by Ramin Mazaheri for The Saker Blog
File it under “things we’d like to be true…so we never examine it”: The West’s unstated belief that their politics are exponentially morally superior to those of Saudi Arabia. “We only work with them – we are not at all like them,” is what it boils down to.
This article aims to show just how similar “Oriental despotism” is to “Occidental domination” in 2018 by revealing the similarity of Jamal Khashoggi’s socio-political vision to that of Westerners.
This is the final part in a 4-part series which aims to pull the sheet off Khashoggi, who is as much as a “reformer” as Hillary Clinton was a “leftist” or Emmanuel Macron was “centrist”. I think it’s necessary because there has been so much talk about Khashoggi, but very little examination of “Khashoggi-Thought” – what he espoused and stood for.
Part 1 showed what true “dissidents” in the Muslim World look like and why the elite-defending Khashoggi does not qualify; Part 2 showed how his rabid anti-Iran warmongering and his hysterical anti-Shia sectarianism precluded any possibility of his being even merely a “reformer”; Part 3 demystified and stripped the Islamophobia from “Salafism” to show that many in the West want to “return to a golden era” – like 1776 in America – just as Khashoggi and other Salafists want to return to 676; and also reminded readers that the West and the Muslim World are the only two regions of the world where we still find supporters of monarchy, which is an inherently reactionary and inegalitarian concept in 2018.
Khashoggi, just like Western conservatives and centrists, denied any sort of modern leftist political movement – socialism, Islamic socialism, etc. – which could undermine the social powers as apportioned up until the 19th century.
Pushing technocratic & elitist bourgeois democracy, anti-socialist economics, window-dressing cultural liberality, and rationalising warmongering is what modern fake-leftism is; because this definition fits Khashoggi, the Clintons, Macron, Blair and others, we now see how similar they are. Therefore, the death, and alleged martyrdom, of Khashoggi allows us to show what Western democracy truly wants to defend: we will see it stands 100% in favor of modern despotism – either/or monarchical or bourgeois – both in the Orient and the Occident.
Non-jingoistic Westerners should not be dismayed at such a thesis: it allows us to increase global unity by showing the similarity of the 1%.
Rationalising China’s success is a must across the West, but how do they do it in Saudi Arabia?
A good test to see if someone is a fake-leftist is to get their views on China. Everybody loves Cuba – music, dancing, beaches, cigars – so supporting them is too easy; it takes a real leftist to squint hard at China and see their leftist commitment and beauty.
If someone claims to be a leftist but only talks about the only-crimes-and-never-successes of the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution, instead of their 266% GDP increase since 2008…this person is a centrist at best – i.e. a fake-leftist. (I write from the Lost Decade-denying Eurozone, which is at -12% since 2008) Such persons get seriously annoyed at being properly pegged on the global political spectrum like this…but I did not invent the spectrum.
Absolutely everybody is starting to notice China’s huge leaps amid the West’s austerity-imposed suicide. But how do they explain it?
Is it the result of their rock-solid socialist constitution, written in 1982? Or is it by accusing the Chinese of having a totalitarian system? Or is it by accusing them of being “radishes” – only red on the outside. Due to their undeniable success, we journalists simply must make some explanation – what did Khashoggi choose?
Khashoggi provided the answer in this article run by Saudi media giant Al-Arabiya, Saudi Arabia, the Chinese model and Vision 2030.
It’s an interesting article because he basically tries to equate the Saudi monarchical governing class with the Chinese Communist Party. LOL, unexpected, no? The Long March, the Cultural Revolution, the Century of Humiliation – all that produced something…just like the blood-red commie “House of Saud Party”, if you believe Khashoggi!
“In fact, the Chinese economy has always been and continues to be a fair economy compared to similar totalitarian regimes. Moreover, the Chinese economy is suitable for all classes of the society and displays a firm determination to fight corruption to the point that leaders, who get involved in corruption, including receiving briberies or committing frauds, are executed.
I think Saudi Arabia can achieve the same because of its cultural background. It is an Islamic country….”
Seemingly no Muslim outside of Saudi Arabia would say that Saudi Arabia is an “Islamic country”; it is the “Kingdom of Saudi Arabia” and not even the “Islamic Kingdom of Saudi Arabia”. As I related in Part 3, a common line in the Muslim world is “Saudi Arabians are not Muslims, they are Wahhabis.”
Beyond the Islamic objections…it is rather hilarious that a total monarchist – a system based purely on class elitism, anti-democratic disempowerment, intimidation, and blood instead of brains – thinks that the House of Saud can all of a sudden produce something which “is suitable for all classes of the society”.
Such a misguided idea, since we must classify it in order to fully understand it, is an 18th century idea known as benevolent despotism…and it is totally reactionary. It’s unofficial motto of “Everything for the people, nothing by the people” is not remotely similar in essence or practice to the People’s Democratic Dictatorship in China; it is, however, extremely similar to the ideal in Western Liberal Democracies in the 21st century, as they expound a (allegedly) merit-based, “benevolent technocratism”.
Benevolent technocratism – which was essentially the campaign platform of Hillary Clinton, and which provides the justification for (still-failing) economic policy domination by the Eurozone’s “best” economists – is 100% fake-leftism.
