The Root Of All Evils
by C. A. Matthews
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:
The Unrealized Potential of Palestinian Oil and Gas Reserves 28 August 2019
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.
Our minds are made up. We’re going to drill for that oil and gas that’s just sitting there asking for us to take it. We’ll need some land on which to build our oil refineries and start our new pipelines headed north toward Western Europe to sell our oil and gas products, too. We might even put in a canal near the drilling site to circumvent having to pay another country to ship these products worldwide.
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.
Keep protesting and speaking out to expose Big Oil's evils. Stand with others to end the rule of Big Oil's puppets and the entire military-industrial complex. Shut down the genocidal war machine forever.
Related Articles and Interesting LinksThe Unrealized Potential of Palestinian Oil and Gas Reserves https://unctad.org/news/unrealized-potential-palestinian-oil-and-gas-reserves
The New Litmus Test https://bernie2016.blogspot.com/2023/10/the-new-litmus-test.html
Biden Wants Arms Deals With Israel to Be Done in Complete Secrecy https://truthout.org/articles/biden-wants-arms-deals-with-israel-to-be-done-in-complete-secrecy/
“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.”
Israel’s Final Solution for the Palestinians https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/israels-final-solution-for-the-palestinians
Ask the American People Before You Impose a Genocide Tax for Prosperous Israel https://scheerpost.com/2023/11/02/biden-and-congress-ask-the-american-people-before-you-impose-a-genocide-tax-for-prosperous-israel/
Fossil Fuel Firms Bought Lawmakers https://youtu.be/2qEIOvF5_H0?si=eY0UP2xOArVGEIV8
Israel Is Evicting Palestinians NOT In Gaza https://youtu.be/ESSQhpgOj7w?si=k9wKOYV3gcyv_XZJ
The Moral Complexities Of Bombing A Concentration Camp Full Of Children https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/the-moral-complexities-of-bombing
As The Lights Go Out In Gaza https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/as-the-lights-go-out-in-gaza
Israel Has A Directive To Kill Hostages
https://youtu.be/_T5SLfZs5ww?si=Gc_kAMO8-072XQxl
White House in discussions with Israel on deploying US troops to Gaza https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/11/01/sjlf-n01.html
Israel in Search of Its Hiroshima: Massive Bomb Wipes Out 20 Apt. Buildings, Kills, Wounds 400 Civilians https://scheerpost.com/2023/11/01/israel-in-search-of-its-hiroshima-massive-bomb-wipes-out-20-apt-buildings-kills-wounds-400-civilians/
Israel Apologists Relentlessly Gaslight And Attack Our Sense Of Reality https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/israel-apologists-relentlessly-gaslight
New Document Leak on Plan to Expel Gaza Population https://scheerpost.com/2023/10/31/new-document-leak-on-plan-to-expel-gaza-population/
This is not a war, it's the second Nakba https://www.councilestatemedia.uk/p/this-is-not-a-war-its-the-second
In Gaza, Biden is an equal partner in Israel’s mass murder
https://www.aaronmate.net/p/biden-is-an-equal-partner-in-israels
“Gaza has become a graveyard for children,” a UNICEF spokesperson says. “It’s a living hell for everyone else.”
US Says It's Powerless To Stop The Genocide That It Is Directly Funding And Supplying https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/us-says-its-powerless-to-stop-the
Biden 'Countering Islamophobia' While Incinerating Gaza Is The Most Democrat Thing Ever https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/biden-countering-islamophobia-while
The fight for Palestinian Liberation is a Fight for the Whole Working Class https://unac.notowar.net/2023/10/23/the-fight-for-palestinian-liberation-is-a-fight-for-the-whole-working-class/
“Killers of the Flower Moon” Shows Wealth-Building Doesn’t End Racial Injustice https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/11/01/sjlf-n01.html
US Immigration Policy Is Designed to Divide the Working Class
https://truthout.org/articles/us-immigration-policy-is-designed-to-divide-the-working-class/
Only Israel, the United States, and Ukraine Refuse to Stand With Cuba https://scheerpost.com/2023/11/03/only-israel-the-united-states-and-ukraine-refuse-to-stand-with-cuba/
UN Human Rights Committee Calls for Moratorium on Life Without Parole in U.S. https://scheerpost.com/2023/11/03/un-human-rights-committee-calls-for-moratorium-on-life-without-parole-in-u-s/
