A Visit to Libya

I know I share with at least a few of my readers a strong interest in travelling to the rarely-visited and absurd destinations around the globe. I don’t see myself making it to any of them any time soon, so I am left with living through others.

Friend of Registan.net and all-around nice and interesting guy Michael Totten visited Libya last year and his story on the visit has been published in the LA Weekly. When I met him earlier this year, I heard some of the stories from his visit and I’m glad that the full article is finally available.

I saw no corporate advertising: no Pepsi signs, no movie posters and no cute girls flashing milk-mustache smiles for the dairy industry. I did, however, see one hysterical propaganda billboard after another. They were socialist cartoons from the Soviet era, the same kinds of living museum pieces still on display in North Korea and other wonderful places where starving proles live in glorious jackbooted paradise.

The Happy Worker theme was a common one; smiling construction workers wore hardhats, and Bedouins-turned-widget-makers basked in the glory of assembly-line work. One poster showed two hands chained together at the wrist below an image of Qaddafi’s sinister Green Book descending from heaven.

Doesn’t sound too different from some places in Central Asia.

Read the rest of the story here.