A blogger has been publicly flogged for encouraging free speech in Saudi Arabia. Raif Badawi, 30, who set up the Free Saudi Liberals website, was arrested in 2012, and charged with offences including insulting Islam. On his conviction last May, Badawi was fined 1m riyals (£175,000, $280,000) and sentenced to ten years in jail and 50 lashes every week for 20 weeks in a public square in Jeddah.
One of the only good things about fracking (no, this is not a non-sequitur) is that it promises to make the US a bigger source of oil than Saudi Arabia*. If that happy eventuality arises, we can hopefully stop pandering to those cruel barbarians in Saudi Arabia, halt the armament sales, and let the nasty regime fall. And good riddance. Enough of supporting these antiquated regimes, their beliefs as arid as the desert around them.
* That is, if a majority of frackers (who are apparently over-borrowed and expected oil prices to be close to $100 a barrel, not $50-60) survive.
The side effect of the decline of Saudi Arabia is that it will adversely affect its working class. The elites will probably survive, because they have a huge amount of money saved and invested; in the event of a crisis, they will almost certainly pass on the costs to those who have nothing to do with the regime’s nefarious activities.
In the 80s, most liberals wanted to boycott the apartheid regime in South Africa. But Margaret Thatcher was opposed to this approach, partly because it would be the black working class that would suffer. Its the same with Saudi Arabia today.
Doesn’t this reasoning lead to the view that suffering working people are the BEST guarantee against reforming damaging institutions?
The existing injustices already disempower the working classes so one must NOT reform them because the weaker classes will still be disempowered? The working people, be they in the fields or the factories, suffer either way but at least reforms can point to gradual redistribution of power.
From Rome to Thatcher–that’s what concerned established power systems, not the welfare of the working classes but the reallocation of the power of the status quo elites which reform entails.
I’m not saying those institutions shouldn’t be reformed because the working class would be hurt. I’m saying that those institutions ought to be reformed, but the way in which you make that happen, must be in a way that doesn’t hurt the working class in the process, however unintentionally.
Ah, yes, now I see your meaning. Well then, we agree. 🙂