However, I have to bring this part of the article to your attention:

For Jocelyn Rochat, this little international policy professional secret raises a vast question: our lack of religious education, our ignorance of Scriptures at a time when religious foundations are far more crucial than we'd like to believe in political and military decisions. Religion is not confined to the private sphere, Jocelyn Rochat concludes. A parameter to take into account "at the risk of no longer understanding the way the world works today."

Next thing we know it will be Golem and the Evil Wall which crept up and slipped away with all those WMDs.

Note to fellow Americans on this board - keep those eyes opened wide. Roughly one in five Americans believe in this hocum. And they vote. Dubya didn't happen in a vacuum. Onward Christian soldiers.

And to my fellow Europeans on the board, you really have to see it to believe it. It suffices to spend a day in your car driving through, say, Texas or Oklahoma or Kansas listening to your car radio and flipping the dial every so often. Truly, wonders never cease the creativity of the ignorant human mind.

Though in fairness, I noted the same creativity while a student back in the late 1980's in Peshawar, Pakistan. And, as in certain parts of the US, one keeps one's incredulity to one's self in public.

It's good that this comes out now, as it should serve, by dribs and drabs, to undermine Sarko and his rapprochement with the Americans. I confess to taking a perverse glee in this in much the same way I am enjoying Villepin's very public defence of himself.

Let's Go Red Wings!

George W. Bush, when asked by Bob Woodward "how is history likely to judge your Iraq war?" replied, "History, we don't know. We'll all be dead." (Woodward Shares War Secrets, CBS News, 60 Minutes, April 18, 2004).

That's been widely interpreted as a reference to the apocalypse.  

I honestly don't know if he really believes this stuff, is just pandering to the "Left Behind "crowd, or if we're projecting our fears onto him - giving him more credit that is due.  But nothing he says or believes should shock us at this point.  He is a madman.


"Pretending that you already know the answer when you don't is not actually very helpful." ~Migeru.

The first occurrence of "Magog" in the Hebrew Bible is in the Table of Nations in Genesis 10, where Magog is the eponymous ancestor of a people or nation (without any accompanying apocalyptic symbolism, or mention of Gog, although "Magog" may mean "the land of Gog"):

Gog and Magog are mentioned in the New Testament Book of Revelation, which draws on the depiction of them in the older prophetic works. They appear in verses 20:7-8:

    7. And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle: the number of whom is as the sand of the sea.
    8. And they went up on the breadth of the earth, and compassed the camp of the saints about, and the beloved city: and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them. (KJV)

Here, Gog and Magog are identified as the nations in the four corners of the earth, and their attack is represented as an eschatological crisis after the Millennium, to be vanquished by divine intervention. The language of Gog and Magog's destruction is very similar to that of their mention in Ezekiel.

   10. Thus says the Lord "On that day it shall come to pass that thoughts will arise in your mind and you will make an evil plan:"[6]
    11. You will say, "I will go against a land of unwalled villages...(FRZ)(FRZ: mostly refers to Iraq as Frz (Unwalled Villages) in the Book of Esther)[7]
    12. To take plunder and booty..."[8]
    13. Sheba and Dedan, and the merchants of Tarshish, with all the young lions thereof, will say to you, "have you come to take a spoil?"[9]
[...]
They will be joined by Persians from the East, Phut from the West, Kushites from the South, and others. We are told that Gog dwelt north of Israel, but there is little else to identify Gog in the passage. Gog and his allies are to attack "a land of unwalled villages" to collect booty, but before attacking Israel itself will be reduced to a "sixth" of their size (Ezekiel 39:2). Their reduced army will be destroyed in Israel, their dead buried in the Valley of Hamon-Gog for all to see and comment on (39:15-17).

The U.S. army arguably hasn't yet been reduced to 1/6th of its size, been joined by the Iranians, Libyans and Northern Sudanese, or made moves against Israel. But who knows what might yet happen!

Interestingly, Gog and Magog exist also for Muslims under the name Jouj and Majouj. They are kept prisoners in the mountains by a wall which they try to demolish and which is rebuilt every day by Allah. They are supposed to escape at the end of times and rampage all over the world...  

"Ne te courbe que pour aimer..." René Char

The main bit is quoted above by nanne, from Revelation: Satan is freed and unleashed to deceive the nations, (alluded to as Gog and Magog by back-reference to Old Testament prophecy). It all ends up in a whopping battle around what other than the Holy Land and Jerusalem. All the baddies get tasered if not nuked, and in the end the born-again Christians and all the converted Jews survive and Jerusalem can be the Bride of Christ. The End.

How much do we need to know about all this? I mean, how much do we want to know? :-(

But if it is true that Bush really spoke this way to Chirac, that is really unsettling. What could it mean? That Bush thought it would help persuade Chirac? That he thought Chirac would understand and get hip to the End Times narrative? The mind boggles. That, even though he didn't expect Chirac to be swayed, Bush thought he was duty-bound to bear witness to the truth?

Let me out of here.

When locusts move on, they leave nothing behind

When the nomadic Magyar (Hungarian) tribes descended upon Western Europe 1100 years ago, Westerners alternatively identified them as the returning Huns (hence "Hungarian") or the wild hordes of Gog and Magog (Magog-Magyar). In later Chrstian times, the feudal/clerical upper class of the Hungarian Kingdom internalised both concepts into their mythologic history(-re-writing).

A strange result was that with the ascent of nationalism, Attila and Gog/Magog fully completed the inversion from evil forces to noble Barbarian ancestors that, say, only wanted to create a peaceful unified Europe.

*Traitor*, n.
A benighted individual who perceives an illusory distinction between serving his nation and abetting the criminals who govern it.

IMO there are good reasons to think that W isn't strongly religious except that he needs the image to pander to the fundies who were critical to his success and remain his only support left. For example, although the media certainly refuses to talk about it, W doesn't really attend church, which even if not entirely diagnostic is certainly worth pondering. Also, his "brain", Rove the man who made W the politician, is an atheist, which seems to demand an "openness to the devil" not entirely consistent with citing Gog to justify the occupation of Iraq.

And to think that CNN is part of the "librul media"...

"If you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles." Sun Tzu

that said.. this meseanic vision is not religion.. actually it hardly ahs anything to do with it.. Religion is the excuse to give some paranoic and melo-maniac people a skin of respectability..

SO it certainly could be truth ... but it can also be a bluff...

A pleasure

I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact. Levi-Strauss, Claude

Just thinking aloud.