MBS: Make Saudi Arabia Into An Open Society.

What’s the way out for the world? More advanced thinking, as produced by direct democracy. The Open Society, was practiced by Athens, 25 centuries ago, and extolled by general Pericles and his thoughtfull spouse, the great philosopher Aspasia: “Our city is thrown open to the world, though and we never expel a foreigner and prevent him from seeing or learning anything of which the secret if revealed to an enemy might profit him.” The Open Society is a crucial ingredient in real democracy.

Arguably the two most successful polities the direct descendency of which we presently enjoy, Greece-Rome and Qin, practiced quite a bit of the same openness, buttressed by legalism. Rome copied deliberately the leading, most democratic Greek City states. China and Europe then descend from then most-Open Societies, Qin, Greek democracies and their Roman parrot.

Athens’ power rested on high tech, her navy, and silver mines (the latter paying for the former; slaves operated the mines). 

Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salam (MBS) has been the effective ruler of Saudi Arabia. He has modernized this fascinating realm with violent enthusiasm. It is unlikely he could keep on modernizing without violence: a Saudi king was assassinated by a nephew, a little while ago. MBS has many enemies inside the Royal family, let alone in the rest of Arabia… naturally he has to look terrifying to insure his own safety. Authentic progressives must agree that more progress is to be had with MBS than with regressive raving maniacs mad with god… who have often been the alternative.

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MBS should make Saudi Arabia into an Open Society. This is the best, safest solution. How safe is that for the Saud family? How safe is it for Arabia?

Arabia is so backwards in mentality, from Wahhabism, that it will take a long time to effect change, and MBS and eventual successors, should, and could lead the charge. So as change leaders, they would be safe for a long time… considering the long way to go.

A precedent calling for forging ahead arises from the French Revolution. Louis XVI of France’s error was to stop half-way: Louis saw the need for change, his wife read the most recent subversive literature (Voltaire, Rousseau)… and Louis had not wanted to be king. Conscious that French plutocrats had to pay taxes (they were exempt and the US war of independence had ruined France), Louis decided to start a revolution. However, when he found that it involved a constitutional monarchy, he tried to stop the revolution. One thing led to another, many heads got cut.

Emperor Nicholas II of Russia had the same exact problem: Nicholas instituted democratizing reforms, so democratizing that the Kaiser and the Prussian General Staff thought that their own military dictatorship was undermined by them. However, after the Germans declared war, Nicholas abandoned all and any reforms… although he was stridently and extensively warned of the danger of doing so… for years.

So the advice of progressives to MBS should be for MBS to lead the change and the charge, and not falter: be both the autocrat in chief, and the revolutionary leader. He can then argue that he inherited the problem, and nobody is in a better position to solve it. He can also argue he needs muscle to do so against the old believers (Peter the Great of Russia had the same problem) and various plutocrats who inherited wealth and power too. A show of goodwill will bring forgetfulness, and redemption. An Open Society is always smarter and, as catastrophic changes are sure to pile up, as climate change accelerates, Saudi Arabia needs all the brains it can get. MBS can stay the brain in chief, even if rough. Open up!

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Some are particularly resentful because a Washington Post journalist was cut up, more or less alive, and MBS had something to do with it, considering some of his subordinates did it (all of SA is subordinate to MBS!)

Well, yes, sure. And also MBS is criticized for the war in Yemen with opponents, the Houthis, propped by Iran. MBS was allied with the UAE. I am no specialist of that conflict. Obama sent drones and hunted Al Qaeda in the Bin Laden ancestral home region…. busting the occasional weddings, killing hundreds. I don’t see why Obama gets a pass for killing wedding parties of thoroughly innocent people, hundreds of innocents whom Obama ordered killed, while MBS is vilipended because some Saudi security tortured one opponent to death. If it turns out, it’s Obama and the US Deep State who got MBS and the UAE in Yemen.

Indeed, Yemen’s civil war began in 2014 when Houthi insurgents—Shiite rebels with links to Iran and a history of rising up against the Sunni government—took control of Yemen’s high altitude capital and largest city, Sana’a, demanding lower fuel prices and a new government. After failed negotiations, the rebels seized the presidential palace in January 2015. President Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi and his government resigned. Beginning in March 2015, a coalition of Gulf states led by Saudi Arabia launched a campaign of economic isolation and air strikes against the Houthi insurgents, with U.S. logistical and intelligence support… So MBS’ Yemen adventure started in Washington.

