that is a danger to democracy. Democracy requires a well-informed citizenry. People who vote on real issues. People who educate themselves on real issues, and people who you can talk to and you can create a political consensus. The United States is rapidly becoming a place where you cannot create a political consensus because people have become radicalized by conspiracy theories.
 
RFE/RL: Is there a solution to this or is it just going to get worse with the proliferation of media sources and the popularity of the Internet.
 
Kay: It’s very difficult tor rescue someone, if I may use that verb, once they’ve become a conspiracy theorist. They become immune to rational argumentation. My project in my book was to educate people who are not conspiracy theorists and to show them the basic structure of conspiracy theories so that they recognize them. So that when their brother-in-law sends them the email about Barack Obama or 9/11 or the latest plane crash or how the U.S. military caused the latest earthquake, they will recognize the structure and claims that have been contained in conspiracy theories for centuries. And they will see that structure and compare it to the information or purported information they’re getting and be able to say hey, this is bunk. And arm themselves with the mental tools required to know when something looks like conspiracist nonsense or when it might be legitimate.

The man known as Europe's last dictator made a startling announcement last week: Come early October, he will release all of the political prisoners in his jails. For 17 years, Alyaksandr Lukashenka has ruled Belarus in much the way that it was run as a Soviet socialist republic: Most of the economy is state-owned, independent journalists are routinely harassed, opposition political activists are beaten and arrested, and the secret police -- still known as the KGB -- maintain a massive cadre of loyal informers.

On the surface, Lukashenka shows signs of reform. He recently pardoned four political activists who were jailed as part of the crackdown that followed Belarus's rigged presidential election last winter. To avoid any appearance that their release was a concession to outside pressure, the regime announced that all four had "recognized their guilt and the unlawful character of their actions."

Such moves should be seen in the context of the cat-and-mouse game Lukashenka has long played with the West. The European Union and the United States imposed sanctions on Belarus after December's electoral farce. With the country enduring a massive financial crisis -- consumer prices have almost doubled since January, and inflation is near 50 percent -- Lukashenka desperately needs outside assistance, which the West has made contingent upon political liberalization. Releasing political prisoners, including detained presidential candidate Andrey Sannikau, is a tacit attempt to improve chilly relations with Europe and the United States and should not be mistaken for genuine change within the regime.

Read the rest in "The Washington Post. "

TRIPOLI -- When Nicolai Odobescu was asked by his company to relocate from Chisinau, Moldova to war-torn Libya, his response was, "Yeah, why not?"

The 34-year-old Odobescu had been working as a service manager at the Leogrand Hotel, the largest in the former Soviet republic. But last month, the Turkish company for which he works, Summa, told him that they wanted him to move to Tripoli, where they had just purchased a new hotel.

On August 20, just three weeks into his job as the manager of the Oya! Cafe at the Al-Mahary Radisson Blu and nearly half a year into the ongong struggle between loyalists of the regime of Muammar al-Qaddafi and his opponents, Odobescu had to move again, when the hotel was forced to close due to the armed uprising in Tripoli. The hotel emptied its rooms of guests, shut its doors, and the staff quickly traveled to a secure villa about 10 kilometers outside Tripoli.

"We stayed in a civilian region where there is no, any shooting," he says. "But anyway there was bombing, nearly."

When things quieted down several days later, the Radisson reopened, only to be met with hundreds of international journalists who had poured into the Libyan capital to cover Qaddafi's fall. With only two hotels open in the capital, the Radisson quickly filled up, and its managers had to make a waiting list for desperate journalists looking for a place to stay.

For the hundreds of guests at the Radisson, Odobescu has been a reassuring presence, making endless cups of coffee and dispensing with pastries. As food is in short supply, his café has become a hub of activity. The day before I interviewed him, he had worked nonstop for 18 hours.  

Though the journalists can at times be demanding, he says that they are far easier to service than the hotel’s previous guests -- families of regime figures who had relocated to the Radisson for fear that their homes would be attacked by rebels. All told, Odobescu says, the government paid for 100 rooms.

"Now it’s more better customers," he says. "More cultural. More 21st-century people."

When I ask Odobescu if he expected to be caught in the middle of the civil war, he replied, "I know very well where I am going." All this leads me to assume that his company offered him a significant pay raise to relocate from sleepy Moldova to bomb and bullet-strewn Libya. But his answer surprises me.

"For the moment I didn’t discuss with my bosses. But I will. I will."

