The Revolution Continues blog is news, views, opinion and other expressions of hope from a leftist point-of-view. (We are not affiliated with any candidate, political party or organization. All are welcome.)
It’s been really hard keeping up with what’s been happening recently in Syria and the rest of the world. Then I remembered a wise old saying, and I sat down and started listing the facts, just the facts. Here they are as simple as I can explain them:
First off, the US and its Western allies once called the group now in charge of Syria “terrorists”, but now we’re calling them “moderates” and forgiving them for all the torture and extrajudicial killings that they did. Their leader, Muhammad Al-Jawlani, used to have a $10 million reward on his head for being a terrorist with an organization formerly known as Al Qaeda. (Never heard of them before, have you?) But now we’re supposed to ignore his past because he turned in his turban for a Western-styled suit…
Yeah, that’s it. It’s sort of like a woman becoming a virgin again after twenty years of marriage and several children.
Second thing, we’re told that this recent invasion of Syria is not a land grab. Pay no attention to the Israeli military (using American provided weapons) bombing Syria 480 times in 48 hours because (in their words) the “moderates are terrorists” and can’t control their own people to Israel’s satisfaction. (But Al-Jawlani wears a suit now—doesn’t that make everything all right?)
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So much suffering that never should have happened all because Palestinians were never given equal rights and were dehumanized. Wars for oil during a climate crisis. --White Rabbit 2587 on X
Connect The Dots… or Wars For Oil During A Climate Crisis
by C.A. Matthews
227 Dead from Hurricane Helene (109 in North Carolina alone)
118,908+ Palestinians dead in the Genocide of Gaza by Israeli Forces (5.4% of the total population, estimated by 99 US doctors who have been to Gaza in the past year. Other estimates are over 200,000+ dead.)
1. Venezuela 2. Saudi Arabia 3. Iran 4. Canada 5. Iraq 6. United Arab Emirates 7. Kuwait 8. Russia 9. United States 10. Libya
The list of countries that US and/or NATO-align countries have had or are currently picking a fight with in order to gain control of petroleum reserves: Venezuela, Russia, Iran, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen
What have these seemingly random facts or “listicles” got to do with each other? Read them again and see if you can’t connect the dots.
Can you guess what was behind the strength and destruction of Hurricane Helene (and as of this writing, Hurricane Milton)? What if I told you that the Gulf of Mexico is super hot this year, hotter than it’s ever been in recorded history. The heat of the gulf’s water fueled Helene’s strength, causing it (and now Milton’s strength) to jump from a Category 1 to a Category 4 hurricane in less than a day. The rapidly heating Earth will continue to increase the flooding, tornadoes, and assorted storm damage.
The climate crisis—or more accurately the climate catastrophe—is doing more than making your air conditioner work overtime. It’s causing droughts, floods, and killer storms like Hurricane Helene. The burning of fossil fuels is making things worse by adding to the “greenhouse gas effect” that is heating up our planet. Humanity needs to kick the oil habit—and fast—if we want to even begin to turn things around and save our children’s futures.
Now do some more connect-the-dots...
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For the love of Big Oil is the root of all evils. —1 Timothy 6:10
No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve [both] God and Big Oil. —Matthew 6:24
Before you interject, “Hey! That’s not quite what those Bible verses say,” read this short article from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. Here’s a blurb:
Oil and natural gas resources in the occupied Palestinian territory could generate hundreds of billions of dollars for development.
Geologists and resources economists have confirmed that the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt) lies above sizeable reservoirs of oil and natural gas wealth, in Area C of the West Bank and the Mediterranean coast off the Gaza Strip, according to a recent UNCTAD study.
Let that information settle into your brain for a bit. You’re a smart person. (You’re reading this blog, aren’t you?) You’re intelligent enough to put two and two together and come up with five, right? What would you do to get your hands on 122 trillion cubic foot of natural gas along with an estimated at 1.7 billion barrels of oil?
More importantly, what wouldn’t you do to get a hold of such a resource?
I know many of my readers are supportive of environmental concerns and would state without hesitation, “I’d do nothing about those oil and gas reserves off the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. The burning of fossil fuels is heating up our planet and causing catastrophic climate change—a change we may never be able to recover from as stronger hurricanes, larger floods, and long-lasting droughts become more common. Big Oil has enough blood on its hands already.”
