You sound like an oilman. But civilisations don't advance on a single track. Take North Sentinel Island a people who will put an arrow through you for setting foot on their beach. Savage? Backwards? Or simply developing on their own terms, at their own pace, without asking anyone's permission? The distinction matters. The Middle East has been picked over by outside hands for centuries colonised, partitioned, resource-extracted, and periodically bombed into modernity by people who meant well, or said they did. They've developed their own ways in response to that, which shouldn't entirely surprise us. And here's the thing worth sitting with: if climate change does what the projections suggest and takes down western civilisation as we know it, the people living close to the land in low-tech communities may well turn out to have been the ones playing the long game. Cave-dwelling starts to look less primitive when the grid's gone down and the supermarkets are empty and let's not forget the US Empire has killed far more people in the last 100 years then Islam has and let's not get onto the white Christian Nazis. Just putting that out there. )
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