![]() ![]() With Washington in its pocket, it lulled a society into thinking that consumption is fulfillment in a suburban home with a two-car garage, adults talking on their Androids while monitoring the movements of 2.5 children watching HDTV, all paid for by the phantom wealth of its institutions’ in oligopolistic control of the worlds’ financial system. Wall Street acts like London’s financial district at the British empire’s sunset years. A schizoid Japan in 1941 went tora, tora, tora into Aloha, and the knowledgeable quietly hid their tears while obediently engaging in the misplaced banzai exercise. Harvard-educated Admiral Yamamoto of the Imperial Navy, ironically the master navigator into Oahu’s sugarcane fields and Pearl Harbor, was opposed to the China incursion and aggression against the U.S., vis-a-vis the aggressive and rambunctious members of the Imperial Army that consigned the Navy to troop carriers and plotted the 1931 Mukden incident in Manchukuo. Japan’s military and Zaibatsu (precursor to today’s Keiretsu), instead, designed a self-sufficiency plan by accessing China’s coal resources and reaching out to the Dutch East Indies’ BP held oilfields. oil the embargo practically put a noose on Japan’s neck, daring it to plunge its own katana (samurai’s short sword) into ignominious seppuku. oil embargo order of July 1941 “made war with Japan inevitable,” resulting in a “general impoverishment” economy threatened with insufficient oil for “normal domestic consumption.” Japan’s Meiji, already heading toward empire with its hakko ichiu (one Asia) philosophy, and a Manchukuo migration policy to the non-Han Qing dynasty domain, was too dependent on U.S. ![]() Historian Samuel Elliot Morison writes in The Rising Sun in the Pacific that the U.S. The “seven sisters” (now only four) inked the Achnacarry (Scotland) agreement of 1928, the first oligopolistic commercial control on the price and the production of oil. World War I between the Allies (Britain, France, and Russia) and the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy) was over power, fueled and decided by access to oil. Two thousand years before, Zoroaster revered the eternal fire from natural gas, British surveyors with the Shah of Iran in 1908 hit petroleum fields that proved to be the most critical resource to England when the Guns of August was triggered by the Sarajevo assassination of Franz Ferdinand of Austria. But England and France in the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement divided the Ottoman lands between them, frustrating the German empire’s building designs. Resource poor Germany courted the Ottoman Empire’s resource, finding black gold in Basra while surveying a highway to connect to Bonn. The German Reich’s industrial power produced quality steel but Westminster settled for wealth in financial books. England’s admiralty gave up coal for oil to become the world’s most powerful Navy in 1912. Oil and the combustion engine in war proved to be a volatile combination. The geopolitics of oil in the last century makes it very clear that the black fluid on the ground is more than just a smudge on the garage floor as it has been the raison d’etre of imperial nation-states. 7’s Day of Infamy 70 years ago that lifted U.S.’ emotions to militant heights, a masterful instance of great literary coinage, has historians judging the attack on Pearl Harbor to be not surprising nor unmitigated. Happily, historiography in time allows analytical consensus and a broad ownership of communal wisdom. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |