Following the Apocalyptic Curve of Woke Millennialism

Part I: late '60s to 2000.

Feb 13, 2025

This is the first installment of this investigation. It could use some editing, especially in terms of sequence, and suggestions are welcome.

Religious or Millennial?

Much has been written about the woke movement as a religious movement (really a “new religious movement”), about the cult-behavior of some of its components, about the role of faith in a redemptive narrative overriding empirical awareness. And most of those analyses are critical: if woke is a religious movement, then avoid its superstitious luxury beliefs that feed a sense of well-being while hurting the very people whose suffering had awokened you.

Here, I’d like to explore a particular aspect of this kind of “religious” Woke, namely its millennial and apocalyptic dimensions. McWhorter’s book on Woke as a religious movement (Woke Racism) is at once a Hofferian denunciation of true believers, and a disquieting study of their apocalyptic progress. I use the terminology developed in millennial studies for describing these dynamics, and putting them in a larger historical and comparative perspective. Thus, our discussion deals especially with millennial dreams, a promise appealing to outrageous hope, of collective redemption in heaven on earth (most famously for a millennium, Revelation 20). This almost invariably includes a radical attack on the wielders of power in the present world, “ridden with evil.” Millennial ideologies are, by their very nature both political and radical.

Historians, assuming a fundamental break between the Middle Ages and the modern period, refer to “secular millennialism” as utopian, and of their moments on the public stage as revolutionary movements, activistist bringing on that utopia. Once one defines millennialism as an effort to forge a radically better world (whether religious or secular), then Marxism and Communism, Nazism, all display similar dynamics in “apocalyptic time,” that is, the time to bring on that earthly millennium of collective salvation.

The key issues in millennial studies are:

Given that most millennial visions never rise from suppressed “hidden transcripts,” how do the rare cases, “take”? How do they recruit and gain the momentum to go public?
How does those movements that manage to “take,” that is to go public with their hidden transcripts and gain strength rather than get pushed back by their radical behavior.
Once they’ve taken in public and entered “apocalyptic time,” what kinds of apocalyptic “jazz” do they use to stay there, and what swerves (from passive to active, from transformative to coercive) do they take?
How do believers deal with the (inevitable) disappointment of the results their efforts produce, especially if they have taken political power in their quest?
How do believers navigate their return to normal time?

The most dangerous “true believers” hold an active, cataclysmic apocalyptic scenario in which they are the ones chosen to bring on the cosmic destruction necessary to purge the world of evil and prepare the coming kingdom. Historically, movements that took this apocalyptic turn have brought on megadeath, as early as the Taiping in China in the mid-19^th century, of tens of millions. The 20^th century has pushed the numbers over the hundred millions (Bolshevism, Maoism).

McWhorter rephrases Hoffer on the movements’ ability to recruit, “by appealing to an idealized past, a fantastical future, and an indelibly polluted present.” That is the apocalyptic millennial narrative: time is divided into 1) a distant past (often idealized), 2) a present filled with danger and suffering from a (waxing) evil, and 3) an idealized future promise. What the cynic might call “Sky Pie on earth by and by.”

All millennial movements have a premise: once the fundamental force of unjust oppression is identified and eliminated, a just world of equality and freedom from oppression will spontaneously appear. The French revolutionaries were convinced that if they abolished ‘class privilege’ (the libertés of the nobles), then virtuous citizens would flourish. The communists thought that if they got rid of property, then true comrades would arise. For the Maoists, and some would argue, for the Woke, the enemy is a “notion of privilege, which apparently, despite ongoing efforts, can never be fully annulled or adequately atoned for, and so must be purged.”

But in order eliminate that evil now, you must convince your audience that “the times” are terrible – unbearable – and that the oppressor has become ever-more penetrating and powerful. For the medieval peasants that Le Goff and others write about, it was a brutally exploitative elite that kept them at the limits of subsistence and so downtrodden, always subject to periodic famine. For Marx, the bourgeois class was a messiah’s donkey, with its spirit of capitalism effecting the astonishing mechanization of production that would make the worker’s paradise possible.

