do you remember what happen to Craig Murray when we critised the at-the-time friendly ruler of Usbekistan for boiling people? he got fired.
How many communist and social democrats were killed in muslim countries during the cold war and after? What was left to oppose their governments? the religious fanatics. They spread like a species in a ecossistem whose competitors species were removed. I mean real people who vanished from the face of the earth.
In august 15th, 1971, Nixon ended the convertability of the USD to gold. at the same time, Nixon and Kissinger made agreements with the Saudis and OPEP in general. in contrast to the rest of third world producers of raw materials, they could control the price of their resource, as long as they sold it in USD.
Shortly after (1973), there was a huge jump in oil prices. oil companies started to make much more money and the US Fed. Reserve could now print much more bills. Inflation started to be exported from the US to the rest of the world; a hidden tax. In 1971, precious metals made up about one third of the wealth stored in banks; nowadays is about 3%. The speculation economy boomed. The "glorious thirty" years of growth in Europe ended. then came Thatcher and the rest of vulture politicians, who were in waiting.
The end of cheap oil will be though - especially because oil and gas is involved in the production of food -, but it is also a blessing, first and foremost for the people of the middle east.
Fact: the main effect of U.S. et all-try foreign policy for the middle east have been to prevent modernisation in the Arab world and promote the rise of fanaticism! the middle eastern nations are ruled by despotic democracies, most of them friendly of the US. but only when the nations which do not do business the way the US wants they are called dictatorships!
Aside from your (excellent) other points, this is one of the key turning points in recent history that's often overlooked.
It didn't just lead to the Oil Crisis - which was an obvious economic disaster, and a direct contrast to the relative prosperity of the previous decade. It also seeded two narratives that have dominated the landscape since then - one being Islamicism, and the other the threat of inflation.
The fact that the Saudi sheiks aren't particularly Islamic, and that the inflation created by the oil crisis and related financial changes was only notionally related to worker efforts to increase wages, has largely been forgotten.
Instead we have these two folk tales - aggressive Islamicist bad people, and aggressive working class bad people who aren't prepared to 'reform' or be 'flexible' - that have become foundational talking points among the elites.
They're both nonsense of course. But Tricky Dick enabled both of them.
What someone like Joerg clearly doesn't get is that not only are the narratives self-serving nonsense, they're also disconnected from the really important issues.
DoDo put together an excellent list of more important things elsewhere in this thread. As far as I'm concerned 'slaying the dragon' means giving up on fairy stories and tackling those much more important problems head on.
The best way to do this is to change the narrative. At this point climate change and energy sustainability are a much bigger threat to 'our way of life' than scary brown mad beumbers are.
We should be dealing with those problems directly, and not wasting time blowing shit up in Iraq and Afghanistan. Because the reality is that neither of them are even slightly important in the longer term.
If you want to worry about a clash of civilisations, consider how much of a civilisation you're going to have left when almost no one can afford to run a car or heat their home, and most of the big cities are underwater.
Notice that there is a blind spot on the general discussion of modern fundamentalism which should be addressed. there is christian fundamentalism in the US which has some important similarities with Islamic fundamentalism, namely the subordination of women to their husbands, such as their acceptance of aggressive sexuality - better known as abuse. See Manuel Castells' masterpiece "The Information age: economy, society and culture"; Volume 2 - "The Power of Identity". (main meme: the network society); can't remember the chapter.
Sorry for the delay in noticing your comment. my reply comes too late, I guess.