I sincerely appreciate that response. It’s a commendable answer, but let’s venture into the hypothetical realm for a minute, shall we? Let’s pretend we’re not decent, planet-loving individuals but politicians from certain nations. (We discussed what kinds of politicians we generally have in the West in last week’s blog and why we need to get rid of these sociopaths.) Okay, ready to use your imaginations? Let’s go.
We’re politicians of large Western economies and their allies. Our countries are into burning fossil fuels big time, and we’re not planning to stop burning them anytime soon, no matter how often the climate scientists warn us about their downsides. There’s just too much wealth generated by Big Oil concerns to stop oil and gas exploration. We believe strongly in the superiority of capitalism and the making of big profits for our shareholders.
As an added bonus, Big Oil pays us politicos quite well for our work supporting their drilling and fracking. They don’t pay us directly, of course, but they pay us through their lobbyists and political action committees (PACs) that support our campaigns. We’re not about to forget there’s untapped oil and gas reserves off the coast of Gaza and in the West Bank region of what is now known as “Israel” because our bosses in Big Oil will keep reminding us. We’re going to do whatever we can to get our hands on those natural resources, and we’re not going to let anyone or anything get in our way.
To put this argument into the oil man’s vernacular: Drill, baby, drill!
You do know why we need to sell natural gas in particular to Europe, don’t you? In case you’ve forgotten, we blew up a perfectly good liquid natural gas pipeline a year or so back in the Baltic. (More on that story here.) Doing so took out the competition for our oil companies’ gas sales to Europe. Without competition, our oil exporting country sold heating oil to places like Germany for four to six times the previous price they’d paid our competitor.
Unfortunately, shipping all this heating oil to Europe started making our own country’s heating oil and gas prices go through the roof, making our constituents none too happy. It also made them question the billions of dollars in military aid we were giving to a proxy army in order to bankrupt our biggest oil and gas competitor. Oops!
We told our friends in the mainstream media to keep pushing the narrative that our funding of this proxy war was all about protecting “freedom and democracy,” even if the leader of this proxy war had a long track record of absconding with funds. Some of the armaments we sold to him for this proxy war went “missing,” because we didn't keep track of them too closely. These missing armaments eventually ended up in the hands of other not-so-nice people around the world that we’ve said in the past were terrorists. Double oops!
So, we decided that we really have to stop selling so much of our own oil and gas to Western Europe and get the E.U. their fix via this new pipeline we planned to build in the Middle East.
But wait a minute! There are 2.2 million people living on this land where we recently discovered the oil and gas reserves. It’s one of the most densely populated areas on Earth, no less. And these people aren’t interested in us taking their fossil fuel resources from them. They actually want to keep their homes, schools, hospitals, historical landmarks, and houses of worship. They want to keep everything for themselves. Such selfish animals!
I know, I know… What else is new? Indigenous people are always crying over losing their land rights and having their mineral and petroleum resources stolen from right under them. But we in the Western nations know how to shut up indigenous people forever, don’t we? It’s what we’ve always done—we just use our military strength to overpower them and wipe them off the face of the earth or scatter them to the four corners of the globe. After all, we do what it says in the white man’s bible: Might makes right.
And it’s right for us to have control of all that untapped oil and gas, isn’t it? Our main trading currency, the petrodollar, is tied to the price of fossil fuels. We can’t afford to lose control of the world’s markets of oil and gas. We must have it, or else our economies will falter and collapse, and we politicians would be out of work and off the Big Oil gravy train before we knew it.
So, think again: What would you, as a sociopathic politician who is paid well by Big Oil, do to get your hands on that oil and gas? Would you go to war over it? Would you fund a proxy army in a far away country to stop another country from making profits from their own fossil fuels, especially if you could do so without using your own military and risking your own soldiers’ lives? Would you blindly support a Western “ally” in the Middle East, one that you regularly give billions of dollars in aid and military equipment to, and give them carte blanche to wipe out those pesky natives so you can get your oil men on the ground and start the drilling for all that lovely “black gold”?
Would you lose any sleep over exterminating the indigenous people who are in the way? (There's only 2.2 million of them, with half of them age 17 or younger. No big loss there since children can't drive yet.) We’re talking about 122 trillion cubic foot of natural gas along with an estimated at 1.7 billion barrels of oil. What does that amount of fossil fuel translate into dollars? You can't even imagine how much profit there is to be made!
And if your “partner” in this acquisition of petroleum resources first wants to wipe out those savages and bomb all their buildings into rubble so they can be razed? Well, that’s their business, not ours. It’s not like we’ve set a sterling example on how to deal kindly with the indigenous peoples of our own white-settler colonizing project over the past three centuries, now have we? Racists gotta live and make money, too.
