Mirage 2000 Quotes

Everything is competing to show its good will. Things tend irresistibly towards perfection, effusiveness, reconciliation. Fortunately, nothing is ever perfect, thanks to Dostoevsky's 'unspeakable little demon ... that evil spirit that prompts to murder and scorn.' Everything tends irresistibly towards transparency. However, there remains a glimmer of secrecy - a clandestine dust-breeding that is mostly useless, an umbilical mirage, insider trading, but secret all the same.

The loss of Mecca threatened Sultan Mahmud II’s authority and finances, and in 1811 he ordered the Ottoman Governor of Egypt, Mohammed Ali Pasha, to expel the Wahhabis. Mohammed Ali Pasha and his son, Ibrahim Pasha, campaigned for seven years to destroy the First Saudi State. When Imam Saud al-Saud died in 1814, his son, Imam Abdullah, withdrew to the Nejd pursued by Ibrahim Pasha and an army of 5,000 infantry, 2,000 cavalry, and 150 artillerymen with howitzers, mortars, and cannon.14 This largely Egyptian army besieged the then Saudi capital of Dir’iyyah, where the vastly outnumbered and outgunned Wahhabis, who had no artillery, held out for six months before surrendering on September 11, 1818.

After several failed attempts to negotiate a settlement, Abdulaziz invaded Yemen. One Saudi column led by his eldest son, Prince Saud, captured Najran and advanced to Sa’dah, the center of today’s Houthi movement. Facing tremendous difficulties with mountainous terrain and tribesmen, he subsequently had no more success than the Roman General Gallus had had 2,000 years earlier or the Royal Saudi Air Force would have eighty years later. A second column led by the second son, Prince Faisal, was more successful. Using motor transport and modern weapons paid for with a loan from the newly arrived Standard Oil of California (today’s Chevron), Faisal advanced rapidly down the flat Red Sea coast.38 The Yemeni coastal tribes—notably, the Zaraniq—are Shafi Sunnis and were happy to join the war against the Zaydi Shia. They facilitated the surrender of the coastal city of Hodeidah without a fight.

At the height of the first oil boom in 1980, there were nearly 10,000 Saudi students in the United States. After 9/11, there were barely 2,000. In 2017, because of King Abdullah’s scholarship program, there were 68,000 Saudis studying at hundreds of American universities and thousands of others in Britain, Canada, and Australia. Only China, India, and South Korea had more students in American universities, and when measured as a percentage of its total population, Saudi Arabia was far ahead of the others.

Where America is concerned, we more or less harbour the illusion that everything that is thought over here becomes a reality over there: not just the achieved utopia of technology and happiness, but the utopia of theory become reality. All this is based on a massive misunderstanding: theory is not made to be realized. Its effectuation is also its death. But this accomplishment allows us to glimpse what might well be an obscure desire on the part of thought: that of losing itself in its effects, of abolishing itself in a reality that transfigures or disfigures it. This is doubtless what has happened between America and European thought: a great two-handed game, a dual relationship without absolute primacy of one party or the other - the supremacy of French thought is a mirage, even if it has lasted for a whole generation. All in all, we might be said to have witnessed a 'becoming-phenomenon' of ideas, but in a non-Hegelian sense: not by a sublation of Spirit, but in the sense of an irrevocable derision and degradation. And yet this ordeal has to take place: thought has to be confronted with its actualization, for better and for worse. In this sense, we can say that this confrontation of thought with its own actualized object - with which, in the guise of the real, it cannot at all reconcile itself - has constituted an event.