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  • Smart Bombs, Serial Killing, and the Rapture: The Vanishing Bodies of Imperial Apocalypticism
  • Peter Yoonsuk Paik (bio)
Abstract

This essay considers the surge in apocalyptic imagery in American popular culture and politics after 9/11. It commences by contrasting the intellectual justifications for a new American imperialism (and a warlike foreign policy) among conservative thinkers, and the strange ideological partner of this neo-imperialism—the apocalypticism of the Christian fundamentalist Right. Examining the unprecedented historical phenomenon of an apocalypticism that endorses an imperialist politics, the essay analyzes the mass popularity of the Left Behind series of novels, which present a Christian fundamentalist scenario of catastrophes and genocidal bloodshed that will overtake the world with the rise of the Antichrist. The essay goes on to argue that the form of spirituality behind this imperial apocalypticism is not Christian in nature but Gnostic, taking up Harold Bloom’s provocative thesis from The American Religion. The second half of the essay focuses upon the Gnostic reworkings of the dilemmas of faith and belief, such as the story of Abraham’s sacrifice, in the recent Hollywood films Signs (2002) and Frailty (2001). The latter film, argues the author, depicts serial killing as a religiously sanctioned act of violence that is at the same time surgical, rendering in literal terms the rhetoric of President Bush’s war on terror as a struggle of those who respect innocent life against “evil.” However, the critical force of such a representation is limited because the film belongs to a new tendency in cinematic narrative that the essay calls “post-ironic,” in which the most outrageous perspective raised by the narrative becomes validated by its conclusion. —pyp

One of the most well-publicized hypotheses regarding the terror of 9/11 is the notion that religious fantasies played a major role in inspiring the militants of al-Qaeda to launch their suicide attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Only irrational fanatics could have been capable of killing themselves for the sake of taking thousands of innocent lives and destroying three buildings that symbolize Western power and preeminence. Surely the hijackers must have been enticed and deluded by the rewards promised by Islam to martyrs—instant entry into paradise where they would be served by “seventy dark-eyed virgins.” The lurid and prurient nature of this fantasy has been invoked to account for the terrorist bombings committed by the Palestinians against the Israelis, as well. In the eyes of the liberal, capitalist West, such fantasies reveal the obscene underside of the puritanical worldview associated with radical Islam. The Muslim terrorist is capable of launching suicide attacks because he has embraced an immoderately concrete vision of the afterlife that has spawned in him a kind of psychosis. The belief that Islamist radicals are religious fanatics acting from a delusional hatred of the secular West or from contempt for the superseded religions of Judaism and Christianity has played no small role in stifling questions about the ideological factors behind these acts of terror, and about the legitimacy of Israeli policy towards the Palestinians in the occupied territories.

That the mystifications underlying the mass media discourse on Islamist terror and the American military response to it might possess significant theological content of their own comes as little surprise. One may recall the jarring “slips,” such as “crusade” and “infinite justice,” terms deeply disturbing to most Muslims, used by the Bush administration in the immediate aftermath of the attacks of 9/11. Even as these terms were hastily jettisoned under the criticism of American Islamic clerics, the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has done much to confirm the view that the actual policy of the United States has become that of a latter-day crusade against the Arab world, whether in the name of preventing the future use of weapons of mass destruction or establishing a model liberal democracy in the region. Indeed, one might argue that it is theological, absolutist notions of freedom and security that are driving the war on terror. This article makes the case that the destruction inflicted by the United States against Afghanistan and Iraq is no less religious in nature than the terrorist acts of...

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