Understanding Apocalyptic Terrorism

Countering the Radical Mindset

Frances L. Flannery

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317674566
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book explores a cross-cultural worldview called 'radical apocalypticism' that underlies the majority of terrorist movements in the twenty-first century.

Although not all apocalypticism is violent, in its extreme forms radical apocalypticism gives rise to terrorists as varied as members of Al Qaeda, Anders Behring Breivik, or Timothy McVeigh. In its secular variations, it also motivates ideological terrorists, such as the eco-terrorists Earth Liberation Front or The Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski. This book provides an original paradigm for distinguishing between peaceful and violent or radical forms of apocalypticism and analyses the history, major transformations, and characteristics of the apocalyptic thought system. Using an inter-disciplinary and cross-cultural approach, this book discusses the mechanisms of radicalization and dynamics of perceived oppression and violence to clarify anew the self-identities, motivations, and goals of a broad swath of terrorists. As conventional counter-terrorism approaches have so far failed to stem the cycle of terrorism, this approach suggests a comprehensive "cultural" method to combating terrorism that addresses the appeal of radical apocalyptic terrorist ideology itself.

This book will be of much interest to students of apocalypticism, political violence, terrorism and counter-terrorism, intelligence studies, religious studies, and security studies.

Part I Roots of the apocalyptic worldview

1 The original Book of Revelation

DOI: 10.4324/9781315771168-2

After this I looked, and there in heaven a door stood open! And the first voice, which I had heard speaking to me like a trumpet, said, ‘Come up here, and I will show you what must take place after this.’

(Rev. 4:1) ¹

When members of the Japanese Doomsday sect Aum Shinrikyo placed deadly sarin nerve gas on a Tokyo subway and sickened up to 5,000 people, they believed that they were hastening the advent of Armageddon through the instructions of Lord Shiva, god of destruction. Their religion, which prompted them to engage in fourteen attacks with both chemical and biological weapons, was a fusion of the Book of Revelation, Buddhism, Hinduism, and New Age religion. When leaders of the Christian militia group The Covenant, Sword, and Arm of the Lord trained around 1,500 armed soldiers in a military style camp for a future Armageddon that they believed would take the form of a race war in America, they too believed that they were fulfilling their role as foretold in the Book of Revelation. So did one person whom they influenced, Timothy McVeigh, when he blew up the Oklahoma City Murrah Federal Building just outside its daycare, claiming 168 lives, including nineteen toddlers. And, when Joseph Kony organized his followers to kidnap, torture, mutilate, and rape over 60,000 children in Uganda to force them into becoming the Lord’s Resistance Army, he also believed himself to be acting out scenes from the Book of Revelation.

The Book of Revelation has arguably been responsible for more genocide and killing in history than any other. Yet that is not the vision of the book itself. In fact, the Book of Revelation tells the story quite differently.

According to Christian Scripture, sometime in the late first century CE John of Patmos received a series of visions in which he visited the Temple in Heaven and learned that the corrupt ways of the world on earth were going to be short-lived. The word “apocalypse” comes into use from his writings, the “apokalupsis” or “revelation” according to John. This word, from a Greek verb meaning “to reveal, unveil, uncover,” claims that a visionary sees a new worldview unveiled. The revelation conveys reality from the divine perspective, outside of the limitations of ordinary human knowledge. Beyond the popular equation of apocalypse with “the end of the world,” for scholars of antiquity an apocalypse is a narrative that relays a revelation, usually in a dream or vision, of what has been hidden from others about the true nature of the world. ² It comes to a group in crisis, and gives them hope and new purpose. ³ It is therefore transformative.

Apocalypses first derived from ancient Persia, after which they were transmitted to early Judaism and then early Christianity. However, the Book of Revelation is so definitive of the literary genre “apocalypse” that this book alone has come to be called, simply, “The Apocalypse.” It is full of visions that disclose a divine reality and, as the book makes clear, it is no less believable to its intended audience just because it is a visionary report (Hanson, J.S. 1980). We modern, post-Freudian people think of dreams as subjective, unreal fantasies that might tell the dreamer about his/her own psyche or past. We think of visions as akin to hallucinations or other unhealthy altered mental states and we certainly do not trust dreams or visions to reveal truths about the political future of the world. By contrast, the peoples of the ancient Near East and Mediterranean considered dreams and visions to be a kind of hypnagogic state that exists in between sleeping and waking, in which certain privileged people could receive real messages from God or the gods (Noegel 2007; Butler 1998; Flannery-Dailey 2004; Szpakowska 1999). Dreams and visions were a “change of reality level” that acted as “a cushion to soften the contact between god and man” (Oppenheim 1956, 192). By means of dreams and visions, a person might even interact with dangerous divine beings such as angels, but without dying as a result of the contact.

