We’re Going to Help Blow Up the Garden of Eden

Why Is the United States Destroying So Much Holy Land?

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Jesus said, "The pharisees and the scribes have taken the keys of knowledge and hidden them. They themselves have not entered [The Kingdom], nor have they allowed to enter those who wish to. You, however, be as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves."

-Gospel of Thomas, Saying 39

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Does the United States have a reasonably good Intelligence service?

This isn’t a blog about the CIA specifically and is more focused on the State Department as a whole, but it’s important to start with the foundational premise before moving to the meat of the story because your opinion on the question will inform your opinion on the rest of the piece. The United States has an outsized impression of its own Central Intelligence Agency given a track record of incompetence in the Caribbean, Cuba, and Brazil–call it “Trial and Error” if you’re feeling charitable. Having said that, it’s also clearly capable of exerting its will given enough time and violence. Despite plenty of fumbles in all of the aforementioned regions, for example, the United States eventually got its way making it best to think of the CIA as more a hall of horrors than a singular boogeyman; a tool in a massive toolkit whose utility has been creating chaotic situations in other countries due to its limitless depravity and budget rather than its tactical acumen. 

Having said that, they’re not idiots, either. The Little Mayor That Could himself tweeted it earlier this week, on the same day it was reported that the CIA dropped a drone on Ayman Al-Zawahiri’s head. That’s not some stroke of luck. For the purposes of this blog, you don’t need to think the CIA is brilliant (and I’d prefer you didn’t!), but you do need to buy into a key concept that feels, to me, like common sense: things that may seem like esoteric knowledge to the average person are well-known to the institutions whose job it is to know the ins and outs of the cultures they plan to exploit.

The world is unpredictable. In the post-Cold War proxy war era, the State Department’s job is to hedge, and create probabilistic outcomes that favor the United States in general, regardless of how much it fucks things up for other countries.

All of which is preamble to a pattern that I’ve noticed that has increasingly made me uncomfortable with United States foreign policy operations. We’re helping our proxy partners destroy or seize a lot of Holy Land. In Yemen, we’re going to help Saudi Arabia blow up the Garden of Eden in Socotra. Last year, paramilitaries that the United States has helped fund for 50 years destroyed portions of Lalibela, the Zion of Ethiopia. And in Ukraine, Mike Pompeo shoved his pork rind chomper into some shit he wasn’t supposed to when he helped them create a schismatic church that ultimately seized Kyiv from the Russian Orthodox Church–also a Zion. 

Something that I often think gets lost in the critique of “esoterica” as a means of acquiring information is that texts and traditions from antiquity aren’t curiosities to the cultures from which they’re plucked. They are essential ways of life, such that they survived long enough for a Westerner to show up and marvel at it before syncretizing it into whatever belief system they practice. And within that esoteric knowledge is also a knowledge of how to potentially manipulate a group of people in the same way that critics of Christianity think of the Christian religion as a means of psychological manipulation.

There’s lots of Zions. In America, we think of Zionism primarily through the lens of Judeo-Christian culture, leading us to focus only on Israel, but that’s a limited scope of lands that people consider essential to ancestral identity. This past week, the United States decided to send billions of dollars to the UAE to help in its ongoing genocide against the Yemeni people. This isn’t a new conflict, and United States complicity in Saudi atrocity has a decades long trail of blood. However, in 2018, there was a new element: the UAE invaded Socotra, an island just off the coast of the Horn of Africa but–up to that point, at least–still Yemeni territory. Ever the opportunists, the United States is even thinking about putting a missile defense system there, which will cost a lot more money. 

Socotra has the kind of history (and accompanying Wikipedia page) that make folklorists drool. The flora and fauna on the island are unlike anywhere else in the world, and its proximity to many of the early tribal movements accompanying Biblical history make the “Garden of Eden” labels more than just a curiosity or hyperbole. Cave drawings and markings unearthed around the turn of the century showed a mixture of non-homogenous languages and texts, robust trade information, and some early Nestorian Christian work. By all reasonable accounts, Socotra is an essential link to the shared past of all of humanity. The idea of putting a big, expensive piece of military hardware in such a place is obscene on its own before considering the complicity in an ongoing genocide; the genocide itself is cost of doing business for the United States since anticommunist efforts in Indonesia (and likely before). This American life is many things, but it is most of all expensive.

Like many of the countries in the region, Yemen has significant religious tradition and lore, but Socotra specifically is a Holy Land with as much weight and importance (depending on your faith) to the last 2,000 years of religious development as Jerusalem. Thomas the Apostle converted the island to Christianity as early as the first century–and, if you’re on “Team Early” (i.e. the scholars who are still attempting to definitively prove that the Gospel of Thomas was written before the synoptic gospels and represents a version of Thomas’ teachings) he may have been using a completely different form of Christianity that has survived there since time immemorial. Centuries of movements make these things impossible to pin down, but legend of Socotra’s inhabitants being mostly Christian is present in a pretty tidy historical thruline. What’s notable about the legend, though, is despite maintaining a Christian culture for many centuries, that Christianity was unrecognizable to French missionaries in the 17th century. Despite it being much closer in degrees of separation to original Christian thought, what Thomas was preaching wouldn’t have had anything in common with what a Catholic French guy thought it meant to be Christian. 