Benevolent technocratism is the same old despotism of the bourgeois, and thus fake-leftism
Khashoggi’s view of ideal governance is perfectly described for us in this same article:
“I like to simplify things for a better understanding before I try to make others understand them. That’s why I try to imagine the National Center as an operating room where in the middle is the Deputy Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman as the chairman of the Council of Economic and Development Affairs surrounded by ministers, members of the Council, and other experts.
Right in front of them, I imagine personal computers linked to the room’s database and a few meters far many screens showing numbers and graphics with goals set for each ministry and government institution. I also imagine the chairman of the Council zooming in on one screen to see the reasons behind flaws and the concerned minister explaining why they occurred and suggesting solutions to tackle them. This system, as I imagine it, is able to make every minister work hard and held accountable.
From this scope, can the plan be monitored and its executors held accountable with complete transparency without an elected Council and without the basis of democracy to achieve the success of both the transformation plan and the Vision? Personally, I think this is possible but it can only happen in Saudi Arabia considering its social and cultural background, which is based on Islamic ethos and considering the fact that others have done it as well.”
Does anyone not envision Eurozone/EU leadership operating in the same “too smart to be touched by commoners” style? Khashoggi’s vision is basically to be a West European-aping technocracy where the “talented tenth” rules with assumed but unproven moral aims.
Khashoggi admits – and without shame – that this fantasy lacks democracy, but this fantasy is also robotic, technocratic, clinical and nearly inhuman. There is no way any of these so-called experts have spent a day sweating in the Saudi sun, yet they sit in total removal from Saudi society and decide policy for 33 millions. (Oh, and they’re all related, LOL; or, like in France, they all went to the same school.)
Crucially, because they have the data and computers then of course they will have the same success as China! Too bad political science is not a “science”, and that moral motivations matter. What Khashoggi fails to realize is that China’s “technocrats” get to the top by having a PhD in something not offered in any Western university: socialism (with Chinese characteristics).
The US, being not Western Europe, also aspires to ape this aristocracy, but for various reasons they only recently became even less class-mobile than Europe. This is why the loss of Hillary was so significant – it was a blow against this aristocratic technocratism which long-ago swept the West’s intellectual centre, Europe.
Contrarily, China’s President Xi spent seven years in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution (LOL, or according to The New York Times where he “fled” to), where he taught farmers how to read by firelight. In Cuba an admired and beloved small-town cobbler who just got elected to help keep Cuban parliament real – an unthinkable development in Western Liberal Democracies. In Iran there are plenty of representatives of the lower class all throughout the government, and this policy has been cemented by the totally-misunderstood Basij, which I tried to explain here.
Never uttered in the West: they believe that technocratism is more important than democracy
“The second frame of reference is China’s huge economic success, comes alongside arguments related to democracy being a precondition for progress. Therefore, we are witness to a new ‘Chinese model’ different from the commonly spread model of Western democracy.”
Khashoggi is obviously implying that China has had success despite not having democracy, therefore anti-democratic Saudi Arabia can do the same.
Too bad that Khashoggi’s frame of reference – the alleged anti-democracy of China – is not at all accurate. The Chinese frame of reference is “socialist democracy”, which is qualitatively different from “Western bourgeois / liberal democracy”. Calling socialists “anti-democratic” is as false as socialists who say the liberal democratic West is “anti-democratic”: the two are structurally different, making both sides right about each other, but only partially. Liberal Democracy, I must admit, does have certain freedoms socialist democracies do not…these freedoms are not universally-guaranteed, but are reserved for those with money, but that is technically a “freedom”.
Again, Khashoggi is failing to see socialism’s motivations, concerns, demands and goals anywhere – he sees Chinese success solely as resulting from technocratism.
But in socialist democracy, where non-elite-born hold at least SOME top posts, then we will inevitably find that all technocrats do not interpret all social data the same: this is the exact point of conflict where Western Liberal Democracy totally collapses and reveals its essential, unmodern elitism.
Khashoggi, like Macron or Hillary, does not want this socialist-style of representation in their governance, nor do they want socialist-style policies, because such policies are not 100%-focused on maintaining the elitist lifestyle of the bourgeois/monarchical/1% class which they are a part of.
But any objective reading of postwar China – a country under blockade, refusing foreign investment, long-banned from top international organisations (like modern Iran), pulling itself out of swamps caused by a “century of humiliation” solely via their own policies, efforts and domestic investments – shows that China’s success is due solely to socialism. The same goes for Iranian Islamic Socialism, which has had similarly spectacular redistributive success amid similar global Cold War. Not so to Khashoggi who, like all journalists and commentators, must find an explanation for China’s astounding success in the past decade:
“The reason might be principles of Confucianism”, which is more utter nonsense.
China had Confucianism all through their Century of Humiliation…and also totally undemocratic inequality. They had it in the Ming and Ching eras and long, long before…and totally undemocratic inequality. I adore Confucianism, but as a social-moral model – as a political model it is totally outdated. Pushing pure Confucianism is “Chinese Salafism”, and this is what China’s Cultural Revolution explicitly overturned: the political disempowerment of the rural Chinese peasant caused by politically-outdated Confucianism.
