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Showing posts with the label "arab world"
Saudi Arabia has the backing of an emerging superpower  "Showkutally Soodhun, president of Mauritius’ ruling MSM (Militant Socialist Movement) party and the island nation’s former vice president, also praised the Kingdom for taking the lead in the global fight against terrorism."  Yes, you read it rightly, the leader of "Militant Socialist Movement" party has praised one of the most reactionary regimes in the world .
This cannot be accurate, for these kind of surveys do not show the wide difference between classes in major issues.  Such a survey is merely a snapshot that refletcs the blockage towards full capitalist  "development" and therefore the dominance of bourgeois norms (e.g. sexual and gender norms), the failure of modernisation of the 1950 and 1960s, the development of rentier economies, especially in the Gulf, instead of industrialisation  on the one hand and the defeat of the 2011 revolution on the other. As for the threat of the US and Israel, the Arab world is still a very strategic battleground where local ruling classes and international ones have major and common interests in restructuring or preserving the existing order. Major questions that could be included in the survey, and that could   provide a picture beyond the symptoms, are the type of politcal regime and economic system the Arab countries need, and how should the wealth be exploited and distributed, etc
"The Arab world’s main problem is dictators who continue to be supported by foreign powers, and foreign powers bombing them when they cease to be useful. The problematic Western interventions, past and present, will remain controversial and dangerous. When they are financed by Saudi petrodollars, they are even more problematic, serving the interest of a lethal repressive regime rather than the suffering people of Syria." — Madawi al-Rasheed "Problematic" and "controversial"? This is what I call liberal academic correctness; not calling a spade a spade.
"we might note that for the underachieving Arab countries, which is in fact the overwhelming majority of them, the crunch on their course of development is fourfold." Development under the threat of war in the Arab World