What To Do About Saudi Arabia

Tags

9/11 terrorists, Bush family, China, Donald Trump, Islamic State funding, Jered Kushner, Kashoggi murder, Military-industrial complex, Mohammed bin Salman, Noam Chomsky, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Saudi-UU relations, Trump family, Wahhabism

It seems that Mohammed bin Salman is about to admit that the journalist Jamal Kashoggi has been murdered, but he has no idea who did the deed or why. Some think he’ll say a “rogue element” did it, but if so it had nothing to do with him. If such an admission comes, what will we, the West, do about it? Nothing comes to mind, l mean doing nothing. If overwhelming evidence points to you as a murderer, and the police arrive with questions, would “I know nothing about it” have the cops thanking you and going on their way? No. Call it the Russian gambit, and it only works if you’re the absolute despotic ruler of a country. When a Putin or a bin Salman are asked if they committed a crime, they deny it. Does anyone ever say, “Yep, it was me, I’m the one”? It seems laughable when the media report these denials as if they might even be true. Last month MBS was threatening Canada with punishment for criticizing what’s risibly termed his “human rights record” – a broken record if ever there was one. Our critique was not only justified, it was absolutely essential to clarifying Canada’s position vis a vis international law. Now MBS is quite clearly the man who ordered a murder on sovereign territory of someone whose crime was… what? Criticizing MBS, and doing it reasonably and justifiably. If we attempt sanctions or some other punishment for this barbarous and illegal act, says MBS, he’ll punish us back and harder. Am I missing something here?

 

It’s been a while since any head of state asserted his right to do whatever he feels like doing, since absolutist monarchies pretty much died out in 1793, when Louis XVI went to the guillotine. Even North Korea seems to know those days are gone now. So the kingdom of al-Sa’ud stands alone, one man at the helm and doing whatever he wants to do with no opposition at all. I explained a few blogs back how Saudi Arabia functions, its royal princelings and princesses in the thousands, it’s religion a travesty supposedly based on Islam, its reins of power now in one man’s hands – one man who exemplifies the cliché of absolute power corrupting absolutely. But let’s be clear about this religion of theirs. Wahhabism has as much to do with Islam as Mormonism does with Christianity, and its central doctrines are ones of hatred and intolerance, vehemently towards “infidels” of course, but also towards all sects of Islam with the exception of Sunnis, who are nominal patrons. The lucrative control of Islamic holy sites, Mecca and Medina, is in Saudi hands, meaning the Shia, Ismailis, Sufis and many others cannot make the prescribed Haj pilgrimage under Wahhabi law. This law also condones mistreatment of non-believers, particularly us infidels, who can be robbed, cheated, defrauded, lied to, and abused in numerous other ways with impunity and the sanction of the Wahhabi faith, if you can call it that. So MBS has no spiritual qualms about lying to most of the world, although I doubt if the fate of his soul is something he gives much thought at all to. So here we have this barbaric throw-back to a medieval sensibility acting as if it’s a superpower, waging a unjust and brutal war in its back yard, treating women as chattels, beheading homosexuals, imprisoning anyone for any reason, with no rule of law worth the name, and now assassinating critics on foreign soil for reasons so flimsy they’re not even mentioned anymore. This is not some impoverished cess pit in the lower third of the Third World either. It is per capita one of the richest nations on earth, although these riches are controlled by around a millionth of one percent of the population. But to keep the hoi polloi docile the amenities and infrastructures are good, a hospital on every block, the cities clean and virtually brand new. There are really no rural areas to worry about since the rest of the country is basically a beach. Besides the total lack of any rights, there’s not much to complain about – unless you’re female.

 

Here’s a story I heard from a horse next to the horse’s mouth. One of the Saudi princesses, one of the thousands, went to study at the American University in Cairo. She found the slums and poverty of Egypt intoxicating, “so real” she said “after the sterility of my homeland”. Real life was appealing, as it can be. At university she met and fell in love with a westerner, a tall blond American boy. She told her family she intended to marry him and live in the US. The family blew up, ordering her home. She knew enough not to return, because she knew what happened to girls like her. But her brother, who she was close to, persuaded her to meet him in Cairo and discuss the situation amicably. She went to the meeting, where she was kidnapped and flown back to Riyadh in a private jet. She was locked in a special room on the roof of her family house. There were no windows, and she was forbidden any visitors and all conversation. Food was shoved in through a slot in the door. She’s been in that room now for fifteen years. Her food is still taken in, so she’s alive. But those aware of the situation believe she is now completely insane. This is Saudi Arabia. This is the place we are wondering how to punish for a state-sanctioned murder on foreign soil. And Donald Trump found MBS thoroughly convincing when he denied all knowledge of malfeasance. What exactly is going on between the US and Saudi Arabia?

