Lesson 93 – Exilic Period: Doctrine of Separation in a Pagan Culture

© Charles A. Clough 1998

Charles A. Clough
Biblical Framework Series 1995–2003

Part 4: Disciplinary Truths of God’s Kingdom
Chapter 4: Kingdom Ended: The Discipline of Exile

Lesson 93 – Exilic Period: Doctrine of Separation in a Pagan Culture

28 May 1998
Fellowship Chapel, Jarrettsville, MD
www.bibleframework.org

We’re going to finish the doctrine of separation and as we do I want to back up a minute and remind ourselves what’s going on here. This is not a classical Bible study in the sense that there’s not any real exegesis, verse-by-verse-type teaching because what we’re trying to do is touch topically on the foundation behind Scripture. I mention this because we’re going start drifting into the contribution of apocalyptic literature and the unique roll that literature plays in the Bible.

Part of our objective is to present a panorama of the history of the world interpreted through the Scripture. When we have listed events, I originally picked out the events because if you read the sermons, Joshua’s sermon, Stephen’s sermon in Acts 7, the classic sermons in Scripture, you see the events or the periods that are cited in those speeches and you discover that there’s a set of events that comes up again and again.

So what we’ve done is we’ve gone from event to event but more than that, in addition to going to these events we’ve tried to show that each of those events provides your imagination with enough material from the narrative depicting certain truths, doctrines, so we’ve tried to narrate particular doctrines to particular events.

This is not to say that those doctrines can’t relate to other things, it’s just that there’s a preferential treatment … for example, justification by faith clearly in the New Testament relates to Abraham, the call of Abraham, over and over again it’s related to that. So there’s a structural integrity going on between an event, an historical event narrated in Scripture, and the doctrinal truth that the Holy Spirit teaches the church.

The third objective has been not only the history, the event, but the truthfulness of the gospel. Therefore when we went through Genesis 1–11 we spent a lot of time going through geology, biology, some of the cosmology, because it’s necessary to make a map in our minds that we can think of somewhere inside our head or in our heart, wherever, we basically have a reality map. This is tucked away somewhere in our heads; we all have it, there’s no question everybody has this and most of our maps are composites. There are pieces of the Bible in there and there are pieces of paganism in there. When we respond to circumstances in our lives, particularly when we respond rapidly and almost thoughtlessly, our whole psyche, our brains and everything else are responding, they’re being programmed from the map.

It’s sort of like operational software, if you know computers, the operating system sort of sets up how the application runs. The problem in Christian growth is that we want to make sure that the operating system at the lowest level, the most basic level of our head and our hearts is structured Scripturally. That’s not an easy process, because half the time we’re not even conscious of the map; half the time we’re just responding to event after event and we don’t see that the way we’re responding should tell us something about the fact that our operating beliefs may not be too strictly biblical.

We may know chunks of the truth; the problem is that we can take in pieces of doctrine, pieces of biblical stories, etc. The next thing is to get them down into the map of reality. One of the ways that happens, it’s spiritual phenomena, it’s the Holy Spirit opening our hearts, but I think one of the conscious ways it happens is when we’re convinced of the deep truthfulness of Scripture. I’m convinced from years of experience with myself and many Christian groups that there are chunks of a lot of unbelief in our hearts, and half the time we’re not even conscious of it. But it’s why sometimes we encounter a situation and we wonder, why did I respond that way? It’s probably because down at the deep map level it hasn’t been impregnated yet with enough Scripture, and deep down being thoroughly convinced that this is true.

So when we come to these events what we try to do is show the truthfulness of these events, so that God’s work providentially in history to bring about these events so when we read the narratives of the events we’re convinced that this really did happen the way the Bible says it happened, now we have a little more force to the doctrines that are being taught reflecting those events.

The event that we’ve been working on is the event of the exile. There’s no question this all happened, absolutely no questions. If there were questions about Genesis and Exodus and Moses and coming out of Egypt and the days of the conquest and some of the archeology of Jericho, yes, there’s debate about those things. But there’s no debate about the exile. This is close enough in history so that even unbelievers know this.

Now the question comes, okay, so what? Now we have the exile, we have Israel kicked out of the land, what is God doing? What’s the meaning of this thing? We said the meaning is that He’s teaching more about sanctification, and tonight we’re going to be dealing with sanctification particularly stressing separation, Israel’s separation from the world. I put that truth first; there are actually two truths that seem to be emphasized in this event, sanctification and then revelation and inspiration because of the rise of a new kind of literature for the first time in biblical history called apocalyptical literature.

