Posted by pancho from ? (64.79.4.2) on Thursday, February 28, 2002 at 3:11PM :
Reading a book on the modern state, written around 1981 by two Englishmen who loved the place, spoke Arabic and had no axes to grind on our heads.
What amazes me is how much history passed through that land...how many major players rushed back and forth across the stage there. The first this and the first that...the first cities, the first developed agriculture, writing, reading, arithmatic, first great codes of Laws, first true library,first queen to rule an empire in her own right, great and good and bad and bloody and creative but never dull kings and queens and emperors. The Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Chaldeans from which the Jews came, the Jews who gave us Jesus and the greatest flowering of Islam, that other religion derived from the same Old Testicle source up there in Ur.
Gudea, Kurigazlu, Hammurabi, Sargon the Great and Ashurbanipal, Nabopolasser and Nebukhadnezzar, Khosroes and Darius, Alexander the Great and Xenophon and Cyrus and Julian the Apostate and Caracalla and Walid Ibn Khalid, the "Sword of Islam" and Haroun Al Rashid and Scheherazde and the Thousand And One Nights, and on and on.
The famous battles, Gugamela and Issus, the tombs of Alli and Hussein and Job and Jacob, the Garden of Eden, the death of Alexander, the Hellenic city states, Selucia and the Parthian city of Ctesiphon, the Romans the Ottomans, the Christians the Muslims . All that is missing is a tribe of Apaches from Texas wandering through Babylon.
During the Gulf War Set Up I was shocked to hear people discuss the bombing of baghdad like it was nothing...wondered how they would feel if Paris or Rome were discussed in such a cavalier manner...then I realized that Iraq and Baghdad had far more depth and history and a wealth of riches that belong to ALL of Western Civilizations and here is this family of hicks from Texas poisoning that land and killing the descendants of our single greatest link to the very dawn of history. It figures the United States the Enron of nations, would be doing this...a country that has nothing else to brag about except that it HAS no history...that it is as new and fresh and unencumbered as any cream faced loon with absolutely no appreciation, a neuveaux riche kid from hell, new on the block who churns everything up into a meat grinder to produce Pop Culture from his other end.
-- pancho
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