Whether you care about any of that is personal. You can’t make someone give a shit about beliefs that they don’t hold, so the above may sound like gobbledygook if you’re anti-religious or just not that into it or even just someone who believes that human beings place far too much emphasis on the sanctity of the past. Hell, all of those positions are perfectly reasonable and logical, and this blog isn’t meant to convince a given reader to find deeper meaning in Socotra’s theological, spiritual, or historical importance. That kind of stuff is important to me personally, but personal beliefs aren’t especially relevant in matters of geopolitical struggle and falling bombs. Instead, what I’d suggest is that whether or not someone in the United States cares about Socotra is irrelevant when assessing whether it’s “fair play” for the West and its allies in their war games. 

Because it’s not just Socotra. There has been an uncanny pattern of callousness and violence against Holy Lands from United States proxy allies in recent years, along with accompanying utilization of religious divides as fodder for stoking conflict. The invasion of Socotra occurred in 2018, the same year that Mike Pompeo and the United States State Department took an active interest in helping the Orthodox Church of Ukraine take control of Christianity in Kyiv. I’ve covered this in the past such that it feels unnecessary to dig into the schism further, but Kyiv is a Zion for the Slavic Christian people. The same logic regarding Socotra applies here, which is that a Westerner’s opinion on whether or not a Russian should want to kill their neighbors and potentially die for Kyiv is irrelevant. That same Russian may ask why Ukraine, Europe, and the United States are so eager to let people die instead of giving Kyiv to them. This isn’t an endorsement of that view, but an acknowledgement that my opinion of it doesn’t matter, unless I was egotistical enough to think that somewhere out there hordes of Russians are waiting to lay down their arms once enough Americans make up their minds about the Slavic Zion.

Just two short years after the Socotra and Kyiv nonsense, there were reports out of Ethiopia that the United States was actively working with the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front again, as it had been since at least the 1970s. The TPLF said in a statement in late 2021 (which the United States denied, naturally) that it turned down the United States’ request that they try and overthrow the capital of Ethiopia, Addis Ababa. They did take them up on the request to invade Lalibela, a small town in the Northeast that is home to what are possibly the oldest Christian churches on Earth. They’re not Western Christian churches, though. They’re Ethiopian Tewahedo, and like the people of Socotra, they don’t pray to the same version of Christianity as the Westerners who think of Israel as Zion. For those that don’t follow African politics (understandable, given that our own are complicated enough to manage), this burst of violence was not random but part of a brutal Civil War that’s been in overdrive Ethiopia since about the time we showed up. 

This latest manifestation is a wrinkle of a familiar playbook for those who are familiar with the history Ethiopian-U.S. relations, with China replacing Haile Selassie as the representation of the Orient that the West has always been terrified of. It’s a proxy war again, but now our war with Ethiopia is about fighting back against China instead of destroying His Imperial Majesty. Just like in the 1970s, colonial interests are proxying through Tigray and Eritrea to create or prolong bloody conflict to the general goal of destabilization. Instead of trying to overthrow an Emperor, though, this new proxy appears to once again be a thinly-veiled move against China, who helped fund one of the most extraordinary pieces of renewable energy infrastructure ever created. His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie once predicted that when the Ethiopian people were given access to Western technology, it wouldn’t be long before they exceeded any Western accomplishment.

So that makes three. Three proxy moves through allies to stoke conflict with governments the United States doesn’t want around anymore. Three Holy Lands either seized or defiled. That’s to say nothing of Palestine, which weighs on my conscience daily. Unlike the above about Lalibela, or Socotra, the atrocities in Palestine are far more recognizable to those who casually engage with politics. And there are countless recent examples of defilement of Islamic culture and Holy Land that go unchecked by the United States, serving as a tangible example to ground the overall argument in. That’s three four concurrent examples of manufactured Holy War, all of which have resulted in bloody conflict with governments or groups of people that the State Department doesn’t like very much.

Which brings us all the way back to the starting premise, before the religious esoterica and Cold War thrulines. The one about our Intelligence services. When I was reporting on this story about Jamaica for my pal Barry over at Defector, I spoke with a guy whose sourcing was good enough that Kissinger helped get him fired, and he told me something that stuck with me. The basic premise was this: people who look at individual operations as independent events are rubes, and all of them were pretty interdependent in strategy and execution. Now, there’s a way of taking that statement and running with it in a remarkably unhealthy way, which plenty of conspiracists have shown their ass doing over the years. But as a rationalist at heart, I reject the conspiratorial interpretation of what that reporter told me and instead apply the rules of the observable world to it: the CIA is a top-down org. It has an organizational strategy. And, generally speaking, the corporate world tends to repeat its own ideas over and over and over and over again. 

My interpretation of that reporter’s advice is to think of the CIA and our foreign policy operations much in the same way you would think of any other professional network. These guys all go to the same conferences and the same schools, meet the same fucking people, look up to the same gloryboys. They get the same memos and read the same books and implement the same strategies in bureaus around the globe. So, when a bunch of Zions all get fucked up within a couple years of each other in regions we want to destabilize, it catches my eye. I don’t like our foreign policy operations from any era, but ever since they got away with Abu Ghraib it’s felt a little like the bastards have gone from callous disregard to active cultural genocide. 

Like the religious beliefs above, your reaction to that is going to depend on your fundamental belief structure. Do you believe that the goals of the United States are so important that the pursuit of them supersedes what any other culture or group of people want for the world? I don’t. So it makes me uncomfortable to think that somewhere out there there’s a guy getting paid by our government to rape someone in a church. Maybe you feel another way about it.

Have a Good Sunday. All the Best.

Casey