But a Salafist’s only tool is an old calendar – they want to wax nostalgic and turn the pages backwards, never forwards.
Khashoggi is an anti-socialist, monarchy-loving Salafist – he will always only hunt around China’s past for its success, and never objectively examine its present.
Trump’s entire “Make America Great Again” hinges 100% on mining an allegedly-perfect late 18th century past.
Macron, in combination with EU-technocratism, is a Petainist Salafist – a few days after a far-right assassination plot was uncovered, Macron praised the Nazi collaborator Petain as an inspiration for today.
In a time when France’s president enforces detested policies by decree, when democratic votes are ignored across Europe, we should see that there is very little difference between modern Muslim un-democracy and Western un-democracy.
The only people who don’t admit this are ethnocentric Europeans, who can apparently subsist on the pride produced by flattering themselves with feelings of superiority, and also by those Christians who refuse to have fraternal feelings towards Muslims as Muslims have towards their fellow Abrahamic believers (those who are also not imperialists, of course). Such flattery is indeed the manna of their far-right, but also the Western fake-left, and this is the point of this article.
Fake-leftism means never admitting the small circle democracy is limited to
When we start calling things by their proper names, “fake-leftism” becomes more and more obvious in journalists like Khashoggi.
Fake-leftism leads to absurdly unreflective statements such as this, which have no basis in modern facts: “Western countries are adept at finding the reasons behind low voter turnout in elections or to determine why people are unhappy with the parliament’s performance.”
I suppose Western countries are adept…compared to Arab monarchies. Turnout is quite low and in 2016, when this article was written, any citizen-observer of the Eurozone (as well as the European Union) could see that disapproving performance registered no “democratic” impact on economic policy whatsoever. Both Khashoggi or a self-aggrandising Westerner could have written that sentence – both are fake-leftists.
Fake-leftism means someone who is out of touch with what Leftism means on the global scale, as they assume “left” and “right” only matter domestically; but it also means someone who pretentiously believes they are in tune with the average person despite spending their entire lives pointedly avoiding the average person. Khashoggi revealed this in an article titled The Saudi labor ‘shop’ must close, undergo reforms:
“I listened to the new Education Minister Ahmed al-Issa talk of his plan to transform education and enable it to produce competitive youth by launching “independent” public schools. He said children in private schools do not exceed 15 percent of the kingdom’s students, while 85 percent attend public schools. This surprised me as I used to think the rate of those in private schooling was higher, since that is the preference of all of my relatives and acquaintances.
I discovered then that those of us at the GCF (the annual Saudi Global Competitiveness Forum) are a small minority in a much bigger community that was totally absent, despite being the target of the forum. This community is supposed to be the working class to whom ministers keep promising hundreds of thousands of jobs year after year. Although the organizers want the whole Saudi economy to be more competitive, most citizens who graduate or fall out of public schools and universities are unable to compete.
Competition
If we want King Abdullah Economic City (KAEC) to be more appealing than Dubai or the free-trade zone in Ethiopia, for example, we must make our environment more competitive for business investments.”
The first paragraph reveals what Khashoggi is: A journalist who was totally out of touch with the 99% of Saudi Arabia…or at least the 85% (“99%” is, of course, not statically accurate, but it has become a useful byword and tool of understanding). He’s also a bad journalist for not knowing such a basic fact of life about his own country – it is reminiscent of a parliamentarian from Macron’s party who recently provoked outrage from a “Yellow Vest” protester on TV because she did not know the minimum wage.
I included the 2nd and 3rd paragraph because it’s important to show how abruptly his line of thought ends: Khashoggi does have a class epiphany, and he even relates it honestly…but he blames his fellow citizens for being “unable to compete”. He then drops the idea altogether and moves on to “Competition” and free trade.
Furthermore, he clearly believes that in this article he has established a plausible link between societal-domestic-interpersonal competition between citizens and competition between businesses, corporations, trade zones and nations. That is so wrong and so false that I do not have the time to disprove it; if you have to ask, you’ll never know, as Louie Armstrong said about jazz.
“Arab citizens are losing faith in democracy even though it has been at the forefront of their demands.”
Reading Khashoggi finds that he specialises in this type of nonsense typified by Thomas L. Friedman of The New York Times, truly one of the world’s greatest fake-leftists. (Indeed, it is amazing that such a warmonger and elitist votes for the “left party” – only in the West…) For the average Muslim or Saudi Arabians it is just as shocking to see Khashoggi described as a “reformer”. Again, there is no difference in 2018 between the Oriental or the Occidental despot.
Anyway, the truth is that Arab citizens are losing faith in one type of democracy – Western Liberal…and so are Westerners themselves. This realisation is great because it increases global unity, so why resist it? Socialist Democracy, however, is in bull form in any country which can withstand the decades of capitalist-imperialist blows, and the failure to recognise these trends and to abandon socialism makes someone a fake-leftist, as we all know.