TRIPOLI -- Adham had never picked up a gun before, never mind fired one. But all that changed on August 20, when the tall, lanky, 26-year-old Tripoli resident was handed a weapon and a grenade to fight against the 42-year regime of Muammar Qaddafi. "It was the first time for everyone," he tells me.

I meet Adham on Friday, August 26, in a darkened alley not far from the Mediterranean coast. It is just after sundown, and as the power went off in Tripoli earlier in the day, it is almost impossible to see anything. After I tell him I am a journalist, he welcomes me to a small, impromptu iftar dinner and gives me an impression of how, block-by-block, the Tripoli underground managed to seize nominal control over most of the sprawling capital in just two days.

On the evening of August 20, a Saturday, the uprising within Tripoli began with men chanting anti-Qaddafi slogans at the central Ben Nabi Mosque. This was the "zero hour," as another rebel fighter would tell me. For weeks, rebels had smuggled guns into Tripoli and left them in safe houses; some of the guns used by rebels were also purchased directly from members of the "kataib," or Qaddafi militias. With the August 13 fall of Zawiya, a strategically located city about 30 kilometers west of the capital, all the pieces were in place for rebels to take Tripoli.

But before that could happen, the capital's citizens would have to rise up first. Upon receiving orders from their neighborhood commander, Adham and his fellow rebels immediately began to set up roadblocks with whatever materials were available. "Everyone took their place," he says, in a pattern replicated across the city, while NATO military advisers reportedly coordinated the overall battle plan with rebel commanders outside Tripoli.

The fighting on Adham's block was intense, and about four or five pro-Qaddafi soldiers were killed over the course of 48 hours. The rebels in his neighborhood captured 35 Qaddafi loyalists, all of whom, Adham says, were taken to the local rebel council that had been set up in advance of the uprising as a shadow government to seize control of the city as the regime fell to pieces. "If someone fights, we shoot, but we never kill someone who gives up," he tells me when I ask about reports of reprisal killings.

Soon, we are joined by Nasser, a middle-aged rebel fighter. Hearing that I am an American, he immediately tells me a story that, given the fog of war, may or may not be true. Just the other day, he says, rebel soldiers apprehended four Americans -- an elderly woman and three men -- trying to flee Tripoli by boat to the Mediterranean island of Malta. They were public relations consultants working on behalf of the "son of a bitch" Yusuf Shakir, a regime propagandist, Nasser says. When the rebels who had arrested the Americans turned them over to the Tripoli council, its leaders determined that the Americans should be kept at the downtown Corinthia Hotel. "The council treated them with respect," Nasser tells me. The practical difficulties of communicating with sources and venturing around Tripoli make this tidbit of information impossible to confirm.

I HAD ENTERED Tripoli the morning of Thursday, August 25, three days after rebels claimed to have gained control over most of the city. That might have been the case, but Tripoli did not exactly feel secure for those of us journalists driving its empty streets. Having spent the previous evening sleeping on thin, dirty mattresses in an abandoned apartment building in Zawiya (a town where, we discovered upon our arrival, four Italian journalists had been kidnapped just hours before), a few colleagues and I convinced two Libyans to drive us to the Corinthia, where we knew many journalists were staying.

Rebels had set up checkpoints at what seemed to be every other intersection, so a trip that should have only taken about 20 minutes turned into an hour. Along the way, we passed the headquarters of the Khamis Brigade, named after Qaddafi's youngest son, which rebels had overtaken on August 21. Everywhere lay the detritus of armed combat, from burned-out tanks to spent bullet shells. Arriving at the Corinthia, we were told by the unflappable man behind the front desk that the hotel was full, so we asked our drivers to take us to the Radisson, the other hotel where journalists were shacking up. We made it out right in time; 15 minutes after we left, we later discovered, a huge firefight erupted just outside the Corinthia between Qaddafi loyalists and rebel fighters.

We were told that the Radisson was just down the road from the Corinthia, so we knew something was wrong when we entered a neighborhood where a giant painting of Qaddafi covered a building wall and posters of the Brother Leader hung on lampposts. Given that everywhere else we had ventured in Tripoli had been marked by anti-Qaddafi graffiti, this must have meant that we had entered a neighborhood that had yet to fall under rebel control. Our fears were confirmed when we drove by the giant, bullet-strewn walls of Bab al-Aziziya, Qaddafi's massive compound, which, though the rebels had claimed to have captured it, was still the site of on-again, off-again battles between the two sides. Up ahead we saw a roundabout where an encampment of some sort had been demolished. Freshly dead corpses lay everywhere.

