ZCommunications | The Chomsky Sessions II, Science, Religion and Human Nature, Part I by Noam Chomsky | ZSpace

ZCommunications | The Chomsky Sessions II, Science, Religion and Human Nature, Part I by Noam Chomsky | ZSpace

"Now let's take concrete examples of fundamentalist irrationality, I'll give you a real example. Actually it's an example I knew about five years ago, but I didn't publish it 'cause it sounded so crazy it couldn't be true. It turns out to be true. It's now verified. In January 2003, immediately before the invasion of Iraq, George Bush was trying to round up international support for the invasion, and he met the French president, president Chirac. And in this meeting with Chirac, he started ranting about a passage from Ezekiel, the book of Ezekiel, a very obscure passage that nobody understands. It's a passage about Gog and Magog, nobody knows if they're people or places or whatever they are. But Gog and Magog are supposed to come from the North to attack Israel, and then we get off into ultra-fanatic Christian Evangelical madness. There's a whole big story about how Gog and Magog come down to attack Israel, there's a battle in Armageddon, everybody gets slaughtered, and the souls who are saved rise to Heaven.

OK, some kind of story like that. Reagan apparently believed it. When his handlers didn't control him enough and he was kind of off by himself, he'd start raving about this stuff. For him, Gog and Magog were Russia. For Bush, Gog and Magog were Iraq. So he told this to Chirac, and Chirac hadn't a clue what he was talking about. So he approached the French Foreign Office, the Elysée, and said: ”Do you know what this madman is raving about?”. And they didn't know either. So they approached a pretty well-known Belgian theologian who wrote sort of a disposition on this passage and the way it's interpreted and whatever it might mean and so on. OK, how do I know? Well, I know because that Belgian theologian [inaudible] sent me a copy of it, with a background of the story. I never published it because this just sounded too off the wall.

Finally, I was talking to an Australian academic, researcher, and I mentioned it to him. He decided to look into it. It turns out to be correct. In fact the story appears in the biographies of Chirac and in other evidence. So yeah, that actually happened. So here's the world in the hands of a raving lunatic who, you know, is talking about Gog and Magog and Armageddon and the souls rising to Heaven. And the world survived. Well, OK, that's, that's not a small thing in the United States. I don't know what the percentage is, but it's maybe 25, 30 percent of the population. Yeah, that's pretty serious irrationality."

A French Revelation, or The Burning Bush
JAMES A. HAUGHT