I could go on and on dissecting Khashoggi’s writing for “fake Muslim leftism”, but the point has been established. I doubt anyone with an income under $100,000 / not working at a major Western NGO thought for a single moment that Khashoggi was a “reformer”, but hopefully this article showed how he is truly no different from Western rightists, centrists and fake-leftists.
Conclusion: Why Kare for Khashoggi? Why anything in the Muslim world? Answer: more imperialism
Western shareholder control of Aramco would give them the most powerful economic weapon in the world today. Talk about Google and Apple and smartphones all you want, but the global economy rises and falls according to the price of oil; because of this fact, Western capitalist logic dictates that they must control oil-producing nations.
The introduction of Western Liberal Democracy & their constitutional monarchy in Saudi Arabia would inevitably result in the control of Arabia’s oil by the international 1%. What that nefarious group has now is merely secondary control, with primary control held by the House of Saud.
Say what you want about Saudi Arabia – their leaders control their oil, at least. Say what you want about Iran – their People control their oil (which is why the West wants to ban Iranian oil, as if it contained the contaminating ideas of Muslim democracy, Islamic socialism, etc.). Saudi Arabia is also one of the world’s relatively untapped markets for international capitalists, much like Iran. Both nations have economies which are hugely state-controlled – and this cannot be tolerated in neoliberal capitalism, and thus it inexorably moves to change them & to Westernise them. Even if the Pentagon and Tel Aviv want no changes to the status quo in the region, we must see that the forces of capitalism are stronger than the forces of nationalism (or Zionism), and we all see this painfully plainly in Europe today.
Crucially, many in the House of Saud are anti-neoliberal (but not anti-capitalist) because they correctly understand that the monarchy cannot stand in 2018 without explicitly anti-neoliberal economic measures: two-thirds of all Saudi workers are employed by the government, major welfare programs, etc. Few leftists will objectively remark on this fact, but that is leftist economics in a very significant, real-world sense: Just as all capitalism is not “neoliberal”, not all socialism is “perfect socialism”, and the House of Saud is undoubtedly using socialist-related economics to buy their People’s support.
Double-crucially, while the old guard of the House of Saud realises this reality, many of the younger princes do not. Like the younger generation of Westerners, their young princes have been inculcated in anti-socialist neoliberal capitalism, and this inherently imperils the monarchy’s ability to buy off the Arabian People.
This line of thinking was rendered excellently by the prolific Whitney Webb for MintPress (whose leftist analyses were not ruined by her study of religion in university, I note) in her article The Real Reason the Knives are Out for MBS, so I only need to make a brief summation here:
What is of primary importance to the Western ruling factions are the Aramco Initial Public Offering and the $6 trillion in potential privatisation schemes of Vision 2030. However, as Webb notes: where does Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman really stand on the economic spectrum? Foreign investment into Saudi Arabia has plummeted, the IPO for Aramco (the world’s most profitable company) still has not taken place, and maybe MBS is not such a neoliberal traitor after all? He thus incarnates this shifting conflict between the neoliberal, younger generation of princes (and their Western puppeteers) and the older generation which grasps that neoliberalism – foreign control of a nation’s economy – can only lead to the loss of the monarchy’s absolute control and thus their pampered existence.
Let’s not forget why the West needs traitors in charge: Saudi Arabia’s collusion with Washington is what allows the “exorbitant privilege” of the US (petro)dollar, which makes the US financially impregnable; Saudi oil money is truly the liquidity which fuels the many risky investments of Wall Street; the Saudis make enormous US arms purchases not just for themselves but for the entire region.
We must look at the defense of Khashoggi by the West via the economic lens (which, of course, is verboten in Western mainstream discourse): how can international high finance finally get full control over Saudi oil, especially if MBS is not so neoliberal anymore yet remains in power?
Answer: Reduce the power of the Saudi absolute monarchy to a Western Liberal Constitutional monarchy (like the UK, Canada, Denmark, Netherlands, etc.), which would create bourgeois “rule of law” and thus allow Saudi assets to be sold to Western capitalists.
I have demonstrated that there are myriad capitalist pressures pushing the West to make Saudi Arabia conform and to not be independent: and, after all, conformity merely means “Western Salafism”, i.e. Western Liberal Democracy in the form of constitutional monarchy. Khashoggi was playing the leading propaganda role in this effort calling for a constitutional monarchy, which amounts to a soft coup against the absolute monarchy of the House of Saud.
And that is ultimately why MBS had Khashoggi killed.
By killing the West’s head propagandist MBS is saying: there will be no bourgeois, Western constitutional monarchy. The West is so up in arms over Khashoggi because it is a red flag that they are perhaps dealing with a Crown Prince who will not play neoliberal ball, as he had falsely promised to Western puppeteers in order to get their approval to ascend to Crown Prince.
Because the Western 1%, and the Mainstream Media they own, wants to obscure this lens – how the defense of Khashoggi fits in with the inevitable capitalist pressure from international high finance to get control over Saudi oil – they thus want us to believe that Khashoggi was a “reformer”. But the West doesn’t care at all about democratically empowering the 99% in Saudi Arabia, of course; and the mere step up from absolute to constitutional monarchy is no “reform” in the 21st century – modern political thought declares that this is a bogus reform.
