Discussion UsefulNotes / MuammarGaddafi

• "Get Back Here!" Boss: After the fall of Tripoli when he fled, the war effort to sweep up the remaining resistance from that point on was just as importantly an effort to chase down Gaddafi before he escaped/regrouped.
• Glass Cannon: The loyalist town of Bani Walid wound up being this. After NTC forces pushed through the town's defenses, they managed to capture 95 percent of the town very quickly.
• Path of Most Resistance / Revealing Cover-Up: Making headways into Sirte with no sign of Gaddafi, the rebels begun speculating that he might have already left the country. And then they stumbled on a loyalist safehouse that put up a much tougher fight.

These aren't No Real Life Examples Please per se, but they're still frigging game mechanics.

Hide / Show Replies

If for whatever reasons listing his life as tropes is OK and I was a bit overzealous, these are not, as they are indexed under No Real Life Examples Please.

• And There Was Much Rejoicing: His death.
• Arch-Enemy: (Indexed under Villains, which is a category within Evil Tropes) He seemed to particularly dislike United States President Ronald Reagan, who gave him the nickname "the mad dog of the Middle East". The rebels held this view of Gaddafi himself.
• Ax-Crazy: Many, many political figures, critics and commentators called him out on his rather psychotic mindset. To repeat, Reagan called him "the mad dog of the Middle East", and Nimeiry once said he had a split personality, "both sides evil".
• Bald of Evil: His son Saif al-Islam◊. And possibly Gaddafi himself.
• Big Brother Is Watching: While in power, Gaddafi put surveillance in government, in factories and in the education center to keep an eye on them, ordered assassinations and placed bounties on critics around the world, forbade anyone from forming political parties, made it illegal for Libyans to engage in political conversations with foreigners, and removed foreign languages from school curricula.
• The Caligula: (Indexed under Villains, which is a category within Evil Tropes) Showed many signs of this, beginning with his extravagant clothing and speeches. On other hand, he somehow managed to stay in power for 42 years despite impoverishing his people, allowing in foreign workers while many of his own people were unemployed. He butchered the education system, removing history and going so far as to claim scientific subjects are useless.
  • He organized executions just to make an example, admitting that "some innocent should be killed to scare the real criminals", attended by college students, complete with live TV broadcasting. He kidnapped a Lebanese girl scout to make her one of his female bodyguards. Let's not get started with those guards... it seems virginity was one of his criteria.
• Calling Your Attacks / Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: (Only Nice Job Fixing It, Villain is indexed on NRLEP) What eventually got him overthrown, when he announced to Libya and the world that he would massacre any who stood against him in Benghazi and everywhere else. That had acted as the catalyst the UN needed to authorize a no fly zone and have NATO carry out an aerial intervention.
• Elite Mooks: (Indexed under Villains, which is a category within Evil Tropes) Besides his female bodyguards, there's also the infamous "Khamis Brigade" named after one of his sons.
• Emergency Presidential Address: His famous "Zenga Zenga" speech.
• Epic Fail: His attempts to destabilize neighboring Chad by supporting various rebel groups backfired so spectacularly, he actually reinforced Chadian unity by causing the rebels and the government to team up to fight him.
• Evil Overlord
• Evil Is Hammy: (Not indexed on NRLEP itself, but Evil Tropes is) Sort of his thing.
• Four-Star Badass: Averted. For all the resistance his loyalists put up in the battle for Sirte, he himself went down rather quickly when the rebels captured him (in fact, his death process was probably extended by the rebels deciding to beat the hell out of him rather than just straight-out killing him).
• From Nobody to Nightmare: He started off as a small-time junior officer, but then became the military dictator of Libya for 42 years.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: (Not indexed on NRLEP itself, but Evil Tropes is) The rest of the world really got physically involved in the 2011 uprising after Gaddafi started threatening to blow passenger jets out of the sky if the UN didn't butt out, resulting other countries actively helping the rebels' attempt to bring him down.
  • Doubly so, since Libya has actually done this before.
  • He was reportedly fearful of military coups against him and deliberately kept his army weak to prevent this.
• I Have You Now, My Pretty: Apparently several Libyan women were raped by him. Not surprising at all, since no Libyan woman would ever say no to the Brother Leader.
• It's All About Me: Just like another infamous Arab dictator, he plastered the capital with enormous posters of himself (they were cheerfully torn down and burnt when the rebels captured the city). Reportedly he gave a gift to his underlings of watches with his face on the dial.
• I Was Quite a Looker: Relative to his later-in-life, melted-face look, the young Gaddafi looked pretty handsome◊.
• Kill It with Fire: One of his many Kick the Dog moments during the war was to round up several dozen of his opponents in a cell and execute them with grenades, strictly For the Evulz. [Though Kill It with Fire isn't indexed, For the Evulz is under Evil Tropes and Kick the Dog is also indexed on NRLEP]
• Last Villain Stand: (Indexed under Villains, which is a category within Evil Tropes) After the brigade in charge of defending Tripoli surrendered without a fight, he was considered an Anticlimax Boss for a time, until his remnant made their stand in his hometown of Sirte, where they resisted the rebels for nearly a month. He was killed as the city fell.