I know some of you will balk and say something along the lines of, “But I would never sanction ethnic cleansing just to steal land and drill for oil!” But put yourself into the shoes of the sociopathic leaders of the Western nations and Israel and ask yourself the questions again. You know now what all is at stake, and how much you’ve already invested into this scheme.
The Palestinian people of Gaza and the West Bank area are considered racially inferior by Israel, your partner in this oil deal. You have no problem with the Israeli take on these indigenous people. They feel they rightfully deserve to have control over that oil and gas. So, there's no problem taking it from the Palestinians, is there?
Ask yourself the questions again: What would you do to get your hands on 122 trillion cubic foot of natural gas and 1.7 billion barrels of oil? What wouldn’t you do to get a hold of such a prize?
Please don’t tell me there aren’t people in Washington DC and in Israel who aren’t more than willing to commit war crimes in order to get that oil and gas and make their Big Oil masters happy. We all know that’s exactly what they’re doing. Capitalists always get their way.
Money makes the world go round, after all, a capitalist will tell you. What better way to generate it than by drilling for oil and gas?
Why else would the US government want to keep all Israeli aid and military spending talks secret—done without Congressional approval? If the US isn’t committing war crimes alongside the Israeli military already, it certainly sounds like they’re getting ready to do so. And our spineless, sociopathic politicians know the majority of the American public won’t knowingly stand for it and could rebel against them. So, the feds are going to keep their actions quiet and lie about what they're doing for as long as they can get away with it.
“For the love of Big Oil [money] is the root of all evils.”All evils—but especially the evil called genocide.
“This culture of silence is happening even as senior agency officials may acknowledge in private that Israel is committing war crimes, according to the report. “Over the past weeks, as I have heard from numerous officials across both the executive and legislative branches, it has become clear to me that many senior leaders not only fully understand how Israel is currently using U.S.-provided arms in Gaza, but are even, behind closed doors, willing to acknowledge that these actions include ‘war crimes,’” [Josh] Paul told HuffPost. “The fact that none are willing to do so publicly … points to a deep moral rot in our system.”
In these weird times, sometimes it's good to take a break and look back into our past and see what all we can learn from those who came before us. Sometimes, it's just good to take a look back and see where we went wrong and do our best not to take the same or similar path again.
This week, during the big wind up to the coronation of King Charles III, I had a conversation with our resident historian and British person, Coast Watcher, about who's really the power behind the throne. We both agreed that Charles has no real power outside of his billions in the bank and his ability to boss around (and fire) his household staff. But is the power in the UK really in the hands of the so-called Prime Minister, either?
The same could be argued about who is the power behind the American presidency in the twenty-first century. Who really manipulates and control the president's agenda? Nowadays no matter who is in office, no matter what part of the "uni-party" the president claims to be a member of, it seems that the same ol' things occur.
Wars are started on the flimsiest of excuses in order to take resources (oil, natural gas, lithium, etc.) from other countries. This is particularly true of nations that try to disengage from doing international trade using the petrodollar, such as Libya and Iran. These countries eventually wind up being either bombed and/or economically sanctioned. Millions die. US banks and big corporations are bailed out of debt, but the working classes aren't.
The Princeton Study clearly shows how corporations own everyone and everything in the US, but who exactly pulls the strings on a daily basis? Who are those "men behind the curtains" worldwide? Let's take a peek...
Behind the Curtain by Coast Watcher
Back in the 1980s there was a hugely popular BBC TV comedy series called Yes, Minister. It portrayed the bumbling antics of Jim Hacker (played by Paul Eddington), Minister for Administrative Affairs, as he negotiated the labyrinthine pathways of British government. Working behind the scenes was the Machiavellian Sir Humphrey Appleby (played by Nigel Hawthorne), the Permanent Secretary attached to the ministry.
Minister Hacker was frequently left in the dark by his supposed civil service underling, Sir Humphrey, who always had an eye for maintaining the hegemony of the British Civil Service while enhancing his own position and prestige wherever possible. As the character of Sir Humphrey says, "Ministers may come and go, but the Civil Service goes on forever."
And so it is with most Western governments. Like that of the UK there’s always a solid core of apparatchiks determined to advance their own cause and feather their nests, often at the expense of government transparency and efficiency. Like Sir Humphrey these people may be permanent fixtures in the civil service, but there are always some who come and go over the course of years, taking advantage of the revolving door between government and industry.