Webb did not stress enough the existence of an alternative – socialist democratic control of Saudi oil. Nor did she stress that Khashoggi was actually facilitating this neoliberal takeover, not hindering it.
Khashoggi was no journalist but a pro-Western, pro-neoliberal propagandist – he had no importance to MBS otherwise.
Capitalism-imperialism always plays multiple destabilising games at once – in order to ensure their interests prevail: thus, there is no conflict between their supporting MBS but also supporting Khashoggi at WaPo as a back-up plan. However they get control of Saudi resources is fine – whether it’s via a puppet or a soft coup, they don’t care.
Khashoggi was no “dissident” against the monarchy, but I’ve reminded readers that this was no problem for the monarchy- and bourgeois-loving West; he was tapped to be the Western 1%’s “Head Saudi Propagandist” because his writings clearly show that he wanted a Western-style bourgeois technocracy & constitutional monarchy in order to rule Saudi Arabia more “efficiently”…which means becoming Westernised as much as possible, economically unequal as much as possible, and Socialist Democratic not at all.
Time well tell: Mehdi Ben Barka, PressTV’s Serena Shim and others will be remembered as true martyrs for the Muslim world and for all of humanity; Jamal Khashoggi will soon be forgotten, except for the gruesome details, and that is because he was no friend nor supporter of the People but of the elite of which he was a part and which he unquestioningly and immorally supported. I hope this series shed light on that.
But I also hope that this series showed how Khashoggi is no different from the fake-leftists in the Western world. Muslims and Saudi Arabians are not any different from those in any other global region, and emphasising, clarifying and promoting our common humanity – and the common struggles of the 99% worldwide – is the goal of leftism.
***********************************
This is the final article in a 4-part series which examines Jamal Khashoggi’s ideology and how it relates to the Islamic World, Westernization and Socialism. Here is the list of articles slated to be published, and I hope you will find them useful in your leftist struggle!
Khashoggi, Ben Barka & PressTV’s Serena Shim: A 4-part series
Khashoggi Part 2: A ‘reformer’…who was also a hysterical anti-Iran/Shia warmonger?
Khashoggi Part 3: ‘Liberal Democratic Salafism’ is a sham, ‘Islamic Socialism’ isn’t
Khashoggi Part 4: fake-leftism identical in Saudi Arabian or Western form
Ramin Mazaheri is the chief correspondent in Paris for Press TV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea and elsewhere. His work has appeared in various journals, magazines and websites, as well as on radio and television. He can be reached on Facebook.
Congratulations on giving us such an enlightening persperctive. We can see the real force behind high level finances( imperialism) and the energy they deploy to try to control the earth. A real war game in full action. The « gilets jaunes » in France are signs that these people (the 1% world elite) are in for troubling times. They better be putting on their »safety belts ».
http://khidr.org
Above another overlooked factor is how the spread and legalisation of Marijuana in the West is viewed eschatalogically in certain sectors of the Islamic world.
Qom is the ancient seat of The Green Man.
In the last days his influence will spread across the globe.
Anon; I checked out your link and it says nothing about the Muslim view of marijuana in the West. Can you please elaborate on that. I do agree with you about the liberating role of the Green man however. I find this argument in Carl Jung. He argues that liberation is to be found in that which has been confined to the shadow. For the English the green man is the lord of Sherwood Forest.
http://khidr.org/al-mahdi.htm
The green one prepares the way for the Mahdi.
Snow, please do not laugh, but let me fill you in on a secret.
You must have seen what’s in English called “water pipe”? It’s known as nargille https://www.thefreedictionary.com/narghile.
If you think they were smoking tobacco in it think again. After 1922, Athens was flooded with the Greeks from the Middle East (particularly Smirni, todayTurkey) and they brought this “culture” with them. One of the songs, which I like is where the guy says, “just plant some marihauana by my grave, and I do not need any one to cry for me”.
Here it is, it’s all about kanavouria (marihuana): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cToxtsNiTg
Muslim world is no different.
I’ll make serious comment later.
This is how you dance after few puffs from nargille, and few ouza (this video shows pictures of their hangouts in Athens):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3VqzjMbh_4
Final one about hashish (again from the pipe):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQUvxMiM8_U
Qum was the city that was basically the spiritual center of the Islamic revolution, and continues to be the center of Iran today. Also seen as the foremost city of knowledge in the Shia world currently.
Ramin; If you keep this up you may be obliged to accept the status of being the world’s number one socialist revolutionary journalist. In my eye you are already there. Not to encourage bourgeois egoism on your part but merely to express appreciation – again. I find it hilarious that as a principled leftist you advance a convincing argument that objectively obliges true leftists to support MBS in his struggle to maintain Arabian independence from the evil empire. Now isn’t that a stretch for the Western mind! It appears Putin is on track here. I am looking forward to more articles from you about life in peaceful bucolic France these days.
Snow Leopard, you are entirely too generous with your compliments!!!
LOL, it is hard to imagine “rooting for” MBS, and you are right that many rigid & doctrinaire Western “leftists” cannot do that easily. in their defense: it does take some very, very far-right forces to be on the right of MBS, LOL, but such forces do exist in neoliberalism and imperialism.
