Slave Revolt Against the Sauds?

Jack Douglas
Mar. 03, 2011

Saudi Arabia is like a Magic Kingdom made of spun sugar candy, though oil has been substituted for the sugar. It is all puff and show. It looks very formidable with its massive terrorist mercenaries and home-grown secret police and its huge pile of bribe money which it dispenses to the mobs when they look dangerous, as Rome dispensed bread and circuses. This totalitarian regime looks efficient at annihilating any show of freedom and dissent from its slave population. Some weeks ago it looked like it could and would murder anyone within the Kingdom who even looked like they might mutter dissent and they routinely rounded up anyone suspected of freedom tendencies. It was even rumored, probably by their secret police, that the Saudis had rigged bombs to the vast oil basin to blow it up if anyone looked like they might be able to take it away from the royal family.

But in the past month their totalitarian foundations have been severely eroded and the assaults on them grow stronger every day. People have suddenly started to worry about the Saudi oil, the largest in the world. Oil spot prices are soaring and the Saudi stock market has just been plunging. The royal family has begun to panic. Instead of just rounding up anyone suspected of freedom thoughts, they have suddenly been throwing hundreds of billions of dollars in bribes to the people, even some of it to the mass of college students and other young people who can rarely find a job at home.

They not only are now getting weaker fast. They look weak. Just yesterday a group of the top intellectuals of the Kingdom publicly urged serious consideration of making the government a Constitutional Monarchy, exactly as the vast majority of citizens of next door are doing. A major Shia cleric from the oil rich East of the Kingdom did the same and was almost immediately arrested and disappeared.

This is a catastrophic danger for a totalitarian tyranny like Saudi Arabia. Tyrants must look ready and able to strike down all serious opposition to their iron fist because the smiling and scraping mobs hate them. The Saudi’s are hated because of their totalitarian tyranny, their total corruption, their hypocrisy, their betrayal of the real traditions of Islam, the clans and tribes, their cowardice in hiding behind mercenary torturers and murders, and their theft of the nation, seizing all of the oil wealth for their huge family and dispensing it to the slaves only as they choose to do.

The threat to the U.S. imperial puppet regimes, especially Saudi Arabia, is so vast that yesterday the U.S. Military-Obama government openly supported Bahrain’s royal family in its fierce resistance to freedom, equal treatment, representative and responsible government and limited monarchy. This is really a secret support for Saudi Arabia, though the U.S. military also insists on it to maintain its vast base for the Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, from which it threatens instant annihilation to any people or governments that seem to threaten the Empire.

Every major state surrounding Saudi Arabia, except Iran across the Persian Gulf, is under serious threat of being overthrown by revolutionaries or reformed into submission by its own people, except for a few petro states which have almost no citizens except the rulers. All of them are retreating steadily under the attacks of the mass of their populations. Only some of the tiny UAE states that have almost no indigenous citizens are not yet under much attack. Kuwait is not under open attack, but has rushed through bribes and some real reforms to try to fend off open moves against it, especially by its Shia minority.

Saudi Arabia is seeing the few other Arab kingdoms rushing to accept more and more reforms away from their royal powers. If their royal powers go, the Saudis lose their last veneer of legitimacy and it seems very unlikely they can stand alone against their surging Muslim revolt against such absurdities and tyrannies.

The Saudis have assumed until recent days that they could always count on the murderous mercenaries. But the use of brutal mercenaries is being rejected more and more sternly by the Western publics and, thence, their governments anxious not to look soft on brutal totalitarian terrorists in this present situation. If any major group in Saudi Arabia is willing to risk death to revolt now, the Saudis will be putting themselves at grave risk by using the mercenary terrorists the way Kadaffy is doing and the kingdom of Bahrain which has been built on the Saudi model, did before the West started taking actions against them, like the U;K. suspending weapons sales and so on to them. Only Obama and the U.S. imperial military are willing to openly support such totalitarian puppet regimes. The Shia population concentrated in the oil rich Eastern area of Saudi Arabia is only 15% of the 26million citizens, but that is still four million people who can revolt and who loathe the Saudis and identify with Iran across the narrow Gulf. Iran is already the great power of the region since the U.S. destroyed the Sunni war machine of Hussein in Iraq. Now Iran and Iraq Shia, almost a hundred million Shia on their borders, are quietly allied. Iran has its college student demonstrations, but it also has its 12million man Shia militia still willing, as far as I can tell. to fight against the puppets of the Great Satan, the hated U.S.. or against the Satan if it comes to that.

The Saudis have been stealing the nation blind and stashing their many tens of billions abroad in case. Now they see those stolen goods being seized around the world from Kadaffy and Mubarak. IF they get seriously challenged, the Saudis will most likely decide the safe thing to do is leave graciously and keep the stolen loot. That makes them very vulnerable to anyone who sees this situation.

But that vast oil reserve is a lure to every other greedy person and group in the region. Even Saudi Osama bin Laden might suddenly reappear and lead a charge against the Kingdom to seize the money that can built a caliphate, if used properly by dedicated Muslims.

The Magic Kingdom looks more and more vulnerable. And that means the global economy dependent on that oil is very much more vulnerable.

This is a great historical turning point for the vast Muslim World, especially for the Middle Eastern Arab world which has been kept in abject submission to enslavement by the U.S. and its puppet regimes for much of a century to milk them of their vast oil and gas at dirt cheap prices for Big Oil, the dreaded and loathed “Seven” Big Oil Corps. working for the U.S. Empire. Intelligent Muslims know this. They know that they must seize the day and fight for freedom from the U.S. Empire and its totalitarian puppet regimes before they can ever rebuild livable, honest, decent societies of Muslim human beings. The U.S. and its puppets will kill as many of them as they think they can get away with doing. But the world is watching and even intelligent Americans are now cheering for the freedom fighters overthrowing Obama’s arch buddies like Khadaffy. Obama is secretly doing all it can by dragging its imperial feet and hemming and hawing to give Khadaffy a chance to slaughter the freedom fighters, but even he is partly constrained by American and global forces in a world of instant communications.

The outcomes of such great social revolutions are inherently uncertain and will depend on vastly complex, situated forces and decisions and actions by vast numbers of people. But I think the Arabs and Muslims more generally see this one great chance to free themselves from the yoke of European and American enslavement which has oppressed them for a century, I think they will seize the day, overthrow these totalitarian puppets, and try to build freer Islamic societies that are vastly more legal, decent, fair, representative and responsible to the sovereign, Allah fearing people.

This turning point is one more powerful death knell of the U.S. Global Empire. That will be painful in the short run most Americans, but in the longer run it will free them from the prison of imperial totalitarianism they allowed to be imposed on them by the Republicrat Party and the U.S. military.
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Jack Douglas is professor emeritus of sociology at UCSD.