Hacker News Reader

Comment by tome | Hacker News Reader

Is Saudia Arabia changing its PR strategy? So much good news coming from this kingdom at the moment ...

Is this good news? By all accounts this seems to as much a purging of political enemies by the new leaders and them cementing their grip on power as anything to do with corruption.

Those aren't mutually exclusive.

True, but what is the lesson people are taking away? Is it "I better stop being corrupt" or is it "if I want to keep being corrupt I better swear loyalty to MBS and make sure he gets his cut". If it's purely the latter, has anything really been won?

Fair enough. I think it is too early to say what the outcome is going to be.

I'm also fairly amused at some comments here being critical of the manner in which the changes are happening. An autocratic monarchy is not going to change via committee meetings, legislative votes, or reasoned judicial orders -- not significantly at least.

Moving toward more moderate policies or even further to a constitutional monarchy is going to come from the use of brute force.

I think we can all agree that this is a move towards something new and big. The significant questions are will it work, and is that something a 'good' something.

It is if the man supposedly cleaning things up is every bit as corrupt as those he’s having arrested.

Yes, they are getting ready for a life after oil. They'll still have large inflows for another 1-2 decades so if they start now, they can be a highly developed economy with sizeable tourism, education sector and tech once oil dries up (or becomes less profitable). They recently announced to build a city solely focused around renewables and self driving technology, a future version of Dubai basically.

Well, they could be a solar power house, I imagine.

Whether this is a good move remains to be seen. As was said in another comment, this seems more about cementing power than anything else.

A corrupt regime is bad, but sometimes the alternatives are worse. Just look at some of the Arab countries that were once relatively stable yet now are (still) in turmoil after the Arab spring.

Saudi Arabia is changing, full stop. Mohammad bin Salman is pushing through a sweeping reform agenda, with the explicitly stated aim of returning Saudi Arabia to a moderate Islamic state. We've already seen substantial change. The powers of the religious police have been greatly curtailed, women are allowed to drive, the state-owned petroleum company is being partly privatised and there are major plans for economic modernisation.

Whether this reform agenda actually comes to pass is yet to be seen, but I think we should applaud both the rhetoric and the efforts made so far.

women are allowed to drive

Technically they've said that women will be allowed to drive at some time in future, possibly June 2018. As of today women are still not allowed to drive.

It's still a pretty major move though.

The reform agenda only reaches as far as the door to the throne room. Assuming perfect execution of western reforms we'll still be left with an enormously wealthy, powerful, and ruthless autocratic regime actively trying to spread their power far beyond their borders.

Unless they become a constitutional monarchy with severely limited powers I am going to hold my applause.

Gradual change is better than no change at all.

For a country like Saudi, if you want to make a large scale sudden changes which turns everything upside-down (even if those were good intentions), you will end up with something like Afganistan or Iraq.

The pace of change (however slow for our standard), is quite unthinkable for the locals. I think it will take a couple of decades, at least, to see if anything good came out of this.

Saudi Arabia is bombing and starving Yemenis as we speak. It has been destabilizing Syria by funding jihadis. It is still publicly beheading people for sorcery, witchcraft, apostasy, and sex outside marriage.

Women are NOT allowed to drive until at least a year from now, for "reasons". This was just a PR bone thrown to the West before starting the war on Lebanon.

A cosolidation of autocratic power domestically combined with escalating it's apparent effort to initiate a larger regional war than it already has are not what I'd call unqualified “good news”.

As another comment pointed out, it is quite naive to consider "corruption purges" in countries like Russia, China or Saudi Arabia to be actually concerned with corruption.

But yes absolutely, this is a PR strategy change, but it is primarily concerned with the public image of the crown prince not of the KSA itself.

Well, it's debatable if the improvements in women's rights and the corruption-related investigations are reflective of core changes to the society or if they are superficial changes in the first case, and moves to consolidate power in the second case.

Blockading Yemen in turn creating the world's worst famine and preparing for war against Lebanon and Iran is hardly what I would consider good news.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com