"It seems that almost every time a valuable natural resource is discovered in the world-whether it be diamonds, rubber, gold, oil, whatever-often what results is a tragedy for the country in which they are found. Making matters worse, the resulting riches from these resources rarely benefit the people of the country from which they come"
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Zwick is doing something directors rarely get credit for: turning a plot engine into an indictment. The line is built like a weary pattern-recognition montage - diamonds, rubber, gold, oil - a rapid-fire list that mimics the way audiences skim “resource conflict” as a genre, not a lived reality. By stacking commodities the way a producer might stack bankable elements, he exposes the grim formula underneath: extraction arrives, sovereignty weakens, violence follows, and the people nearest the resource end up farthest from its rewards.
The intent is less to moralize than to puncture the fairy tale baked into the phrase “natural wealth.” Zwick frames the discovery itself as the inciting incident of tragedy, flipping the expected arc of development. The subtext is the so-called resource curse, but he avoids the policy-speak and goes for a filmmaker’s blunt causality: “almost every time” is not a statistic; it’s a verdict. That imprecision is the point. He’s arguing about structure, not exceptions - the recurring alignment of multinational interests, corruptible local elites, and global consumers who enjoy the benefits while outsourcing the damage.
Contextually, this sits squarely in the post-Cold War era when civil wars were increasingly narrated through commodities and supply chains: blood diamonds, conflict minerals, petrostates. The second sentence is the real knife. It shifts blame from the abstract “country” to the distribution of power, reminding you that “riches” aren’t a natural outcome of resources; they’re a political decision, usually made elsewhere.
The intent is less to moralize than to puncture the fairy tale baked into the phrase “natural wealth.” Zwick frames the discovery itself as the inciting incident of tragedy, flipping the expected arc of development. The subtext is the so-called resource curse, but he avoids the policy-speak and goes for a filmmaker’s blunt causality: “almost every time” is not a statistic; it’s a verdict. That imprecision is the point. He’s arguing about structure, not exceptions - the recurring alignment of multinational interests, corruptible local elites, and global consumers who enjoy the benefits while outsourcing the damage.
Contextually, this sits squarely in the post-Cold War era when civil wars were increasingly narrated through commodities and supply chains: blood diamonds, conflict minerals, petrostates. The second sentence is the real knife. It shifts blame from the abstract “country” to the distribution of power, reminding you that “riches” aren’t a natural outcome of resources; they’re a political decision, usually made elsewhere.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
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