  • The loyalists sure put up one helluva fight - according to That Other Wiki, the total number of rebel casualties is six times higher than that of the loyalists. And the loyalists were greatly outnumbered, too (1,000-5,000 vs. 16,000 rebels).
• Narcissist
• Near-Villain Victory: His forces were at the outskirts of Benghazi before the NATO airforce showed up.
• No Honor Among Thieves: (Not indexed on NRLEP itself, but Evil Tropes is) He was betrayed by fellow dictator and President of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, in his final days if this Telegraph article is anything to go by. ^note  Synopsis: Gaddafi was contacting a Syrian TV station via satellite phone to broadcast his messages in Libya. Assad negotiated a deal with the French to hand over the number in exchange for a lifting of pressure on his regime.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: If you look at some of his quotes such as that "a woman has the right to vote whether she is male or female" or "without electricity we would all be watching television in the dark" or proclaiming himself the king of kings in Africa, it seems like he was a complete moron, but he did manage to stay in power for 42 years in a highly tribal country and survived a superpower trying to kill him in The '80s. Read more here.
• Permanent Elected Official: Averted. Gaddafi served as Secretary-General of the General People's Congress (or Head of State) after the revolution in 1967 but resigned from the post in 1977. Part of his argument against standing down was that he didn't have an official office to resign from.
• Rasputinian Death: The precise details are uncertain, but apparently this is how things went: his convoy was strafed by French warplanes, he was hit in the legs, he fled and was captured, and was shot at least two more times in the torso and head. It's not known if he was hit by stray fire or just executed.
• Troll: In general with regards to other nations, but particularly the Arab League and once famously the UN General Assembly back in 2009.
  • There's a famous picture (in the Arab world at least) of Gaddafi smoking a cigar at an Arab League meeting as he ignores the guard leaning over to tell him to put it out. The most hilarious thing is that he didn't even smoke at the time; he literally did it solely to thumb his nose at convention.
• The Usurper: (Indexed under Villains, which is a category within Evil Tropes) As mentioned above, he came to power through a coup against King Idris of Libya.
• Villainous Crush: On former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, no less. The rebels even found a sizable photo album full of pictures of her in his compound.
  • Secretary Rice actually visited him once. She was creeped out when he showed her a Fan Vid he'd had made of her. It featured a song called "Black Flower in the White House", which he had had written for her. She discusses it here.
• Villainous Breakdown / Sanity Slippage: Compare him as a small-time colonel to how he was as a dictator. Just when the world thought the guy couldn't get any crazier, he started ranting about the uprising against him by his own people being fueled by Zionist agents, imperialist foreign powers and LSD,^note Well, "hallucinogenic pills", which became a pan-Arab meme for a while while accusing the Western countries of orchestrating the whole thing in an insidious plot to destroy Libya's air conditioners.
  • This was just the tip of the iceberg for this trope. The more his power slipped, the more his sanity devolved. Many dictators get hit by this pretty hard when their power is threatened, and Gaddafi just fell significantly faster than most.
  • Of particular interest is the speech he gave while sitting in a broken car in a blown up building holding an umbrella, a large part of which was him commenting on the rain. No, we don't get it either.
  • After being deposed, he issued an epic rant which just screams this trope. In it he made three very conflicting points at once, including basically saying "fuck you" to Libya while encouraging them to rise up and rebel against the, well, rebels.

Edited by 151.230.175.147

Since he's now dead, perhaps the main description can be rewritten to reflect that he is a historical figure. That's not the same as changing it to past tense, which was already done by another troper, but to rewrite it more along the lines of Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini's pages. Guys think its a good idea?

Final Fantasy, Foreign Policy, and Bollywood. Helluva combo, that...

The number of tropes has increased a lot over the last month, perhaps we could split the list in "Libya under Gaddafi", or something of the sort, and "Libyan uprising and death"? It would make the list a little more clear.

Edited by Telenil

We should put a picture of him in the article. Anyone agree/disagree?

Final Fantasy, Foreign Policy, and Bollywood. Helluva combo, that... Hide / Show Replies

Why is there a YMMV and a Crowners tab? This article is about a person, not a movie or other type of media.

Unfortunately, the page is locked, and while I do know that it can be unlocked by asking politely in the forums, I feel that this isn't that much of an issue. Besides, I'm not sure I know how to remove them.

To any Tropers that read this after the article is unlocked, and know how to remove the aforementioned tabs, please do so. If this has already been done, my mission is complete.

Hide / Show Replies

We should clean-up his introduction page to make it less encyclopedic and more to the point.

In RWBY, every girl is Best Girl. Hide / Show Replies