The elected politicians are not really of any consequence to these non-elected career civil servants. Many politicos don’t last the course, either losing voter support or doing just enough for long enough to earn all those lovely benefits that come with holding public office. Sir Humphrey definitely knew of what he spoke of.
Such an environment is fertile ground for deep conspiracies which are seldom in the best interest of the public. Of course, the elected ones can always proclaim they had no idea what was happening behind the curtain after these heinous deeds are exposed to the world by a whistleblower like Julian Assange, whether or not their professed ignorance is real.
For instance, it was revealed recently that the CIA had recruited and operated two of the 9/11 conspirators. Whatever the reasoning behind this spectacular self-centered goal, there’s no denying it was certainly not in the interests of the American public—nor that of the citizens of Iraq, whose country the Western coalition invaded by using 9/11 as a pretext under the false flag that it held WMDs (Weapons of Mass Destruction).
It’s no secret, either, that the intelligence services have their hooks deep into the body public. The CIA began as the OSS—Office of Strategic Services. Drawing many valuable lessons from the British Special Operations Executive, the OSS morphed into a powerhouse organization with virtually unlimited budget and almost zero accountability to the public.
The first head of the Central Intelligence Agency was John F. Dulles. A personal friend of President Eisenhower, Dulles’ influence enabled the CIA to set almost all elements of US policy toward the Soviet Union and Communist China. Such influence is still apparent today, with the operations against Russia in the current conflict in Ukraine and the wind up to start a war with China over Taiwan independence.
There’s no denying the woeful impact the manufactured war in Ukraine has had on the peoples of the European Union. They are paying through the nose for natural gas to heat their homes after US Navy divers sabotaged the NordStream II pipeline. In many ways, it’s turning into a defeat for America, as the supposed stringent sanctions against Russia are backfiring in spectacular fashion following the creation of the BRICS initiative set to sideline the petrodollar. And one can't deny that China's diplomatic initiatives to bring about a peaceful resolution to several disputes--including the one between Ukraine/NATO and Russia--makes the United States look even more hawkish than usual.
Of course, as with any Western government, capitalism can’t be ignored. Capitalists must be served! The UK saw the Industrial Intelligence Bureau created in the early 1920s by British businesses to "acquire intelligence on industrial unrest arising from the activities of Communists, Anarchists, various secret societies in the UK and overseas, the Irish Republican Army and other 'subversive' organizations.'" Its founder, Sir George Makgill, was close friends with Desmond Morton, Head of the Special Intelligence Service.
Another revolving door between government and private industry existed between the Industrial Intelligence Bureau and MI5. Agents from one would work for a time in the other organization. No conflict of interest there! The British Fascist movement had its own followers and fellow-travelers inside the intelligence agencies of state and industry, a state of affairs that lasted well into World War II.
With America and, to some extent, the UK sliding ever closer toward fascism, I’ll end this article with some pertinent words from that granddaddy of all fascists:
Democracy is beautiful in theory; in practice it is a fallacy. You in America will see that some day.
Democratic regimes may be defined as those in which, every now and then, the people are given the illusion of being sovereign, while the true sovereignty in actual fact resides in other forces which are sometimes irresponsible and secret. ~ Benito Mussolini
BIO: Coast Watcher uses the power of history to see the patterns of what's happening in the present to predict the future. What could possibly go wrong with intelligence agencies dictating foreign policy and domestic surveillance? Nothing to see here... Move along now.
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Silent night, holy night. All is calm, all is bright. ‘Round yon virgin mother and child. Holy infant, so tender and mild, Sleep in heavenly peace! Sleep in heavenly peace!
There’s
nothing in any classic Christmas carol about “Shop until you drop!”
There’s nothing about spending tons of cash on gifts, food, travel,
clothing, or general rabble-rousing. There’s nothing about “He
who dies with the most toys wins,” or
how great it is to send billions of dollars in weapons to a proxy war
and drone bomb civilians, either. Carols tend to emphasize qualities such as “silence” and “peace.”
How
did we ever find ourselves in the mess we find ourselves in today? To
understand where we are now, perhaps it’s best to unravel the
string of events that led us here.
Let’s travel back in time and
see where our Christmas celebrations took a turn away from silence
and peace and landed us in a pit of noise and turmoil. What wrong
step did we take? How can we get back on the path of peace and
stillness, away from this madness that calls itself “Christmas”
in the 21st
century?