 

The United States of Amnesia no doubt forgets now that the only airplane allowed to fly after the Twin Towers fell on 9-11-01 was the one taking members of the Saudi Royal family out of America. Why them and no one else? Well, the Saudi ambassador in those days, Prince Bandar, was to so close to the Bush family that he was affectionately known as “Bandar Bush” – and of course the Bush family business is oil. There’s another factor too: most of the 9/11 terrorist hijackers were Saudis (the rest were Egyptians), something never properly explained, researched or really even pursued. Instead, Afghanistan was bombed, and then Iraq was invaded. The fog of war conceals most irritating details. It does not, however, occlude the fact that funding for al Qaeda and Islamic State, along with other violent factions, comes principally from the Wahhabi clerics, who share Saudi wealth with the princes. It’s an hereditary clan, like the Mafia. Fast forward to now, and what do we find going on? Well, Trump’s son-in-law, the ubiquitous Jered Kushner, is said to have close ties with MBS, who himself is reported to have said, “Trump’s family is in my pocket”. Breaking with tradition, the first state visit Trump made as president was, not to reliable allies like Canada or the UK, but to, yes, Saudi Arabia. Why? What was discussed? We don’t know. But Jered Kushner is not a government employee, so his close ties must be about private business, no? The president burbles on about this $110 billion deal that’s in jeopardy, apparently, if the US imposes sanctions on Saudi Arabia. Oh, the jobs in danger, the GDP tanking, the sheer horror of losing any deal! But $110 billion is a pittance compared with the Saudi trillions invested in US corporations (they’ve got a pile in Canada too), especially aerospace and the arms mega-business. There’s been a lot of Saudi-US chatter over the past few days, and I imagine it’s about these invested trillions. MBS makes a few hundred million daily, so a few billion isn’t even worth his while. The question is this: Are the Saudis threatening to pull out their trillions and invest them in China or, God forbid, Russia? Or are the Americans threatening to confiscate Saudi assets wherever they’re to be found? This long and mysteriously chummy relationship can only be about money, money mainly in the form of oil. The combo of oil and money leads us inexorably to the venerable old Military-Industrial complex, which lives entirely on oil and money. The Trump family, individually and collectively, are heavily invested in this hydra-headed monster churning out death in a myriad of forms, and consequently needing many small wars running all the time to keep the supply-line busy. The Saudis obviously have a spanner somehow poised to be thrown into these works; otherwise who’d care what happened to them?

 

As I said last time, seizing Saudi assets would be an appropriate and deservedly painful punishment, because a punishment there surely has to be? The kingdom would make an amusing theme park, Despotworld or Tyrantland. But the situation is not really amusing enough for satire. Instead I will leave you with some wise words from one of the few wise men left in America:

“Let me finally return to Dwight Macdonald and the responsibility of intellectuals. Macdonald quotes an interview with a death-camp paymaster who burst into tears when told that the Russians would hang him. “Why should they? What have I done?” he asked. Macdonald concludes: “Only those who are willing to resist authority themselves when it conflicts too intolerably with their personal moral code, only they have the right to condemn the death-camp paymaster.” The question, “What have I done?” is one that we may well ask ourselves, as we read each day of fresh atrocities in Vietnam—as we create, or mouth, or tolerate the deceptions that will be used to justify the next defense of freedom.

— Noam  Chomsky, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals” (1967).

The beat goes on and on and on, so where are those intellectuals willing and able to take responsibility for this latest abomination? What is it that is all it takes for evil to succeed?

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Star Wars Redux?