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There is a big difference between very discreetly expressed view points of MBS, and say the rehashing of atrocious mass-murdering world-imperial Kremlin propaganda to which Pope Francis abandonned himself recently, in a most un-Christian and thoroughly regressive way. The Pope said that a big “very wise guy” told him that NATO was “barking at the gates of Russia”. It apparently did not come to the attention of the geographically unaware Pope that Russia is all over Eurasia, over 11 time zones. The Pope doesn’t realize that it is immoral that a country owns so much real estate conquered over dozens of ethnicities… Even Lenin and Stalin understood this… But the Pope doesn’t.

So MBS? MBS has a difficult situation. The Pope doesn’t. And Putin threatened the entire planet with “radioactive ashes” if it doesn’t obey him, in an attempted return to the maximal expansion of the Kremlin empire achieved when Europe conquered Africa… to pacify and modernize it… Whereas Russia was establishing its Nineteenth Century empire for strictly genocidal purposes over many old nations (including the Balts, Poland, Ukraine… not just Tatars and Chechens).

No evil of that order with MBS, but a will to progress. So give him reason to progress more. The same applies to other authoritarian regimes progressing out of tenebrous pasts…

Patrice Ayme

Mecca at night. The scale is enormous. Kaaba, the Cube, is the 13 meter tall black building at the center of Islam’s most important mosque, the Masjid al-Haram in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, is perfectly visible in the center of the photograph. The cult of the meteorite at the center is older than Islam. Many buildings from Mahomet’s time have been destroyed to be replaced by modern ones, sadly. It’s also sad that non-Muslims are forbidden in Mecca. It would be good to open that up. Any savage can penetrate Christianism’s most sacred buildings (although not all).

There Is No Aristocracy But For Democracy. Meanwhile Plutocracy Is Just Evil Power. And Absolute Power of a Few, Intrinsically Evil.

[This is a much expanded version of a comment of mine dutifully censored by the New York Times, who knows well how to make it so that it’s readership is not poisoned by true and most relevant ideas. The article I commented on was Erdogan Says Saudis Planned Khashoggi’s Killing, and Demands Answers.

Conclusion of the NYT article: “Turkish president Erdogan does not want a direct fight with Saudi Arabia. He does not want to turn this into a bilateral argument between Saudi Arabia and Turkey. He wants it to be on one side M.B.S. and on the other a murdered journalist.”]

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The NYT article was basic, and cautious. Some altitude was needed, to address that debate properly, I reckoned. That “murdered journalist”, Khashoggi, was much more than just a journalist, but also a part of the Saudi establishment, prior, and a propagandist for the Muslim Brotherhood, for decades, and, lately, made himself an excellent advocate for democracy in the Middle East. Erdogan himself exerts dictatorial powers of the Turkish media reminiscent of those exerted by president Xi in China.  

What the Khashoggi affair calls into question is the fact that it is considered Politically Correct, worldwide, to bestow huge powers on some individuals. Having heads of state ordering murders is OK for the PC crowd (because it doesn’t actively condemn it, and instead implicitly admired the mass murder by drone prone Obama). It shouldn’t be…

(The Saudis, as a part of an elaborate plot, had a double of Khashoggi go around Istanbul after murdering the original, in order to make people believe he had not been killed… They had not expected Khashoggi’s fiancée to be waiting outside, and the intense Turkish surveillance of, the Consulate…)

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“Aristocracy” means power of the best: a self-glorification. In truth, aristocracy is just plutocracy, power of Pluto, the god of hell. Too much power doesn’t just corrupt, it turns individuals into demons. Mohammed bin Salman, MBS is not just a perpetrator, but victim of a mental process no one warned him about!

Leaders have so much power nowadays, ordering the killing of others expeditiously proves all too irresistible. We can all turn into Khashoggis all too easily.

Khashoggi, carefree, firmly entering the Saudi Consulate. Questions remaining: was he dismembered, starting with his fingers, he typed insolent statements with, while conscious, and did MBS order that old fashion punishment explicitly?

So Khashoggi entered the Saudi Consulate, for the second time in two days, to receive a statement confirming his divorce from his establishment wife (who disapproved of Khashoggi’s critics against MBS). “Saud” is the name of a family who owns Arabia. Having seized it by force, after making a conspiracy of mutual aid with the Islamist fanatic Wahhab. Late the UK, and then the US would make another conspiracy with the Saud patriarch about oil and finance.

