I am one man in the diminishing band of people who had direct experience of the Dirty Thirties and the anxiety of hearing the broadcast battle reports of the Second World War. I knew people whose lives were forever blighted by telegrams which told them of husbands and sons killed in action. Through all of this time, I believed everything adults told me, every official communiqué, every newspaper report, every preacher and politician. I do not believe so easily now.
The Big Change, as social historian Frederick Lewis Allen entitled his 1952 book, came to rural Saskatchewan after the war. Prior to 1953, feeding a coal and wood stove and carrying away its ashes was a daily chore. So was carrying home two pails of water every day. By 1954, there were water taps in the houses and indoor bathrooms. Later, the coal-fired generating plants of the provincial power grid made electricity the perpetual servant in every home in the village. Then came furnaces fuelled by oil or natural gas. The drudgery of the early 20th century had been banished by tapping energy sources beneath the earth's surface.
When the 20th Century began, there was a war raging in South Africa. The prize for the British Empire was not land itself but what lay under it. The gold and diamonds of the Transvaal were coveted by British entrepreneurs. The ease with which they drew the British government and war machine into stealing the treasures of the Transvaal for them should have become an object lesson for all time in the iniquity of hidden corporate-government relationships and contrived reasons for warfare.
Just days ago I began restoring a trove of fading photographs brought back from the Boer War by a homesteader who had served with the Canadian Mounted Rifles. The celebration of victory consisted of scores of defeated Boers in prison compounds. There were child soldiers among them. What I saw in those pictures was not the glorification of empire, but the hopelessness in the eyes of the warrior children, who knew that the places where they had lived were burnt-out ruins and that mother, sisters and younger siblings, if still living, were being held in concentration camps in some other place. They were all a part of the cruel price of the imperial vision. So were the soldiers of the British Empire who never went home again. A century later, nothing much has changed in the processes of wealth-gathering and destruction.
By 1900, the British Empire was already in industrial decline, but the Royal Navy, which had prevented intervention by other nations in aid of the Boers, was still the most powerful in the world. It became important for the Royal Navy to phase out its world-wide coaling stations and turn the ships of its battle fleet into oil burners. There was oil in Azerbaijan. The struggle between European nations for the control of Middle East oil was beginning.
Later in the past century, British Petroleum became the major oil petroleum extractor in Azerbaijan and grew there to become one of the world's major corporations. Although travel brochures and other media accounts give the impression that Azerbaijan is a progressive, democratic country of great beauty and cultural significance, there are insider reports that characterize it as being polluted by oil spills, bribery, corruption and repression. The world does not know what happens in Azerbaijan.
The mining and petroleum industries are extractive. When the buried treasures are gone they are gone forever. I have seen this in played out mines in Nevada where the riches have been taken and the ruin left behind. The extractive industries there now are casinos and entertainments which suck money out of tourists. I lost a dime in a slot machine and have never since visited a casino. The State of Nevada is financed by losers. Through legal lotteries, my work in the fields of arts and culture is also partially financed by losers. I am not overjoyed by this.
Saskatchewan is now the Canadian hotspot for the extractive industries. We profit by it. There are enforceable regulations and there is public awareness. The befouling which continues to take place in Azerbaijan could never happen here. Or so we tell ourselves. How long will it take to extract everything which can be marketed? What sources of wealth will the province rely on then?
In the race for the Republic presidential nomination in the United States, debaters discuss whether or not the American Empire is in decline. They wonder whether a Chinese Empire will follow. Nobody has very much to say about the huge, linked corporations which make up the unacknowledged empire of Big Oil. The Empire of Oil has more money than many national treasuries and is able to buy as much support as it needs from bureaucrats, politicians and the news media. It is a formidable power on the world stage. Its purpose now is to find and aggressively market fossil fuels before the world is forced to turn to other energy sources.
The debating Republican presidential hopefuls have made me see with increasing clarity that it is better to live in a country governed by agnostics with common sense than in a country governed by Christians with no sense at all. The popular history of our southern neighbour abounds with fictions. The most boastful is that the wealth and power of the country was God-given. It wasn't. The land and its resources were taken from a relatively small aboriginal population by more numerous and technologically advanced intruders from Europe. (This also happened in the country called Canada.)
Also embedded in popular American history is belief the Second World War began Dec. 7, in 1941 and that American military might ended it in victory on the second day of September in 1945. Not so. Poles, Frenchmen and men from the British Commonwealth began fighting and dying in September of 1939.
As final fiction in a shortened list, I add the story that the Petroleum Age began with the discovery of oil in Titusville, Pennsylvania. Wrong. In the 13th Century, Marco Polo saw methane flares lighting the city of Baku in Azerbaijan and oil oozing away into the sea. He preferred olive oil.
The economic peasants of 2012 need to be cynical. We need to doubt. For the good of the human race and its survival we need to discover the truths behind every doubt.
