By Jim Perkinson

Christianity is a tradition of oil, gift of trees of olives, first used to anoint a slab of stone by Jacob (Gen 28:18), and then by Moses, explicitly directed by YHWH, to anoint a tent, a chest, a table, a lamp, a laver, two altars, multiple utensils, and select humans (Exod 30:22-31).  And then in name—but without any written memory of actual pouring on the head in ceremony—of the Nazareth prophet, described as the “living stone,” head of the corner (I Pet 2:4-8).  An anointed one, smeared with Life from the fruits of trees quite particular to that local ecology.  Trees anchoring human dwelling in such a domain that today, are being ripped up by the thousands—just like State of Michigan settlers cut down birch forests central to Anishinaabe life or US cavalry killed buffalo of plains Indian peoples in the 19^th century.  All of it designed to break the umbilical between indigenous cultures and local lands, genocidally disappear the human communities thereby “orphaned,” and re-tool the environments for capital. 

I start thus, because the question of extraction is at the heart of the question of invasion, occupation, and colonization.  Or perhaps more cogently named: the question of technology, of human uptake of other creatures, as armatures and prosthesis and shuttles and fuel for human bodies, claiming supremacies over other species and over other disparaged human communities.  Technology is the re-shaping of the entire planetary surface and immediate underground into an enslaved apparatus for a “hungry-ghost” humanity, rampaging insanely, refusing any concern for limit or future.

But it has not always been so.  More-than-human creatures can be taken up in modalities of respect and honoring as “tools” and yes, as food for human flourishing—as many indigenous communities know how to do. Indeed, as early Israel in its mix of escaped slaves from Egypt and revolting peasants from Canaanite cite-states knew how to do, re-initiated in such a lifeway in Levantine highlands for generations, before reverting back to abusive, extractive relations as a monarchy in expanding settlements serving hierarchy and seeking surplus. 

Olives, for millennia, going back even to Eden, were revered partners, in a tree-human hybridity of living sustainably and within limits, before sliding into the aggressions of human convictions of supremacy and technology, constantly seeking advantage and coercive power.  Palestinians today, still know the intimacy of olive-human mutuality, even in the face of a new kind of violence and rapacity, steamrolling that very reciprocity. This new violence recombines two older “supremacies”—Zionist and Christian—in the name of a new one: a superiority supposedly “civilizational” and “technocratic,” claiming “divinely white” authorship, capitalizing on state-of-the-art weaponry, backed by the most aggressive imperial power on the planet, and benefitted by the market for such AI-driven development, globally.

And it is indeed oil that leverages this new violence.  But an oil of a different kind of ancestor than the olive.  Empire has always entailed a new modality of more-than-human enslavement, euphemized as “energy.” In ancient Egypt it was water forced into artificial channels. In Mesopotamia, trees, clear-cut and re-deployed as walls, tools, fuels (as the Epic of Gilgamesh details regarding Lebanese cedars).  Greece made use of iron (think Prometheus) and Romans, water, wind, geothermal, metal, and animal.  And of course, for all of these, human muscle, enslaved as labor.  Jump to more recent “advents” of such and we have Spanish, English, and Portuguese use of a new source of such enslaved human power ripped from the Mother Continent, followed by British industrial development of coal power, US reliance on fossil remains, and now emergent Chinese mainlining of lithium, coltan, cobalt, rare earths, and solar for digitized delegation (and then discard).  And in our day, a new multi-polar “battle” for global power, rapidly coalescing as hemispheric hegemonies. 

And here the intersection between the early 20^th century Western colonization of the “Mid-East” by way of Israel as proxy and this month’s aggression by the US on Venezuela.  China has played the long game for more than 40 years now, by way of infrastructure projects, finance, state-of-the-art manufacture, and collaboration.  And the flummoxed US, caught between Chinese other-side-of-the-world “Belt and Road” expertise and initiative, and at-home tech-billionaire demand for data-center command of water-cooled electricity, retrenches into fossil-fuel calculation—the climate and planet be damned!  

At the start of Jewish recourse to the Levant seeking refuge from pogroms Russian and European, Zionist projection a la Herzl and Jabotinsky conceived of a newly convened “Israel” as outpost of Western civilization. Jewish settlement was proposed to stand guard against supposed barbarisms of Muslim communities, “Ottoman” and elsewhere to the east.  Britain quickly bought in, and in WWI “resolution,” re-configured the Mid-East in service of BP (British Petroleum) oil interest. 1936 Arab revolt coalescing into the late-30s arming of Jewish militias and then European explosion in WWII aggression, resulting in the 1947-1948 Nakba displacement of 750,000 Palestinians to accommodate Jewish flight from European genocide and refusal of asylum.  US take-over from Britain congealed in 1967 and intensified under the 1974 emergence of OPEC petroleum power.  Couched in “civilizational” guise, buttressed by Christian Zionist drive to provoke the Second Coming, the growing US-Israel codependence was slathered in oil interest.  US invasion of Iraq in 1991 and again in 2003 continued the superpower endorsement of Israel as “military outpost” guarding Western oil concerns, and as “weapons lab” using Gaza as training ground for technology and strategy. 