Minutes later we reached the now-infamous Rixos hotel, where some 35 journalists had effectively been held hostage for a week by Qaddafi gunmen. The hotel had only recently been secured by rebels; there was still fighting going on within the Tripoli Zoo, on whose grounds the Rixos is located. We realized at this point that our drivers had not understood us; they had confused the Radisson for the Rixos. After some hurried and emphatic communication with the rebel fighter in charge of guarding the Rixos, we made it to our destination without incident

THE NEXT MORNING, I venture out into Tripoli. An eerie sense of calm seems to have enveloped most of the city. Tripoli looks like a cross between South Central Los Angeles at the height of the 1992 riots and Sierra Leone during its civil war. The only people on the streets are young men -- and boys -- carrying guns. They are dressed in street clothes and look like gangbangers, and would be more intimidating were they not so friendly (REO Speedwagon T-shirts and Hawaiian shorts are not soldierly affectations). Save a bus with some women and girls, not once do I see a female Libyan outside.

All the Libyans I meet tell me that there was minimal looting during the period of unrest, a remarkable fact given that food and water have begun to run short. The preservation of order may also have something to do with the organizational structures that Tripoli residents had established in preparation for the uprising. Neighborhoods began organizing councils at least three months ago, several Tripoli residents tell me, not just for distributing weapons and planning for the seizure of key sites within the city, but for essential, noncombatant activities such as food and water distribution.

The revolution was truly from the bottom up, and the intimacies of neighborhood life enabled anti-Qaddafi Libyans to organize effectively and covertly. Although political organizing was next to impossible in the police state Qaddafi had established during his four decades in power, the slow progress of the rebels, the ongoing NATO bombardment, and the widespread international condemnation of the regime seem to have spurred Tripoli residents to perform a degree of underground coordination that would have been unthinkable just a few months ago. "We know the opposite guys; we know each other," Mohammed Abou Gabha, a 21-year-old training to become a pilot who is now manning a checkpoint, tells me. "We know who wants Qaddafi and who doesn't want Qaddafi, and we got together."

The councils plan to start collecting the very guns they distributed just a little over a week ago from rebel soldiers for whom weapons are no longer essential. "If you leave a weapon in the hands of a civilian, this will be very complicated, very difficult," Abdullah Ahmed Bilal, a gregarious commodore in the Libyan navy, tells me. "We have seen what's happened in Iraq." That task will be easier than it sounds, at least judging by the faces of the young men strutting around with a feeling of power and accomplishment that they've certainly never felt before.

Although Libyans would not have won this revolution without outside intervention, the magic of the relatively limited NATO effort is that it has largely left the task of post-conflict internal rebuilding to Libyans themselves. There are no foreigners dispatching provincial reconstruction teams as in Iraq and Afghanistan; Libyans are already performing this civic work by clearing their streets of rubble and organizing neighborhood watch shifts. The war is one that Libyans fought very hard to win; I get the distinct impression that the vast majority of them are eager not to let this moment -- 42 years in the making -- slip through their fingers. They want to rebuild their country, and given the dire circumstances, it's impressive that there has been no outbreak of mass chaos.

The other remarkable thing about Libya is that it is the only Arab country where America is not just liked, but loved. (Speaking with Libyans, I never feel I have to lie and say I am Canadian, as I sometimes do in other Arab countries to avoid potentially dodgy situations.) That its people love America precisely because their country has been bombed by it is all the more noteworthy. In Libya right now, Americans are the recipients of precisely the sort of admiration and gratitude they thought they would receive in Iraq eight years ago. One hopes that by playing a limited role in the country's stabilization and reconstruction, they will be able to maintain that gratitude.

