Peter Maass

April 1st, 1992. My father was five months and twenty days away from dying. On that day, Serbians commenced their brutal attack on Bosnia. I think I might have done damage to my psyche to read about Bosnia and Guernica in the same month...To wipe out an entire community or ethnicity for absolutely no reason other than pure dominance is unfathomable.
Line that gave me pause, "There was even a slip of paper from the library saying they didn't posses any overdue books" (p 86). Imagine giving up show more everything you own, including items you don't, like books borrowed from the library. The business of the bureau for ethnic cleansing demanded Bosnians claim they handed over all worldly possessions to a Serbian. This act does not encompass the horrific violence, but rather the senseless humility.
About the violence. Most of the time I found myself twisting and twitching in my chair, wanting to turn away from the sentences of torture Maas wrote. I am one of those fat and happy and white privileged people who blissfully and ignorantly cite misunderstanding when it comes to the war in Bosnia. I was oblivious to the death and destruction with the exception of what the U.S. media decided or cared to reveal to me. What baffles me the most is that, like the Hutu and Tutsi, Serbs and Bosnians at one time got along like neighbors and family. Another war similarity from forty years earlier, like Franco denying the bombing of Guernica, Serbia denied the bombing of Bosnia was their responsibility. Death and destruction is not a macabre mirage and yet they do refuse see or own it. The practice of modern warfare with age-old atrocities was hard to read. Maas takes his time to carefully humanize the narrative by inserting personal anecdotes from his own life. show less

Amazing book which does not overdose on the gory but gives a sense of what it might be like to live day after day for two or three years in a horrific war. His description of life in Banja Luka for Muslims is harrowing, his visits to the cleaned up concentration camps, and his description of the young man shot on Sniper Alley in Sarajevo. Unforgettable. He even met Milosevic one on one. He does not dismiss the Serbs as primitives, or single out Rwandans, or isolate anybody, rather, the show more capacity to evil is in all of us. God help us! Many fun/ironic/sardonic observations. show less

What a gripping book. I read it all the way through once, and I've tried to pick it up and re-read it a time or two, but I just can't do it. The scenes that he describes are horrible enough; the actual people living through them are just tragic.

Maass describes the city of Sarajevo as it was, goes through the smell of a human who has made it through to a gymnasium serving as a refugee camp in the early days of the bombing, and the finally into the details of what happened in show more Sarajevo.

Especially sad to read are the inhabitants' lives before this war started. There was no warning; none. One home had the approval document for a build-out on his home that was due to begin in a few days, as an example. The war-lords of the Serbs are quite well documented, and this was the book that finally made me see how impossible the situation was for the Bosnian Muslims: the Serbs (and Croats) were convincing the rest of the world that the Muslims were evil, the Muslims were armed, and no one else should get involved.

With all of the recent pardons from the World Court of the Serbs who helped perpetrate this genocide, everyone on that Court in Brussels should be forced to read this book. There is just no getting it out of your mind. show less

Are there better ways to meet our energy needs than the ever more frantic search for the world’s rapidly decreasing oil reserves? Unfortunately, the answer to that question is both “yes” and “no” because, while there certainly are cleaner ways to generate the energy that makes the world go around, the transition from oil to those cleaner sources might just bankrupt the planet during the transition process.

In "Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil," Peter Maass explains the show more impact of our oil addiction on those supposedly lucky countries having enough oil to export it to the rest of us. Most of the world’s remaining oil reserves will be discovered in, and exported from, third world countries. Unfortunately, the governments of those countries are most often manned by thugs and thieves who claim the oil riches for themselves and their families. These criminals might be quick to loot their country’s oil reserves but they are slow to plow any of the oil proceeds back into the country’s infrastructure in ways that would improve the lives of their fellow citizens.

Peter Maass devotes chapters to Saudi Arabia, Equatorial Guinea, Nigeria, Ecuador, Russia, Iraq and Venezuela. Maass finds that these countries have one thing in common other than their vast supplies of crude oil. Each of them suffers from the “resource curse,” which states that countries whose economies are too closely tied to the exportation of a natural resource, such as oil, are doomed to “lower growth, higher corruption, less freedom and more warfare.” Doubters only need review the list of countries at the beginning of this paragraph to judge the accuracy of this “curse.”

Maass effectively argues that none of the petty dictators, thieves and kings could have looted their countries on their own. Without the enablement of Big Oil, it simply could not have happened. Oil companies have always shown a willingness to work with anyone able to guarantee them the contracts needed to extract oil, turning a blind eye to what happens in the producing country despite the billions of dollars the companies pump into government hands. Seeking an edge, oil companies have been known to bribe government officials with huge amounts of cash, high-paying “consulting” jobs, building rents, and “charities.” “Whatever it takes” seems to be the motto of many who spend their lives in search of the next huge oil field.

But all of this is overshadowed by the brutal wars fought by consuming nations to gain or guarantee access to the steady supply of reasonably priced crude oil so critical to the world’s economy. While Maass admits that the United States invaded Iraq for reasons in addition to oil acquisition, he correctly points out that the protection and control of Iraq’s oil fields quickly became a top priority of America’s occupying forces. Keeping the huge Iraqi oil reserves in friendly hands, even if not directly in the hands of American oil companies, clearly impacts America’s national security. Because the job of America’s military is to protect the country’s national security, and because every other major power feels the same way, fighting over the oil of producing countries is not likely to end before the oil runs dry.

The picture Peter Maass paints might not be pretty, but it is realistic. He knows that the world’s dependence on petroleum is likely to last another several decades but he urges us to make oil’s twilight as “short as possible.” Sadly, until reasonable alternatives to oil are found, we remain “complicit in the forms of violence – physical, environmental and cultural – that are the consequences of its extraction.”

(I write this as someone who has worked in the oil industry, and in several different oil producing countries, for the last 37 years.)

Rated at: 4.0 show less