By the way, don’t confuse words, if you come out of the Catholic Church there’s another word that sounds similar to this called apocrypha. If you look in a Roman Catholic Bible you’ll see that between the Old Testament and New Testament there’s another set of books; that’s the apocrypha, books like I and II Maccabees, The Wisdom of Solomon, etc. The Protestant canon doesn’t have them because the Protestant canon follows the Jewish canon; the Jewish canon separated the apocrypha books.

The Roman Catholic canon follows what is called the Alexandrian thing and Jews in Egypt kind of went along with this stuff, so the Catholic Bible has these added books. The reasons the Protestants don’t have those is not only because the rabbinic tradition in Babylon with the Rabbis and the Masoretic Text doesn’t have it, but also because doctrines are taught in the apocrypha that frankly we don’t believe. In the apocrypha there are prayers for the dead, for example. The Protestants don’t believe that and the Catholic Church justifies it because it’s in the apocrypha but we don’t accept the apocrypha as part of Scripture. The word, apocrypha, that ends in “a”, is a word that refers to those books. That’s not what we’re talking about when we’re talking about apocalyptic literature. There’s two different nouns so don’t confuse them.

The apocalyptic literature that we were starting to look at is basically sections in Zechariah, Isaiah, and the big one in the Old Testament, Daniel. In the New Testament the book that is apocalyptic literature is Revelation. The style of all these books is the same. They all involve a dream and a vision and in the dream and the vision the author, or the observer, the author of the text is the observer to the vision, and it’s interpreted for him by an interpreting angel. In almost every case there’s an interpreting angel involved in the apocalyptic literature.

The apocalyptic literature emphasizes themes that were not emphasized back here, before the kingdoms fell, back when the kingdoms were in decline, the kingdom divided. Then we talked about prophetic literature. Remember what we said? What is a prophet? In the Old Testament what was the function of a prophet? If people would be clear about this it would really answer the question, do we have prophets today? The answer is we don’t, the gift of prophecy is not functioning today.

This is another big bone of contention between the cults that believe the gift of prophecy continues and God re-established it for the latter day saints, because they believe and justify that on a continuing existence of a gift of prophecy. The Roman Catholic Church in principle believes in the continuing gift of prophecy because of the institution of the papacy. Protestants do not believe in the continuation of the gift of prophecy and this is why, when you have the charismatic movement it’s sort of half way between Protestants and Catholicism, you’ve got these unstable elements in it. The charismatic movement is unstable here because they’re talking about the gift of prophecy. Well, if they were consistent, then if the gift of prophecy is continuing we should be adding Scripture, because that’s what the prophets were supposed to do. No one’s added Revelation 23, to my understanding.

The gift of prophecy is looked upon in the Old Testament as the classic writings of the prophets. These guys generated infallible, inerrant Scripture; that’s their function. Why? Because they’re bringing indictment against covenant-breakers. They’re bringing indictments against Israel and at the same time they’re bringing indictments against Israel they continue the lawsuit and they press the prosecuting case up to a point and then they always bring in grace and they point to the fact that yes, God is going to discipline, but eventually the conditions of the Abrahamic Covenant will be fulfilled. So history is going to come to resolution and it will justify God’s promises to Abraham. That’s the role of the prophets, and that’s the prophetic literature that we studied in the kingdom divided and the kingdom in decline.

In the exile there are still prophets writing, and in the restoration there are still some prophets writing, Ezra and Nehemiah are books that are written, there’s Zechariah, Malachi, so there are prophets there writing, too. But sandwiched into all this period of time is rise of this apocalyptic literature and if you look at the content of the apocalyptic literature, forget now the style, we talked about the style, the style is it’s dreams, visions, weird symbols, and all the rest of it. But the content and purpose of the literature is to assure believers, to give confidence to believers.

What we want to focus on because we’re not going to get into the teaching of the apocalyptic literature, we want to finish up on this idea of separation, the doctrine of sanctification. I want you to start thinking as we move and get to the end of the lesson tonight you’ll see this start to emerge.

The doctrine of separation presumes a situation in which believers find themselves that was not true prior to the exile. The situation envisioned from the exile on is that believers are living outside the land, that believers are living in Gentile power structures, that the pagan institutions dominate. You have isolated believers in all different pagan lands unable to sacrifice, unable to worship in the temple, cut off from a line of living prophets, existing by all their lonesome selves in a pagan foreign land. That’s the situation, and it’s that situation that apocalyptic literature was addressed to. You have to understand that background. Apocalyptic literature is addressed to believers isolated, suffering, and persecuted in a pagan society, and it’s a literature of hope.