Meanwhile, as already mentioned, China has long been soliciting Latin America for “resources,” ports, projects, and investment returns, relying on Brazil for iron, Argentina for copper, Bolivia (and others) for lithium.  And yes, Venezuela for oil.   And now suddenly, US hubris and stupor are piqued, calculus provoked, the future sighted with deep angst and fear.  The developments are complex, the concerns prolix and very mixed, but the US assessment rather obvious.  China is poised to prevail over Eurasia as a whole. BRICS plus Saudi Arabia emerging uncontained.  Iran, in nuclear disposition and oil access, a threat.  Russian continuing to loom over Northern Europe and thus able to threaten the Svalbard Satellite Center, on the Norway island by that name above the article circle, arguably the most important conduit on the planet for satellite information then funneled around the globe (centers near the poles can pick up on satellite signals around the clock unlike centers located away from the planetary axis—likely part of the reason China is also spending time in Antarctica).  Just so happens there is another such center anchored by the Pituffik Space Base in northern Greenland.  And both key to tracking any naval stalking of North America as well as any intercontinental ballistics launched from a Putin advance through the air.

And now, after Trump’s kidnapping of Venezuelan President Madura and wife, killing more than 100 people in the process, the clear message to the rest of Latin America that continuing relations with China may well result in military intervention.  As numerous podcasts now detail, the entire Global South is watching the difference between Chinese imperial involvement that so far comes with a collaborative posture rather than threat or disrespect and the US stance that now stands revealed as violent and intolerant.  Already there is a growing move away from the US dollar as currency of exchange and towards the yuan and rupee—with dire consequences for the US economy.  

And of course, back behind this geopolitical upheaval is the corporate world of high-tech, fossil fuel, and defense industries, the big interests that calculate constantly in terms of investment, return, interest, and new venture.  Chevron certainly stands as the big oil player most profoundly engaged in Palestine (supplying Israel some 50% of its electricity) and now hovers with licking chops over Venezuelan crude, reputedly the largest such untapped source in the world, whose exploitation would be paid for by US taxpayers to create infrastructure and security, and whose benefits would largely accrue not to Venezuelan citizenry but to the industry (including the ventures on the Louisiana coast, toxifying that landscape and its host communities like few other places on the planet).  And all of it in continuing wanton disregard of climate response, on a globe already madly sprinting towards the cliff’s edge of collapse and likely extinction. 

So.  In the midst of it all—how think, feel, and respond as Christian?  Certainly in recognition that Christian nationalism and Christian Zionism (Christians United For Israel boasting some 11 million adherents) and white supremacist Christian patriarchy represent only the latest “Christian” contribution to a now 1700-year-old alliance with empire that has meant the bible in general, and the name “Jesus” in particular, unarguably host the largest pile of dead bodies at their “missionary” feet (far more than any other world religion although these too have also long been bloody collaborators with imperial accumulation around the globe). 

So.  Yes, resist.  Yes, witness, otherwise.  Yes, decry the perversion.  But also recognize, Jesus was not a Christian.  And his initiative was a collective movement of risk and reinvention, not a private possession of salvation.  Indeed, it was a back-to-land movement, pushing peasants and fisherfolk towards what had earlier been indigenous in that tradition in that part of the world, privileging the wild as favored terrain of divine encounter and more-than-human creatures as the tutors and agents thereof—a storm as the most frequent embodiment of YHWH (Ps 29, 89, 104, etc.), a bush as revelation to Moses (Exod 3:1-6), a dove schooling Jesus (Mk 1:9-13; Lk 3:21-22), a seed as model for his movement (John 12:24; Mk 4:1-41), a Messiah presenting himself as vine (John 15) and wheat (Mk 14:22) and insisting, Eat! 

So yes, as the planet implodes in witness against what we have unleashed for nigh on 5,0000 years now in this fantasy called “civilization” (much less empire, or nation/state, or urban gated settlement), the profound question of the hour is that of energy commandeered for technology. In our delirious fetish of the machine as destiny, do we really want to end the beauty of our planet as a unique galactic host of biology?  Or do we want to return to our embodiment in local ecologies as sustainable hybridities of human-and-more-than-human kin, embracing mutual flourishing and mutual limit?  Which oil do we really want: crude? Or olive?  Venezuela will likely prove nemesis.  Palestine already stands as witness.  Choose!