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Upon finishing this suspense novel in 1980, I could not then imagine that the Islamic jihad or war on the West, and especially on the United States, would ever reach its current scale. The story was written in response to the machinations of OPEC (the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries), the cartel of governments each of which had seized American, British, French and other industrialized nation-created private property in those countries. At the time, Saudi Arabia was the noisiest and most arrogant member.
The cartel collectively represents a near monopoly on world oil production. The machinations took the form of price manipulations by reductions in crude production. These seizures were sanctioned by Western governments that ought to have protected or acted to reclaim such property, but, in the name of pragmatic and short-sighted diplomacy, did not. The power which the OPEC countries have over especially the United States is literally extortionate. All OPEC governments are statist regimes of one kind or another, from the communist tyranny of Venezuela, to the semi-fascist one of Mexico, to the feudal monarchy and petite fiefdoms of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Augmenting OPEC's parasitical power are environmentalist polices and regulations that suffocate oil exploration, drilling and production in the West. These phenomena lead one to suspect that environmentalist organizations are to some extent funded by OPEC members. Where do these organizations get the money to raise so much sham alarm and to lobby Congress to pass more such legislation? The money trail has not been more assiduously followed. Think of it this way: Al Capone did not lobby Congress to repeal Prohibition. He had a vested interest in its perpetuation.
As a consequence, for decades semi-free countries like the United States have been in economic thrall to a gang of unfree ones. The pragmatic policies of the West continue to enable the evil of the irrational.
The chief villain of We Three Kings is representative of the most bizarre and anachronistic statist at large in 1980 and in 2010: a royal Saudi sheik. The heroes who refuse to submit to his will - neither pragmatically, nor politically, nor in terms of Islam (which means "submission") - are Merritt Fury, an American entrepreneur, and a New York City police detective. The enablers who sic the Saudi mujahideen on them are the amoral, pragmatic denizens of the State Department.
We Three Kings is about how a single man, moved by the moral principle that one's life and property are one's own, can foil the faceless enablers and defeat a vicious conspiracy to deny him both.
Genre: Thriller
The cartel collectively represents a near monopoly on world oil production. The machinations took the form of price manipulations by reductions in crude production. These seizures were sanctioned by Western governments that ought to have protected or acted to reclaim such property, but, in the name of pragmatic and short-sighted diplomacy, did not. The power which the OPEC countries have over especially the United States is literally extortionate. All OPEC governments are statist regimes of one kind or another, from the communist tyranny of Venezuela, to the semi-fascist one of Mexico, to the feudal monarchy and petite fiefdoms of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Augmenting OPEC's parasitical power are environmentalist polices and regulations that suffocate oil exploration, drilling and production in the West. These phenomena lead one to suspect that environmentalist organizations are to some extent funded by OPEC members. Where do these organizations get the money to raise so much sham alarm and to lobby Congress to pass more such legislation? The money trail has not been more assiduously followed. Think of it this way: Al Capone did not lobby Congress to repeal Prohibition. He had a vested interest in its perpetuation.
As a consequence, for decades semi-free countries like the United States have been in economic thrall to a gang of unfree ones. The pragmatic policies of the West continue to enable the evil of the irrational.
The chief villain of We Three Kings is representative of the most bizarre and anachronistic statist at large in 1980 and in 2010: a royal Saudi sheik. The heroes who refuse to submit to his will - neither pragmatically, nor politically, nor in terms of Islam (which means "submission") - are Merritt Fury, an American entrepreneur, and a New York City police detective. The enablers who sic the Saudi mujahideen on them are the amoral, pragmatic denizens of the State Department.
We Three Kings is about how a single man, moved by the moral principle that one's life and property are one's own, can foil the faceless enablers and defeat a vicious conspiracy to deny him both.
Genre: Thriller
Used availability for Edward Cline's We Three Kings