People in antiquity – whether in Persia, Mesopotamia, Egypt or Israel – did not “have” a dream or a vision; they “saw” it, as one sees something tangibly real (Szpakowska 1999, 16; Butler 1998, 31, 36). Many ancient Near Eastern cultures even lacked a verb for “dreaming.” It was not an activity, but a noun, a real thing to be seen in special state of perception (Noegel 2007; Zgoll 2006, 55–82; Szpakowska 1999, 15).

According to the Book of Revelation, the visions that John of Patmos saw lifted the veil on reality.

Blueprint for an apocalypse

The influence of the Book of Revelation on apocalyptic thinking across the world’s religions is without parallel amongst apocalyptic texts. Although it is not the earliest Jewish or Christian apocalypse, ⁴ The Apocalypse provided a blueprint for thousands of years of interpretations and variations. Like a standard melody that undergoes years of improvisations, the motifs in The Apocalypse appear over and over in different examples of apocalyptic thought, from the Qur’an to Left Behind.

The book purports to be a record of the visions of John of Patmos “on the Lord’s day” or the Sabbath. ⁵ In the first of these visions, John witnesses the appearance of a frightening “one like the Son of Man” (Rev. 1:13) who reveals to him that there are hypocrites in the Christian churches with whom God is displeased (Rev. 1:3). Still in a visionary state, the text next describes John’s ascent to God’s court in the heavenly Temple (Rev. 4:1). The original readers of the text, early Jews and Christians, considered God’s real Temple to be outer space, the realm of the stars (Himmelfarb 1993). Thus, the text claims that John is granted a divine, angelic vantage point from which he is able to see further scenes that explain to him the true nature of evil and the course of past and future events. ⁶

The author knew of a rich, powerful Empire that he symbolically calls “Babylon,” the ancient standard for a vast Empire that oppressed the Jews. According to Revelation, most of the nations of the world love “Babylon” because it provides a high standard of material living. However, through his visions John learns that the Empire had come by its wealth through cruelty: it kills people and builds its economy on slavery (Rev. 18:13). John believes that this injustice will not go unpunished, for he “saw” in a vision an angel offering up, as sacrifices on the heavenly altar, the prayers of those whom the Empire had killed (Rev. 8:3–5).

In additional visions, John learns that the true source of power for this seductive, beautiful Empire is Satan, symbolized as a cosmic, giant red Dragon that hates the people of God (Rev. 12:1–18). This Dragon is the real force behind the Empire. In a stunning vision, John watches it come down to earth and stand on the shore of the sea – that ancient symbol of chaos from which unnatural monsters are birthed – to give rise to the Empire, symbolized as a “Beast” rising out of the sea (Rev. 12:3–13:1) (Beal 2002, 13–22, 25–28). ⁷ Next, John also sees a “second beast” arise that makes people worship the first beast. The second beast controls the Evil Empire’s priestly and governmental operations, including its economy (Rev. 13:11–18) (Royalty 1998).

“Evil” here deserves to be capitalized. In The Apocalypse, it isn’t just the case that people make bad choices, or do evil things, or even that terrible injustices are easily perpetuated by a vast institution like the Roman Empire – the original, historical referent for “Babylon” at the time of writing. Rather, the author of the Book of Revelation, like the authors of other apocalypses, defines “Evil” as a force that draws its power from Satan, the cosmic source of Evil opposing God and Goodness. In this book, the Empire is a monstrous, concretized Evil that aligns with other forces, like Death and Hades, perversions of the natural cosmic process that God has created. ⁸ The Universe is out of sync with what the Creator God has intended.

