Jesus, Plantagenet. If you and I are actually agreeing on something, then I must have been wrong. I take it all back.

Anyhoo, Mr Nicknamenick may have an Absolutist personality. He just made a "hit and run" post in the style of the morally outraged, a fairly reliable indicator of that particular mindset category. . Apparently, he is just too dumb to think beyond superficialities when it comes to judging the House of Saud.

OK, in the birthplace of Islam, a country which is 100% Muslim, the birthplace of Islam, and the protector of Islam's most holy shrines, what sort of government does Mr Nick think will govern that place? It can hardly be a secular democracy that advocates the western invented concept of human rights. It can only be either an Islamic theocracy, or a feudal type despotism where the ruling class placates the mullahs by either buying them off, terrorising them, or engaging in mutual back scratching.

No matter how bad, hostile, incompetent, or corrupt the House of Saud is, it at least is not openly declaring jihad against the West. And if the House of Saud falls, whoever replaces it is not going to be any better in a Western thinking democratic, secular sense. But it could be ten times worse. Think of Adolph Hitler with half the world's oil supply, a couple of trillion bucks in hard currency investments, and a religious conviction that he must take over the entire world by force to please Odin, (or at least bring on Armageddon), and you get the idea.

The problem is not the House of Saud per se. It is Islam. But you can bet that people like Mr Nick will never criticise that. Not that I blame him. Criticising Islam gets you killed. Safer to blame the House of Saud, the Christians, the Jews, the West, the USA, Europe, Pauline Hanson, Tony Abbott, or anybody else but Islam.

The rising of hope in Jeremyn Corbyn's landslide UK Labour leadership election will be short lived. A military-media coup will almost certainly remove him from power.

Western democracy,UK-style,will go into a long, dark period of authoritarian government and will emerge with a military-democracy style rule, with immunity from prosecution for the MI5/British army intelligence operatives who violently destroyed all hope of a left-wing awakening of bottom-up rule.

Britain's allies, including, as especially, Australia, will accept this as the way things should be, as there is no alternative (other than what the corporate-political media establishment says there is).

Of course, I desperately want to be proved wrong. I'd like nothing better than to be proved a left-wing conspiracy nutter.

A right wing military dictatorship would be preferable to a democratically elected Socialist one, Killarney, for the simple reason that socialist regimes usually turn into authoritarian ones anyway, and at least the right wing authoritarians know how to run an economy.

Read up on your history, Killarney. Greece, South Korea, Taiwan, Cuba and Singapore were economically solvent under their right wing authoritarian governments. Chile went from a steadily improving third world democratic country economy until it elected a Corbyn of it's own. It then went backwards so rapidly that people were starving and the Chilean women walked the streets banging pots and pans to let the stupid socialist government know that there was no food to eat. People stood in the streets and cheered when the Chilean Air Force bombed the Presidential Palace and killed that arch idiot Allende. Under General Pinochet, the economy recovered and improved.

Britain became "the poor man of Europe" when it's union dominated socialist Labour Party gained office and the country's economy nose dived. Labour nationalised British Leyland, the coal mines, and every other failing industry to "create jobs." The result was economic ruin. Thank God Margaret Thatcher saved the place from Socialism.

You must be very young to love Socialism so much, Killarney. Older people are more sensible, and they have been inoculated against the empty promises of Socialism through watching it fail everywhere.

After I am dead, I hope you get what you want in the end. I can still remember the Africans and Muslims cheering when the hated white colonialists were sent packing from their countries. Then reality bit and their countries became unlivable. Now they all want to come and live with us, whether we want them to or not. And I know that people with your peculiar mindest cheered on Lenin, Pol Pot, and Kim Il Sung. Then they went into shock when they were all rounded up and led towards the execution pits. They died screaming "But comrades, there has been a mistake! We are Socialists!"

Wow, LEGO, Pinochet is your example of a Right Wing Authoritarian success story? It would be better than a centre-left democracy?

How many tortured - 28,000 The most prevalent forms of state-sponsored torture that Chilean prisoners endured were electric shocks, waterboarding, beatings, and sexual abuse.

How many executed - 2,279
Here is the last song of folk singer Victor Jara - killed in a Chile soccer stadium - his hands were crushed before he was executed
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hY84jqSyspI

How many disappeared - 1,248

How many left country to escape Pinochet regime - 200,000
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_violations_in_Pinochet%27s_Chile

And the so called economic miracle - maybe if you were in the elite, for the majority it was anything but.

"Amartya Sen, in his book Hunger and Public Action, examines the performance of Chile in various economic and social indicators. He finds, from a survey of the literature on the field:

The so-called "monetarist experiment" which lasted until 1982 in its pure form, has been the object of much controversy, but few have claimed it to be a success...The most conspicuous feature of the post 1973 period is that of considerable instability...no firm and consistent upward trend (to say the least).

According to Ricardo Ffrench-Davis the unnecessary radicalism of the shock therapy in the 1970s caused mass unemployment, purchasing power losses, extreme inequalities in the distribution of income and severe socio-economic damage.[20] According to United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean data the percentage of Chilean population living in poverty rose from 17% in 1969 to 45% in 1985."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_of_Chile

Just found this beautiful song by Christy Moore about Victor Jara's life and death
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGtCeyu9hxQ

Here are the lyrics
Victor Jara of Chile lived like a shooting star
He fought for the people of Chile with his songs and his guitar
His hands were gentle and his hands were strong

Victor Jara was a peasant boy barely six years old
He sat upon his father's plough and watched the earth unfold

When the neighbours had a wedding or one of their children died
His mother sang all night to them with Victor by her side

He grew up to be a fighter stood against what was wrong
He learned of peoples grief and joy and turned it into song

He sang for the copper miners and those who farmed the land
He sang for the factory workers who knew Victor was their man

He campaigned for Allende canvassed night and day
Singing take hold of your brother's hand the future starts today

When Pinochet seized Chile they arrested Victor then -
They caged him in the stadium with 5000 frightened men

Victor picked up his guitar his voice resounded strong
And he sang for his comrades till the guards cut short his song

They broke the bones in both his hands and beat him on the head
Tortured him with electric wires then they shot him dead

Victor Jara of Chile lived like a shooting star
He fought for the people of Chile with his songs and his guitar
His hands were gentle and his hands were strong

Hi BJelly. I got this from Wiki.

Estimated number of victims of socialism.

In the introduction, editor Stéphane Courtois states that "...Communist regimes... turned mass crime into a full-blown system of government."[3] He claims that a death toll totals 94 million.[4] The breakdown of the number of deaths given by Courtois is as follows:
65 million in the People's Republic of China
20 million in the Soviet Union
2 million in Cambodia
2 million in North Korea
1.7 million in Ethiopia
1.5 million in Afghanistan
1 million in the Communist states of Eastern Europe
1 million in Vietnam
150,000 in Latin America, mainly Cuba
10,000 deaths "resulting from actions of the international Communist movement and Communist parties not in power."[4]

Courtois claims that Communist regimes are responsible for a greater number of deaths than any other political ideal or movement, including Nazism. The statistics of victims includes executions, famine, deaths resulting from deportations, physical confinement, or through forced labour.

Here is your National Socialist friend Hitler on Socialism.

"We are socialists, we are enemies of today's capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions."

Adolf Hitler Speech of May 1, 1927

Number of victims of National Socialism? 30 million Russians, six million Jews, and a few million French, British, US, Dutch, Norwegian, Belgian, Australians, Danish, Ukrainian, etc etc