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Recent Stories
March 26, 2003
Bruce Jackson
A Battlefield from Hell
Pablo
Mukherjee
Watch Their Lips
David Krieger
Shock But Not Awe
Linda
Heard
Winning Hearts and Minds Bush--Style
Imad Jadaa
The Beautiful Face of America
Adam
Engel
Buckets of Blood
Patrick Cockburn
Kurds Unimpressed
David
Lindorff
POWs, Torture and Hypocrisy
Robert Fisk
The Coup That Didn't Happen
April
Hurley, MD
A Doctor's Outrage in Baghdad
Gloria Bergen
Chretien's Shame
Reema
Abu Hamdieh
The Smell of Death Surrounds Me
March 25, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Life During Wartime
Gary
Leupp
What Democracy Looks Like: the Streets
of Cairo
Bill and Kathleen
Christison
An Interview with Hanan Ashrawi
Bruce
Jackson
Why Protest? Why Write?
Uri Avnery
Bitter Rice: Thoughts and Warnings on
the War
Jason
Leopold
Blood Indicator: Casualties and the Stock
Market
Ralph Nader
A Pre--emptive War on a Defenseless Country
March 24, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
Ominous Signs
David
Lindorff
Peacekeepers at Ground Zero
Diane Christian
Blood Sacrifice
Kathy
Kelly
The Morning After Shock and Awe
John Stanton
US Bombs Iran
Wayne
Madsen
How to Live with a Rogue Superpower
Anthony Gancarski
Iraq and the Death of the West
David
Vest
Earth vs. Bush
Ahmad Faruqui
The Liberation of Iraq in Perspective
Robert
Fisk
We Bomb, They Suffer
March 22 / 23, 2003
Edward Said
The Other America
Saul Landau
The Threats of Empire
Kathleen and Bill Christison
On the Road in the West Bank
Joanne Mariner
Suing Seymour Hersh
Ann Harrison
The Battle of San Francisco
Robert Fisk
A Cauldron of Fire
Hani Shukrallah
The Gates of Hell
Chris Floyd
Memory Lane
Kathy Kelly
Imagine Chicago Under This Kind of Attack
Ramzi Kysia
Bombing Away a Chance for Joy
Linda Heard
Baghdad Burns While Bush Does Lunch
Bradley Burston
Could the US be at War for Years?
Salvador Peralta
Mass Murder as Liberation?
Tom Gorman
Now That's a Coalition!
Jorge Mariscal
Johnny Mack, When Are You Coming Back?
Cindy Milstein
The Grassroots Go Global
Josh Frank
Blocking Portland's Bridges
Elaine Cassel
The Case of Elizabeth Smart: Kidnapping and Insanity
Gordon Solberg
Drowning in Niceness: the Lessons of Elizabeth Smart
Tom Crumpacker
Getting to Know the Real Havana
Poets' Basement
Dobie, Guthrie, Alam, Wechsler
March 21, 2003
Ben Tripp
Blood for Oil:
the Exchange Rate
Cathy Breens
Report from Baghdad: Mothers, Kids and Crash Kits
Scott Handleman
Fourth
Generation Protesting: Shutting Down San Francisco
Vanessa Jones
Paint Them
Red
Brian J. Foley
Patriotic Protest
for Professors
Zoltan Grossman
After Saddam, a War on Iraqi Rebels?
Philip S. Golub
Inventing Demons
Richard Lichtman
On the Current Experience of Terror
Milan Rai
Blitz--Coup
Pepe Escobar
A Cheap Family Farce
Floyd Rudmin
The Nightmare at the Back Door: Nuclear Plant's as Terror Targets
Chris Floyd
See Rome (poem)
Website of the War
Iraq
Body Count
March 20, 2003
Stephen Banko
I Was a Soldier
Once
Kevin Alexander Gray
How Did We Become
an Outlaw Nation?
