Apocalypse, Revolution, and Terrorism: From the Sicari to the American Revolt against the Modern World by Jeffrey Kaplan (review)

This slim but wide-ranging volume emphasizes continuities between ancient and modern religiously informed expressions of revolution, particularly in their selective use of ancient texts and their religious consecration of "acts of negation" (1). Kaplan takes his organizing principle from a statement attributed to Hassan i-Sabah (c. 1050–1124 CE), known as "the Old Man of the Mountain," a member of the Shi'ite Nizari Ismaili sect who is credited in legend with training an order of assassins. Hassan is purported to have said that "nothing is true, everything is permitted" (1), which Kaplan uses to evoke the radical rejection of established truths and rationale for violence up to and including genocide that characterizes the mindsets of apocalyptists, revolutionaries, and terrorists.

Although the book is divided into two parts of two chapters each—"This Was Then" and "This is Now"—it definitely tilts towards the contemporary. Chapter 1 examines the first-century C.E. Jewish Sicari, who conducted targeted assassinations of Roman occupiers of ancient Palestine. Kaplan identifies them as the first group to adopt the terrorist strategy of getting the government to overreact and force individuals to make a choice between the government and the revolutionaries. The first chapter also treats several medieval Muslim groups and the cluster of Hussites, Taborites, and Adamites in fifteenth-century Bohemia.

The second chapter moves to a consideration of the apocalyptic strain on the American radical right. Kaplan emphasizes the pervasive influence of the fictional Protocols of the Elders of Zion in promoting antisemitism and reviews several well-known texts (e.g. William Pierce's The Turner Diaries) and more obscure items (e.g. The John Franklin Letters) that continue to nourish that milieu. The material in this chapter continues Kaplan's previous work on the Euro-American radical right and he does not hesitate to provide his own editorial judgments, for example skewering Ben Klassen's works as "interminably long and deadly dull" (63).

Kaplan's most distinctive contribution, however, comes in the second part of the book. Here he shifts his focus from apocalypse, revolution, and terrorism to an analysis of Russia's various disinformation campaigns, presenting a provocative examination of the various clashes between Russia and the United States during and since the 2016 election. He confirms Russian attempts to influence the American election and attributes them, in a detailed and persuasive scrutiny, to the resurrection of the Russian Cold War strategy of "Active Measures." This strategy aims to influence global perceptions of the West as rapacious and oppressive, and Russian policies and society as thoroughly virtuous, through an array of overt and covert means of disseminating information. Along the way, he convincingly shows how the Pizzagate conspiracy theory about the alleged pedophilia of high-ranking Democrats, including presidential candidate Hilary Clinton, constituted a reprise of the Satanic Panics of the 1980s. Kaplan leaves no doubts about his own positions and concludes with a set of timely and provocative questions about where the United States should go from here.

Overall, this is an interesting, if occasionally idiosyncratic, demonstration of the various intersections of currents in Western apocalyptic thinking, especially on the American radical right, and political developments in Russia and the United States in the age of Donald J. Trump.