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China, death-star, paul william roberts, putin, Russia, satellites, Space Force, space law, Trump ignorance, United Nations, weaponization of space

Last week, amid the outcry against grotesque in humanity at the Mexican border, President Trump – how those two words still sit so uneasily together, so incongruously! – ordered the Department of Defence and the Pentagon to create a sixth branch of the US Military he called Space Force. Its purpose? To make America great again beyond the ionosphere, out there in the universe. Another branch of the military? It does sound like the weaponization of space, doesn’t it? Well, a very clever East Indian fellow, whose name old age currently prevents from recalling, drafted the International Law governing outer space, and among the many clauses in this law, approved by the UN, is the prohibition of weapons there. It also declares all off-world bodies, moons, asteroids, planets, international territory, whose resources, if any, belong to the world as a whole. This may sound chauvinistic to any Venusians or Martians looking on, but from our point of view it certifies the solar system, the galaxy, and indeed everything else, as the communal property of our planet, the one presumed to be discovering everything. It’s not unreasonable, and won’t be until someone else comes along. Possibly no one has told Trump, and you can be certain he’s never read about it himself, that the Reagan-era Strategic Defence Initiative, popularly known as Star Wars, was in fact a sham designed to spook the erstwhile Soviet Union into throwing in the towel. That and an undermining of the economy by means of luring them into Afghanistan actually worked. The Soviet Union was bankrupted by trying to keep up with American financial exceptionalism, and the glorious age of Putin was born. Star Wars was a theoretical system of “death-star” satellites capable of shooting any incoming hostile missiles out of the middle air long before they reached America. Digital videos of the whole kit and caboodle looked very sci-fi and effective, as satellites zapped away at incoming threats left, right and centre, the lasers terminating old-fashioned missiles the way they do in video games. The trouble was that this in itself was a video game. The Pentagon of course never bothered to announce that the SDI was indeed a marvellous idea, but also one so expensive that the entire world together couldn’t afford it. Better dead than bankrupt was the message. But Russia and China believed SDI was in the works, and, unsurprisingly, thirty years later both of America’s eternal foes have rather pitiful versions of “death-star” satellites that can, or sometimes can in publicized tests, zap the satellites that pry into secretive doings on their stretches of earth or threaten their own wastelands of space junk. You can’t have this coercion going on, can you? Ergo: Space Force.

 

Let us theoretically posit that the UN’s Security Council is a monstrous aberration that negates the purpose of the entire rather useless organization. It’s just an hypothesis. So why is it that members of this Security Council always include Russia, China and America, with lesser, very grateful nations given a brief peek at what the big boys do? And what those big boys do – let’s call them RAC – is whatever the fuck they like. If criticized at all, it is by fellow big boys. All three of them have now broken space law, and who is calling for punitive measures? Perhaps no one? At least the international outrage is so muted that this latest American response – always belligerent – is… Space Force, war in outer space, more shame for this planet, if that is anyone else is watching. No outcry so far, no gnashing of UN teeth, probably because 95 percent of the planet views space exploration in much the same way as it views immortality. Yet for the rest of us the weaponization of space is very real, and a very real threat on the same level as the race for atomic weapons. The testing of “death-star” satellites way up there in the endless night will have unpredictable effects down here, from the disruption of telecommunications and data storage systems to the ever-more-likely event of space junk, a few tons of scrap metal, hurtling down to land in your kiddie park or wherever. The consequences of an actual shooting war up there are unthinkable.

 

Yet there he is, Space-Admiral Trump, the uniform tight, muscle-defining, as he salutes another platoon of space warriors on their way to do battle with Darth Putin’s scaly scum or the Beijingons. And no one objects? And no one points out that this is in fact illegal? Let the facts be facts, and life the thing it can, by all means, but don’t see yourselves as innocent bystanders when you can’t be bothered to rebel against monstrosity when it rears up on your watch. If we aren’t prepared to die for certain principles we have no principles at all.

State of Disunion

Tags

China, colonial guilt, david frum, DNA, henry VIII, hidden agenda, history, indigenous, justice, kevin spacey, lgbt, me too, michael wolfe, mig-maw, sex, spirit, state department, thomas more, times up, two, ursula johnson

 

