Heart of Darkness

We live in the flicker – may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was there yesterday.
Joseph conrad

Admit it: you enjoyed Muammar Gaddafi's death. Perhaps in recent months your conscience has led you to defend the long-serving dictator from the global oil frenzy, but deep down – tell the truth – you appreciated the public humiliation of the villain by the Libyan people. The first reaction is denial, I understand. "Even the most cruel of despots deserves a fair trial," that sort of thing. Besides, it doesn't look good to admit any pleasure in watching images that suggest the impalement of a dictator, even if he ordered the deaths of 1,2 prisoners. But you liked it, because the brutality and savagery with which Gaddafi's corpse was treated by the people are there, inside you.

We were the ones who impaled Gaddafi. Well, at least some of us, who, free from the scruples essential to good social interaction, surrendered to the most primitive and genuine desires for revenge. The result: of the dictator who for over 40 years deserved the attention of powerful professional cameras, only the pixelated images from an outdated cell phone model remain; images responsible for immortalizing in seconds the most recent celebration of the darkness that every man struggles daily to repress in the depths of his soul.

I apologize if this whole thing still doesn't make sense, but you understand what I mean when I equate us with the men who are to be judged for torturing and killing Gaddafi, right? It's hard to admit, but put yourself in the place of one of those Libyans who, condemned until then to live under an authoritarian regime, found, after months of hunting and with numerical advantage, a defenseless oppressor. What would you do? Would you run to the NATO troops to ask for a pair of handcuffs?

The cameraman responsible for capturing Gaddafi's last breaths unintentionally summarized Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Coppola's Apocalypse Now in 30 seconds. It's horror, baby – you ask "why?, why?", and the late Michael Jackson tells you it's human nature. We are exactly that, but varnished with one or another of those adornments that sustain civilization. Perhaps that's why it's so unsettling to confront the images of a lifeless body being dragged across the ground: it could be you dragging it.

Thanks to YouTube, it's no longer necessary to descend into the depths of the forest in a boat with Joseph Conrad or travel through Vietnam with Francis Ford Coppola to remember who we are. If you prefer to continue believing that images of Gaddafi offended you because of human rights violations and such, that's fine, but I know what your ancestors did last summer and, therefore, what you can do next summer.

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