Shane Claiborne
Nomadic
Solidarity: Glimpses of Life in Baghdad on the Eve of War
Kathy Kelly
Waiting on the Baghdad Skies to Crack
Anthony Gancarski
Michelle
Makin's "Liberty Shields"
Rahul Mahajan and Robert Jensen
Myths and
Facts About the War on Iraq
Jason Leopold
Cheney's
Lies About Halliburton and Iraq
Ron Jacobs
If War is Business as Usual, There Should be No Business as Usual
Chuck O'Connell
Predictions About the Iraq War
Douglas Herman
US Air Force Veteran on the Coming Air Campaign
Ralph Nader
Come On Democrats,
Stand Up for Peace
William Hughes
War is Theft
Sima Saeedi
Dispatch from
Iran
Hammond Guthrie
John Philip Sousa
Website of the Day
Iraq
Body Count
Hot Stories
Gore Vidal
The Erosion
of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach Bush:
A Draft Resolution
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March
27, 2003
God, Ahmet or Just Another Tyrant?
A Day of Reckoning
By DIANE CHRISTIAN
Our
leader promises ‘a day of reckoning’ for Saddam’s
regime—by which he means not just the shootout at the OK Corral
but a religious settling of accounts.
The ancient Egyptians
reckoned judgment with a scale. Your heart in a canopic jar was weighed
against a feather representing Maat—the goddess of justice and
righteousness. Maat’s consort Thoth, god of wisdom, recorded the
verdict, and if you did not weigh righteously you got gobbled by Amet
the crocodile god lying below the scales who was eager to eat the unworthy
and deprive them of life. For well over four thousand years that image
of scales and ultimate just reckoning has been alive in Egyptian culture.
Tourists today buy ‘the day of reckoning’ on plaster plaques
and painted papyrus. Scales of reckoning also appear on Greek vases
where Zeus weighs the fate of warriors and on Christian churches where
Michael, god’s warrior, weighs good and evil souls in judgment.
Christians use both scales and the written record. In Michelangelo’s
Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel there are two books—a big
one of the damned and a smaller one of the saved.
The President’s
day of reckoning has a direct biblical echo in the book of Daniel which
is set in 6th century b.c Babylon in the court of Nebuchadnezzar, whom
Saddam openly emulates. Nebuchadnezzar in the Hebrew view is a vicious
tyrant whom god humbles—making him crawl on all fours with his
hair like a goat’s and his fingernails like an eagle’s talons.
The prophet Daniel interprets the king’s dreams which foretell
his inevitable downfall. His great image, with head of gold, breast
of silver, belly of brass, will be struck in its iron and clay feet
by a divine stone (usually read as Israel) and his empire will topple.
The great tree of his kingdom which fills the heavens will be cut down
and left a stump. Nebuchadnezzar’s son , Belshazzar, is also warned
and punished. At Belshazzar’s feast he drinks wine out of the
gold and silver vessels his father had taken out of the temple in Jerusalem.
A mysterious hand appears and writes on the wall ‘Mene mene tekel
u-pharsin’. Daniel interprets: ‘God has numbered the days
of your kingdom and brought it to an end; you have been weighed in the
balance and found wanting.’ Belshazzar is slain that very night.
Babylon is shocked and awed by God in both biblical apocalypses—Hebrew
Daniel and Christian Revelation (Apocalypse). The final reckoning is
a cleansing bloody conflict which separates good and evil nations. Mighty
Babylon’s doom in the Christian Apocalypse will sound in a single
hour and Jerusalem will triumph as the heavenly rich city with the tree
and water of life.
The President of the most powerful nation on earth feels righteous attacking
Baghdad. He intends to transform Babylon into liberated Christian Jerusalem.
He’s in charge of a resonant day of reckoning, confident that
evil will be removed by good.
Is he God or Amet or another tyrant?
There will be more than one day of reckoning.
Diane Christian
is SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor at University at Buffalo. She
can be reached at: engdc@acsu.buffalo.edu
Yesterday's Features
Pablo
Mukherjee
Watch Their Lips
David Krieger
Shock But Not Awe
Linda
Heard
Winning Hearts and Minds Bush--Style
Imad Jadaa
The Beautiful Face of America
Adam
Engel
Buckets of Blood
Patrick Cockburn
Kurds Unimpressed
David
Lindorff
POWs, Torture and Hypocrisy
Robert Fisk
The Coup That Didn't Happen
April
Hurley, MD
A Doctor's Outrage in Baghdad
Gloria Bergen
Chretien's Shame
Reema
Abu Hamdieh
The Smell of Death Surrounds Me
Website of the War
Iraq
Body Count
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