This was certainly the winter of my discontent: flu that turned to pneumonia and had me feeling like the Death of Chatterton for over a month. But the year stretching out behind it – and now surrounding it – seems so much more dispiriting. I cannot recall a time when North Americans, indeed westerners in general, seemed more despairing about their present and its future. In America, the fabric of governance is in tatters, every move of even the least significant pawn so partisan in nature that you cannot trust its intent. The media seem reluctant to inform us that, say, the FBI-Russian-Collusion probe is largely a Democrat operation; and no wonder – the moment you find this out the whole venture seems suspect. Similarly with Trump’s alleged achievements: when it’s only Republicans braying about them – and nothing seems certain in the White House anymore anyway – you tend to cease listening. Election promises or threats are still on Trump’s to do list, continually edged downwards and periodically restored to seem like urgent preoccupations. Everyone knows that such promises are what you say to get elected, not usually anything you think of as important. But there is too little attention paid to what Trump clearly does regard as important, and with which he can be said to have achieved some considerable success – if you’re prepared to accept that his hidden agenda does not remotely resemble his stated agenda. Steve Bannon may have become Sloppy Steve and no longer work in the White House, but the reason for these slights and his ouster is not what it’s said to be. As the Michael Wolf tell-all-but-say-nothing blab about the administration makes abundantly clear – when nothing else in the tome is at all clear – is that Bannon is a master strategist, the Machiavelli behind Trump’s disobedient Prince, the only man who knows where all the skeletons are hidden and how the century’s greatest political coup was accomplished. They still talk every day of course, and it’s anyone’s guess to what extent Bannon still remains helmsman. But he was too great a media distraction, even though you scarcely heard of him after the election, and too easy a target for a media in desperate search, as always, for someone to blame. A nexus of unpalatable influences converge in Bannon, who can be said to be their conduit into the Oval Office – particularly that of Mercer, the shadowy billionaire hedge funder whose avowed intent is to dismantle the institutions of US governance, reduce the administration to a parochial think-tank, and turn back the clock to around 1918 – no welfare, no feminism, no civil rights , no LGBTQ, and no impediments to the carpetbaggers, fiduciary pirates, and sundry other predators out to fleece the country and to own it more completely, with less hurdles to jump, than they already do. Mercer, a Trump eminence grise, has been unguardedly open about his wish-thinking in the past, so we know some of the strategy and tactics that appeal to him. You put men in charge of departments they are known to scorn and believe worthless. You fire key figures in departments, men who may be relatively unknown but are utterly vital to their departments, and you do not replace them. You stack the judiciary with reliable men, men who will do what they’re told to do and not what their conscience dictates. And you whittle away at everything until the dross is gone. For power lies off the radar, in under-secretaries and assistants to the mighty. He who controls the judiciary truly holds the reins and can shape the future. Figureheads come and go, but the real power remains. If you look at the more seemingly boring things Trump has done, fiddling with this department and that department, you will be forced to conclude that the Bannon-Mercer strategy has been rather successfully implemented. You have a climate-change-denier running the EPA, for example, and you have a Secretary of State committed to reducing staff at the State Department by up to fifty percent (the numbers can’t be trusted anymore), with many of those let go important section heads whose sections will effectively cease to exist without them. This is the Trump agenda and it is moving along quite nicely out of the media glare, and never tweeted about, for the tweets are a smokescreen few journalists seem willing to fully comprehend, taking the bait every morning like fish-time in the penguin cage. These are the real reasons for American despair.

 

David Frum has a new book too, TRUMPOCRACY, a speculative foray into the presidency – although Frum would never admit to speculating. He always seems to have an eye for which side his bread is buttered on, this determining where his loyalties lie any given year. His consistency is at best punctuated, but he does seem to have concluded there’s no butter for him on Trump’s slice, a conclusion that, as he tells it, leads inexorably to the end of his once-loved Republican Party and America’s destruction. He hadn’t reached this conclusion even months after the election and inauguration, so you must assume that something has happened to change his changeable mind. As editor of the Atlantic Monthly, Frum must have some solid channels to the more influential people in Congress, where the word is that a movement exists to found a new party – the taint of Trump regarded as an indelible Republican stain, impervious to rehabilitation. Frum is always engaging, bright and perceptive, yet his books invariably contain the screech of axes being ground somewhere in the background. Here he makes interesting points about the consequences of a fractured or irrelevant party – it will leave Trump more powerful than ever – but his attempt to leave the reader concluding that obviously a new party is needed veers the argument away from fruitful territory and into trackless bush, where some wise old shaman keeps asking you if a new party is really going to solve the old dilemma. Despair from left and right, thick and fast, and no one keeping an eye on the real damage done daily.