In the case of Woke, argues McWhorter, the enemy is “racism,” and their task to redefine the narrative of the evil to be eradicated. “Racism in all its visible and invisible forms, rather than class or legal privilege or even religion, accounts for evil in the world. It alone explains why whites dominate and people of color suffer.” Racist tendencies within Western countries, especially the US, are seen as pervasive (“systemic”), and invisibly control and oppress those who suffer from these ubiquitous but hidden and denied prejudices. Through intersectionality and post-colonialism, all Black, Indigenous, and People of Color – BIPOC – become victims of white success. Nothing has changed since the darkest of the “middle ages,” since the sadistic times of slavery.

Rooting out these quasi-innate tendencies (in whites) becomes a mission which will at last free the long-suffering group: Black-Indigene-People of Color (BIPOC). Gender, in this world of redemptive thought forms another matrix of oppressive power (male over female patriarchy, hetero-normativity over gender fluid) whose elimination prepares the world to come by dismantling the structures of oppression. Enacting these ideas tears at the fabric of the society about to be transformed. The spoken and unspoken promise: once these prejudices eliminated, once everyone is woke to the suffering of others and stops contributing to it, everything will work the way it’s supposed to.

Battling power relations and their discriminatory effects must be the central focus of all human endeavor, be it intellectual, moral, civic, or artistic. Those who resist this focus, or even evidence insufficient adherence to it, must be sharply condemned, deprived of influence, and ostracized (p.11).

This does not describe a “religion”; it describes a millennial movement. The “true believers” have identified the “evil that must be expunged,” made battling it the “central focus of all human endeavor,” and they are now in the polarizing stage in which everyone not on board becomes an apocalyptic “other.” ‘All good people should join in the battle against the oppressor. There is no middle ground. Silence is violence. If not with us, you are the enemy. No middle ground. The angel of the Apocalypse ‘spits out the tepid.’

The “illogic” that McWhorter documents with such (justifiable) concern and impatience is powerful precisely because it defies the logic of “normal time.”[1] The dream transcends the “reality” that it seeks to transform; it sees the forces of human natures as protean, their current “solid” realities “melting into air,” as Marx wrote just before the (failed) annus mirabilis of 1848. To secular and religious millennialists alike, the advent of apocalyptic time signals the great moment of transformation when one must decisively separate the good from the bad, when we transform the apocalyptic other into the apocalyptic enemy).

Sociolatry in the 4th Century and Woke in the 21st

In his 2020 essay, Michael Vlahos compared the later 4^th century imperial Church, with what he dubbed, “The Church of Woke” of the 21^st century, and found the same pattern described above on a civilizational scale. Back in the 4^th century, bishops used the imperial power (first extended to the Church by Constantine the 320s) to bring collective salvation to the Empire. As the decades passed, and especially after the terrible fright of Julian “the Apostate,” they became increasingly coercive in imposing their radical faith on everyone.

This aggressive ecclesiastical program for the Empire culminated in a decade of triumphalist religiosity (the tempora christiana of the 390s) which became increasingly coercive in its quest for purification. Pagan altars were destroyed, “pagan” Roman aristocrats were canceled, and despite all the good reasons for a religion whose founder was executed as a heretic not to do so, the drive to execute heretics became more pronounced. The tempora Christiana that seduced even Augustine in the 390s, not only failed to bring collective redemption, but they left a torn Western empire incapable of defending itself, subject to waves of barbarian conquest. Ten years later, the Christian (Arian) Ostrogoths sacked Rome; a generation later, Augustine died with the Vandals at the gates in 433.

