If there was no oil in the Middle East, the USA and Europe would have no vital strategic, military, or economic interests in the region and would be indifferent to the outcome of the Arab/Israeli dispute and other local conflicts.
Discuss.
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- anticant
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- anticant is the blogname of a lifelong free speech and civil rights campaigner. A lot of his life since WW2 has been taken up with battling against cruel and over-bossy laws, censorship, censoriousness, and Nanny Knows Best types. Now elderly and in poor health, anticant hopes his memories and thoughts will be of interest to those engaged in today's struggles for freedom, democracy, and a more hopeful tomorrow. e-mail: anticant@hotmail.co.uk
9 comments:
I don't believe this for a moment. There is a centuries-old history of European involvement in the Levant, long before oil was discovered there. In the 19th century Turkey [the "sick man of Europe"] was seen as a bulwark against Russian Slav expansionism. In the 19th and 20th centuries, control of the Suez Canal was considered vital for the British Raj in India. Religious conflicts on the ground, which have been exacerbated since the establishment of Israel, resulted in the deployment of military force by the French and British Mandatory Powers, nominally on behalf of the League of Nations. Nor is current US involvement solely about oil; although oil is a major motivating factor for American actions in the region, there are also ideological and religious strands impelling them as well.
IT Seems to me that history, as a human matter, is about many layers of motives & purposes, all twining like snakes. I agree with Aunty, the economic motive is all-important to the 'realists' among us. But, 'stopping history' with the US on top is the /summa/ to the New C-nt romancers. A variant is the suicide-bomb teen-aged excitement & Blowing The Piss Out Of Kaffirs To Water The Camels. And, then, there is the need for foreign doings & war as a component of the domestic entertainment-industry -- this includes such stuff as the 'Peace Corps' and the US Marines in the US case. It is simply needful to be able to dump overseas somewhere a certyain proportion of the more kinaesthesiac of our young, at least for a time. And, so it goes, tiddly-pom. The Chinamen have known about this stuff for a long time, of course -- and, in their /I Ching/, we are cautioned against regarding 'the provinces' (or overseas) as a dump for those who have simply made themselves impossible at home. This, if persisted in, WILL have bad effects....
I deleted the two previous comments because of an error.
Apologies.
----
Don't you think, Anticant, the religious feelings in the West have been almost extinguished by the ever increasing thirst of power and money felt by not only our money-led politicians but by the public in general?
It seems to me that religiosity is only sought when people concerned are in danger, but the materialistic day-to-day behaviour does seem to me - I repeat - to be the reason of their existence or at least a fundamental part of it.
Those in power pay lip-service to religion, whether they believe in it or not, because it is a useful instrument of control. It is the sincere believers - usually poor, young, and uneducated in any wider sense - who are motivated to do violent and wicked things in the name of their God, as we see today in the Middle East, and also sometimes in the USA.
Yes, I believe the world has not changed since mediaeval times. Those uneducated then were easy prey of religious hunters and knights. As are those uneducated today.
Indifferent to the outcome, not. It's just that Satan knew what he was doing when he was filling Mohammed with hateful lies on top of nearly half of the world's known oil reserves.
As you should know, YD, if you've glanced at my lengthy debates with Richard here and elsewhere, I am not a 'supernaturalist'. Satan is all very well as a figure of speech, but I don't believe in his objective existence - with or without horns, hooves and pitchfork - outside human minds.
Mohammed was just a typical desert warrior-ruffian who had the luck and cunning to make it big-time.
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