 

Up here in the Great White North we are fomenting our own modest despair with two opposition parties that seem to have forgotten they’re supposed to have a purpose beyond the knee-jerk opposition to whatever the governing Liberals do or don’t do. At best a Grade 10 debating society in a querulous, unruly part of town, Parliament increasingly resembles proceedings of the Lilliputian senate, or whatever it was, regarding which end of a boiled egg ought to be cracked open. No one ventures to speak the truth: it actually doesn’t matter which end you crack. Everyone merely looks to see which side they should be on, and then argues for it vehemently, as if they care passionately. Our Conservatives have a good idea of where they must always stand – less taxes, more ethics, blah-blah – which leaves the New Democrats (so au courant and edgy they elected a turbaned Sikh as leader) in the only position requiring some deep thought and ingenuity to come up with objections to the Liberals that the Tories haven’t or couldn’t raise themselves. We’re still waiting for one of these bombshells to explode in Ottawa. In truth, all three parties brandish policies that are remarkably similar, since the most pressing problems all have similar and manifestly obvious solutions – usually money. With surprising persistence the Liberals have forged ahead with a plan to right every wrong since Contact, and if you only listen to the CBC you would get the impression that Indigenous issues, gender equality, LGBTQ-Two-Spirit (and whatever else) rights, and so on were the only problems we face. So far towards guilt and fairness has the pendulum swung that you fear for the backlash when it comes, as it most certainly will. For this policy has ignored the very people who Trump identified as his base in the US, the blue-collar working Canadians who regard themselves, perhaps wrongly, as this country’s founders. Just as the US Democrats began to shun their own base, the unions and proletariat, preferring to cobble together a second hierarchy of achievers, experts, lawyers and economists – a caste who all believe the same things and dominate public discourse – so the Liberals here have similarly formed a central corpus of new-money elites who pretend concern for the working class but in reality applaud entrepreneurship, innovation, and the championing of banner concerns, like the Indigenous, that no one in the opposition parties dares to criticize for fear of politically incorrect exile and banishment. Once the First Nations realized someone was actually listening, their complaints came thick and fast, the more easily soluble ones acted on with a haste amounting to folly, but many of the others getting tangled up in related problems that spawn committee after committee – because no one can admit they may prove insoluble. Far easier to take down the statue of Cornwallis, founder of Halifax, at the request of Mig-Maw representatives who pointed out that Cornwallis, beside his more laudable achievements, was also a racist bastard intent on exterminating the Indigenous, who he regarded as not human, as the Jesuit missionaries did (you have to be baptized to be human, apparently). Renaissance intellectual and statesman Thomas More – author of UTOPIA – believed that people who said the Communion host was just a piece of bread and not the body of Christ ought to be tortured and burned alive. It is unlikely that anyone now thinks he was right about this, yet statues of him still stand in London and portraits hang in museums, not to celebrate his rectitude but to acknowledge that, as Chancellor of England under Henry VIII, and a prominent man of his time, his role in history can never be denied. If you don’t like the past – and anyone studying it can hardly find our ancestors a heartwarming spectacle – you don’t have to; but you can’t erase it. Facts are facts, and always will be – until Steve Bannon becomes Czar. I suggested to the Mayor of Halifax that one of the many fine Mig-Maw artists – like Ursula Johnson – be commissioned to create a work around or near the Cornwallis statue to elucidate his darker side, like the bounty he set on dead Indians, so that visitors will be apprised of the whole story. Apparently Ursula Johnson herself also favoured this solution. But no. The issue became something other than what it was about, a test of wills and a flexing of newly-acquired muscle, so the statue came down and will presumably be gathering dust in some government warehouse into the next millennium, while history smarts, and those forgotten Canadians who prize their history – or what little they know of it – feel snubbed, pushed to the back of the line in favour of the politically correct darlings, people they view as parasites expecting eternal compensation for grievances stretching into the mists of time. This will not end well, and it is highly inadvisable for any government to overlook one disaffected group for another. This sudden righting of old wrongs smacks of a guilt that may be felt keenly by liberal elites, but is not such a pressing issue for those whose awareness of current events is sketchy and sporadic, yet who nonetheless, rightly or wrongly, regard themselves as the builders of this modern nation. No one should say the Indigenous have no grievances. But no one should ignore the grievances building in other quarters for entirely different – but not dismissible – reasons, grievances that a Trump could and would use as the foundation of his base and a time when the pendulum will swing so far back in the other direction it will be hard to believe it was ever anywhere else. Division in society is no way to protect the frail thing we call democracy, which is still the exception in this troubled, directionless world.