Peter Kaufman, in his work on this period, identified this top-down millennial project, which he called sociolatry as “a type of ideology that associates salvation with political idealizations, symbols and spells circulated to inspire loyalty, obedience and service… Christian sociolatry makes Christendom’s leading political figures (or leading dissidents) sacred messengers and substitute messiahs…”[2] This description gives us a good depiction of imperial millennialism in action. Kaufman focused on 4^th century Roman imperial Church from the time of Eusebius (+340), the first to coin the monotheistic motto with such a long and problematic future: One God, one Emperor, to the time of Augustine (+430) who, chastened by the failure of that project, sought to temper and redirect such authoritarian enthusiasms with his anti-apocalyptic, anti-millennial ideology.[3]

In this comparison, Vlahos argues, the “Church of Woke” offers a close parallel, one in which a millenarian movement has taken over significant portions of the political culture’s levers (e.g., college administrations), and with the new and potent weapon of online shaming, has purged the ranks of dissidents. If in the ‘60s, radical clowns threw pies in people’s faces, today they have the canceling power of internet shaming. And over the past two decades, that has permitted a widespread domination on campuses and in progressive circles (including some “mainstream” media) of a Woke narrative accompanied by the systemic intimidation and elimination of dissent.

As McWhorter puts it, “We are to favor an idea that an oppressed race’s ‘story’ constitutes truth, in an overarching sense, apart from mere matters of empirical or individual detail (p.63).” Or the post-modern definition of justice: their side right or wrong. Reasons the post-modernist, ‘So what if it means we reintroduce objective truth and adopt a Grand Narrative. At least it’s not ours.’

Thus the totalizing (apocalyptic, totalitarian) “Grand Narratives” that post-moderns rejected (apparently thinking that only white Westerners have them), returns with a vengeance via the openness of Westerners to listen to, no to privilege, the subaltern. “Third Wave Antiracism exploits modern Americans’ fear of being thought racist to promulgate not just antiracism, but an obsessive, self-involved, totalitarian, and utterly unnecessary kind of cultural reprogramming” (McWhorter p.15). Not just unnecessary, but destructive, and when done by revolutionaries, deliberately destructive.

As the history of millennial movements teaches, no millennial movement that has gained political power has actually brought on the millennium. They all failed, sometimes spectacularly, in achieving their goal (as in the case of the Imperial Church). But they did transform – for good or for bad – the societies in which they “took.” The history of millennialism is written in terms of unintended consequences, the products of re-entry to “normal time.”

Take-off into Apocalyptic Time: The 1960s

Millennial thinkers are valuable and modern academia allows them to get as radical as they want. And our universities justifiably offer a warm welcome to their creative imaginations. But the creativity of non-apocalyptic millennialism changes dramatically when it enters apocalyptic time, “millennial beliefs in action.” Only the generation convinced it has been chosen to enact the final scenes of the great millennial transformation has the courage and strength to carry out the superhuman directives of outrageous hope – both destructive and creative. Most of the time, millennial dreams are dormant, hidden, murmured, sung quietly, cried into beer, declared in the semi-privacy of gatherings. Only when a critical, self-reinforcing mass of believers comes to think that now is the time to bring heaven to earth – secular version, to build heaven on earth – do they have any chance of realizing the dream. Only in apocalyptic time does the choked-down “hidden transcript” become full-throated. When that happens, and when the millennial movement can take over the administration of the state, you have what Foucault, the Western pilgrim to a Muslim millennial experiment in Iran in 1400 AH, called “spiritual politics,” and what Kaufman called sociolatry.

Most millennial dreams offer apocalyptic scenarios whereby humanity goes from this fallen world to that of collective redemption. When exceptional things happen (wars, famines, plagues), signs and wonders (celestial appearances, stories of marvelous happening, patterns discerned by semiotically aroused prophets)… these “signs” can situate the believer in an apocalyptic scenario. Endtimes prophets proliferate, “arguing the End.” If enough are convinced with sufficient urgency, they make the leap into apocalyptic time, in which the concerns of “normal time” do not count, in which true believers – in 200, in 1666, in 1844 - do not plant or even harvest crops. As mass movements develop, they become self-actualizing: the more believers, the greater the enthusiasm, the more convincing the beliefs, the more powerful the movement.