Whether or not Libyans can preserve their unity will be crucial to the country's future. For more than four decades, Qaddafi subsumed any genuine sense of national unity to obligatory worship in his cult of personality. In just six months, though they lack many of the traditional institutions of a state (like Egypt's fabled military), Libyans have nonetheless forged a shared consciousness by fighting together, and working together, to kick Qaddafi out. This may be shaky ground on which to build the foundations of a functioning democracy, but it is something. When I ask Adham about the concerns many in the West have about Libya's "tribal society," he bristles at the question. "This is untrue," he tells me with a frustrated tone. "There are no tribes. Libya is united, Insha'Allah."

originally published at "Foreign Policy"

TRIPOLI -- "Raise your head," reads a graffito as you cross the Libyan border on the desert road coming from Tunisia. "You're in Libya." Most of the graffiti along the route leading to Tripoli that refer to the onetime "Brother Leader," Muammar Qaddafi, aren't as dignified. But having suffered for over four decades, Libyans can be excused if they're a bit vulgar regarding the downfall of the Mad Dog, as Ronald Reagan once called him. And so I had to smile at the spray-painted declarations that "Qaddafi is a son of a bitch," and the caricatures depicting the strongman with snot coming out of his nose, and the other crude denunciations that grace every imaginable surface in free Libya.

Six months after protests erupted in the eastern city of Benghazi, rebel forces fighting under the auspices of the internationally recognized National Transitional Council (NTC) finally appear to have achieved their goal of toppling the Qaddafi regime. When initial reports emerged that rebels had entered Tripoli and made their assault on the dictator's massive compound, Bab al-Azizia, the momentum of the past half-year made the downfall of Qaddafi all but inevitable. 

Reporters have grown used to taking rebel assertions with a grain of salt. Claims that the rebels had liberated whole cities, seized strategic sites, or captured key regime figures (like Qaddafi's favorite son, the London School of Economics Ph.D. Saif al-Islam) would often be followed by reports to the contrary. But with the free Libyan forces controlling almost all of Tripoli (as evidenced by the slew of checkpoints at practically every other intersection), and with cars driving through streets with the pre-Qaddafi Libyan flag proudly on display, it seems only a matter of time before the last regime loyalists across the country are killed, captured, or simply give up.

That the civil war took so long, and that scattered fighting is still going on in Tripoli and in Qaddafi's hometown of Sirte, shows just how far the Libyan dictator has been willing to go in defiance of his own people and the world. No Libyan doubted that once protests broke out on February 17, Qaddafi was willing to murder as many of his own people as necessary to remain in power. One would think that a "rational" dictator faced with an armed popular uprising and NATO bombardment, and concerned about self-preservation, would at some point give in to reality and accept an escape clause. But to presume that Qaddafi is rational is to misunderstand the nature of his dictatorship. His mad, grumbling orders last week to "purify" Tripoli of "rats, crusaders, and unbelievers," the latest in a stream of eliminationist rhetoric, are the words of a man obviously willing to commit wholesale mass murder. It is to the credit of NATO that it decided to demonstrate that the alliance would not tolerate the perpetration of such atrocities.

A spirit of camaraderie is evident in the faces of the Libyan rebel fighters; they are rightly proud of what they have accomplished. Making my way into Libya last week via Dehiba, Tunisia, the only open land border crossing between the two countries, I stopped for a few hours in the western city of Zintan, which has been in rebel hands since April, and then proceeded to Zawiya, a suburb of Tripoli. The only working guesthouse was full of journalists, but the rebels provided me with accommodation in a grungy apartment resembling a crack den.

Later in the evening, I sat with some young rebel fighters, including Mabrouk Zagrouba, one of Zawiya's local heroes. He is a short man, decked out in a white gown and a "FREE LIBYA" baseball cap. A former military officer, he appeared earlier this year in a widely circulated YouTube video that showed him donning fatigues while lambasting Qaddafi. He was arrested on March 17 and tortured for four days before rebels managed to free him.

The young men admire Zagrouba. The minute he crosses the gate they surround him with cheers, and he responds in kind by showering them with kisses on their cheeks. In one sentence he captures the worst indignity of dictatorship: how it turns ordinary men into monsters. "I never in my dreams imagined that Libyans like us -- people from the internal security, military police -- can do this to Libyans like me," he told me. 

Zagrouba has a novel idea of revolutionary justice: He wants to see Qaddafi captured, tried, and then every year on February 17 made to sit in a cage in a public square to face the ridicule of the people whom he humiliated and oppressed for 42 years.

The determination of Qaddafi's hardened loyalists to keep the regime afloat is evidenced in the carnage that they have wrought across the country, particularly in Tripoli, which for a week was transformed into a jungle of urban warfare. It remains a ghost town. Driving in from Zawiya, about an hour west of Tripoli, there was almost no one on the streets, dotted with the hulks of tanks. A massive, metal statue of "The Green Book," the vain compilation of Qaddafi's insane, Islamo-Marxist rants, has fallen from its formerly privileged place overlooking a crossroads.