In that sense the apocalyptic literature differs from prophetic literature. If you observe the Book of Revelation what do you notice about the first three chapters? It’s all about the church. Thinking in terms of the Old Testament, what type of literature is that? Is that apocalyptic or is that prophetic? What is the content of those churches? Christ is acting almost like an inspecting general, He comes walking into the congregation and He says you’ve done this good but you’ve done this bad. That’s much more like the Old Testament prophets.

So the first three chapters of Revelation tend to be kind of like, in style, Old Testament prophetic literature. But starting in Revelation 4 and moving on through the rest of the book it’s very apocalyptic. Then there’s no address condemning the church, there’s no address that chews people out, it’s all the story of the persecuted believers existing in a pagan society that is going to be judged and the final terminating act of history. That’s how all this interplays. That’s why when you look at the chart and see exile you see two doctrines, the doctrine of sanctification and the doctrine of revelation/inspiration, that’s the connection. The doctrine of separation addresses the issue of believers living in a pagan land, how do they live in a pagan society. Obviously in order to do that they need extra support. The extra support comes out of this apocalyptic literature.

Tonight we’re going to continue focusing on the doctrine of separation. Turn to page 67 in the notes, we’ll mention a few things before 67 and 68, and then we’re going to review some text. On page 67 I cite the two classic references, most believers know these verses: separation from worldly culture, Romans 12:2, “And be not fashioned according to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.” There’s the classic New Testament text on separation. Notice that the separation emphasis in Romans 12:2 isn’t on where you’re living; it isn’t on what you’re doing. The emphasis is on how you think, how you think in your heart.

The separation of Scripture originates down at that map level, down at the basic operating system, that’s where the failures happen. So when the Holy Spirit speaks to us through the Scriptures He’s pointing out that it’s not primarily a matter of dress, it’s not a matter of custom, of where you live, it gets back down to a matter of the heart and where our minds are focusing. That is where the separation occurs. That’s the battle. If you can hold it in that area you can endure an enormous amount of pressure, but if you lose it at that level the least little thing will knock you out of the game. So it’s that inner heart core that’s necessary.

We went through Psalm 137 last time, we used it as an illustration, and then there are those two verses I cite in the third paragraph, 1 Samuel 26:19 and 2 Kings 5:15–18, because those passages show you how the Old Testament people thought about this. They used this expression “to serve other gods” as a synonym for living in a pagan land. You have to stop and think about that one because when David says “go serve other gods” we have to be careful how we interpret that. David wasn’t an idiot; he didn’t go into Philistia and worship Dagon. That’s not what he meant. He must have meant something else. So when he says I had to go to Philistia, I had to be exiled and I served other gods, it must mean something other than that he capitulated in his faith to Dagon and the Philistine gods. It must mean something else.

What else could it mean? We have to infer this meaning from the usage. We infer that what they are talking about is when you are in a pagan land you’re living in a value system, another community value system. What sets up the values in any community? The basic map. The map that dominates the most people in that community, the power leaders, how they think at the basic operating level. What’s down there in that deep center of the heart are religious issues. It’s always the theological and spiritual that drives the ethical and the moral.

So what David is arguing for, I think, is when he says I have to “serve other gods” he’s working with a Philistine king, he worked with them, he trained some of their soldiers, was an employee of them, I’ve “served other gods.” I served in another land with a different value system and I had to live inside that sub-biblical value system. I couldn’t change it, I had to live with it; it was God’s will for me to live with it. That’s the situation that we’re talking about here

At the bottom of page 67 I try to state this to get into how the Bible treats it, “Separation, there­fore, involves every societal influence upon our behavior whether it’s local peer pressure, commonly assumed agendas, educational goals, and popularist causes.” That’s the things that do the programming of our map, because we hear it enough times to subliminally propagate onto our heart map, and we begin to believe it.

That’s insidious and if you don’t self-examine yourself, this stuff is like concrete, it just kind of goes down there and all of a sudden hardens up on you and gee, somebody put concrete in there, because you just didn’t see it coming. We’re all subject to this, I am, you are, everybody is. That’s why the Scripture tells us to concentrate, be not conformed in your mind, that’s where the hub of the issue is. So everything we say, even though tonight we’re going to get into behavior, understand that the behavior only follows from the thought pattern. “As a man thinks in his heart, so is he.”

