After having been selected by
his father as the crown prince,
Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia “authorized a secret campaign to silence
dissenters—which included the surveillance, kidnapping, detention and
torture of Saudi citizen—over a year
before the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, according to American officials” with
access to the classified reports.[1]
The killers of Khashoggi had been involved in at least 12 other such operations
starting in 2017. The sheer egregiousness of the operation under the crown
prince says something about not only dictatorship, but also the nature of power
itself.
According to the American
officials, “(s)ome of the operations involved forcibly repatriating Saudis from
other Arab countries and detaining and abusing prisoners in palaces belonging
the crown prince and his father, King Salman.”[2]
Although Saudi law forbids torture as it is considered an abuse of power, and
confessions made under duress are inadmissible in Saudi courts, dictators can
easily ignore the force of law as if it were just a moral imperative.
Furthermore, Saudi officials acknowledged after Khashoggi’s murder “that Saudi
intelligence service had a standing order to bring dissidents home.”[3]
Hence the torture and murders involved international relations, a fact that
points to not only the extent of the crown prince’s use of power to go after
dissent, but also the sheer brazenness and even the underlying mentality.
Extending the reach to include
Saudis in other countries points to the egregious extent to which the crown
prince went to stifle dissent. “Saudi Arabia has a history of going after
dissidents and other Saudi citizens abroad, but the crackdown escalated sharply
after Prince Mohammed was elevated to crown prince in 2017, a period when he
was moving quickly to consolidate power. Since then, Saudi security forces have
detained dozens of clerics, intellectuals and activists who were perceived to
pose a threat, as well as people who had posted critical or sarcastic comments
about the government on Twitter.”[4]
That writing a critical or even sarcastic comment on a blog or on Twitter could justify being kidnapped in another
country and killed there or brought back to Saudi Arabia points back to a
dictator’s attitude toward power—that a person cannot have too much of it, and
thus that any external (or even internal!) constraint is to be regarded as not
only pliable, but easily pushed aside altogether.
When a Saudi group linked to
the crown prince killed and dismembered with a bone saw inside the Saudi
Consulate in Istanbul, Turkey’s government was using surveillance video and
audio recordings to uncover the crime.” According to Bruce Riedel a former CIA
analyst, “the team’s sloppiness showed that it was used to operating freely
inside the kingdom and not under the watchful eye of an adversary’s
intelligence service.”[5]
The brazenness may suggest that as condensed in a dictator, power warps the
mind’s perspective.
By analogy, gravity warps time and space. As the mass of power increases, perhaps past a threshold point, the normal perception and judgment of having gone too far may be skewed by the power itself. Perhaps similar to additions, the high from the intense pleasure from having a lot of power occasions the warping of perception and judgement regarding one’s own power and the illusion that complete control over other people, hence with zero dissent politically, is achievable. Other operative mental defense-mechanisms doubtlessly include denial. If so, then checks on substantial power being held by political officials (as well as religious, educational, and business officials) are grounded in what having a lot of power does to the human mind. Put another way, a limit exists as to how much power is compatible with human biology.
By analogy, gravity warps time and space. As the mass of power increases, perhaps past a threshold point, the normal perception and judgment of having gone too far may be skewed by the power itself. Perhaps similar to additions, the high from the intense pleasure from having a lot of power occasions the warping of perception and judgement regarding one’s own power and the illusion that complete control over other people, hence with zero dissent politically, is achievable. Other operative mental defense-mechanisms doubtlessly include denial. If so, then checks on substantial power being held by political officials (as well as religious, educational, and business officials) are grounded in what having a lot of power does to the human mind. Put another way, a limit exists as to how much power is compatible with human biology.
[1]
Mark Mazzetti, “Saudi Prince Ran Brutal Campaign to Stifle Dissent,” The New York Times, March 18, 2019.
[2] Ibid.
[3]
Ibid.
[4]
Ibid.
[5]
Ibid.