 

Concomitant with all this is the Me Too or Time’s Up tyranny, in which an allegation, even one reporting an event decades ago, with no recourse to the Law or law enforcement, is deemed sufficient to destroy a career and deprive someone of their livelihood. This is not good for the world either. If someone is accused of theft or fraud it will go to the law before any judgement is made, as will virtually every other felony or misdemeanor. Even pedophiles are granted a day in court – but not the suspect of sexual impropriety, or, more troublingly, the prominent member of society thus suspected (and usually in the entertainment business, which we seem to regard as the only real prominence that exists). I agree with the brilliant Cambridge classicist, Margaret Beard – author of WOMEN AND POWER – who says that these men should be publically shamed, obliged to confess the error of their ways, and promise never to do it again. In most cases, that’s surely enough, no? You go up to Kevin Spacey’s hotel room and he makes a pass at you – what did you expect? – and twenty years later you decide this flaw in judgement should warrant destroying his career and probably ruining the rest of his life, not to mention robbing the world of a fine actor? Huh? Am I missing something? The victim seems to be more deserving of punishment for thinking one trifle warrants Armageddon. You think of the mobs eagerly attending burnings and guillotinings, and you are forced to concede that public opinion counts for very little. The whole business also overlooks the fact that men and women may be equal in the eyes of the law, but they are still very different. It’s physiology and anthropology. A man can father two or more children a day if he wishes; a woman has one shot and then it’s a year or more out of action. This reflects something deep in the DNA, which hasn’t ever really changed and, whether we like it ot not, tells us our only real purpose here as animals is to reproduce. Our tragic flaw is the mind which persuades us we can aspire to higher goals, yet the mind’s vehicle is a body that knows nothing more than sex and food. The dichotomy can be blamed for all our woes as a species; and it ought to be taken into account when unwanted advances or comments come up. The peacock struts about with his jewelled tail feathers waving at all the hens. The man feels compelled to further his vestigial mission to spread the seed at every opportunity. Our nature may well be changing, but it will be thousands of years before anyone will be able to determine that for certain. In the meantime, history will remain history, and men will be governed for much of their lives by animal instincts seemingly beyond conscious control, and, let’s face it, not viewed as repellant by all women. The suppression of reality is not good for the world, which changes at its own pace. You don’t go to China for a trade deal and dictate all the politically correct changes the Chinese will have to make to get that deal. They famously dislike any interference in their internal affairs, just as Henry VIII would have been outraged if the Emperor of China told him to stop racking, flaying and boiling his subjects alive. Change comes little by little. We shall have to see if the current male wariness around women can override the boiling reptile instinct to hump – and then be equal again.

 

I shall leave the midden of Europe and the trembling of Britain until a later date – or never. My very best for the coming year.

 

Paul William Roberts

 

robertspaulwilliam@gmail.com     

Early Dog Days

Tags

Canada, China, trump

 

RIP Liou Zha Bo, a great friend of world peace and true democracy, a scholar and a poet, who tended to view his country through a lens too sharp for his time. Like everywhere, China is different. Her governments don’t brook criticism – not from anyone, except, occasionally, themselves – which tells you they’re insecure, understandably uncertain how they’d deal with the rising up of a billion disaffected people. Better to crush all nascent dissent, and give everyone else a little taste of wealth. Just a little. Better also to let the waking dragon roar a bit at the world, at the coffers and vaults of the west. It’s been asleep for so long. But, all in all, is the US any more tolerant of vehement dissent? Was there any real substantial difference between the Kent State massacres and Tiananmen Square? And China hasn’t sent 500,000 young men and women to their deaths in foreign wars over the past fifty years, has she? Let the dragon yawn and stretch; its time is surely nigh, and then we shall have to change our indolent ways.

 

Julie Paillette (my spelling is aural, not visual, so forgive if necessary). A wonderful choice for the new Canadian Governor-General. Her Majesty will probably enjoy chatting with an astronaut, someone who has obtained a real perspective on this world. Kudos to le Petit. I am hard on him, true, but only because I want him to be perfect – which, alas, he’s far from being, as are we all. I think he wants to do the right thing; but I suspect there are more powerful forces preventing him, consigning him to a purely decorative role. Will he have his father’s integrity and grit, to speak out one day? – that’s the question. We deserve to know who really holds the reins here, even if there’s nothing we can do about it. Or nothing legal, nothing peaceful.