DRAAAAAAINAGE! Why do we have fanatical religious terrorists? We drink their milkshake!

Depressing news to wake up to. Bombs exploding in Brussels. As of this writing, 32 dead, though that number may change. Hopefully it won’t get larger. As of this writing, they haven’t identified suspects, but it happened four days after one of the organizers of the Paris massacre was captured. I think ISIS-linked extremists are a safe bet.

And then we have Donald Trump and his mob responding by saying it’s time to break out the waterboard. And I think almost every regular reader of this site agrees that is exactly the wrong response.

I think rather than the knee-jerk “Waterboard ‘em!” or “Nuke ‘em till they glow and shoot ‘em in the dark!” responses we get from the right wing, perhaps we should take a closer look at why we’re in this mess at all.

And as it turns out, There Will Be Blood tells the story pretty well.

It all comes out to this scene…

See, we in the west are Daniel Plainview, and the Middle East has one hell of a milkshake. And we’re sending oil companies acrooooooooss to their milkshake.

We Drink Their Milkshake! We drink it up! We take the wealth from their land, leave them with nothing, and when they complain, we respond with force.

Like Eli Sunday, the folks in the Middle East are religious, and they turn to their religion when they’re impoverished and repressed.

But...

Do you really think that everyone in the Middle East who’s as impoverished and desperate as Eli are going to be as broken as Eli in the end? No, a lot of them are going to lose their shit, and get a wee bit hostile, and that’s the situation we have today. So far, our only response is to try to clobber them with bigger and bigger bowling pins, but the only way that will end is with virtually the entire Middle East dead. We need a better way to deal with the problem.

We drink their milkshake, but they’re fighting back instead of just letting us clobber them with bowling pins. The ones doing the fighting call themselves ISIS today. We think of them as monsters, and we’re right — after all, they’re killing innocent women and children in their bloodlust. But they think of themselves as the Fremen from Dune — the freedom fighters making a stand for themselves and their families. Guess who they think are the Harkonnen… Oh, and it’s no accident that Dune’s a good metaphor for this conflict. Frank Herbert was inspired by our thirst for Middle Eastern oil. The oil spice must flow…