The
idea that Christmas was about going broke every December buying
numerous superfluous presents for loved ones, friends, co-workers and bosses is a
relatively recent invention. Most place the blame on Queen Victoria
and Prince Albert’s shoulders. Albert and Victoria (both of German
descent) introduced the tradition of Christmas trees to the English-speaking world.
Of
course, being tremendously wealthy, the royals lavished tons of toys and
other gifts on their huge brood of children. The British middle class
was coming into its own in
the mid-19th century, so they had an overwhelming urge to copy the customs of
their young and spendy queen. Hence, the yearly mad rush to the toy
and department stores began.
To
outdo your middle class neighbors, you had to have the biggest tree
with the biggest pile of gifts under it. Competition was not only
encouraged in Victorian times, it was practically mandated. This
competition started near the beginning of the industrial revolution, and
mass-produced items were becoming the “in-thing” to give. Simple
gifts of food and drink were seen as inferior and only for the
poor and disadvantaged to share with each other on Christmas Eve.
The
burgeoning middle class had to have the best their money could buy
from the best stores and manufacturers. To aid these
not-quite-as-rich-as the-queen folks and guide them toward where they could purchase the latest mass-produced gift items,
a new art form was developed. “Advertising” told the middle class
exactly what was the in-thing that year and, more importantly, where it could be
purchased and for how much.
“Be
the first family on your street to own this wonderful consumer item!”
advertisers shouted, bursting the peace and silence of the beautiful snowy skies.
This
is where the Western celebration of Christmas took that big wrong turn.
“Okay,”
you say. “Materialism is bad. Unselfish giving of our time and talents is good. We all stop
purchasing useless mass-produced goods we never wanted or could use and end this stupid
competitiveness, and everything will be hunky-dory, right? We'll start now, and the world will be peaceful before you know it."
But
it isn’t, and you know it. We still have hatred, violence, and
endless war. What wrong turn did we take there?
Would
you be surprised if I told you it was the same one?
The
same mass production and keeping up with the neighbors and
allowing the elites to dictate how we ordinary beings should live our
lives has led us into this mess. There can be no “Peace on Earth, Goodwill to Humankind” when there’s money to be made creating
billions of useless disposable items—from $1 plastic do-dads to $1 billion
bomber aircraft.
By creating an insatiable need to have more and
use more via
advertising, we perpetuate the modern myth that Christmas is a holiday for commerce. Because what’s the use of having stockpiles of
anything—including weapons—if you don’t have the means to
deplete them before next year’s big rush to the “toy” store?
Ka-boom!
Capitalism
depends on endless growth in order to make capitalists (the elite)
endless profits. Endless resources are needed to produce ever more
mass-produced products for consumers to buy (as they're instructed by advertising to demand more and more)
year after year. When the natural resources are depleted at home, capitalists
must go abroad and take them.
Sure, capitalists could offer others money
and a fair trade, but bombing another country to smithereens and
destroying their economy is much more fun, isn’t it? Once you’ve
destroyed another country's economy via either a "hot" or "cold" war, you can assume all its resources and use
its people as cheap/slave laborers. They have to work for you now, or they don't eat. More profits to be made for the "winning" capitalists. Yeah!
To reiterate, advertising drives the middle class into a frenzy of crass
materialism each December, which then leads corporations into destroying our
environment in search of the raw resources needed to manufacture these items while also making these corporations vast profits, and these resources are being obtained more and more via endless
warfare. Rinse and repeat.
A
holiday to honor the birth of a man of peace has been co-opted by capitalism and endless wars for resources. Totally and completely
co-opted.
Now
that we know how we’ve gotten ourselves into this mess, how can we
get out of it? Could it be all we have to do is ignore the
propaganda that capitalism is the best economic system ever? (Propaganda is simply another name for the advertising put out by
our governments to prop up private corporations destroying our earth in their race to obtain natural resources.) Could it be that all it takes is to stop billionaire CEOs and the endless warfare and sue for peace throughout the world? Could it be that simple?
“Sleep
in heavenly peace!” By following words of peace and not those
of capitalist warmongers, we will find ourselves surrounded by the beautiful silence of
Christmas, where only the celebration of the gift of love is
needed.
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20 million killed in WWI is peanuts compared to the stakes in Ukraine proxy war. With 2000 nukes on hair trigger alert and looming risk of nuclear winter, we're all in the cross hairs. #PeaceNowhttps://t.co/skq1YiCDLO