Ramin; Are you aware of a book by the late Arthur Koestler, author of “Darkness at Noon,” called “The Yogi and the Commisar.”? Having pioneered criticism of the inadequacies of the Soviet Union he went on to argue in the Yogi and the Commisar that the only way Socialism-Communism could possibly work is for the socialist revolutionary to be a successful yogic adept. He then went on to despair because he judged that to be an unrealistically high expectation. But this was decades ago. I read this book 30 or so years ago and the demands of my inner life give me no choice but to follow this dual path. It has been a lonely 30 years for me but my heart commands that I persist. So when I encounter your truly excellent work speaking of Iranian spiritual socialism and the masterful way you poetically and humorously make such effective arguments in that direction my heart expands and I feel myself being drawn out of lonely isolation. I trust that my heartfelt responses to your very valuable work cause you no personal embarrassment.
Socialism, Leftism are trademarked by the Jewish Mafia. As is Nazisim, Capitalism, Liberalism, Anarchism. The list is endless. Only idiots use such words.
Ramin….We are waiting for your analysis on the French mayhem :-) … Cheers!
I can’t add anything to the comments so far. This is a superb view of the situation, at the very top of all other commentary. Thank you, Ramin Mazaheri.
And indeed this does allow us “to increase global unity by showing the similarity of the 1%”
My second comment. Went back to the Star Wars era and for me the stiff reaction of « Dark Sidious » with regard to the assassination of Kashoggi only indicates how they felt hit at the core of their strategy with regard to trying to control Aramco and the leadership of the House of Saud. I’m certain the hand exchange between Putin and MBS at the G20 will not help their case.
Haha… Yes, that handshake comes to mind, doen’t it? However, I do not believe that Mr Putin had anything to do with the killing; he is too wise. But, MbS has proved he is a ‘quick learner’.
While I think there is much to admire in this, you lost me with your total derision for elitist, archaic, classist constitutional monarchy, in contrast to egalitarian and fair Chinese communism. So, today, the rulers in China have no special, absolute privilege, like monarchs do in other countries? (Why do Soros and the US State Dept spend huge sums of money buying off members of Parliaments?) And wealth is distributed equally, even though China now has many billionaires (Pepe Escobar has referred to the Chinese economy as ‘neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics’ or something like that.)
Hillary Clinton is only regarded as a “Leftist” or “socialist” by the Right. She herself would be quite uncomfortable being referred to in that way. So your implicit assumption that Clinton or Tom Friedman are somehow posing or claiming to be “leftists” when they are in fact not is something of a straw man and somewhat distracting from your argument. Outside of Breitbart and similar opinion organs, they are Centrists.
Well, Hillary would call herself a centrist these days, but most leftists would tend to call her rather center of right. Hillary fully backs corporate power. Hillary is very pro-war. In her last campaign she promised an immediate war in Syria by imposing a no-fly zone, and she certainly seemed to want war with Russia. Hillary is strongly allied with the Wall Street bankers.
Positions like those are strongly to the right. Like many of the fake leftists, she’ll try to cover with a marginal lefty position on the side, about which she will talk loudly and often and make great claims. But she would cover strongly to the right.
Bill and Hillary might have been really on the left during their first term as Governor of Arkansas. That lasted 2 years, and then Bill was defeated by the state’s business interests. Bill came back and won again, but by then had allied himself with those business interests. That is what then led to the promotion of running for President.
At the very beginning of her time as First Lady, Hillary bragged of her friends on the left and took up at least as a position a few select leftist causes. But Bill moved away from his campaign rhetoric, and after Hillary’s botched health care reform push where she hated leftist ideas like single-payer and instead promoted corporate interests, New Gingrich came to power in Congress. As a result, Bill Clinton then triangulated himself to the right and governed as a Republican. He put Republicans in his cabinet in key positions like Secretary of War, and his closest advisors were people seen often on Fox News after Gore won/lost the next election.
Hillary then moved to NY and became Senator, and became even more entangled with Wall Street, and was a sure vote for any war. And I don’t recall her ever objected to Bush’s massive surveillance powers and other such right-wing policies. When she became Secretary of State, she named a lady from that classic horde of leftists which was Dick Cheney’s personal staff to key positions in the State Dept. The lady began as spokesperson, then became the lead figure in trying to provoke a war with Russia. The lady Hillary Clinton pulled from Dick Cheney’s staff to fill these roles was Victoria Nuland.
Hillary started politics as a “Goldwater Girl” campaigning for Goldwater for President. By the end, she pretty much ended up as her own Goldwater for President as she moved to the right constantly chasing the money, the donations, the speaking fees, the contributions to the Clinton Foundation that the big money that is always on the right can provide a politician on the prowl for money.
The pro-war, pro-banker, pro-empire crowd of politicians and media tries to call themselves ‘centrist’. But they are far, far from any reasonable center in the past. Their claims of being ‘centrists’ is just PR an propaganda.
Yes, Hillary gradually became a genuine fascist in action. Good summary of Hillary’s changes in direction of more and more power, thanks.