Just ask the relatives of those who, in various places the USA was not at war with, innocently gathered, and all were killed in a drone strike!.. Because the gathering had the “signature” of terrorism, we were told by the US government. At least when Khashoggi was hacked into piece, only him died, not the whole neighborhood.

The solution to lethal, arbitrary leadership, all over the world? Not just reduce the power of  MBS, but reduce the power of “leaders”, all over.

The West may as well lead towards much more democracy, the rest will (be forced to) follow. Just criticizing Saudi Arabia is not enough.

Evil loves the Dark, already observed the Persian religion 4,000 years ago. Throwing a light on how Khashoggi died is a good thing. It would be even better to throw a light on the entanglement of CIA, SIA, and Bin Laden in the 1990s… Or how exactly the Afghan War started… And the role of the USA in that (hint: it was primordial).

1979 US ATTACK AGAINST AFGHANISTAN Secretly Ordered

The USA actually pushed, for years before that, Pakistan’s Inter Service Intelligence, to create a Muslim Fundamentalist war in Afghanistan. So it was not just a question of Democratic President Jimmy Carter. The drivers of US fundamental policies in the Middle East wanted to cause a Muslim Fundamentalist war in the Muslim world, to create there a factor of division. Once people are divided and at each other’s’ throats, they can be easily manipulated.

So Afghanistan was turned from a heaven of peace and advanced civilization into a house of horrors (my parents went there quite a bit in the 1970s: it was very safe, and secular… As I explained somewhere else, my friends of my father were mandated by governments in France and Afghanistan to find out about the considerable mineral riches of Afghanistan. That effort was not instigated by US plutocrats, so was intolerable…)

So let’s dig into Saudi Arabian potentates’ evil ways. But let’s not forget who pulled the strings to start with… Not just a geographical superpower, the US, but a mood animating the USA, and not just the USA, all of Western Civilization, which the Saudi princes have attempted to reproduce, namely using fascist power (generally found in the Qur’an, but also well beyond that), to instill a reign of terror.

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Rushed hush ushers sheep best:

My original NYT comment was much shorter, of course. Yet, apparently the NYT disapproves of allusions to the fact the USA is who, ultimately, pulls the strings in the Middle East… and started the Afghan war, now the longest war of the USA, by a long shot. Actually, the alliance between the Saud family and the UK was signed in massive blood by the 1920s (and not just Ottoman blood, during WWI, see Lawrence of Arabia… which was fair, as the Ottomans occupied Arabia, but Arab blood, a more dubious situation…). US plutocrats and oilmen came around in the 1930s, to culminate in the Great Bitter Lake Conspiracy we enjoy to this (by “we” I mean that, although the conspiracy has been organized by the USA, Europeans countries profit from it, including France, as they run on Saudi oil…)

Conspiracies are managed best, when they are secret, or, at least discrete, and not a matter of public debate. This is why the NYT wanted its public not be exposed to my Chomsky-like revelations, this time again, as with many other times before that (especially as I am often better documented, and more balanced: I don’t just decry evil as the PC crowd does, bleating perfically, in fake outrage, except when their favorites: Clinton, Obamas, Bushes attacking Iraq, do it… Instead I try to understand evil ways, and see how justified or unavoidable they were…)

Absolute power corrupts. Everything. Not just those who directly profit from it. But also the very institutions which tolerate it, and the People who enjoy it.

Aristos: best. Kratia: power.

Want the best to govern? Want Aristocracy then? Well, the best form of government is total democracy, enabling total debate, and no straying into violations of human rights.

The light should shine on all as its name is truth. 

Patrice Ayme

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Let’s ponder again:

Aristos: best. Kratia: power.

Want the best to govern? Want Aristocracy then? Well, the best form of government is total democracy, enabling total debate, and no straying into violations of human rights.

How to enact it? What went wrong with Athenian total democracy was the lack of democratic institutions enforcing no straying out of proper, full informed debate, and no institution enforcing human rights (ostracism was used willy-nilly in Athens, and the national assembly was often hysterical, not just mass murderous and idiotic…)

Now we do have democratic institutions (although not perfect… they are best in existence than not)…