Colonialism is alive and well in central banking

why they killed gaddafi

Issue 95, 19th February 2021

Ellen Brown 

| American author, attorney, public speaker and advocate of public banking reform. She is the founder and president of the Public Banking Institute.

1,551 words

Read time: approx. 8 mins

2021 marks the 10-year anniversary of NATO’s violent intervention in Libya and the assassination of Muammar Gaddafi. As was suspected at the time – and was later shown in the published emails of Hilary Clinton – NATO acted to prevent Gaddafi founding an African central bank with its own gold-backed currency. That institution would have challenged the power of the dollar and finally allowed Africa to escape its colonial shackles, writes Ellen Brown.

It was thanks to the 2016 publication of Hillary Clinton’s emails that the reason behind NATO’s entry into Libya was revealed. It was to prevent the creation of an independent hard currency in Africa that would free the continent from its economic bondage under the dollar, the IMF and the French African franc. That hard currency would have allowed Africa to shake off the last heavy chains of colonial exploitation.




US-NATO intervention was allegedly undertaken on humanitarian grounds, after reports of mass atrocities under Gadaffi; but human rights organizations questioned the claims after finding a lack of evidence. In the years that followed, however, verifiable atrocities occurred.

The creation of an independent hard currency in Africa would have allowed Africa to shake off the last heavy chains of colonial exploitation.

As Dan Kovalik wrote in the Huffington Post“the human rights situation in Libya is a disaster, as ‘thousands of detainees [including children] languish in prisons without proper judicial review,’ and ‘kidnappings and targeted killings are rampant’.”

Before 2011, Libya had achieved economic independence, with its own water, its own food, its own oil, its own money, and its own state-owned bank. It had arisen under Gaddafi from one of the poorest of countries to the richest in Africa.

Education and medical treatment were free; having a home was considered a human right; and Libyans participated in an original system of local democracy. The country boasted the world’s largest irrigation system, the Great Man-made River project, which brought water from the desert to the cities and coastal areas; and Gaddafi was embarking on a program to spread this model throughout Africa.

But that was before US-NATO forces bombed the irrigation system and wreaked havoc on the country. During the term of President Obama, the situation on the ground in Libya was so bad that he asked his advisors to draw up options including a new military front in Libya. The Defense Department was reportedly standing ready with “the full spectrum of military operations required.”

The Secretary of State’s victory lap was indeed premature, if what we’re talking about is the officially stated goal of humanitarian intervention. But Clinton’s emails revealed another agenda behind the Libyan war; that one, it seems, was achieved.

Mission accomplished?

Of the 3,000 emails released from Hillary Clinton’s private email server in late December 2015, about a third were from her close confidante Sidney Blumenthal. One of these emails, dated April 2, 2011, read in part:


In a ‘source comment’, the original declassified email added:




2. Increase French influence in North Africa,

3. Improve his internal political situation in France,




Other explosive confirmations were detailed by investigative journalist Robert Parry. They included admissions of rebel war crimes, of special ops trainers inside Libya from nearly the start of protests, and of Al Qaeda embedded in the US-backed opposition.

Toppling the global financial scheme

Gaddafi’s threatened attempt to establish an independent African currency was not taken lightly by Western interests.


First some background: It is banks, not governments, that create most of the money in Western economies. This has been going on for centuries, through the process called ‘fractional reserve’ lending. Originally, the reserves were in gold. In 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt replaced gold domestically with central bank-created reserves, but gold remained the reserve currency internationally.


Effectively this meant that the money supply was now created privately as debt at interest. This system requires a continual supply of debtors; and over the next half century, most developing countries wound up in debt to the IMF. The loans came with strings attached, including ‘structural adjustment’ policies involving austerity measures and privatization of public assets.

After 1944, the US dollar traded interchangeably with gold as global reserve currency. When the US was no longer able to maintain the dollar’s gold backing, in the 1970s it made a deal with OPEC to ‘back’ the dollar with oil, creating the ‘petro-dollar’. Oil would be sold only in US dollars, which would be deposited in Wall Street and other international banks.


Violent intervention was not chiefly about the security of the people. It was about money and oil and the security of global banking.

In Libya, Gaddafi also broke the pact; but he did more than just sell his oil in another currency. As these developments were detailed by blogger Denise Rhyne:

“For decades, Libya and other African countries had been attempting to create a pan-African gold standard… a pan-African, ‘hard currency’.


What was possible for Africa





Mystery solved

Hilary Clinton’s emails shed light on another enigma remarked on by early commentators. Why, within weeks of initiating fighting, did the rebels set up their own central bank? At the time, Robert Wenzel wrote in The Economic Policy Journal in 2011:


There the matter would have remained – suspicious but unverified, like so many stories of fraud and corruption – but for the publication of Hillary Clinton’s emails after an FBI probe. They add substantial weight to Newman’s suspicions: violent intervention was not chiefly about the security of the people.


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Ellen Brown
Issue 95, 19th February 2021