Excellent post and excellent analysis, not only of who is Khashoggi and why he was killed, but also of why China is economically succeeding, while the West is failing.
This article needs to be read in conjunction with the most recent article by Thierry Meyssan: “How the West Eats its Children”
The “West” was briefly (semi) democratic from the end of WW2 until about 1980. It was during this period that Western countries flourished.
Since 1980, with the election of Reagan in the U.S., followed by Thatcher in the U.K., the ‘Western elites’ have taken power back, and restored elitist dictatorships to the U.S. and the U.K., where democracy has since become a charade that is used to camouflage the true nature of dictatorial governance.
Since about 1990 the ‘Western elites’ transformed their goals to a ‘Global’ dictatorship, under the governance of international institutions (which they control). Stripping nations of their sovereignty is a key part of this agenda. and major developments such as the EURO common currency, Mass Migration and Climate Change are part of this effort of sovereignty stripping, in order to subvert populations to a ‘Global’ elitist dictatorship. The neo-con ‘Project for a New American Century’ with its doctrine ‘Full Spectrum Dominance’ was developed as the military component of this plan, in order to deal with any recalcitrant country or leader
However, for reasons that are too complex to argue in a comment, government by dictatorship is vastly inferior to democracy in terms of societal performance. Both this article and the one by Meyssan touch on this subject.
The author is this article is quite right that China’s success is due to ‘socialist’ democracy (and Russia’s as well). On the other hand the so-called ‘Western’ democracies are failing because they have been transformed into elitist dictatorships.
Russia and China are enemies of the ‘West’ because they are succeeding as ‘socialist democracies’ (albeit less than perfect), while the ‘Western democracies’ under elitist dictatorships are failing. This is an existential threat to the elitist dictators.
I agree fully with the author’s view that the ‘Western elites’ are attempting to overthrow MBS because he is a Saudi nationalist and is resisting their attempt to strip Saudi of control of its resources and wealth, and that this effort is at the root of the Khashoggi killing and the Western reaction to it.
I first thought the article was verbose. Ramin could have stated that he worked for the WaPo, and that would be enough. But there are always new people wandering in and it was very good to show in detail how khashoggi was a monster serving the 1% and spouting terrible ideas, This shows the MSM is vile, for the hue and cry they have put up for this agent of Imperialism.
To start with, I am going to present Trangas’s radio interview with Kazakis’ regarding current state of the left in Greece, which actually applies to all the left in the World today, without any excvlusions.
Trangas on number of occasions referred to himself as an old fashion conservative, who believes that Greece’s relationship with USofA should be strong. Now that this is out let’s get to the interview.
Oh, yes, while everyone avoids the dirty word “Communism”, I will stick to it as a reference to the “Socialism” as it’s the ultimate Socialism according to good ol’Lenin.
Word to Ramin: I liked what you said here and I am going to grub few quotes:
“… Or is it by accusing them of being “radishes” – only red on the outside …” This is how I see them. Okay, lets play word games. Even though we call them Communists, they call themselves “… People’s …
… It’s an interesting article because he basically tries to equate the Saudi monarchical governing class with the Chinese Communist Party. LOL, unexpected, no? The Long March, the Cultural Revolution, the Century of Humiliation – all that produced something…just like the blood-red commie “House of Saud Party”, if you believe Khashoggi! …”
… Benevolent technocratism – which was essentially the campaign platform of Hillary Clinton, and which provides the justification for (still-failing) economic policy domination by the Eurozone’s “best” economists – is 100% fake-leftism. …
… Benevolent technocratism is the same old despotism of the bourgeois, and thus fake-leftism
Never uttered in the West: they believe that technocratism is more important than democracy…
… “The second frame of reference is China’s huge economic success, comes alongside arguments related to democracy being a precondition for progress. Therefore, we are witness to a new ‘Chinese model’ different from the commonly spread model of Western democracy.” …
… Khashoggi is obviously implying that China has had success despite not having democracy, therefore anti-democratic Saudi Arabia can do the same. …
End of quotes
I am not going to even mention Socialists, because there is nothing to talk about. I am going to jump straight into the Communist mess. I am not going to give you Communist theory, you can read Marx, Engels and Lenin for that yourselves.
For this discussion, I am going to resort to Kazakis’s words, who admits that he used to be in top echelon of KKE Greek Communist Party for about 20 years ( I know I said it before in another comment).
His page (in Greek) http://dimitriskazakis.blogspot.com/
He best describes the Communist transition from old Communists to the to new, by using Kotzias (Greek Minister) as an example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikos_Kotzias
Bare with me, and I’ll show you how things changed over the last 50 years. He starts of by telling us that Kotzias was his mentor and a friend in the “old” days. He called Kotzias “Stasi” because of his connections with East German Communists, who as he says were more refined than the Soviets, who in his opinion were more “rigid – box” like, which Greek Communists did not want to sign on, particularly after the Czech episodes.