The modern condition of standing apocalyptic threats of extinction from technology have created generations of people living in the shadow of destruction, whose imaginings of the future are dramatically destabilized (avertive millennialism). These insecurities can stimulate radical political thought aimed at revolutionizing society to avert pending doom. In the Port Huron Document of SDS in 1962, a still relevant document, the threat was the nuclear annihilation (“we knew we might die at any moment.” ¶3). Since the fall of the USSR in 1991, global warming has taken the fore (although with Iran’s imminent breakthrough, nuclear will return to a major place in avertive apocalyptic discourse).

With the growth and penetration of technology, all kinds of radical trends and opportunities appeared. Virtually every major communications revolution (alphabet, codex, print, radio, tv) has intensified the impact of the new radical notions. The current revolution – internet – is no exception to the rule. On the contrary, if printing set off a wave a millennial thinking in Europe, then internet is setting one of globally.

The Y2KBug showed us a future of technology-induced apocalyptic alarms to life on the planet. From global warming to artificial intelligence, to nuclear war, to ETs, the inhabitants of the 21^st century live under the constant realistic threat of cataclysm. If in 1000, everyone thought that God would bring this world to an end, in 2000 one needed no Godly intervention to imagine the end of the world.

This existential insecurity strengthens one of the key components of apocalyptic narrative: the present is unbearably, inexcusably, catastrophically painful. ‘Those who are guilty of producing this waxing, pervasive evil and oppression, may rule the current world (and make their victims wretched), but they will pay; no, they must pay, now.’ Hence the systemic critique of Western culture which must bear its Original Sin (here “white privilege”). Hence, the immense importance of opposing micro-aggressions against the marginal and under-represented. Hence the phobia of critiquing the systemic flaws of other cultures and religions.

The First Apocalyptic Wave of the Post-War Period: ‘60s and ‘70s

One of the appeals of apocalyptic time is its liberation from the constraints of normal time: once in apocalyptic time all the concerns about long-term future consequences disinhibit behavior. ‘The first will be last and the last shall be first.’ (Where today, ‘the “fascists” who punish upstart behavior will be last and their victims at last free will be first).’ Or, as Gracie Slick put it (1968): “In loyalty to their kind they cannot tolerate our minds, in loyalty to our kind we cannot tolerate their obstruction.” The late ‘60s and early ‘70s, when radical, pacific, egalitarian ideas enthused many, the world’s highways and by-ways filled with seekers and gurus. This marked an apocalyptic moment for the progressives – peace, cooperation, sharing and celebration. Schiller’s ode: “Alle Menschen werden Brüder wo dein Sanfte flugelweilt,” where joy spreads its wings, all men are brothers. The bomber jet planes were “turning into butterflies across our nation.” (And people, really interesting people, really believed that.)

In 1967-8, this American movement showed unprecedented global reach: US, Israel, Czechia, France, Japan, Poland, Yugoslavia, Brazil, Mexico – all in their way, participated in this wave of hope. In addition to the purely political dimensions of the global protests, the movement celebrated life (often anchored in the combination of drugs, sex and rock music). Its intellectual architects, especially Marcuse and the Frankfurt school at the “New School,” leveled a totalizing critique at the prevailing culture against which this “counter-culture” arose, opposing the noxious restraints that modern society inflicted on individuals with an ideal of self-actualizing humans.

The reentry into “normal time” of this apocalyptic wave was relatively smooth (as opposed to the French Terror or the Boshevik purges), partly because it never took power. Failing at revolution, many intellectuals took refuge in academia, where they became tenured radicals, deconstructing the power structures that oppress the victims of Western hegemony. They taught their radical scholarship to youth who hoped the next apocalyptic wave would happen in their day, but when it didn’t, the disciples followed their teachers and continued the generational work of deconstructing power and hegemony (Western only). Here nationalism and patriotism were tribal, antithetic to the desired cosmopolitan millennium. The US and its empire of capital were apocalyptic foes of social equality.

But while intellectual revolutions churned in academia, the 80s and 90s, the larger political discourse was still 20^th century – freedom, dignity, win-win, non-coercive relations. Especially with the fall of the USSR and end of the Cold War, the spread of positive-sum, civil-society themes dominated the public sphere. The Oslo Peace Process (1993-2000) embodied the (necessarily imperfect) liberal dream: Land for Peace. Everybody wins, and no one gets everything they want.

