After the end of the Cold War, liberalism started to become more distinct in the southern part of the globe. The liberal and neoliberal ideas imposed by the U.S. and the continental Europe played an important role in the structuring of the political institutions in these countries. Even the communists and socialists who fought against the apartheid regime in South Africa started to adopt liberalism as a state policy. In a way, countries that stayed behind the capitalist world started to see liberalism as a magic wand in the context of development, progress, human rights and justice, and they actually relied on it.
Nowadays, liberalism or neoliberalism has no boundaries. People kill for the sake of their interests or take over governments by orchestrating coups. Today, the ideas that northern capitalism put forward can be highly demanded from African and South American dictatorial, military governments.
This transformation which took place gradually in the U.S. can happen quite fast and extremely in countries in the southern hemisphere. Zimbabwe is one of the important recent examples to this transformation. A despotic regime can be toppled by their despotic comrades and the severe transformations can be presented to us as smooth reformations thanks to the assistance of the U.S.
It is useful to see the Khashoggi case from this perspective. For the past six months, there has been an effort to reach a synthesis between traditional governance and Western methods with the liberal regulations turning into a state policy under the patronage of the U.S. What Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said during his visit to America is about nothing but this voluntary transaction of liberalism. The $110 million arms deal Trump landed is also a product of this transaction. The Saudi administration thinks that this deal was very profitable for them and they both bought liberal tendencies in exchange for their money and weapons which would further motivate the continuation of massacres in countries like Yemen.
The murder of Khashoggi seems like a joint operation of the Daesh mentality and CIA. Both the CIA and MOSSAD have carried out similar killings in various parts of the world. Their execution teams sometimes disappeared a politician or a bureaucrat, an academic, or a businessman in South America or in Asia. However, this is the first time in the Muslim world that a consulate is mentioned in relation to a murder. However, even in the Arab traditions which the Saudis rely on, a person shows hospitality to his guest even if he knows that he is his executioner.
Salman showed the whole world how a country which supposedly gave some freedoms to women can kill its own citizen on its soil. Some people say that this murder is normal for the Saudis, but I disagree with them. Except for the murders carried out for power, such a vile murder has neither been carried out by the Saudis nor by any other Gulf country to date. Moreover, this is unprecedented in the history of the Muslim world.
Saudi Arabia wanted to show the language of liberalism which they want to establish in the country. Since liberalism is a new notion in Saudi traditions, they wanted to show how functional it is by conducting an act resembling Daesh. In a way, this new Saudi liberalism is not something different from the neoliberal policies Trump has been pushing.
Just like the old persuasion rooms in Turkey, a professional terrorist group also tried to talk Khashoggi into going back to his country. The Saudi intelligence itself was trying to convince Khashoggi to return to his country and offered him the chance to continue expressing his views in his own country by using one of the most important methods of liberalism: persuasion. What an optimistic approach! Doesn’t this murder show how Crown Prince Salman is open to opposing opinions? Isn’t the U.S. also like him? The harshest critiques to Trump are coming from within the U.S., why wouldn’t the same thing be true for the Saudi administration?
If Khashoggi was persuaded and brought back to Saudi Arabia, he would disappear after two or three weeks later, and rumors would spread that his dismembered body was found in the desert. However, instead of this classical method, the Saudi administration chose a way of defiance which showed their tougher face to all dissident voices living across the world. Maybe the biggest mistake of the Saudis was the preference of the “crime scene.” If they had chosen a consulate in South America or in an African country as a crime scene, they would be able to cover the murder, but the message they were trying to send wouldn’t spread as much as they liked. We don’t know yet whether Salman himself chose Turkey or if he had no other option. Though it seems possible that he had no other option.
I have always seen Daesh terrorism as a postmodernist way of acting. The Khashoggi murder carried out by the Saudi authorities is a reflection of its neoliberal policies. Because the concerns of classical liberalism are more humanist notions like freedom, human rights, justice; and the concerns of classical capitalism are more weighed on the economic side. Saudi neoliberalism, on the other hand, went one step forward and wants to both preserve its capitalist tendencies and also try to subdue or punish people through persuasion who don’t think like them.
The Khashoggi murder showed that Saudi neoliberalism’s concerns are not about human rights, because in the neoliberal tradition there is a tendency to destroy the subject rather than empowering it. The state wanted to show its power both to critiques like Khashoggi, and also to the other regional actors. What the Saudi administration forgets here is that “Zorba (tyrant) the Greek” is not only the name of the novel written by the Greek author Nikos Kazantzakis. Tyranny is going to be one of the key concepts for Salman’s neoliberalism, and will reveal how a team of 15 criminals breaking out a “fistfight” while trying to persuade a journalist paved the way for new murders. We shouldn’t forget that: every tyranny has an end. The rage of the oppressed cannot be silenced and cannot be stopped with methods the young crown prince is trying to import from the U.S…
