Neom: Forces 'told to kill’ to clear land for eco-city

Col Rabih Alenezi says he was ordered to evict villagers from a tribe in the Gulf state to make way for The Line, part of the Neom eco-project.

One of them was subsequently shot and killed for protesting against eviction.

The Saudi government and Neom management refused to comment.

Neom, Saudi Arabia’s $500bn (£399bn) eco-region, is part of its Saudi Vision 2030 strategy which aims to diversify the kingdom’s economy away from oil.

Its flagship project, The Line, has been pitched as a car-free city, just 200m (656ft) wide and 170km (106 miles) long - though only 2.4km of the project is reportedly expected to be completed by 2030.

zephyreks,

At least Saudi Arabia is doing something to guard against the imminent collapse of their oil economy… So that’s good, I guess.

Not sure Neom is the project I would have funded to do so, but I imagine the Saudis are getting desperate.

SrTobi,

Wait? I thought they had killed the project or at least significantly reduced it in scope? Why still kill for it then?

Stamau123,

This was when the stupid plan was both big and stupid, now it’s puny and stupid.

Those people are still dead tho

mycathas9lives,

Protesting in Saudi? I didn’t know such a thing existed. /s

whereisk,

Does for a little bit, then it doesn’t.

YeetPics,
@YeetPics@mander.xyz avatar

How long before tankies start protesting the Saudi colonialism?

Oh, they won’t? Okay.

Linkerbaan,
@Linkerbaan@lemmy.world avatar

Liberals will never protest the murder of brown people

Liz,

Both tankies and liberals would object to being conflated with each other.

Linkerbaan,
@Linkerbaan@lemmy.world avatar

Explain the difference between a liberal and a tankie.

hint; they’re the same.

theareciboincident,

They do, every year, at career fairs across the nations schools. It’s called divesting from the military industrial complex.

You just pretend not to see it.

This issue is brought up literally every time the Saudis are mentioned. However, your take is a fresh and interesting one that makes absolutely zero sense.

What are you doing?

Oh that’s right, nothing. Okay.

It’s not even a fucking meme in the tankiest Putin apologist communities to support Saudi Arabia.

Seriously where are you even getting this from?

Addition1291,

All this hardship and money just so they can build a giant glass box in the middle of the fucking desert. Anyone whose spent like 5 minutes in a greenhouse will tell you why that’s a bad idea for a city.

ForgotAboutDre,

It’s fine they’ll fill it with air-conditioning, all powered by fossils fuels.

ChillPenguin,

If it even gets built out. I’m expecting this to become a bioshock or escape from LA type situation. Where the city starts off normal but just goes straight to hell.

Zorsith,
@Zorsith@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

I’m thinking more “fallout vault dweller” scenario, hundreds of small isolated cities each with their own experiment.

CosmoNova,

Please don‘t call it an eco-region just because these eco wrecking saudis do.

Danquebec,

And it’s a real word. Neom is obviously not an eco-region lol

retrospectology,
@retrospectology@lemmy.world avatar

You’re saying creating a 100 mile long barrier with a mirrored surface that cooks everything around it and prevents wild life from reaching the sea isn’t creating an eco-region?

tabris,

This is such a stupid project. You could fit the same size city in 6km x 6km and it’d be bigger than what they have planned. Much cheaper and easier as well, and no reason to kill anyone… Oh wait, I see the incentive.

HubertManne,
HubertManne avatar

I agree its stupid but the original idea was larger and had a transit system going down it. I think that was the concept. To sorta maximize transit as you did not need to branch it off to go to various places.

dditty,

Whatever they end up building will still be harder to navigate than traditional city layouts. An example one lemmy user mentioned in a previous post is how unfortunate it’d be if you lived at one end and worked at the other.

HubertManne,
HubertManne avatar

yeah. I was just pointing out there was a reason. I have been thinking about it in the back of my head today. How valuable is it and is it worth it. When I look at my city metro its basically a hub and spoke and what you see is that most of the spokes are around 15-20 miles out from downtown and I know they have been extended so I think closer to 15 for the original spans. Im thinking this gets to what that other lemmy user said. Having a commute where you go from the end of one spoke downtown to the end of the other would stink. Since there are multiple spokes that are mor places to live that are sorta in that magic 15-20 mile distance. Our metra is similar but goes way farther out but also has way fewer stops. So it can be farther out without being to bad. All the same those branches tend to stop once the commute from downtown is about an hour or so. Im guessing that really the circular city type thing is the way to go and likely why most are like that barring natural barriers like oceans or whatnot.

barsquid,

That’s by design, I’m sure. Like this is the sort of setting you would find in a cinematic critique of capitalism’s inherent hierarchical nature.

barsquid,

Public transit sounds also easier as a grid or something if you are able to plan it beforehand.