"Without Qaddafi, everything is going to be okay," Mohammed al-Bosefi, a 24-year-old medical student, tells me. That simple sentiment encapsulates what practically everyone in Libya thinks -- with the exception of those men, many of them mercenaries, still fighting for Qaddafi. "He's a criminal," says Isa Abudiyeh, a 70-year-old Libyan whom I met on the Tunisia-Libya border. "He supported crimes against the world, so the [world] helped us because they wanted to stop it. And they stopped it."

Libya has been brought so low by the degradations of the Qaddafi mafia that the only place to go is up. It is not reassuring to see boys who look no older than 15 walking around hotel lobbies with Kalashnikovs. Integrating them into a functioning, democratic, and stable state will not be easy. But there is a sense here of national unity, of pride in having accomplished something unthinkable, that one hopes will carry over into the rebuilding effort. For too long, the peoples of the Arab world have lived in humiliation, with their heads perpetually bowed to tyrants, kings, and lunatics like Qaddafi. As victory in Tripoli draws near, at least one thing about Libya is sure -- its people can indeed raise their heads high.

Originally published in "The Weekly Standard"

TRIPOLI -- As fighting continues in the Libyan capital between rebels and fighters loyal to deposed leader Muammar Qaddafi, a sense of calm has finally settled over most of the city, putting something of an end to what has been the most intense conflict to emerge in the "Arab Spring."

Explosions and gunfire were still audible late in the afternoon on August 26, nearly a week after rebel forces entered Tripoli and four days after they made their initial assault on Qaddafi's Bab al-Aziziyah compound.

But leaders of the rebels' National Transitional Council have assured journalists here that they control 90 percent of the city, with the remaining Qaddafi strongholds slowly succumbing to armed attack. More cars are coming onto the streets, though it is far too early to say that any normal sense of life has returned to the war-torn city on the Mediterranean coast.

A drive through downtown Tripoli early on August 26 revealed a ghost town. Martyrs' Square -- formerly Green Square, the plaza in central Tripoli where Qaddafi would regularly rally his supporters -- lies empty. The large scaffolding that used to support a platform and lights is still standing. Graffiti covers concrete barricades surrounding the square with expressions like "Finito" and "GAME OVER." Trash is collecting on the streets, and residents this morning woke up to discover that there was no running water.

'A Qaddafi Hospital'

The Zawiya Street hospital houses the victims of the running street battles that have gripped the city over the past week. Doctors say that they have treated both rebels and Qaddafi supporters alike, with favor toward none. Walking down the hallway, I am assaulted by a horrible stench. After tying a cloth mask over my face, I enter a small room where five decomposing corpses lie under blankets. Flies buzz around the room. I have never smelled anything worse in my life.

As the airport is long closed and major aid organizations have still not established a significant presence here due to the recently ended fighting, Tripoli's hospitals are running short on supplies. When I visit the Zawiya Street hospital around 11 a.m., it is being staffed mostly by nurses and medical students. The doctors, who have been working nonstop shifts, are sleeping.

"I came here yesterday because my neighborhood was surrounded by snipers," says Mohammed el-Bosefi, a 24-year-old medical student who lives on the road connecting the airport to Qaddafi's compound, the two sites in Tripoli that have been the scene of the most intense fighting, and which remain contested. He would have rushed to the hospital earlier had the route there not been so perilous. "I couldn't come here. I stayed in my neighborhood just to help my friends, my relatives, my neighbors," he says.

On August 25, he tells me, more than 100 people were brought to the hospital and 10 died, mainly from gunshot wounds. While Tripoli residents have largely stayed off the streets this past week to avoid the violence, many of the casualties were injured inside their homes, Bosefi says.

"This is a Qaddafi hospital," says Ala Salem, a 22-year-old Tripoli resident, as he surveys the blood-stained floors and decaying walls. "This is what we want to [show] the world."


A Plan Long In Waiting

While Tripoli lies in an obvious state of physical disarray, a strange sense of order pervades its streets. The rag-tag group of rebels -- mostly young men in their early 20s and late teens -- has devised a block-by-block system of checkpoints to ensure that pro-Qaddafi forces cannot advance to secure parts of the city.

