Episode: 140 — "How to Be an Uncommon Human" · Full Episode #140
Season: 10
Language: Libyan Arabic
Suleiman Doga (سليمان دوغة) is a Libyan journalist and media figure. He grew up inside the Gaddafi era, came of age during its most violent stretch, and built a career across Libyan and pan-Arab media. The conversation in EP 140 sits at the centre of the season's preoccupation with how the regime's violence shaped a specific cohort of Libyans psychologically — those who were children in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the dictatorship's televised cruelty was at its most explicit.
The conversation's most charged story concerns his maternal uncle, Yusuf Kharbeesh (يوسف خرباش), who was assassinated by the Gaddafi regime's "stray dogs" — the regime's name for its overseas hit squads — in Italy in 1983. The family was forbidden from mourning him publicly. To grieve the loss of a man killed by the regime was itself an offence. Soon afterwards, the family's grandmother's house was demolished — a piece of additional punishment levied against the wider clan.
See: The Uncle in Italy
Doga described watching live executions on Libyan state television as a child during Ramadan. The regime's televised hangings of dissidents — students, intellectuals, ordinary citizens accused of opposition — were programmed into the evening's family viewing. He framed the memory not as exceptional horror but as ambient horror: the texture of a Libyan childhood in that period.
His most distilled line about his cohort: "We were the worst generation — the first hit by Gaddafi's transformation." He was referring to the 1977–78 reordering of Libyan economic and political life, and to the years immediately after, when the regime was at its most ideological and most violent. The generation born just before the transformation absorbed the full force of what came next while having no framework to understand it.
"We were the worst generation — the first to be hit by Gaddafi's transformation." (EP 140)