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25 Millenarianism and Violence in the Contemporary World For over two thousand years, apocalyptic images and motifs have inspired, tormented, and puzzled their audiences. Many have found, and indeed still do find, hope in the image of the prophesied New Jerusalem, the emergence of heaven on earth, and the coming of the Messiah. Many have also sought to determine the exact date of the prophesied end times by performing complex calculations with the various numbers and time frames given in the apocalyptic literature. A small number, however, have gone further and, believing themselves to be on the side of the forces of good, have taken the martial themes found within apocalyptic literature as a justification for violence against those whom they perceive to be the enemies of God. Although the great majority of these incidents occurred several centuries ago, most notably in the high Middle Ages,1 the last quarter of the twentieth century witnessed several well-documented cases where groups inspired by apocalyptic/millenarian ideologies engaged in violent episodes or acts of collective suicide. On November 18, 1978, in Jonestown, Guyana, over 900 members of Peoples Temple, a California religious movement led by Jim Jones, died in an act of collective suicide; almost a decade and a half John Walliss Chapter Two later, 74 members of the Branch Davidians, a Seventh-day Adventist splinter group, met a fiery end when, in an attempt to end a fifty-one-day standoff , U.S. authorities inserted tear gas into the Branch Davidians’ home at Waco, Texas, igniting (so it has been argued2 ) several fires in the wooden building; between October 1994 and March 1997, some 70 members of the Order of the Solar Temple died in a series of ritualized murder-suicides in Switzerland, Quebec, and France; in May 1995, members of Aum Shinrikyo , a Japanese group already implicated in at least 23 other murders, launched an abortive attack on the Tokyo underground using the nerve gas sarin, an attack that could easily have resulted in thousands of fatalities; two years later, 39 members of a group calling itself Heaven’s Gate committed collective suicide in the apparent belief that the world was about to be “spaded under,” and that they could escape the destruction via a spaceship hiding behind the then-passing Hale-Bopp comet; finally, in Uganda, in the spring of 2000, around 780 members of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God (hereafter MRTCG) died in a series of murder-suicides, the details and reasons for which are still—and possibly will remain—unclear.3 Indeed, such was the fear in the period leading up to the eve of the year 2000 that “doomsday cults” would unleash havoc on the world or on themselves that several law enforcement agencies , most notably the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, produced reports for their respective staffs concerning what the former referred to as “individuals or domestic extremist groups who profess an apocalyptic view of the millennium or attach special significance to the year 2000.”4 Leaving aside the question of why such incidents occurred when they did (a sociological topic in its own right), perhaps the most important question is why they occurred at all. Although millenarian beliefs are often suffused with violence, and although a number of millenarians believe that they will play an active role in the prophesied final apocalyptic struggle, the vast majority hold to a more passive view of the end times, believing that their task is simply to observe the signs and omens and passively wait for the inevitable.5 Indeed, even among those who believe that they will play an active role in the violent transition to the millennial kingdom, the vast majority (even where they engage in violent rhetoric or arm themselves) do not believe that it is their millennial role to instigate the final confrontation .6 Why then, of all the groups holding millenarian ideologies in the world in the late twentieth century, did these six engage in violence either against themselves or others? What made these groups cross the line from violent rhetoric to violent behavior? In this chapter, I intend to go some way toward answering this question by presenting a comparative discussion of these six incidents of apocalyptic violence, focusing in particular on the key recurring issues and social 26 Millenarianism and Violence in the Contemporary World [3.149.230.44] Project MUSE (2024-04-23 22:53 GMT...

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