Though the capital was late to fall in the civil war -- which began six months ago when protests broke out in the eastern city of Benghazi -- its citizens were well prepared to mount their own resistance when rebel forces finally made their assault. Interviews with rebels and anti-Qaddafi activists reveal an elaborate system of secret cells that were formed three months prior to the liberation of Tripoli.

Mohammed Abou Gahba mans a checkpoint right outside his apartment building with a group of his friends. Standing over six feet tall and with thick arms, he learned English while living in England and is training to become a pilot. But for the past week he has been patrolling his neighborhood with an assault rifle. He says that three months ago, citizens in his neighborhood -- as they have across the city -- began organizing "councils" to prepare just for the moment when rebels would advance on the city. "We do it in secret," he says. "We don't need to be in public because if the government knows, if Qaddafi government knows we have a council here, they will kill us, capture us, and put us in prison."

Abdullah Ahmed Bilal is a commodore in the Libyan Navy and lives not far from the checkpoint manned by Mohammed. He speaks of the Tripoli underground that naturally formed when it became clear that the challenge to Qaddafi's regime, which began in the east, became serious and might actually make its way to the capital. "Before the rebellion came to Tripoli," he says, "for three months we organized...we organized them, everyone was responsible for his area, must do this, this, this, this. Because we have seen during the Iraq war so many people kill, steal so many things, that's why. We organize this thing three months before."

'He Can't Be A Muslim'

August 26 marked the first day that Friday Prayers were held in Libya without the Qaddafi regime in power. Though the Libyan leader liked to paint himself as a hero fighting on behalf of the Islamic faith, like all dictators, he controlled the practice of religion so that it would not present a threat to his god-like status. There was only one hero who would be worshipped in Qaddafi's Libya, and it was not Allah.

Faiq Shineb is the caretaker of the Mulai Muhammed Mosque. Libya's most famous house of worship, it appears on the dinar, the national currency. Growing a beard, as religious Muslim men tend to do, was discouraged under Qaddafi, and would make one an easy target for the intelligence services. The hirsute Shineb tells me with a broad smile that he began growing his current beard a month ago, his own expression of optimistic defiance against a regime that controlled nearly every aspect of the individual's life.

Bilal, the naval officer, says that Qaddafi's forces tried to bomb the Mulai Muhammed Mosque where he prays because some rebel fighters had holed up inside. They missed the house of worship, hitting an adjacent apartment building instead. "How can he be a Muslim like this?" Bilal asks. "He can't be a Muslim."

During the Qaddafi era, imams were selected and monitored by the regime. Some of the men at the mosque tell me that they think there are secret cameras hidden in the mosque's walls. "Last Friday, as before Friday, as before Friday," Shineb says, the imam of this mosque would deliver the same chutba, or sermon, in which Qaddafi, or "Brother Leader," would doubtlessly be praised. Shineb says he hasn't seen the imam since the battle for Tripoli began. "I don't know if he will come back or not," he tells me. "I don't know because maybe the people, when they see him, I don't know what they will do."

In early July, news leaked that a German nonprofit organization, Quadriga, would bestow its annual honor -- given to "role Models for Germany" -- to Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Yes, that Vladimir Putin, the man who, in his 11 years ruling Russia, has presided over the country's slide into authoritarianism, a withering of the rule of law, and a foreign policy of aggression toward its neighbors.

According to the German newspaper "Sueddeutsche Zeitung," Quadriga selected Putin, whom it described as, "in the tradition of Peter the Great, a switchman in the direction of the future" for his fostering "stability through the interplay of prosperity, economy and identity." An outcry erupted in the German media, and a national leader of the country's Green Party, along with a respected historian, resigned from Quadriga's board of trustees.

But ultimately it was the threat from Vaclav Havel, playwright, anti-communist dissident and the first president of a free Czechoslovakia, to return the prize he had won in 2009 that persuaded the foundation to change course. The very same day that Havel's disapproval was reported by the Czech newspaper "Lidove noviny," Quadriga announced that it would cancel the award celebration, originally scheduled for October 3, the date that East and West Germany were reunified. The foundation said that it "most deeply" regretted the displeasure expressed by Havel, whose intervention was all the more stirring considering his poor physical condition: the former president has not made a public appearance since March. ("The truth is that Russia has become a threat to its neighbors," Havel told my co-blogger Michael Zantovsky for a "World Affairs" profile that appeared earlier this year. "I don't care whether this be considered liberal, or conservative, or progressive.")

