by HongPong
The Babel/Babylon military base, military industrial eschatology??Apocalypse Now...
Chef: I used to think if I died in an evil place then my soul wouldn't make it to heaven. Well, fuck. I don't care where it goes as long it ain't here.
Iraq is one of the world's most historic places. One site of interest is Nebuchadnezzar's old palace, the site of Daniel's prophetic dreams and all that weird stuff in the Old Testament. Google Earth shows us the lumpy ziggurat rendered near the palace and other historic sites, some rebuilt.
The 'Whore of Babylon' and all that other stuff was technically located right here. Saddam rebuilt the palace and stamped his own name into the bricks, alongside Nebuchadnezzar's.
Kurtz: What do you call assassins who accuse assassins?
So, in six thousand years, what political entity might want to take control of this geographic point? What sort of thing would want to control the point where supposedly God crashed the tower of Babel and introduced discord to humanity? (eris discordia's headquarters, you R. Anton Wilson fans could say)
Hubert: You are fighting for the biggest nothing in history.
I'll give you a tip... it's got five sides and it can nuke the whole world....
Kurtz: The horror. The horror.
That's right! The US administration's Pentagon, esoterically compelled to assert direct control over the land of Babel and the Garden of Eden, plopped a huge military base right onto the site, parking a fleet of black helicopters on the very parcel of land once cursed by the Israelites. So the Pentagon, a vast and grim bureaucracy, seizes control of this most wicked of sites and builds a military base on top of it, another strange layer of history in the making.
It's another attempted religious conversion of a geographic point that some cultures believe to be a junction with the spiritual plane - like Al Aqsa/Temple Mount or those places the Hindus and Sikhs dicker over.
Note above how the helicopters are parked in two lines that converge about where that little white sphere icon is. That sphere (a wikipedia bookmark in Google Earth) marks the location of the Ishtar Gate, one of the original wonders of the world. The whole site has a strange geometry.
Now as an atheist I'm bound to discount all lines of reasoning that depend on theological primary claims, but seriously, if you believe in any kind of Judeo-Christian theology then this area has to have some kind of black magic - some sort of haywire quality in the cosmic order. Maybe that's why the Pentagon needed to seize it: the five pointed entity wanted to either rectify the location, or else use its mythical power as an infusion into itself.
Google Earthscreensnap
Backing up a little further here, we see the rest of the base sprinkled around the lake area. The many trailers are the basic units of military materiel. There is a major highway just to the east (we are facing west here).
It's disturbing that no one in America knows or cares that Babylon itself has a US military base. You would think a few fundamentalist Christian preachers would be alarmed about it. Does Pat Robertson think this is a good idea? That, I think, would be the answer to where this whole project fits in the big worldview - the big strange ideology that guides the decisions.
I'm just getting a little dramatic here. The most fundamental point is that it's a cruel and callous act to build a foreign military base right on top of the world's top-level archaelogical sites, of major religious and cultural significance. It's just like they didn't give a fuck when the Baghdad museum got sacked.
[quoting Kurtz] Willard: As for the charges against me, I am unconcerned. I am beyond their timid lying morality, and so I am beyond caring.
They had this kind of eerie glint in their eye when it was all getting fucking burned. That's what the antiwar movement is all about: showing America that their crazy shit is nuts - and it won't deliver whatever the hell it promises.
Roxanne: The war will still be here tomorrow.The bill is coming due. I don't know much, but I'm pretty fucking sure about that.
Sometimes I think it's just like what the Willard tells Kurtz in Apocalypse Now:
Kurtz: Did they say why, Willard, why they want to terminate my command?
Willard: I was sent on a classified mission, sir.
Kurtz: It's no longer classified, is it? Did they tell you?
Willard: They told me that you had gone totally insane, and that your methods were unsound.
Kurtz: Are my methods unsound?
Willard: I don't see any method at all, sir.
Kurtz: I expected someone like you. What did you expect? Are you an assassin?
Willard: I'm a soldier.
Kurtz: You're neither. You're an errand boy, sent by grocery clerks, to collect a bill.
All right I'm going to put Brando's bloated rant in here too... If this was the site where God judged everyone should disagree all the time then it makes sense...
Kurtz: I've seen horrors... horrors that you've seen. But you have no right to call me a murderer. You have a right to kill me. You have a right to do that... but you have no right to judge me. It's impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror. Horror has a face... and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies.
I remember when I was with Special Forces. Seems a thousand centuries ago. We went into a camp to inoculate the children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for Polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn't see. We went back there and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms. And I remember... I... I... I cried. I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn't know what I wanted to do. And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it. I never want to forget. And then I realized... like I was shot... like I was shot with a diamond... a diamond bullet right through my forehead.
And I thought: My God... the genius of that. The genius. The will to do that. Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we. Because they could stand that these were not monsters. These were men... trained cadres. These men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love... but they had the strength... the strength... to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral... and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling... without passion... without judgment... without judgment. Because it's judgment that defeats us.
Related:
American Democracy worked in Iraq
US Bases in Iraq
Who's In Charge - Obama, The Pentagon Or Israel?