So this radical millennial movement, despite its significant victories in academia (post-modern, post-colonial, critical race/gender studies) and in organizing protest, was not a major player in the final decades of the 20^th century. Outside of academia, it was still so marginal that when 40,000 activists gathered in Seattle in November 1999, organizers declared it a major accomplishment. Indeed, it was still prudent for believers not to say certain things out loud back then, since they would still more likely alienate rather than attract a public audience. It was not yet, by any means, a “mass” or “millennial movement.” It was still on the margins of society (with a major institutional base in academia).

But at the turn of the millennium, something happened, and the progressive movement entered apocalyptic time, sweeping the globe (or so it seemed). This is the point indicated on the apocalyptic curve (above) by the “entry into the public sphere” of the radical millennial ideology, always a crucial moment. In 2000, it elicited far less resistance than normally happens at such moments, and (at least to some) suprising acceptance, even enthusiasm. It is from here, for example, that the radical political left dates their becoming a movement.

In describing the global movement the authors claim was kicked off by the Seattle Protest of 1999, and who share the goals of those protests, note:

The trajectory of popular movements of this period (1999-2014) shared several tendencies. One was a cognitive and emotional shift from an activist pose of “doing what one can” and building for an as-yet not visible future in which, as a popular bumper sticker of the 1980s declared, “The U.S. Left Will Rise Again,” and toward a more assertive posture expressed in the chant, “Ain’t No Power Like the Power of the People” and then later that “Another World is Possible,” and “Another U.S. is Necessary,” and finally, by the 2010s, that “We Are Unstoppable, Another World is Possible.”[4]

In other words, since ca. exactly 2000, and over the course of a decade, the global progressive left felt it had become a mass movement.

Within three years the movement went from mobilizing tens of thousands, to tens of millions worldwide, from Seattle’s 40,000 to February 15, 2003, when a global coalition of progressive groups organized as many as 10 million in rallies world-wide to protest the US’s proposed war on Iraq. In London, 2 million marched; in Paris, well over a million. Spokespeople for the movement saw themselves as a new, (moral) Superpower, “a hegemonic counterweight to American imperialism.”

2000 and the Onset of Apocalyptic Time: The Durban Alliance

What explains this sudden surge? Eric Hoffer wrote in the early 50s:“Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.” And in 2000, the global progressive left found its devil in “Nazi Israel.” In late August 2001, at Durban, a widespread agreement brought together radicalized “human rights” NGOs and Caliphators, combining two apocalyptic narratives, one Jihadi, one progressive, with a common apocalyptic enemy, the evil to be swept from the earth to make way for coming redemption. Durban marks the formal alliance of Caliphators with the (radical) progressive left, in which both millennial movements, despite how radically opposing their visions of the millennium of peace to come, joined around a key element of their apocalyptic scenarios, a major boost to their (now joint) revolutionary power. They had both identified the apocalyptic enemy: the two Great Satans that Khoumeini had denounced some twenty years earlier): the US and Israel.

This unholy alliance married pre-modern sadism and post-modern masochism. Scapegoating Jihadis could shout: ‘You, the US are the embodiment of racist evil; you, Israel, guilty of genocide. And you deserve our hatred.' And the oikophobic West, could agree emphatically to this attack on their culture. 'You're right: our imperialism and racism are the worst in the world and in history. We do deserve your hatred. Especially the Jews.' In my book I document how, after 2000 this became Y2KMind: When jihadis attack a democracy, blame the democracy. Pre-modern (tribal) justice: my side right or wrong; post-modern justice: their side right or wrong.

After 9-11, many proponents of this approach came out, some penitential - 'What did we do to provoke their hatred?' and some triumphantly aggressive – “America’s chickens are coming home to roost!” When Reverend Brown, Kamala Harris’ pastor, speaking at a 9-11 memorial service only days after the attack, said: "America, is there anything you did to set up this climate?" he placed himself squarely in the camp of those who "blame the democracy" for the savage hatred of the global Jihadis who, in their own words, want to establish a global Caliphate at whatever cost necessary. It was the precursor of all those who after October 7, rushed to “fill the vacuum” with accusations of Israeli oppression.