Anyone with a passing understanding of contemporary Russia can understand the outrageousness of recognizing Vladimir Putin for a contribution to human rights. Doubly ironic is bestowing an award in recognition of the reunification of Germany to a former KGB officer who recruited Germans to spy on their countrymen. Stationed in Dresden from 1985 through 1990, Putin worked hand-in-hand with the Stasi, the East German secret police and one of the most ruthless intelligence services known to man, whose files, according to the historian Timothy Garton Ash, stretched for 110 miles when opened after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The initial decision to give Putin the award may owe partly to the fact that the vice chairman of Quadriga's selection committee, Lothar de Maiziere, was forced to resign from the cabinet of ex-Chancellor Helmut Kohl over rumors that he had worked for the Stasi. But the Quadriga controversy was more than the result of some personal favor. And the organization's choice to rescind its prize to Putin at the behest of Havel is not only a story of the dueling reputations of world figures. The whole episode is illustrative of a worrying trend in German foreign policy that has seen it move closer to Russia at the expense of its traditional Western allies and the new democracies to its east.

Germany's relationship with Russia hinges on its heavy consumption of Russian-supplied gas. Germany, the industrial powerhouse of Europe, is the biggest customer of Gazprom, the Russian energy conglomerate, which Putin has assiduously used as an instrument of foreign policy over the past decade. German-Russian relations reached their peak under the former Social Democratic chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, who once described Putin "an impeccable democrat." Just weeks after stepping down as chancellor in 2005, Schröder became chairman of the board of Nord Stream, a project that would transit Russian gas directly to Germany through a pipeline under the Baltic Sea. By avoiding land routes and bypassing transit countries in central and Eastern Europe, Nord Stream will allow Russia to cut off gas to these nations while continuing to ship it to Germany. Not for nothing did the late American congressman and human rights advocate Tom Lantos deem Schroeder a "political prostitute" in 2007.

Relations between the two countries thawed under Schroeder's Christian Democrat successor, Angela Merkel, who grew up in East Germany and was thus all-too-familiar with the reality of Russian dominance. But over the past five years, relations have slowly returned to the Schröder-esque status quo. When Putin's handpicked successor and puppet, President Dmitry Medvedev, mentioned the word "candidate" in passing during a speech at a conference in Hanover in July, Merkel replied, "Candidate, that's lovely to hear." With a Russian presidential election coming up next year, the remark was hardly accidental. This utterance amounted to, in the words of "International Herald Tribune" columnist John Vinocur, "an approximate political endorsement by a German chancellor of a nonannounced candidate for president" in a country where elections are a farce. More significant was Merkel's March decision, highly controversial within Germany, to abstain from the United Nations Security Council resolution authorizing a no-fly zone over Libya, distancing Germany from France, the U.K., and the U.S. and putting it on the side of Russia and China.

To be sure, Germany has serious economic considerations to weigh regarding Russia that cannot be written off. But being Gazprom's largest customer and Russia's biggest trading partner comes with its own levers. Trade is a two-way street; without a German consumer, Gazprom and its subsidiaries would not be able to collect fees. The relationship between Germany and Russia, in other words, is one of co-dependence, and, on the German side, could become more independent were Berlin serious about weaning itself off Russian gas. The German government's knee-jerk decision in the aftermath of Japan's Fukushima disaster to end its use of nuclear power demonstrates a lack of seriousness when it comes to energy generation.

As with many aspects of contemporary German political life, another reason for Berlin's timorousness toward Moscow is in some part attributable to historic guilt from World War II, when Nazi forces committed heinous acts against Soviet citizens and starved millions of Soviet troops to death in Operation Barbarossa. It is this very sort of admirable, if at times misplaced, feeling of responsibility for the past, however, that doesn't exist in Russian leaders of the Putin mold. "There's a sense we should avoid conflict at any cost," Rolf Fuecks, director of the Heinrich Boll Foundation, recently told RFE/RL about the attitude of the German political establishment toward Russia. The uproar over the Quadriga award, however, indicates that many Germans do not approve of the way in which their country's foreign policy has been headed.

"People, your government has returned to you!" Havel triumphantly declared in his 1990 New Year's Address, his first major speech as president of a free Czechoslovakia. The loss of a human rights prize is hardly bound to make Vladimir Putin blanch; the former KGB man is not known for his sentimentality. But how fitting that a lifelong dissident who sacrificed so much to return government to his people should strike a blow for freedom against a dictator who has stolen government from his.

originally published in "World Affairs Journal"