Bob Dylan Says China to Attack Middle East in Battle of

Armageddon

Bob Dylan on stage, 1979:

China's got an army of two hundred million people, they’re going to

come down to the Middle East. There's going to be a war called the
battle of Armageddon …

Dylan’s theme-time disk jockey Scott Warmuth in his Goon Talk blog post of 9
May 2010 recommends Jack London’s ‘The Unparalleled Invasion’ in
connection with Bob’s New Orleans conversation with Sun Pie in Chronicles.
However, although certainly not irrelevant, the former is a short story about
the West’s biological invasion of China.

In Chronicles Dylan inverts that – in the mouth of the mysterious Sun Pie.
Chronicles p 204:

“You a praying man?” he said.

“Uh-huh.”
“Good, gonna have to be when the Chinese take over.”

Chronicles p 205:

I was curious about what Pie was saying and I sat down in one of the rickety chairs.
“They’re coming back, these Chinese, millions of them. It’s been preordained, and
they won’t have to use force. They’ll just walk in and take up where they left off.”

This is indeed an inversion of the Jack London story, where germ warfare is
used by the West to ‘invade’ China, an indifferent and complacently secure
monolith too vast geographically and population-wise to be attacked in any
conventional manner. Warmuth:

There is much more to explore here, especially how the hidden use of the Rohmer
material might tie in with the passages in Chronicles: Volume One in which Sun Pie
talks with Dylan about how to prepare for the coming invasion of millions of Chinese.
"The Unparalleled Invasion" by Jack London is also worth looking at.

The parallel is unparallel, so to speak (if not very grammatical), and for that
reason so Dylan. But let’s go back to Dylan’s Vineyard apocalyptic period,
when he had been reading and studying, albeit only partly, under Hal Lindsey,
author of the now rather dated if not discredited Seventies bestseller Late
Great Planet Earth, which interpreted Revelation passages as referring to the
‘Yellow Peril’ of two-hundred million Chinese communists pouring over the
Tigris and Euphrates rivers into the battle of Armageddon. Or, if you’re
Michael Gray, the battle of Johanna. (‘A little learning is a dangerous thing’,
indeed.)
It should be noted that, contrary to those who like to dismiss the ‘brand of
Christianity’ Dylan was into at the time, the fact that Hal was associated with
the Vineyard does not mean that his eschatological views, then or now, are
official Vineyard doctrine – or that the Vineyard is myopically obsessed with
apocalypse (in the way that Michael Gray is so myopically obsessed with
BLIND WILLIE MCTELL he overlooked Infidels’s (1983) wider ‘code in the
lyrics’ to the extent of not recognizing JOKERMAN’s poetic eschatology and
shifting time frame – beyond suddenly leaping from first-century Galilee-
Palestine to Reagan’s America at the drop of the Miltonian bogs-fens-
dens(ish) ‘Molotov cocktails and rocks’ et al lines).

Excerpt from the long introduction to SOLID ROCK, Tempe, Arizona, 26

November 1979:

Now Jesus is that solid rock. He's supposed to come two times. He came once
already. Now He's coming back again. Now you've got to be prepared for this,
because no matter what you read in the newspaper that's all deceit. The real truth is
that He's coming back already. And you just watch your newspapers! You're going to
see, maybe two years, maybe three years, five years from now, you just watch and
see. Russia will come down and attack in the Middle East. China's got an army of
two hundred million people, they're going to come down to the Middle East.
There's going to be a war called the battle of Armageddon, which is like some war
you've never even dreamed about. And Christ will set up his kingdom. He will set up
his kingdom and he will rule it from Jerusalem. Now I know as far out as that might
seem this is what the Bible says.

But it is not only China who is in on this scenario. Compare the Toronto 20
April 1980 concert rap:

Actually I wanna tell you a story. We were playin' about four months ago someplace
that was a college or a campus. I forget exactly where. Arizona I think it was.

Anyway, I read the Bible a lot; it just happens I do.It says things in the Bible that I
didn't really learn until recently, and I really mentioned these because there are
higher learning people there, preaching their philosophy. So people can study all the
different philosophies, of Plato and, uh, who else? Well I definitely recall reading
Nietzche and those people like that.

Anyways, in the Bible it tells a specific thing in the Book of Revelations that might just
apply to these times, and it says that certain wars that soon - I can't say exactly when
but soon anyway - so that at that time it mentions a country to the furthermost north,
and has as its symbol the bear. And it's also spelt R-O-S-H in the Bible. This was
written quite a few years ago. So it can't but be applied to one country that I know.1

But do you know another it can be applied to? Maybe you do. I don't know. Then
there's another country called . . . can't remember what the name of it is, but
it's in the eastern part of the world, and it's got an army of two-hundred million
foot soldiers. Now there's only one country that that can actually be.