In doing so, they used their privilege to attack those who shared with them that privilege. ‘You, democracies who have allowed me such prominence (which no other “civilization” would have done), deserve what you’re getting.’ It was, and is, the embodiment of what Nietzsche denounced as ressentiment. Or as the zero-sum proverb goes: No good turn goes unpunished.

9-11 was a critical moment. It brought to the surface the hidden transcript of remorseless Green-Red hostility to the USA. Here Brown spoke publicly in the USA, before a gathering of people horrified at what had just happened to their fellow citizens, and he uttered the apocalyptic memes in which the enemy, the USA, deserved what the Jihadis had just meted out. Normally when such politically radical millennial (and hostile) discourse surfaces, it is driven back by a public horrified at the implications. But no, according to the journalist, the crowd cheered. Explained one progressive, “It was largely a lefty and pro-peace crowd, and Amos was playing to the house. [italics mine]”

When a millennial movement goes public with its most offensive and radical beliefs and receives crowd approval, apocalyptic time begins in earnest. And in the face of such exhiliration, did it really matter that now, being pro-peace suddenly meant cheering on a ferocious war on ourselves? (One wonders what many in the crowd who were not (yet) looped in, felt upon hearing Reverend Brown and witnessing the response of others in the crowd.)

Ta Nehisi Coates expressed the same dualistic vision of the demonized other when he explained that he had no sympathy for the white cops and firemen who died at the World Trade Center on 9/11. They were “not human to me, Black, white, or whatever, they were menaces of nature; they were the fire, the comet, the storm, which could—with no justification—shatter my body.”[5] In other words, ‘not people, not like me at all. So now I could, with good justification, view the shattering of their lives as justified. Israeli oppression deserves Hamas savagery. As for my black body and the Arab Muslim conquerors who shattered and continue to shatter it, oh, never mind.’

Notes McWhorter on the difference between the wave of opprobrium such dehumanizing language provoked for any white or white-adjacent (“or whatever”) person speaking thus of a marginalized and disadvantaged minority, in contrast to silent acceptance of Coates’ dehumanizing tropes:

The only reason Coates was given this pass was condescension: brute denigration (word chosen deliberately) of a black human being. To not hold Coates responsible for the horror of a judgment like that—imagine it coming from, for example, John Lewis—and to even assign the book containing it to impressionable young people nationwide is to treat him as someone not responsible for his actions. It is to treat Coates as a child (p. 108).

Others, object of a similar moral lapse, call it humanitarian racism.

The Other “Great Satan”

But Durban wasn't just about the US. The other great Satan - Israel - was in for even greater abuse. For those today, in 2024, somewhat bewildered by the seemingly sudden spread of virulent antisemitism after October 7, 2023, consider Durban its first open expression in progressive circles. Noted Canadian jurist (and then Minister of Justice) Irwin Cotler who was present: “Durban became the tipping point for the coalescence of a new, virulent globalizing anti-Jewishness reminiscent of the atmospherics that pervaded Europe in the 1930s.”

He did not refer here to "mere criticism of Israel" but to the melding of Nazi and Jihadi antisemitism in, for example, the poster/tee-shirt that circulated freely, initially with a UN logo:

Here also, the first blood libel since the Holocaust to have widespread success, the lethal narrative of the IDF's cold-blooded murder of an innocent boy in his father's arms, dominated the discourse. Al Durah, carried in effigy by angry crowds, was the patron saint of Durban. It was here that the progressive radicals from the West joined in alliance with the Jihadis (who actually did target children) against the "child-killing” Israelis.

Protesters march through the streets during the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, Friday Aug. 31, 2001. (AP Photo/Obed Zilwa)

Given the status of Al Durah as the still-uncontested icon of hatred of the 21st century, a quintessentially anti-Zionist symbol, the sign would more accurately read "Palestine's Images of Hate". These same crowds bore aloft posters with Arafat, Saddam Hussein, and Bin Laden literally days before he struck the US.

