Eschatologicalisms

Are dangerous religious delusions running the world?

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.”

The Second Coming, W.B. Yeats

It is possible that we are in the grip of madmen whose fantasies about human history and their role within it are driving us to the brink of destruction?

Eschatological - the theology or study of "last things," including death, the afterlife, the end of the world, final judgment, and the ultimate destiny of humankind. It stems from the Greek eschatos ("last") and relates to themes of finality, such as the Second Coming or resurrection.

I have just finished a book by Andrey Platonov called ‘Chevengur’ about the Russian Revolution. No writer had greater credentials to write about the Revolution than Platonov. His father was a railway worker who gilded the cupolas of churches. Platonov worked along similar lines: he was an engineer who left his writing to build wells and irrigate land during the famine, only to return to writing to produce such a powerful indictments of Soviet thinking, despite his earnest desire to want to believe in the Bolshevik government, yet at the same time so brilliant that Stalin wrote beside his name ‘What a bastard!’ and let him live.

Reading Platonov in English, it is difficult to fully appreciate the strange combinations of adjectives and nouns, the non sequitur emotional development of characters and the grotesque absurdity of the plotting. However, a little light is given to his bizarre deployment of techniques and unusual narrative when we are informed that Platonov wrote from ‘inside’ the Revolution and understood it as a religious manifestation as opposed to a political or economical one. It was not logical, rational or coherent: it was time - and everything else - out of joint.

For centuries and centuries, surviving the Enlightened and mercantile reforms of Peter the Great and correspondent adjustments in the theology of the Russian Orthodox Church, Russian was woven together by hundreds, possibly thousands of Christian cults who held deep beliefs about the re-birth of a new world with Moscow as a Third Rome, in accordance with prophesy. If you imagine how many individual churches with their own heterodox views on Christianity there are stretching across the American plains of today, this will give you some idea of pre-Revolutionary Russia.

The Revolution for Platonov was a spiritual episode, not a Marxist one. Across an overwhelmingly agrarian Russia, peasants threw off Tsarism in the expectation of salvation. Ironic, isn’t it? A materialist philosophies’ greatest triumph was one that was more accurately in keeping with spiritual beliefs nurtured over centuries rather than than an outcome of the dialectic forces of history.

In Platonov’s novel, the reader wonders why the characters are described as always ill, always weak and always dying. From the perspective of the Old Believers, this is in keeping by Revolution and revolutionaries with the tradition of rejecting the body, the place of lust, greed and sin, and extolling the sanctity of Spirit. The sufferings, the killings, the starving of the Russian people during the Revolution was a manifestation of this process to attain God’s Kingdom.

You had to suffer and die to get there. The fundamentalists were quite happy to drive people to that state for the ‘greater good’.

Is it possible to feel sorry for Benjamin Netanyahu? No. However, I saw a video (unverified) of a Rabbi criticising him for the lack of progress of starting a war and destroying the Al Aqsa mosque. The Third Temple wasn’t being built and this meant the Messiah was delayed. ‘We’re trying,’ said an unusually apologetic Netanyahu. ‘You’re not trying hard enough!’ said the radical Rabbi.

Is Netanyahu trying to blow-up the world for his own extreme sectarian beliefs?

Or has Netanyahu, like Donald Trump, partially built on a base of extreme Eschatologists who are attempting to push events to global war and mass destruction for the fulfilment of their sect’s own wild prophecies; and, as events spiral downwards, both men are now in hock to these types for political survival? In Trump’s case, Christian Zionists, all the Revelatory zealots, the Mormons, the Jewish lobby and even wooden church in the middle of nowhere promising a white horse to every member at the Rapture are urging him on to precipitate the End of Days, and, it is rumoured, telling him of his pivotal, unique role in world history, and everlasting fame for enacting this.

When these ideas combine and find a common destination with ones that promise gentile slaves to Jews by Rabbis; virginal women bestowed upon Muslims for their martyrdom; and the rising of a Third Rome in Russia, then we can see there are a lot of people out there cheering on, pressing for and trying to bring about Armageddon. All based on spiritual reasonings - that are always abstruse and rely on very tenuous interpretations of often literal texts, taking them as symbolic, and then defining this highly ambiguous symbiology as carrying a clear, unquestionable meaning.

Isn’t it ironic that despite all the money, the wealth, the material goods, of so many of these people from the billionaire class, from powerful families, they are funding these groups and finding their own personal calling in stoking their fires of destruction. Do any of these people involved, at all levels, from minister and rabbi and cleric to churchgoer, sponsor and large donor, ever lift the veil of their ‘spirituality’ and take a moment to try and understand the inner workings of their own psychology? I doubt it. They’d rather hide from themselves by investing that dark energy, those perverted drives in the destruction of others for a better world.

Add in the eugenicists, the Malthusians, the racial purists, the doomsday environmentalists, the financial-war machine matrix, the Turks wanting to restore the Caliphate, the Greater Israel project, the Accelerationists, the Covidians - a special mention for Stupidity and Cowardice - and a hundred others who think that widespread collapse will improve their specific sects’ lot, then you can see…

We’re in for difficult times ahead.