On page 68 we mention three false ideas of separation that have grabbed Christians over the centuries of church history. I use three words, I used those three words back when we were dealing with Genesis and how to interpret Genesis. It’s the same patterns; you have the same old issue. One is capitulation, that means we wholesale adopt the value system of our community, the value system of our society, it automatically becomes ours, we capitulate to it. We don’t resist it, we don’t examine it, we just surrender all and capitulate. That basically is what liberal theology has done in the 20^th century, there’s no separation, there’s just been a total capitulation.

Then you have accommodation. Accommodation is sort of a mild version of capitulation, in that accommodation is usually what believers do. Capitulation is usually what unbelievers do or religious Christians, you know, they profess to be Christians, so capitulation pretty much is professing the unbelieving (quote) “Christian.”

Accommodation unfortunately comes into our own camp. In accommodation what happens is that because of my economic situation, because of my social situation, because of some situation personally, I find myself wanting to stay here, but then in my heart I know the Scriptures want me over here. So to get out of the bind I come up with a gimmick, and the gimmick is I can justify being here instead of over here if I reinterpret the Scrip­ture. My methods of interpretation kind of get greasy because I don’t like the literal interpretation of Scripture that would drive me over here to this position because there are some consequences I don’t like, so we have accommodation. Where you observe this, where I personally have observed a lot of this is when you find in the academia, in professional society, where being here means I get grants to do research, I’m published in peer-reviewed literature, I teach in a position where I can be professionally embarrassed if I let it be known I was a biblicist, that sort of thing. So therefore, I want this position and I’m secure here, I really don’t want to go over here because I want to do all this, so I’ll kind of take the Bible with sort of a cafeteria approach to the Scripture.

Then we come to the real gutsy people; these people really want to separate. Over history there have been whole movements of people that have done this. They say we’ll fight society and we’ll form our own Christian enclave and we will physically separate out from society. Usually you can see these groups because what they inevitably do is they come over and preserve the culture and lock it up and freeze it. The rest of the world goes on and they still stay frozen at whatever the milieu was, whatever the historic date was that they did this thing.

Monasticisms is an example of physical separation. People in the Roman Empire were stupid, and I can understand wanting to get out of the system, so you can understand why. They wanted to learn, there was no learning in a pagan society, they wanted to go read, they wanted to study, they wanted a Christian life, so let’s just get out of here and come on over here to a nice safe monastery. The problem is the sin nature comes with it. You’re not separating from the flesh. The other problem is you’re destroying the evangelistic link. So it becomes a problem.

Last time we gave that extensive quote from J. Gresham Machen who thought long and hard about this and the date of footnotes 12 and 13 is about 1914 I believe, somewhere around there. [“Wrote Machen: ‘Instead of destroying the arts and sciences or being indifferent to them, let us cultivate them with all the enthusiasm of the veriest humanist, but at the same time consecrate them to the service of our God. … Let us go forth joyfully, enthusiastically to make the world subject to God.’ Speaking of why such a wise balance is needed just for the first step of evangelism, Machen said: ‘We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet succeed only in winning a straggler here and there, if we permit the whole collective thought of the nation or of the world to be controlled by ideas, which, by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion.”

Anyway, at the beginning of the 20^th century Machen was a fundamentalist professor at Princeton Seminary, they were under a lot of pressure at the time, the historical situation was rapidly unfolding [can’t understand word/s] separation of Princeton, there was some pretty profound stuff, and Machen had this very good balance, and in quote 12 he mentions that you can’t separate from the arts and the sciences, etc. By the way, this is an address he gave to the seminary class in September when the school year opened. He is trying to teach the guys that would be preachers what they should expect. He was warning them, don’t knock the arts and the sciences per se, critique them on the basis of Scripture, but don’t neglect them, because if we don’t go out there and we don’t have Christian artists, and we don’t have Christian musicians, and we don’t have Christian people in these other areas, what then happens is we lose them by default. We lose vast areas by default.

Then it comes down to quote 13, the result of that is, and Machen was preaching it and seeing it, the result is that our evangelism goes down the tube, because we lose the ability to communicate in language we speak. What we do is we tend to develop an evangelical language and we start witnessing in the evangelical buzz words. It’s like speaking English in France. You can’t do it, you have to have translation. That’s what Machen’s whole point was.

