Powerful face few checks
Idon’t know exactly what happened to Jamal Khashoggi and neither do you. The Turks seem to know, but I don’t trust the Turkish president. Turkey is nominally a democracy but President Erdogan is a tyrant in the making. He imprisons political enemies. He seeks to extend his own powers. He appeals to crude religious patriotism. The world has seen his type a thousand times and continues to see it: Putin, Xi, Maduro and a hundred others, bastards all, and thriving now as they have always thrived.
The people who definitely know what happened to Mr Khashoggi are the Saudis. They know because they killed him. But for two weeks they denied it. They lied more obviously than any schoolboy.
In the end they had to admit it, but they’ve now said he died in a brawl. It’s another obvious lie. By the time this column is published they will have told more lies. It’s what dictatorships do.
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is a theocracy. There’s nothing new in that. Kings and priests have held hands throughout history.
The House of Saud espouses a puritan form of Islam. There’s no being gay in Saudi Arabia, nor is there any drinking. Unless of course you are a royal – and there are thousands of royals. If you are interested you might look up the story of the Saudi princeling who beat his gay sex slave to death in a London hotel while drinking champagne cocktails.
Mr Khashoggi had criticised the Saudi royal family, which is why they had him killed. Again it’s what dictatorships do. Stalin silenced his enemies, Putin, Xi and Kim Jong-Un silence theirs, and the crown prince of Saudi Arabia has now silenced one of his.
Power brings wealth and impunity which is why people like it. The powerful get away with everything up to and including theft and murder. The poor get away with nothing.
Shakespeare summed it up 400 years ago:
Plate sin with gold And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks. Arm it in rags a pygmy’s straw doth pierce it. (King Lear, Act 4)
The world hasn’t changed much since then. But it has changed a bit. There are a few places now where the poor and the powerless can hope to get justice. Places where you cannot just kill a journalist. You and I live in one.
Such places are far from perfect but they are a huge advance on any dictatorship. Together they form what is known as the free world. The leader of the free world is the United States, and the leader of the United States is Trump. Yet Trump instinctively and invariably sides with the thieves, the liars and the murderers.
His first act when Mr Khashoggi’s death became undeniable was to send an emissary to, where else, Saudi Arabia. He encouraged the Saudis to investigate a crime for which they are the obvious and only suspect. He floated the idea of ‘rogue killers’. If Congress doesn’t stop him, and I doubt it will, Trump will let the crown prince of Saudi Arabia get away with murder.
And that, in the end, is why Trump is so vile, so dangerous, such a cancer on the world. It isn’t his lying or his limitless vanity or his hair. It’s that he’s a moral throwback. He reverses one of the few steps forward our species has taken.
To side with Trump is to favour money over justice, the oppressor over the oppressed, the bully over the victim and the lie over the truth.
To side with Trump is to get into bed with tyranny.