Watch The Epic of Black Gold online: Episode 3 Oil as a weapon

We find out how OPEC came to understand the value of oil as a fearsome weapon against the West. The real rebellion took place in the early 60’s with the creation of OPEC, the brainchild of Juan Pablo Perez of Venezuela and Tariki of Saudi Arabia. Characterized as “an aggressive conglomeration of camel drivers’ emirates and banana republics” by the Washington Post in 1960, OPEC was expected to last only a few short years, but last it has. Their dream was to make Black Gold a means of development for the Third World. OPEC reached its peak of influence in the early 70’s with the admission of Libya and Algeria at the time of the Yom Kippur War when Black Gold shot up five times its existing price in a matter of months, throwing the world into financial turmoil…putting an end to 30 years of prosperity in Europe. There was an outburst of joy in the Third World, but that was to be short-lived.

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