So, during first 9:15 minutes he talks about Greece’s desperate situation and at 8:45 he talks about Greece smuggling oil for ISIS (he calls it khalifat) and then to Turkey. He continues by saying that Greece is involved in repackaging of meds (perhaps relabeling as made in Greece, this is how it’s done kids, in Global economy), but he does not say who is the source. Anyway, back to Kotzia, who quit KKE in early 80’s and joined ND (center-conservative party) 13:02 just so he could be given a job at the ministry of external affairs. Later on he went to Pasok (Socialists), and shortly after to Syriza (claiming to be the hard line communists). This exemplifies his personality as classic “aparatchik, as they were called in Russia – my words. At 14:20 Kazakis says that Kotzias quit KKE because very likely he could see Communism as dying ideology. He describes Kotzias behavior as “servant of the mechanism, hence parallel description to aparatchik, searching for new mechanism”. As they continue to discuss Kotzias, at 23:54 Kazakis calls Kotzias “good technocrat”, which would be politically correct description of this type a person. Hence we have arrived at a long winded description of a technocrat, which means one thing, technocrat tries to cling to power no matter what while no ideology is applicable here. He calls these people (Ανανωτικη) annoying Left. At 30:30 both call this scenario Euro-Communism (where patriotism, ethnicity, history, national culture is dead). Kazakis says the new generations of the so called Euro-communists do not have slightest sense of patriotism. Those Euro-Communists are totally globalized. This neo-liberalism with Left-face has introduced the ugliest edge of individualism, totally dissolving any sense of society and social order. I repeat, old social order has been totally removed for the benefit of ugly individualism. Kazakis says that Real working class has ethnic characteristics and it’s the only group in any society which possesses sense of patriotism, while the elites care about money only. Then they went on to discuss the Leftist parties owning publicly traded companies, which as he says were introduced to change those progressive parties into becoming part of the government controlled identities and thus pulling those parties away from their social benefactor which are the working people.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTU9oHG9wlI
Having said all that we are back to the article.
The question whether China is red or radish, I say not even radish. The communist party is there only to centrally control Chinese people, which may not be such a bad thing after all. The West with it’s hidden dark force is not really any different. Democracy is non-existent.
Suggesting that Saudi Arabia is anything else than feudal kingdom is a joke.
For the rest you can fill the blanks yourself.
Short note, you will notice that they did not discuss religion (Orthodoxy – Greek Orthodox). Trangas, being well seasoned jurnalist, wisely avoided any questions on the subject. Knowing/suspecting that Kazakis, while being officially an ex-communist may be atheist. Why I say that? Tsipras embarked on a turbulent road of destruction of the Greek Nationhood, whose very identity is the Orthodoxy.
Trangas has some discussions (in Greek) with one of them being here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zuj2do2_THU
Might I ad, that even during and after 1917 revolution in Russia, while some 50,000 priests were murdered and number of churches burned or turned to warehouses, generally speaking communists did not dare to destroy it’s Orthodox Church.
Euro-trush embarked on such, which could possibly result in bloody resistance by the Greek people.
This is as Trangas says war against Christ and Christianity.
A bit of a side question, but I’m curious whether Mr. Mazaheri is in France right now? There are obviously interesting events taking place there, and I’d love to hear his opinions.
When I go to the PressTV website, I see articles on the French crisis, but they do not name the reporter who is doing the reporting in the article. Is that Mr. Mazaheri, in whole or in part?
Hi,
I am in France.
Any written reports you read there about France – either news or editorial – are not written by me. I am their TV reporter for France, so if you watch PressTV you may see me interviewed or my 2-minute news reports.
Very interesting times, and I will have an article on the Yellow Vests for the Saker shortly.
Clip from Andre Vltchek interview courtesy of today’s OffG:
Q: You were recently in Syria, a country that thanks to the Russian intervention and the resistance of the Syrian people supported by the regional allies _Iran and Hezbollah above all_ is slowly trying to return to normal. What country did you find?
AV: I found a beautiful, confident and proud country. I am also writing a long report about my visit there….
Syria won. And there, the entire Arab world won together with it. Arabs were, for decades, thoroughly humiliated – by the West, by Israel, by their own leaders who were put on the throne by London, Paris and Washington.
As I have written many times, Aleppo is the Stalingrad of the Middle East. The losses were terrible, all over Syria. But the victory is tremendous, too. … People in all countries of the region are watching and now they know: it is possible to defeat Western imperialism and its spooks, its terrorist implants.
Great articles, Ramin. Thanks. Having worked in Saudi Arabia for 6 years, I agree completely with your views about the country. It is interesting that I noticed, since I arrived there, that there was distribution of ‘some’ income among Saudis; they were not poor. However, there were many imigrants – from Bangladeshi, Philippines, India, Pakistan… – who were at the bottom, had no rights, and lived in misery. The Saudis of any class exploited those imigrants in a most disgusting way… Capitalism is not nice…
I have lived in Islamabad where I saw extremes of Saudi wealth in the midst of gut-wrenching poverty.
But then, I did not know how this world actually operated- I was a child of the lie.
It took numerous years to truly wake up. Then, I saw the film Syriana. People rubbished me when I commented to people about its composite truths.
Young, idealistic people are the most easily manipulated into the great Con that is ’empire’
Was Mr.Khassoggi about to release some disturbing secrets.