However, John doesn’t just see the problem, he also sees the solution: this world ruled by Evil is not the ultimate one. Through his visions he learns that we live in a multi-tiered universe and that this earth is only a temporary shadow of reality. Through his revelations, John even visits the ultimate world, God’s world, which is beyond the earthly plane. In a spirit journey, he ascends to the heavenly Temple, God’s palace and court, and learns that God rules the universe from there, despite the Roman “Babylon” ruling on earth (Bauckham 1993a, 33 emphasis mine). Through these visions, John looks into the future to see that God’s judgment will be meted out from this heavenly Temple onto those on earth. In fact, this judgment has already started. With the macro-view of reality gained from the divine perspective of his visions (Rowland 1982, 9, 14–17; Bauckham 1993b, 7), John recognizes that this terrible reign of Evil that he and his companions are experiencing on earth is going to be short-lived. For Revelation, the end of regular human-led history is coming “Soon!” (Rev. 22:7, 10, 12, 20). ⁹

Scholars call endtime events “eschatology,” from the Greek word eschaton, signifying “the end” in a temporal sequence. The endtime is such an important part of apocalyptic literature that in popular culture the word “apocalypse” has become synonymous with a cataclysmic “endtime” of history. However, John’s “apocalypse” or “revelation” is not all about eschatology. Instead, through his visions, John gains a proper reorientation to the true nature of reality and knowledge of the gradually unfolding coup d’état of the Universe in which God will conquer Evil. The coup d’état will occur on all levels on which Evil operates, both on earth and in heaven, from the bottom all the way to the top.

Over the course of the Book of Revelation, John’s visions unfold in multiple stages that describe the Universe’s gradual transformation from a world partially ruled by Evil to one that will eventually be wholly ruled by Goodness. His early visions reveal that Evil reigns on earth. John sees what the rest of the world does not recognize: that so many people, including those in the Church, ¹⁰ partake in Evil and that the Empire and its priestly and governmental officers are fueled by the cosmic force of Evil, the Dragon Satan.

At the same time, according to the Book of Revelation, John gradually sees that God’s judgment on Evil’s reign is already unfolding in heaven. Christ/the Lamb is opening seven seals – seven heavenly decrees – and certain patterns in history are beginning to mete out God’s punishment on the world. Angels, the intermediaries shuttling between God and humankind, pour out punishments in the form of natural plagues, environmental disasters, wars, disturbances to heavenly bodies, and famine on the earth (Rev. 6:16). These terrible occurrences are the harbingers of God’s full intervention. They are an assurance that the Dragon, the first beast, and the second beast are all doomed (Rev. 12:13).

With the revelation of the sixth seal, John’s visions reach beyond his own historical time period. That vision and his subsequent visions are truly eschatological in nature, involving a change to the world order that is so dramatic that it deserves to be called “the end of history.” John experiences a time in the future when he can claim, “the sky vanished like a scroll rolling itself up” (Rev. 6:14). He knows that the “great day of wrath” is about to come.

John’s subsequent visions predict that there will be a full-scale intervention by the angels in a battle against “Babylon” and her allies. According to the Book of Revelation, this will happen at Mount “Megiddo” (Rev. 16:16), from whence comes the name “the Battle of Armageddon” (from the Hebrew consonantal word m-g-d). Angels will bring an end to the mighty Empire and her vast armies of allies: Evil Babylon and the kings of the world who love her will fall (Rev. 18:2, 19:18, 19). More importantly, God’s angels will also conquer the power fueling the wicked Empire, as an angel imprisons Satan for 1,000 years in a sealed, bottomless pit (Rev. 20:1–3).

At this point in John’s visions, Goodness is spread over earth. This occurs in the form of a “millennial” 1,000-year-long reign of Christ and the righteous martyrs who had been beheaded by Babylon, but who are now resurrected (Rev. 20:4). This “millennial kingdom” replaces the scope and reign of the former, Evil Babylon. Yet however wonderful it is, it turns out that ultimate Evil is hard to vanquish! Hence, in his revelations John then sees even further into this eschatological future, and he finds that Satan will arise just once more (Rev. 20:7).

As the text continues to unfold the future, one fina...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Other Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Roots of the apocalyptic worldview
• Part II The apocalyptic formula and terrorism
• Part III Conclusion
• Index