Here we find the major conduit of Nazi-mimetic, Muslim-apocalyptic Jew hatred into the Western public sphere. It was the emotional charge - we have seen the enemy and joined with its victims in outrage! It was also a sine qua non of the alliance with the Caliphators: anyone who defended Israel - including all those liberal Jews - were enemies of the revolution.

The final statement of the NGOs at Durban set the progressive agenda for the years and decades to come, calling for

a policy of complete and total isolation of Israel as an apartheid state… the imposition of mandatory and comprehensive sanctions and embargoes, the full cessation of all links (diplomatic, economic, social, aid, military cooperation and training) between all states and Israel… [and condemned] those states who are supporting, aiding and abetting the Israeli apartheid state and its perpetration of racist crimes against humanity including ethnic cleansing, acts of genocide.^[6]

To extend the analogy Vlahos makes between the 4th and the 21st century, we find here a demand that the faithful make a sudden and radical change in their moral universe. When Constantine “converted,” the leaders of the Church, now beneficiaries of his bounty and his delegated power, redefined Rome’s place in the apocalyptic scenario. Previously, since the very origins of the Christian movement, Rome had been the seven-hilled Babylon of Revelation (18), the quintessence of earthly evil. With the Roman Christian empire, this valence had to be reversed to accommodate the new, powerful ally. The process involved not only the conversion of the empire to Christianity, but Christianity to imperialism.

This meant that classic tropes reversed: instead of standing in the way of salvation, now empire, war, cooperation with imperial authorities, persecution of Christian dissent, icons, all became licit if not salvific; previously central beliefs (iconoclasm, martyrdom as resistance to imperial authority, an earthly millennium of equality) became taboo. This top-down transformation did not gain immediate or even widespread acceptance: millenarians like the Donatists considered the new situation a moral catastrophe in which the Church had been invaded and corrupted. But then, they were specifically the ones the imperial ecclesiastical authorities went after as “heretics.”

Similarly in 2001 at Durban, with the launching of the global progressive left as a movement, there was a radical shift demanded in order to accommodate the new apocalyptic ally. Now war, hatred, and excluding Israel, became central features of the movement. Now, peace-loving demonstrators were expected to stand shoulder to shoulder with triumphalist Muslims carrying pictures of war-mongers like Saddam Hussein, Yassir Arafat and handing out fliers calling for putting the Jews to the sword. The conversion of a demotic peace movement to (Muslim) religious imperialism was well under way. Above all, Israel delenda est. By 2003, it had become a litmus test of “liberal” credentials to support the Palestinians who, at the time, were sending their youth out to commit suicide killing Israeli civilians.

Those rare millennial movements which upon “coming out” and going public, find receptive audiences, and gain strength in the public sphere, go mainstream. They have a potent future as a public player at least for as long as apocalyptic time prevails. Indeed, these movements have the possibility of “taking” like a forest fire. In that case, argue millennial scholars, the flames must run their course, riding their human believers like animals to their sacrificial destruction. In 2000/2001, on the wings of the secular Palestinian narrative of freedom, the voice of Jihad stormed into Western discussions, and it demanded respect, including “respect” for its hate speech against Jews. Who could dare deny free speech to Palestinians?

Events from 2000 onward, brought a sharp turn in the meaning of our political language. New norms “took”; the Overton Window shifted significantly “left.” Revolutionary memes entered the public sphere. It was no longer taboo to call Israel Nazis; it was no longer intellectually dishonest to accuse the Israelis of racism and genocide. Eliminating the state of Israel now became an increasingly legitimate policy option for discussion (again). All of a sudden “liberal” meant supporting a movement whose most prominent feature was Jihadi suicide attacks on civilians.

