I Please be aware that this is a serious breach of etiquette. But can we abandon manners and contextualize Donald Trump’s attack on Iran? The West’s intense interest in the Middle East, Western, and Central Asia, sustained for more than a century, and the endless attempts by foreign governments to shape and control these regions, is no accidental political act. They are somehow connected to a specific fuel source located underground.
Trump’s war objectives are typically incoherent and clearly incomprehensible even to himself. But Iran would not have been treated as an “enemy of the West” if Winston Churchill’s government had not persuaded the CIA to stage a coup against the popular democratic government of Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953. Britain did so because Mossadegh tried to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company to stop foreign powers from stealing the country’s wealth. The US tried to overthrow him twice with British support, and was successful on the second attempt, also with the help of an opportunistic Ayatollah. It reinstated the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. In 1954, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company became British Petroleum and later BP.
Anger over the 1953 coup and the most vicious repression ever under the Shah’s dictatorship combined to spark the 1979 revolution, which was taken over by the Ayatollahs and had dire consequences for many Iranians. If our government hadn’t violently crushed democracy for oil, they wouldn’t be running this country.
If we take a step back from this history, we see something else that should be obvious. The conflation of capitalism and “free markets” is one of the most successful lies in human history. historic and ongoing resource plunder; Police, military, and death squads deployed against people who resist. Transfer of benefits from weaker countries to larger ones. Labor intimidation. deceiving consumers. Collection of rent. Cost dumping on the living planet. All this is the opposite of “free”. It’s very forced and very expensive.
Often there is also little market sign. In many cases, land, supplies, and labor are simply stolen. Public resources, whether oil reserves, forests, water systems, or railways, are given (or sold for a fraction of their value) to private monopolies. The wealthy are rescued by the state when they are in trouble, but the poor have no choice but to sink or swim. The term “free market capitalism” is a contradiction in terms.
“Oil did not cause capitalism, but it greatly expanded and empowered it.” Photo: Brandon Bell/Getty Images
The world’s military forces exist primarily to deliver profits from resources, especially oil, to banks and shareholders, commodity traders and asset managers, hedge funds and private equity firms. To the same end, an infrastructure of persuasion, including lobbyists, media, and social media algorithms, is mobilized to ensure that the most amoral, sadistic, and belligerent people are chosen as leaders. Because they keep oil and other goods flowing for the benefit of capital, whatever the human cost. Their opponents are demonized and alternatives are dismissed as “unrealistic,” “unpopular,” and “unaffordable.”
This is why we always underestimate other people’s desire for change. For example, one study found that 89% of people around the world want more action to stop climate change. However, the same people believe that they are a minority. In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, surveys consistently showed that a majority of people want to move to a better world where health, well-being and environmental protection are prioritized over economic growth. But the government has spent billions of dollars to restore our dysfunction.
As the hydrocarbon industry and its financial backers find themselves threatened by green technologies, their control over governments and media is tightening. They have poured millions of dollars into campaigns to deny climate change and dissuade the public. Politics has become tougher, less open, and less tolerant. The democratic recession is primarily caused by fossil fuel interests. The entire planet is suffering from a resource curse.
Oil did not cause capitalism, but it greatly expanded and empowered it. Reduce our dependence on oil and destroy the world’s most violent and exploitative relationships. We will eliminate dictators and war machines, coups and assassinations, invasions and nuclear threats. Of course, that’s not all. There will still be water wars, land wars, and mineral wars. After all, military machinery cannot be left to rust. But it’s a lot.
We will also end the greatest violence humans have ever committed against each other: the total degradation of our lives through climate change. The two emergencies are one: a political emergency and an environmental emergency. We need to put ourselves on an anti-war footing with the same urgency that has traditionally put countries on a war footing: an urgent program to remove fossil fuels from our lives faster and further than any government currently plans.
A key intervention is the National Emergency Briefing, an upcoming film hosted in cinemas by volunteers across the country that will adequately explain our predicament and put pressure on governments to mobilize for serious action. If you are concerned about cost, please consider this. The government’s Climate Change Committee estimates that the additional costs of a single fossil fuel price hike in 2022 will be total cost The price shock caused by President Trump’s attack on Iran is likely to be even larger. We get nothing in return for higher oil prices, but we get a new, safer, cheaper energy system in exchange for net-zero programs.
I’m not saying that defeating the fossil fuel machine is easy. Capital will try everything to stop us. This is what Extinction Rebellion discovered in the UK when a vicious new protest law was drafted to shut it down. This is what Standing Rock activists in the United States discovered when they tried to stop an oil pipeline from crossing their land. That’s what Earth defenders in the Global South discovered, even more brutally, as militias gunned them down. Control of resources is the driving force of politics. At the moment, democracy is a light show played on castle walls.
Concentration of fossil power leads to concentration of political power. If we were less dependent on fossil fuels, we might not have Trump, Putin, Ayatollah, or Prime Minister Netanyahu. Fossil fuels push the world towards authoritarianism. Reverse our demands on them and overthrow many of our current tyrannies. What a beautiful world we could have: greener, cleaner, cheaper, kinder, fairer.
