Before his untimely, savage death at the hands of his enraged and liberating people, Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi begged to know:
"Do you not know right from wrong?"
This ubiquitous questions the Libyan dictator posed before being dispatched with a gunshot to the head.
The sheer hypocrisy of this beggarly query would certainly shock many, coming from a monstrous megalomaniac who spoiled his own country's petrol largesse while alienating its potential and stagnating growth. Following his self-aggrandizement to the point of self-parody, Gadhafi rattled the nerves of more stable leaders in the region while instigating terrorist attacks throughout the world, all of which culminated in the explosive tragedy of Pan-Am 187 over Lockerbie, Scotland on November 21, 1988.
Still, Gadhafi's empty plea does not fall on deaf ears, but rather exposes the inescapable weight of a guilty man, one who can never outrun his wickedness. From his depraved indifference to the impoverished plight of his people, to the flimsy attempts to wrest a respectable legacy from African nations degraded in turn by disgraceful dictators, the recently deceased "Dear Leader" lived in the shadow of his plottings, all of which burgeoned to unassailable rage and revolution among his people. They knew enough of right and wrong to take decisive advantage of a regional movement, bursting forth from Tunisia, shaking loose the status quo in Egypt, which then emboldened the isolated backwater of North Africa in between.
Indeed, the Libyan people understood the wrong of laboring beneath the interminable self-adulation of a leader who betrayed the hopes of many four decades ago, yet only now seeing an opportunity to be realized once again.
They knew right from wrong, as he did, though he disregarded its hold on him, just as his own people suspended their ethical moorings to dispatch once and for all the government, the legacy, and the lingering effects of a man who had so corrupted right and wrong to his own sick advantage.
No matter how chaotic, no matter who evil the perpetrator, or unsettling the victim's response, the knowledge of right and wrong is a constant for mankind, once which cannot be swept away by power, revolution, oppression, or opposition.
Though Gadhafi's broken body, the first of many battlegrounds for the feuding Libyan people, is now buried in an unmarked grave, his question, his challenge — one which he ostensibly resisted and failed to live up to — will hang over the delicate future of a country which he took by fiat, ran afoul by force, and lost forever in one fierce moment of retribution.