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The Axis of Evil: On Petroleum, Politics, Wars & Ecology

Humanity today is witnessing different phenomena, ranging from climate changes that resulted in major floods, eartquakes, storms and hurricanes to ecological disasters and numerous wars. The world is literally burning, we are burning our planet with carelessness and killing ourselves in wars for “greater causes“. Is the fire that is burning us our creation, is it something that we have caused by forgetting who we are and where we are? Could we have envisioned it? This seminar will be a kind of time travel, a constant comparison of past and present – what was written and said and is it happening and why? What was the evil in the past and what is it today: from Gog and Magog to petroleum, wars and ecological disasters – with the goal to increase even a tiny bit the respect for our planet and the love for our neighbor.

Gog and Magog from past to future

Gog and Magog appears among different books and files from the past belonging to different nations or religions – one thing is similar in all of them: Gog and Magog is an embodiment, a form of evil. Hebrew Bible defines the term as “individuals, peoples or lands; a prophesied enemy nation of God's people according to the Book of Ezekiel, and according to Genesis, one of the nations descended from Japheth, son of Noah“. Jewish eschatology depicts it as enemies to be defeated by the Messiah while Christianity interprets Gog and Magog as allies of Satan contrasted to God at the end of the millenium.

Thomas de Kent: Gog and Magog consuming humans

In the Christian Bible, Gog and Magog are mentioned on several occasions as, for example, in Ezekiel (38: 14 – 16 ): “Therefore, son of man, prophesy and say to Gog, ‘Thus says the Lord God: “On that day when My people Israel dwell safely, will you not know it? Then you will come from your place out of the far north, you and many peoples with you, all of them riding on horses, a great company and a mighty army. You will come up against My people Israel like a cloud, to cover the land. It will be in the latter days that I will bring you against My land, so that the nations may know Me, when I am hallowed in you, O Gog, before their eyes.” or in the Book of Revelation (20: 7 – 9): “And when the thousand years are finished, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, and shall come forth to deceive the nations which are in the four corners of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to the war: the number of whom is as the sand of the sea. And they went up over the breadth of the earth, and compassed the camp of the saints about, and the beloved city: and fire came down out of heaven, and devoured them”. The Bible announces a great war (maybe third World War?), or a great issue, disaster that will overcome inhabitants of the Earth in the future (ecological disaster?). Gog and Magog are a part of metaphors in political discourse through time. In 1971, Ronald Reagan, gouverner of California at the time, held a speech where he points at Russia being the Gog and Magog of his time: "Ezekiel tells us that Gog, the nation that will lead all of the other powers of darkness against Israel, will come out of the north. Biblical scholars have been saying for generations that Gog must be Russia. What other powerful nation is to the north of Israel? None. But it didn't seem to make sense before the Russian revolution, when Russia was a Christian country. Now it does, now that Russia has become Communistic and atheistic, now that Russia has set itself against God. Now it fits the description of Gog perfectly.“. Thirty two years later, in 2003, US invasion on Iraq is looming and the president G. W. Bush is on the phone with the French president J. Chirac trying to convince him that France should join the “coalition of the willing“ against Saddam Hussein and tells him that “the prophecy is being fulfilled“ refering to the Gog and Magog. French president was intrigued with the constatation and immediately contacted Thomas Römer, a theology professor and an expert in the Old Testament from the University of Laussane, Switzerland. Chirac asked Römer to write a paper on Gog and Magog, and he explains: “ "In chapters 38 and 39, a global army is formed to fight a final battle in Israel. That battle is ordained by God, in order to rid the world of His enemies, and thus herald in a new age. The axis of evil is composed mostly of nations to the north of Israel, and led by Gog.”. Römer uses the term “axis of evil“ which was first used by G. W. Bush in his annual message, State of the Union , in 2002 and further on, often to describe governments that he accused of sponsoring terrorism, seeking weapons of mass destruction or nuclear weapon (Iran, Iraq and North Korea).

Bush's "axis of evil" comprised Iran, Iraq, and North Korea (red).

Another past to present relation is definitely the area of controversy in geographical sense. When we take a look on the map, searching for the borders of Iraq and Iran where the focus of the war was, or Syria where the focus is today, it overlaps with Biblical Israel, the promised land of God's people. In the Bible, Israel is where today Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, part of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon, part of Egypt and the Gaza strip are today. These are all countries that we can hear about in the news almost every day. Comparing that with the petroleum map of the Middle East, gives an interesting motif – this is the area where the concentration of the petroleum is the largest in the whole world.

Borders of Biblical Israel

Petroleum map of Middle East

Petroleum

Petroleum and natural gas formation started approximately 300 or 400 years ago in the ocean where tiny sea plants and animals died and were buried on the ocean floor, covered by layers of silt and sand over time. In the last 50 to 100 milion years the pressure applied on the remains buried them deeper and deeper and the enormous heat that appeared as a byproduct of pressure, turned the remains into oil and gas. Today, we drill down through layers of sand, silt and rock to reach the rock formation that contains oil and gas deposits.