Unless part of the point is to keep all the poors at one end. They will be reluctant to travel very far daily so the wealthy won’t have to look at them. Servants will have to travel, I guess. Maybe servants come from the middle section.

SlopppyEngineer,

Nobody would talk about it if it was a standard square city. Masdar city is a square design of 6km² for example, also trying to be a hub of future technologies, and most people will go “mass what city?” The Line attracts attention, and with attention often comes money. At least they have the first part right, the second part isn’t working out as they hoped it would.

CosmoNova,

Who cares if people talk about it when it‘s doomed to either become an unlivable hellscape or more likely never see completion because it‘s utterly infeasible? They destroy a huge area, waste billions and worst of all throw many lives into a meat grinder just to get some clout by the dumbest idiots on the planet. In the end of the day more people will dislike and look down on them for this moronic project that many knew would never work.

SlopppyEngineer,

Welcome to late stage capitalism, where billionaires are the pharaohs of old, doing huge constructions sacrificing countless workers just for vanity.

tearsintherain,
@tearsintherain@leminal.space avatar

Couldn’t have said it better.

Zoboomafoo,

I don’t think capitalism is to blame for a King’s vanity project

Jimbabwe,

Everything bad is capitalism. Don’t you read the internet??

Eheran,

*Lemmy

TropicalDingdong,

if you’ve ever wonder what it was like to see the pyramids being built…

Tar_alcaran,

It wasn’t, the pyramids ended up as planned. This won’t.

Skua,

They didn't always go as planned! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bent_Pyramid

Kyrgizion,

The pyramids were built by well paid craftsmen. This will end up being built by de facto slaves from other countries.

PugJesus,
PugJesus avatar

The pyramids were built by well paid craftsmen.

Designed, certainly. But constructed by peasant corvée.

FlyingSquid,
@FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

Not true. The pyramid builders lived privileged lives in exchange for what they did.

harvardmagazine.com/…/who-built-the-pyramids-html

PugJesus,
PugJesus avatar

If not slaves, then who were these workers? Lehner's friend Zahi Hawass, secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, who has been excavating a "workers' cemetery" just above Lehner's city on the plateau, sees forensic evidence in the remains of those buried there that pyramid building was hazardous business. Why would anyone choose to perform such hard labor? The answer, says Lehner, lies in understanding obligatory labor in the premodern world. "People were not atomized, separate, individuals with the political and economic freedom that we take for granted. Obligatory labor ranges from slavery all the way to, say, the Amish, where you have elders and a strong sense of community obligations, and a barn raising is a religious event and a feasting event. If you are a young man in a traditional setting like that, you may not have a choice." Plug that into the pyramid context, says Lehner, "and you have to say, 'This is a hell of a barn!'"

Lehner currently thinks Egyptian society was organized somewhat like a feudal system, in which almost everyone owed service to a lord. The Egyptians called this "bak." Everybody owed bak of some kind to people above them in the social hierarchy.

That's literally corvée.

FlyingSquid,
@FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

You do know that everyone else who wasn’t a priest or a royal lived even worse lives than that, right?

PugJesus,
PugJesus avatar

Okay, great, I see our argument is "Words don't matter, corvee isn't corvee, unskilled labor isn't unskilled labor; because they lived in a barracks and were fed well".

FlyingSquid,
@FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

Corvée (French: [kɔʁve] ⓘ) is a form of unpaid forced labour that is intermittent in nature, lasting for limited periods of time, typically only a certain number of days’ work each year. Statute labour is a corvée imposed by a state for the purposes of public works.[1] As such it represents a form of levy (taxation). Unlike other forms of levy, such as a tithe, a corvée does not require the population to have land, crops or cash.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corvée

How does that describe pyramid workers?

