Dictator’s useful idiots happy to take his money

This has also been true of Arab and Third World dictatorships. The psychotic murderer Che Guevara is an icon of style chic, even today. Cuba's revolting dictator, Fidel Castro, with his Havana Stalinism, was often touted as a great and wise statesman. Even a year or two ago the intellectual and moral giant Michael Moore paid tribute to Castro's health service without mentioning his gulag of dissidents.

But no devotion was ever stranger than that lavished on the Libyan dictator, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. Of course, intellectuals always love money and Gaddafi had plenty of it. There was a period in my life where I couldn't wait each week to visit the big news stand at Sydney's Town Hall to read the new edition of the Workers News. This was the journal of a Trotskyite grouplet, the Socialist Labour League. It was financed in part by Gaddafi's munificence, and I rejoiced at the exotic ideological material it offered. In among the routine denunciations of uranium mining and calls for greater trade union militancy would be a couple of pages extolling Gaddafi's fatuous and incoherent green book and the Libyan revolution.

 No intellectual in Western life has had a more doleful influence than that champion of frauds, Edward Said. His animating idea was that all Western scholarship on the Orient, by which he meant the Arab world, was a kind of false consciousness, trapped in a narrative of colonialism and Western superiority.

The silliness of the idea has led to its reverse, a kind of reflexive idealising of "the other", so Arab despots, extremists and millenarian mass murderers are imbued in many progressive circles of the West with all kinds of qualities of wisdom and kindness which they singularly do not possess.

 Gaddafi was the most absurd example. He of the 40 virgin praetorian guard, he of the murderous suppression of dissent, he of the dysfunctional sons arrested around Europe for beating up servants, he also of the nuclear weapons program and the sponsor of countless acts of terrorism, this man for a time was a hero to elements of the Western Left, including even parts of the Australian Labor party. For my sins I seem to have tracked some of the odd doings of the Gaddafi family for decades, especially as they relate to Australia.

Gaddafi's best known political subsidiary in the West was the Trotskyite Workers Revolutionary Party in Britain. This mad group for a time attracted some support from the famous Redgrave family. It was later exposed that its leader, Gerry Healy, was a serial sexual exploiter of its younger female members. Like the big dictator Muammar, so went the little dictator Gerry.

But Gaddafi had his loyal legions in Australia too, beyond the Socialist Labor League. Bill Hartley, for many years a member of Labor's national executive, was a devoted proponent of Gaddafi, though it seems he received more lavish subsidy from Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Indeed there was an active Iraq Friendship Society in Australia, with a number of Labor luminaries from the Left, while Saddam was in power.

During the 1980s, when Gaddafi was sponsoring terrorism in Latin America, Ireland and the Middle East, and conducting his own terrorist operations, he also turned his attentions to Australia. In 1984 I wrote a story about Gaddafi's government placing advertisements in Arabic language newspapers in Australia asking for Australian Arabs to join the military units of his worldwide struggle against imperialism. This story had some influence on the law forbidding the recruitment of foreign mercenaries in Australia.

It also caused a kerfuffle in the Australian parliament, and when Michael MacKellar, the Liberals' then spokesman on foreign affairs, raised it in parliament a Left-wing Labor member took a point of order against him, saying that he shouldn't speak about a respected trading partner of Australia's in such terms.

My closest encounter with the Gaddafi clan came, however, in 2003, when I interviewed young Saif Gaddafi, Muammar's second son. He was hosted in Australia by the mining industry, which quite sensibly wanted to get involved in exploration and production in Libya. And he was touted as the moderate, humane, reforming version of the Gaddafi family. But there is something about tyrants' sons. They rarely turn out well. Young Saif entered in a cloud of flunkies, a blonde floozy on his arm, overweight bodyguards everywhere, himself in a white linen suit (he dressed rather like John Pilger) sporting designer stubble and a shaved head.

What's it like being Colonel Gaddafi's son, I asked. Not easy, he said. His father didn't always realise that he was just like any other Libyan who likes to "dive in Australia, ski in France" and generally do the ordinary things that ordinary Libyans like to do. He was supposed to tell me how the new, modern Libya opposed terrorism. And he started out OK, telling me the attacks on New York on 9/11 were thoroughly opposed by him and dad.

"Of course," he said, "we're talking about the New York bombings, not the Pentagon, that's a military target and we hate that building." At this point a mining executive leapt forward to say that what Gaddafi meant was that he came with a message of peace. Nonetheless, I persisted and Gaddafi Jr described the Pentagon as "the devil's building" and said it was perfectly OK to attack the Pentagon. On the other hand, the CIA, he told me, his family liked co-operating with. I'm not sure if the CIA was entirely grateful for this encomium.

Like a lot of tyrants' sons, Saif was a multi-talented fellow, acquiring a PhD from the London School of Economics, to which his family contributed generously, exhibiting his paintings in Paris, etc. His brother, Hannibal, was arrested several times in Europe, variously for beating his girlfriend and beating servants. One arrest in Switzerland induced Muammar Gaddafi to demand that the UN dissolve Switzerland.

Another brother was the head of a feared security agency. The utter, absolute, intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the Western activists and intellectuals who embraced these gangster dictators is matched today in the same fatuous calls for dialogue and understanding of Islamist extremism in its many guises. The gullibility of a certain sort of progressive is almost infinite.