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Comment by jandrese | Hacker News Reader

Arabians are a wonderful people, it's the Saudi royal family that is the problem. They are going to become more of a problem as the world is forced to transition away from oil. There are few things more dangerous than dictators that find themselves losing power and support.

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Agreed - whe I worked at Lockheed, there were a few Arabs who literally quit after 9/11 as they refused to work at a company that was selling weapons to the DOD to kill other arabs.

I stand by my statement: The Royal Saudi Family (the CIA, and the Clinton Bush Cabal) can collectively go fuck their evil selves. Fuck them.

MSB in particular.

Especially ones that are wildly monied/connected, and ones that Western apparatuses are used to allowing to skirt justice regularly.

Saudi royal family is the problem? Without the royal family, Saudi will be controlled by radical Islamists. The royal family is the major force to keep the country away from the religious fanatics.

You fundamentally misunderstand SA. The wahhabists and the house of Saud have a symbiotic relationship. The royals turn a blind eye to the excesses of the radicals, provided it's targeted externally, and in return the radicals legitimize the rule of Saud as a theocracy. This is why the royals suppress violent actions within their borders, but not the structure that ultimately causes those occasional acts of domestic terror, while doing nothing to hinder how those same networks do terror internationally, including 9/11.

What you said does not contradict what I said. Do you think the royals is the problem? Would it be better to get rid of the royals and let the wahhabists rule the country?

If the royals are gone the wahhabists would not take rule. That's not how it works. They are a key to power in SA but incapable of holding it themselves, which is why they legitimize Saud symbiotically. I loath the both of them but it's important to understand the actual structure going on.

So who will take control of the country?

Besides the house of Saud there are multiple other clans that historically have held power there, and continue to be powerful and influential today. The other key to power in SA is control of the oil money.

> Without the royal family, Saudi will be controlled by radical Islamists

But that's true only because the royal family has (1) fostered the strength of radical Islam directly by allying with radical Islamists to justify their power, and (2) made such a hash of things that any opposition (which, as a direct consequence of their promotion of radical Islam, comes largely from slightly divergent radical Islamists) seems preferable to a large portion of the population.

As a result, SA is at least two revolutions away from having a decent government, and the royal family benefits from the fear the West has of the likely course of the first of those.

What happens after the two revolutions?

That's a very good question; there's a reason I said “at least” and not “exactly”.

One revolution by radical Islamists a la Iran, one revolution (not necessarily final) of a more "normal" alignment, and any number of revolutions of anything in between.

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