PugJesus,
PugJesus avatar

How does that describe pyramid workers?

unpaid

forced labour

intermittent

imposed by a state

for the purposes of public works

I'm not seeing the unskilled Egyptian workers we're talking about here miss any of these criteria.

What do you think 'obligatory labor' in the context of a 'feudal'-like system for the Pharaoh by commoners on a massive construction project is exactly?

FlyingSquid,
@FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

They were unpaid because Egypt didn’t have the concept of currency. They weren’t forced, they volunteered their services. All work in Egypt was intermittent due to Nile floods. It wasn’t for the purpose of public works, it was for the purpose of religion.

But you’ve got me on the imposed by the state part.

PugJesus,
PugJesus avatar

They were unpaid because Egypt didn’t have the concept of currency.

You don't need currency to be paid.

They weren’t forced, they volunteered their services.

That's not what 'obligatory labor' means.

All work in Egypt was intermittent due to Nile floods.

Okay? All work for peasantry is intermittent due to the changing of the seasons. That doesn't mean you can't impose corvee on a peasant - in fact, peasant farmers are USUALLY the ones who ARE getting corvee'd precise BECAUSE their own ordinary labor is intermittent. The point of distinguishing corvee as intermittent is to differentiate it from slavery and ad hoc forced labor, not because picking up drifters who do small jobs instead of full-time factory workers changes the nature of a corvee.

It wasn’t for the purpose of public works, it was for the purpose of religion.

It was a public monument by the government. Your own link says, and I quote:

From the Egyptian Old Kingdom (c. 2613 BC, the 4th Dynasty) onward, corvée contributed to government projects.[6] During the times of the Nile River floods, it was used for construction projects such as pyramids, temples, quarries, canals, roads, and other works.

KISSmyOSFeddit,

Pharaos probably were like “build my tomb inside a golden tower that reaches the stars” and a couple years later, “OK, a pointy 400 foot high pile of rocks will have to do I guess”.

gregorum, (edited )

deleted_by_author

    •
    SwingingTheLamp,

    Neom, Noem, so hard to tell the difference, since they’re both stupid and evil.

    BluesF,

    Well I’m not surprised to see that Neom is going wrong in both stupid and horrifying ways. This particular part will make it hard to be too smug about it with the Saudi fanboys though… This is just sad.

    turtlepower,

    I’m just wondering why I don’t hear the outcry against SA that I hear about all the other murderous regimes in that neck of the woods. Like, are the masses that oblivious to what the fuck is going on, or is it that people are that scared of these cucks?

    Hugh_Jeggs,

    Hugh’s guide to ensuring nobody takes anything you say seriously -

    Step one - Include the word “Cuck” in your vocabulary

    Stay tuned for step two

    turtlepower,

    And here you are focusing on the wrong thing and getting worked up over something that was said about someone other than yourself. I will use whatever fucking words I want to instigate the tiny dick goat fuckers. If it bothers you so much, maybe you are one? You Saudi? Fuck you, oil bitch. Fuck Saudi Arabia. Fuck you.

    Hugh_Jeggs,

    Oh aye mate, aye, Saudi as fuck me aye. Gaun yersel ya racist wee dobber 😂

    turtlepower,

    I am not racist, but I know how to fuck with people, and one of the easiest ways is to use the words that hurt them most. Too bad you never learned nuance and how to differentiate between racism and trying to fuck with a murderous, rapey, billionaires.

    Hugh_Jeggs,

    Nuance ? You said Saudis were, and I quote, “tiny dick goat fuckers”

    Is “nuance” just something you read and repeated, like “Cuck”?

    I’ll just sit here and wait for you to start bleating about strawmen and dogwhistles like the dimwitted parrot you are 😂

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • world@lemmy.world
  • GTA5RPClips
  • DreamBathrooms
  • InstantRegret
  • magazineikmin
  • thenastyranch
  • ngwrru68w68
  • Youngstown
  • everett
  • slotface
  • rosin
  • ethstaker
  • Durango
  • kavyap
  • cubers
  • provamag3
  • modclub
  • mdbf
  • khanakhh
  • vwfavf
  • osvaldo12
  • cisconetworking
  • tester
  • Leos
  • tacticalgear
  • anitta
  • normalnudes
  • megavids
  • JUstTest
  • All magazines
    •