We can already see that the petroleum is almost as old as our planet is and that it reaches from past to nowdays. It also reaches from the underground to surface, like a mythical creature designed in the far past to appear in the future and becaome a threat to the inhabitants of the Earth. Today, petroleum practically controls the life on Earth: price of petroleum dictates the price of absolutely everything else, petroleum reserves dictate the distribution of power and even the rate of currency. All of these things are desirable to every country leader so we can easily conclude that petroleum causes and has caused many wars and disastres around the world, especially in the area of the Middle East. Reza Negarestani comments the idea of petroleum in modern world and says: “according to the classic theory of fossil fuels, petroleum was formed as a tellurian entity under unimaginable pressure and heat in the absence of oxygen and between the strata, in absolute isolation. A typical, Oedipal case, then, a typical case of repression. Petroleum’s Hadean formation developed a satanic sentience through the politics of in-between which invariably wells up through a God-complex deposited in the strata.”. He refers to the petroleum as “a satanic sentience“ that manipulates and oppresses the world. Another issue that raises when it comes to petroleum is the number of ecological disasters that occured in the last 50 years. Oil spills are a major issue today endangering not only the life on human kind on Earth but also the natural balance in animal and plant world. The Deepwater Horizon oil spill is an industrial disaster that began on April 20th 2010 in the Gulf of Mexico and it is the largest marine oil spill in the history of petroleum industry. US government estimated that 780 000 m3 of oil were discharged in the ocean and it was not sealed untill September 19th 2010. Due to the months – long spill along with the effects of cleanup activities, extensive damage to marine and wildlife habitats and fisihing and tourism industries was reported. There were 11 people killed by the oil spill and 17 people injured. Researches in 2012 showed that the leaking is still present, and in 2013 was reported that dolphins along with other marine life are dying at six times the normal rate.

NASA Terra satelite: Deepwater Horizont oil spill (2010)

Frontline: The Spill (2010)

Desert as a battlefield

In the Book of Exodus, the Biblical writer is sending a warning to the God's people: ”(...) everything must be leveled to fulfill the omnipresence and oneness of the Divine (...)”, Moses guided the people through desert for 40 ears until they reached the promised land – desert is in the Bible standing as a strong symbol of the battle and temptations that a man has to overcome in order to enjoy God's mercy. Jihadi radical think of desert as of an ideal battlefield: to desertify the Earth is to make the Earth ready for change in the name of Divine's monopoly. Desert is a militant horizontality. The Gulf War that lasted from 1990 to 1991 was codenamed Operation Desert Shield, and was a war waged by coalition of 35 countries led by the US against Iraq in response to Iraq's invasion on Kuwait. The war culminated with the operation Desert Storm (January/February 1991) which restored monarchy in Kuwait, but destructed both Kuwait and Iraqi infrastructure.

Air forces attack during the Gulf War

Stickiness and the burning world

Petroleum as an underworld fits perfectly, even Negarestani confirms that it is a Hadean structure – an undergroung monster hidden deep underneath the surface of Earth, now coming to manipulate the weaker and to pollute our planet. It is also a hyperobject – it is both in the past and in the present, it is both underneath and above the surface of the Earth, it is both a supstance that comes from the dead organisms and the supstance that kills the living ones. It manipulates people to start wars over the petroleum fields. This leads us to the war as a hyperobject – war that is started by two sides affects the whole humanity, war that is supposed to defend the weak ones is a war for power and possesion. A war that thinks of a desert as an ideal battlefield, takes place in populated areas, kills civilians and innocent people and leaves nothing but ashes and the desert.

Damask, the capital of Syria before the Syrian War

Damask, the capital of Syria today

References:

Reza Negarestani, “Paleopetrology: From Gog-Magog Axis to Petropunkism.”Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials, re.Press, 2008, 9-39.

Brian Henessy, ”Do we need to worry about Gog and Magog?” Israel Today: October 19th 2015, WEB: http://www.israeltoday.co.il/NewsItem/tabid/178/nid/27599/Default.aspx

Frank Jacobs, ”How Dubya Used the Book of Ezekiel as a Blueprint for the Iraq War” Big think: December 2016, WEB: http://bigthink.com/strange-maps/gog-and-magog-or-dubyas-biblical-mind-map

Samuel Tomlinson, “ Apocalypse Damascus: Bombed-out houses and rubble for as far as the eye can see... this shattered landscape is all that remains of one suburb in Syria's capital“ Daily Mail Online: December 2015, WEB: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3371675/Bombed-houses-rubble-far-eye-apocalyptic-landscape-remains-one-region-Syrian-capital-Damascus.html

Frontline: The Spill, dir. Marcela Gaviria 2010

Marijana Rako

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