The Witch Doctor is a story about oil drilling in tribal territory. For some strange reason, human kind has built a system where people can buy other people’s land from people who live far away from that land, even if the territories have been in the possession of local tribes for centuries or more.
Multinational corporations are guilty of vast numbers of extreme crimes against natives around the globe, often with help from police and national soldiers. How do we justify a system that gives someone the right to take the rightful land of other people? Why is money more important than reason?
We like to think that we somehow have advanced, gotten beyond the unjust systems of the past, where slavery and repression was accepted as divine rights of the ones in power. Things haven’t really changed that much.
Today the privileges come from national belonging and wealth instead of noble blood. What before was regarded as God’s will is today a question of money. Poor people in poor countries are just as suppressed as they’ve always been. Tribal communities are often treated like animals.
The real curse is not the one of the Witch Doctor, but the one of human greed and indifference. By doing nothing we are all part of the problem. Let’s start doing something.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/jun/13/oil-fuelled-sudan-war-crimes
https://intercontinentalcry.org/perus-amazon-tribes-will-risk-lives-stop-oil-drilling/
http://www.ipsnews.net/2014/05/bagua-massacre-test-justice-peru/
Fictionspawn 
http://player.theplatform.com/p/7wvmTC/MSNBCEmbeddedOffSite?guid=n_maddow_exxonchad_161213
This is a news video showing a somewhat different angle on the same topic.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thank you for commenting, Marleen! Interesting video, it does show another aspect of the same problem. A bit nationalistic, though, the interests of America should not be of importance neither in Chad or Iraq, but the interests of the people who live there.
Still, it does show how thanks to multinational corporations oil and other resources is in fact a curse for poor countries and especially poor people in these countries. They end up being pawns, insignificant or even expendable for powerful people and organisations taking those resources away from them.
LikeLike
It’s more of the “doing something about it” side. This guy is up to be Secretary of State right now. It does, near the end especially, get a bit more concerned with the nation in which he might be confirmed. That’s kinda how the people in the nation where he might be confirmed are, and the most likely way for him not to be confirmed.
During his confirmation interviews, besides playing dumb (which no one believes) as to whether his company lobbied against sanctions, he also was deficient on his answers concerning Putin. One way I would put it is he had his own “Aleppo moment(s)” — but maybe worse in his case that that for which the LIbertarian Party candidate for President got written off.
That guy (Gary Johnson) heard a question as concerning “a leppo” — was confused as to what was being asked (on Aleppo). It became apparent he was a little slow of mind (although he’d have been against human atrocity). This guy who is likely to have a lot of power is supposedly not slow of mind; he just doesn’t care, except sort of in the opposite direction.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I also saw the person being questioned to probably be confirmed for Secretary of the Interior a day or two ago. I didn’t see the whole hearing. I came in where the appointee was reassuring the representative who had just asked him a set of questions; there was some winking and nodding going on. Then he finally came out with the real point. He had been saying he wants “the people” to use public lands. He wants “people” to be able to go fishing, for “people” to be able to go skiing and swimming. He added hunting. Then he included, like it was part of the same kind of thing, that the people ought to be able to go in and drill for oil.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Wow. That is a perfect example of the idea of neoliberalism, the idea that freedom for corporations is somehow the same as freedom for the people. It’s all on the contrary, the two are not even compatible.
LikeLike