In the last paragraph on page 68, which sort of starts to set up the theme for tonight, I point out that “Wisely separating from worldly culture while citizens of a pagan society requires great alertness (starting from a self-examination of our hearts), hard work, and a dedication. It requires a peculiar resource,” and here’s the resource, and now you can see the connection between separation and apocalyptic literature; watch this. “… peculiar resource: a vision of God’s sovereign control over, in back of, underneath, and behind every pagan power that pushes on us.” You need to know that, because what happens in the tug of war in our hearts is that we need to have the ability to envelop. Remember when we talked about apologetics, I drew this diagram and said that if this is an unbelief segment that is impinging upon you, the way you deal with that is not by a direct approach, or trying to deal with it. What you try to do is envelop it within a Scriptural framework.

It’s like an amoeba, because that’s what the other side does to us. They’ll take some Christian truth and I’m sure people in your family, you’ve talked to them about the gospel, you tried to witness to somebody, some friend, neighbor, someone in your home, family, and you give your testimony, I became a Christian and here’s what happened to me, and you think you’ve communicated just as clearly as you can do it, and then five minutes later and they’re talking about the psychology of your personal psychological makeup is thus and such and I can see how that might work for you. I’m not built like you are psychologically and that’s not going to work for me. What’s happened here? What happened was that you witnessed, and here’s some truth. What they did is they took their unbelief and surrounded it, interpreted it, and changed it. They enveloped it, they surrounded it, they sucked it up, digested it, and assimilated it within their system. So what we have to do with unbelief, we have to use the same tactic. We have to suck it up, envelop it, reinterpret it, and assimilate it into a biblical framework. Guess what apocalyptic literature does? What is the emphasis in Revelation, Zechariah, and Daniel?

Let’s look at the text, see if we can watch this. Turn to Daniel 2:31. This was a new thing that God has done, keeping in mind the historical situation. Again background: what was Daniel’s situation when this happened? Think. Personal. What was Daniel doing? He was young, he was all alone, he was a political hostage, he had been deported from his country, he basically was a prisoner of war and a hostage. And worse than that, he was being groomed and de-cultured. The communists did this in China, the cultural revolution of Mao Tse-tung, a horrible time in China. He would have reeducation camps, if anybody had a halfway manifestation of thinking for yourself, you, you, you, you, out of here, we’ve got special classes for you. So you go to this concentration camp and you get indoctrinated. That’s the way Daniel was. Remember, they gave him a new name, tried to change his identity, tried to make him lose his Jewish-ness, tried to make him forget the Old Testament, tried to make him worship other gods. He’s a believer, alone, isolated in this overwhelming pagan environment. He needs to have a vision and a perspective because every single day of his life he’s getting another vision, he’s being crushed, he’s being made to feel like he’s all alone, it’s a hopeless situation, you’re never going to see your homeland, you’re going to lose your Jewish identity, everything is against you.

Through the king and so on, he comes and interprets this vision, verse 31, “You, O king, were looking and behold, there was a single great statue; that statue, which was large and of extraordinary splendor, was standing in front of you …” we went into the statue. Verse 32, “The head of that statue was made of fine gold, its breast and its arms of silver, its belly and its thighs of bronze, [33] its legs of iron, its feet partly of iron and partly of clay. [34] You continued looking until a stone was cut off without hands, and it struck the statue on its feet of iron and clay, and crushed them.”

What you have is four kingdoms here. What’s going on in this vision? What’s going on is that Daniel, here he is all by himself, and from his perspective here’s the king, that’s the power, and here he is a victim. What God is saying through this vision is that this guy is part of a system. It has four parts, the head, the breastplate, the legs and the feet; four kings. And over and above this is God’s plan, because this thing is going to be crushed, this kingdom, by a stone made “without hands,” not of human origin.

So what does that do? Do you see what’s happening in this vision? Here is this Gentile pagan power that at first looked so big to Daniel, but what it’s doing it is being enveloped. The pagan power is itself being a puppet of God Most High, that God controls even that. So Daniel, when you look out and you see this pagan state coming at you with their reeducation programs, with all their political power, with the threat of capital punishment, with imprisonment, with torture, you just understand, I am in control says God. And one day all four of these guys will be absolutely crushed, and when I get done in verse 35 they’ll be “like chaff from the summer threshing floors.”

That’s the vision of apocalyptic literature. We like to know all the details, what corresponds to what kingdom; that’s a whole study in itself and we’re not going to get into all that. We want to get the big picture. Apocalyptic literature cuts pagan power down to size. Apocalyptic literature says God has the final answer in history.

This apocalyptic idea is that there’s a plan of God for history and the plan controls paganism. So when paganism starts to threaten me as an individual believer I look in back of the paganism through my apocalyptic revelation and I understand, aha, God Most High has a plan in this, I can bide my time, I know the end of history, I have read the last chapter, I know how it’s coming out.

