March 22, 1993

Apocalypse, With And Without God

Essay

by CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER

It is not enough that the murderous ravings of David Koresh and his apocalyptic religious cult have turned into a terrible human tragedy. There seems to be a great desire to turn it into a cultural statement. The siege at Waco has occasioned a worldwide festival of commentary -- and condescension -- on the subject of American primitivism. An Israeli TV interviewer asked me to explain to his audience why it is that America seems to throw up these weird religious cults at such regular intervals. I pointed out that Israel sports the Ateret Hacohanim, a group of believers so convinced of the imminence of the Messiah who will rebuild the Temple of Solomon that they spend their days studying the ancient laws of animal sacrifice. That way they'll be -- to borrow a phrase from George Bush's -- ready on Day 1.

Tut-tutting about American primitivism mixes easily with that other sport, eye rolling about religious primitivism. You know: There go those religious nuts again. In keeping with a popular culture that gives serious religion no attention but devotes endless prime time to crooked, hypocritical and otherwise deformed religiosity, the Waco wackos are getting more coverage in a week than religion does in a year.

A front-page story in the Washington Post looked for deeper trends. ''The United States has become a land echoing with the rumble of apocalyptic prophecy,'' it reported on Day 5 of the siege. And the phenomenon is ecumenical: ''The anticipation extends across religious lines.''

True enough. But it also extends beyond religious lines. What the endless media chatter about the Koresh phenomenon misses completely is that millennial thinking is hardly the property of the religious. Indeed, the most widespread and historically significant outbreaks of millenarianism in our time have been secular.

For the past half-century more than a quarter of the earth's people were controlled by political movements whose pursuit of the millennium was as fanatical as that of their religious counterparts -- and far more destructive. Soviet, Cambodian, Korean, Chinese communists relentlessly drove their people to extremes of privation and repression in order to hasten the arrival of full-fledged ''communism,'' the millennium as foretold by that 19th century prophet Karl Marx.

In 1958, for example, Mao decided to skip the intermediate stages of ''socialist construction'' and go right to full communism. He called it the Great Leap Forward. It would take a million David Koreshes to kill the number of Chinese who perished (through famine, forced labor and civil unrest) to satisfy that lunge for the millennium. Two decades later, the Khmer Rouge murdered more than a million of their countrymen in an attempt, explained Khieu Samphan, to ''reach total communism with one leap forward.'' Has any religious vision occasioned more human sacrifice than ''total communism''?

As for the U.S., there are a handful of people who believe Koresh's loony speculations about the end of the world. But not a decade ago, tens of millions of Americans, including many who should have known better, were in the grip of a national anxiety attack about nuclear apocalypse. Jonathan Schell's panicked anticipation of nuclear destruction, modestly titled The Fate of the Earth, was rapturously received. The Day After, a re-creation of the End, was the TV event of the year. Psychologists were dispatched to help kids deal with its anticipated psychological fallout. Hundreds of thousands took to observing ''Ground Zero Week,'' which featured the loving re-creation of every detail of the apocalypse -- in the weird expectation that rehearsing the End would prevent it. Those who refused to join the hysteria were diagnosed as suffering from ''nuclearism'' or ''psychic numbing.''

With the end of the cold war, nuclear apocalypticism has gone out of fashion. The vacuum is amply filled by the eco-catastrophists. The late '60s featured Paul Ehrlich's huge best seller, The Population Bomb, an astonishingly wrongheaded prediction of the End brought on by overpopulation -- by 1983. In the '70s, the Club of Rome predicted, with hilarious imprecision, a coming doomsday of uncontrollable pollution, wild overpopulation and resource depletion (by 1992, for example, no oil).

Today the Vice President of the U.S. writes a best seller warning that if environmentalism does not become ''our new organizing principle,'' then ''the very survival of our civilization will be in doubt.'' And ''the potential for ! true catastrophe lies in the future, but the downslope that pulls us toward it is becoming recognizably steeper with each passing year.'' Familiar, isn't it? The yawning chasm -- accompanied, as for every apocalypse, by the death struggle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness: ''We now face the prospect of a kind of global civil war between those who refuse to consider the consequences of civilization's relentless advance and those who refuse to be silent partners in the destruction.''

Some prefer their catastrophes more mundane. For them we have economic apocalypse. It is hard to think of a time when the best-seller list did not feature a Crash of Nineteen-something book. A few years ago, it was The Crash of '79. Then The Panic of '89. (Same author!) Today it is Bankruptcy 1995. The idea is the same. Only the date gets pushed back.

The apocalypse recedes. Yet its fascination endures. It is fine to look down one's nose at Waco. But Bible-thumping psychopaths hold no monopoly on belief in the End. Before casting stones at the easy targets, a secular society might reflect on its own ample appetite for apocalypse.