Progressive suddenly meant celebrating Bin Laden’s blow for freedom against the suffocating American hegemon. Wrote the French “philosopher-sociologist” Jean Baudrillard:

Moral condemnation and the sacred union against terrorism match the prodigious jubilation engendered by witnessing this global superpower being destroyed [sic]; better, by seeing it more or less self-destroying, even suiciding spectacularly. Though it is she [the US] that has, through its intolerable power, engendered all that violence brewing around the world, and therefore this terrorist imagination that―unknowingly―inhabits us all. That we have dreamed of this event, that everybody without exception has dreamt of it, because everybody must dream of the destruction of any power hegemonic to that degree…

Progressives spoke their hatred of the US with far more vigor after 9/11, Europeans especially. Y2Kmind transferred from Israel to the US: if jihadis attacked, it was because the democracies deserved it.

Any pushback against this judgment, any effort to locate the cause of the hatred in the culture of the Jihadis, especially in its Islamic roots, became unacceptable. From 9-11 on, the term Islamophobia became an increasingly demanding accusation against criticism of Islam, especially anything that linked it to the radical doctrines of Jihad. Indeed, even uttering the term “radical Islam” was viewed by Western elites as a gratuitous provocation at best. What's good for the goose among oikophobic progressives (their own Christian past), is most decidedly not good for the gander (their Muslim compatriots’ past). An elaborate respect allowed Jihadis to spew hatred of Jews while critics of Muslims suffered serious consequences, even legal ones. Jihadi assaults in the West were met by a compliant journalism that obscured as much as possible the Islamic motivation for the attacks.

Nothing illustrates and embodies the apocalyptic dynamics of the turn of the millennium in 2000 than the role played by the Palestinians. At Seattle in 1999, the Palestinian cause was scarcely present.[7] At Durban in 2001, they drowned out all the suffering of the rest of the world. Bernard-Henri Lévy, a passionate liberal who went to Durban with hope, reflected on his disappointment:

I thought about—and I still think about, every time I think about that great moment of shame, contempt, and moral failure—about all the activists for all the just causes who had arrived [at Durban] full of hope, persuaded that they finally had a stage upon which to express themselves, and who ended up reduced to silence by the screaming activism of those who wanted, in Durban’s Kingsmead Stadium, to see a single face, that of the little boy Muhammad al-Durrah—and only wanted to hear a single slogan: “Free, free Palestine.”^[8]

The 21st century opened up with a major mobilization of two allied millennial movements who ignited apocalyptic time around the designation of the enemy, from the Caliphator’s view an external enemy (Israel, US, West, unsubmissive infidels), from the “progressive” view, an internal one (“we have met the enemy and he is us”). So in the West, alongside the Palestinian cause as a litmus test, one finds oikophobia, a weaponized form of post-modern self-loathing, de rigueur. The West is evil. With so powerful a moral directive, true believers could now throw their weight and bend the arc of history towards justice.

In this apocalyptic drama, the Israelis became the embodiment of every Palestinian projection onto them: targeting children, genocide, racism, religious supremacism. Before the great demonstration of 2003, there were multiple mass demonstrations specifically against Israel, including a major dress rehearsal in April of 2002, at the news, supplied by a pack of lethal journalists, of the “Jenin massacres.” Renowned author A. N. Wilson accused Israel of “massacres and the cover-up of genocide,” as the Muslim Association of Britain passed out calls to put the Jews to the sword, and Labour politicians like Jeremy Corbyn and Tony Benn shared the stage with radical Muslims shouting Allahu-akhbar. Lethal journalists, Human Rights NGOs, UN personnel, post-colonial academics, all carried forward the Durban directive. It mattered not at all to them that, empirically, the IDF’s performance at Jenin, of a 3:1 combattant-civilian casulty ratio (the inverse of the norm) was an unparalleled high-point in humane urban warfare.

As one observer noted about 21st century antisemitism:

Contemporary Christian antisemitism, deprived of its foundation because of expanding globalization, identifies with Islamic antisemitism in spite of all the differences between them and grants it the paradoxical right to hate Jews and Israel as the sole “impediment to peace” and to global integration—to hate them as the participants in a universal conspiracy.

rlandes’s Substack

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