I have two quotes over there. When you have a map or a basic structure in your heart that is so powerful, it is a vision that is so encompassing that it literally dominates every area of history. Remember I said Romans 12:2, separation starts in our mind, if our minds are properly loaded and are referencing the proper map of reality, and have a basic structure that’s biblical, look what it does to the behavior pattern.

On page 71 I have two quotes; one is an unbeliever imitation of what I’m talking about, and I deliberately picked the communists because in our own century communism is a Christian heresy. What? How can you say communism is a Christian heresy, I always thought communism was atheistic? Yes, it is, but do you have any understanding of where the power was in communism. Do you know what it was? It was a philosophy of ultimate victory. I could sacrifice, they could bomb me, torture me, kill me, I didn’t care because I’m on the winning team. Capitalism will be destroyed, and communism will finally triumph. In other words, communism had a vision of progress for victory.

Guess where they got it. I checked this out one time. There are two sources, two pathways where communism got this idea. It’s a fascinating story if you’re ever interested in history and want to chase this down sometime. One thing goes from Karl Marx back to Hegel, and Hegel kept talking about these kingdoms of history. Do you know where Hegel got his idea of kingdoms and progress of history? Daniel; isn’t this interesting? Two-step process. Marxism came out of Hegelian philosophy and Hegel read the Book of Daniel and captured the idea of progress right from Daniel 2.

The other source: there were people along with Marx who were the German radicals, German radicalism. German radicalism got in to Daniel. So what we have in Daniel 2, the idea that history is progressing through victory for one side or the other gave the framework for the faith and the hope of communism.

On page 71 to show you how effective this was, this is a citation from intelligence work that was done by a contractor for the U.S. Government, the Rand Corporation, who interviewed prisoners of war during Viet Nam. This was done in the early days, 1968–69. The B-52 terror bombings had just begun. Of course these were powerful bombs, because the idea was you couldn’t see them in the jungle so we’ll just bomb the jungle, destroy everything in the jungle.

To give you an idea of the bombs that were used, when we hear big booms at Aberdeen Proving Ground we’re probably hearing 120-mm canon fire which has a TNT equivalent of about five pounds. What the B-52s were dropping was 1,000-pound bombs that had an explosive power of something like 700–800 pounds of TNT. When those bombs went off, they would break every ear drum within half a mile. So there are thousands and thousands of Vietnamese now that are totally deaf because they have ruptured ear drums just from being near the bomb when it went off.

A friend of mine who was in an infantry group who was pinned down by fire and he called for artillery support and got it, actually from the U.S.S. Missouri that was lobbing thousand-pound bombs from [can’t understand word/s] and he said that when he sat there watching this thing and it went overhead because he was surrounded in front of his line, he couldn’t move forward, and he said when those things hit, it was the most amazing thing that ever happened, the trees just went up, he could see a ripple come to him on the ground. You’ve seen water ripple, the ground rippled. He says I was standing there and all of a sudden I fell on my face. That’s the shock of a thousand-pound bomb.

What was tremendously psychologically powerful about the attack was that these B-52s would fly very high so you couldn’t hear them. They would fly a pattern, so one of them would just boom, boom, boom, the next one boom, boom, boom. We did the same thing in Desert Storm except 24 hours before the bombing raid we would send fighter aircraft over and drop leaflets, tomorrow night at 7:00 p.m. you’d better move or you’re going to die, because this real estate is going to be rearranged starting at 7:00 o’clock. We’d tell them in advance exactly what piece of ground was going to be dealt with and what time it was going to be dealt with because it was saying you can’t stop us. So tomorrow at 7:00 o’clock, no warning whatso­ever other than the notes, boom, boom, boom, bomb after bomb after bomb blew up, and this is what terrified these guys, This is psychological detonation. If you get any closer it turns your insides to jelly. You don’t have to be burned, you don’t have to have shrapnel wounds, it’s just the pressure of the explosion that will destroy you.

So these are young kids, 17 and 18 years old that had endured those kinds of attacks. [The quote says: “The analyst found particularly remarkable … the degree to which the men do not simply ‘mouth’ what they have been told, but seem to have fully absorbed and assimilated it. … Thus, what may have begun as indoctrination has become sincere conviction … and may, therefore, be virtually impossible to dislodge. The men polled here … are unlikely to change their views. … They can perhaps be killed, but the probably cannot be dissuaded either by words or hardships.’ ”]

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