1
The NBC Third Edition says the ‘equation …[of] Rosh with Russia, is unsupportable.’
So anyway, I was telling this story to these people. I shouldn't have been telling it to
them. I just got carried away. I mentioned it to them and then I watched. And Russia
was going to come down and attack in the Middle East. It says this in the Bible. And I
had been reading all kinds of books my whole life: magazines, books, whatever I
could lay my hands on anyway, and I never found any truth in any of it, if you wanna
know the truth.

But I said, This country is gonna come down and attack. And all these people - there
must've been 50,000 . . . maybe it wasn't 50,000, 5000 maybe . . . I don't know
maybe 3 - 3,000 - they all booed. Everybody just booed; and it was the whole
auditorium of people, I said, Russia's gonna come down and attack the Middle East.

And it was Oooh! They couldn't hear that. They didn't believe it. And a month later
Russia moved her troops into, I think, Afghanistan. And the whole situation changed,
you know. I'm not saying this to tell you they were wrong and I was right, or anything
like that. But these things that it mentions in the Bible. I'm gonna pay mighty close
attention to . . . been a lot of previews of what Anti-Christ could be like. You had a
preview: you got Adolf Hitler. Well, a preview?

Anyway, the antichrist is gonna be a little different from that. But then he's gonna
bring panic to the world. But he will eventually be defeated too. But you're still gonna
have to be aware of these things. You need something solid to hang on to. It was
manifested in the flesh! Testified in the Spirit! Received by angels! Preached out in
the world!

Revelation 9:13-15:

New International Version - UK (NIV UK)

13 The sixth angel sounded his trumpet, and I heard a voice coming from the horns
of the golden altar that is before God.

14 It said to the sixth angel who had the trumpet, Release the four angels who are
bound at the great river Euphrates.

15 And the four angels who had been kept ready for this very hour and day and
month and year were released to kill a third of mankind.

Revelation 16:

New International Version - UK (NIV UK)

The Seven Bowls of God's Wrath

1 Then I heard a loud voice from the temple saying to the seven angels, Go, pour
out the seven bowls of God's wrath on the earth.

2 The first angel went and poured out his bowl on the land, and ugly and painful
sores broke out on the people who had the mark of the beast and worshipped his
image.

3 The second angel poured out his bowl on the sea, and it turned into blood like
that of a dead man, and every living thing in the sea died.
 4 The third angel poured out his bowl on the rivers and springs of water, and they
became blood.

5 Then I heard the angel in charge of the waters say:

You are just in these judgments, you who are and who were, the Holy One,
because you have so judged;

6 for they have shed the blood of your saints and prophets, and you have given
them blood to drink as they deserve.

7And I heard the altar respond:

Yes, Lord God Almighty, true and just are your judgments.

8The fourth angel poured out his bowl on the sun, and the sun was given power to
scorch people with fire.

9 They were seared by the intense heat and they cursed the name of God, who
had control over these plagues, but they refused to repent and glorify him.

10 The fifth angel poured out his bowl on the throne of the beast, and his kingdom
was plunged into darkness. Men gnawed their tongues in agony

11 and cursed the God of heaven because of their pains and their sores, but they
refused to repent of what they had done.

12 The sixth angel poured out his bowl on the great river Euphrates, and its water
was dried up to prepare the way for the kings from the East.

13 Then I saw three evil spirits that looked like frogs; they came out of the mouth
of the dragon, out of the mouth of the beast and out of the mouth of the false
prophet.

14 They are spirits of demons performing miraculous signs, and they go out to the
kings of the whole world, to gather them for the battle on the great day of God
Almighty.

15 Behold, I come like a thief! Blessed is he who stays awake and keeps his
clothes with him, so that he may not go naked and be shamefully exposed.

16 Then they gathered the kings together to the place that in Hebrew is called
Armageddon.

And these Visions of Johanna-Armageddon are now all that remain. Or at

least they are if you are so complacent you are ‘resting in the fields far from
the turbulent space’.

So just ‘watch your newspapers’ – and the reaction of the Chinese authorities
to this. And watch out for Chronicles volume two?

And read Jack London. There must be a chink of light at the end of the tunnel.
…
Paul Kirkman June 2011