Apocalyptic Summertime Fun

New York City on June 7.

1,406 words

The portents are everywhere these days. If one were to take a casual look, even for a brief moment, at the headlines about fires, floods, hurricanes, war, plagues, pestilence, and various other scourges that are raging across the Earth, it is easy to see why adherents of an apocalyptic worldview would have more than enough confirmation that the end is indeed nigh.

This is not a new phenomenon, of course. Careful observers of the apocalypse know that these patterns recur again and again throughout human history. Priests get rolled in the mud, cities are burned, grain is hoarded, imitation rubber galoshes are sold to the highest bidder at exorbitant prices, and cans of imitation prime rib are hoarded in root cellars. These days, alarmists of all sorts, both religious and secular, have decided to use the language of the apocalypse to give their climate change, mass migration, or myriad other panics added emphasis. Maybe we’re being set up for an autumn of overpriced pumpkin spice lattes and plague-induced lockdowns. Who knows?

Christianity, for instance, has an eschatology: a doctrine of “the last times,” or “the last days,” or “the final state of the world.”[1] Scholar Norman Cohn describes it as the “central phantasy of revolutionary eschatology.” Generally speaking, the pattern that emerged throughout ancient Jewish and Christian writings and those of their noteworthy predecessors is that

[t]he world is dominated by an evil, tyrannous power of boundless destructiveness — a power moreover which is imagined not as simply human but as demonic. The tyranny of that power will become more and more outrageous, the sufferings of its victims more and more intolerable — until suddenly the hour will strike when the Saints of God are able to rise up and overthrow it. Then the Saints themselves, the chosen, holy people who have groaned under the oppressor’s heel, shall . . .  inherit dominion over the whole earth.[2]

The apocalypse’s destructiveness can take any number of forms. The apocalyptic writer often describes a world of moral and physical degeneration, populated by human agents of evil: violent climactic changes, drought, earthquakes, and fire presage an ultimate catastrophe.[3]

While Leftist scholars and other commentators in the mainstream press have warned about the use of this apocalyptic framework by the Right, as well as its presence in popular culture,[4] it is glaringly obvious that our hostile liberal-globalist elites and their allies in the legacy media continually invoke the apocalypse to justify their own designs on the world.

One article with the headline “Man surfs away from apocalyptic wildfire in ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ video” includes video of a British Columbia man wakeboarding with a raging wildfire in the background. The video was filmed on July 29 at Osoyoos Lake, which is close to the border of British Columbia and Washington. That wildfire was the Eagle Bluff Fire, which burned over 16,400 acres by late July.

Also in late July, unprecedented flooding in China prompted the evacuation of approximately 800,000 people in and around Beijing. The headline was similarly dire: “Biblical flooding in Beijing after heaviest rain in 140 years.” The deluge was a result of Typhoon Doksuri that caused “. . . catastrophic flooding over the weekend and into the start of August.”

Speaking of flooding, the widely-publicized Burning Man festival quagmire has been put firmly in this category by both the Left and the Right. A story in the United Kingdom’s Daily Star is headlined with “Burning Man flood that trapped 73,000 in mudbath was ‘God’s judgement’, senator says.” Uncharacteristic rainfall at the site in the Nevada desert resulted in revelers being stranded for days. There was one fatality as well, and there were wild rumors swirling around his cause of death, with some speculating that Ebola, or even cannibalism had been responsible for the man’s demise.

Meanwhile, personnel in the Plague Department — which is conveniently located in the Bureau of Apocalypses — have been working overtime. It turns out that cancer numbers are surging worldwide among those under 50 years of age. According to a new study in the journal BMJ Oncology, “cases of cancer among people aged 14 to 49 rose by nearly 80 percent, from 1.82 million to 3.26 million, between 1990 to 2019.” Furthermore, over one million people under the age of 50 died of cancer in 2019, which is a 28% increase from 1990.

Elsewhere, the World Health Organization (WHO) is up to its old tricks again. This time it’s about — you guessed it — yet another variant of COVID-19. The headline is ominous, and the language is dire: “WHO sounds major alarm over ‘concerning’ Covid wave coming this winter as deaths soar.” Even the sub-headline invokes the memory of “the darkest days of the pandemic.” The WHO chief with the unpronounceable name and dubious credentials, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said, “We continue to see concerning trends for COVID-19 ahead of the winter season in the Northern Hemisphere.” Is a vulnerable populace being terrified into yet another lockdown? Time will tell, but I’m leaning towards yes.

Earlier this summer, as Canadian wildfires raged across the north, leading to smoke billowing south across the 49th parallel and points beyond, New York City was shrouded in a red-orange haze. The “eerie glow” shrouded the Big Apple’s iconic landmarks. One headline read, “Worst air quality in 20 years grips New York City, creates apocalyptic-looking skyline.” The story sets the scene:

Hazy skies, the fiery, red sun, and the smell of smoke caught the attention of residents from Maryland to New England on Tuesday. The air quality spiked to very unhealthy levels across the Northeast on Wednesday morning as wildfire smoke from Canada poured into the region.

The Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre has a handy interactive map that shows all active forest fires across the country. Even its website is resplendent in red, orange, and black.

Similarly, a writer for the Council of European Canadians remarked on the nature of weather reports these days. In this apocalyptic age, even the most routine weather maps are slathered in various shades of red. The overall effect is to convey a sense of alarm concerning an ever-worsening climate crisis.

Along with hurricanes, fires, flooding, and earthquakes is the prospect of drought. According to Global News, “Extreme drought a ‘sleeping giant’ climate disaster.”

The following headline does its best to cover several eschatological bases in one fell swoop: “Massive Fireball Near Putin’s War Command HQ Triggers State Of Emergency After Kamikaze Drones Attack.” This is possibly the best headline I have ever read. There must be something innately captivating about apocalyptic pronouncements such as this to make us all stop and take notice.

One article entitled “Existential threats to humanity are soaring this year” leveraged the brain power of three authors to tell us that artificial intelligence, nuclear war, and rising temperatures are going to kill us all.

In Morocco, the strongest-ever earthquake to hit that country has reaped 2,500 lives; efforts to save those still buried in the rubble are ongoing. Video shows the moment when the quake collapsed buildings as people fled and dust billowed.

The plague of locusts cannot be far behind. Sure enough, though, there have been reports of an invasive species of ants invading Europe. Numerous news outlets glommed onto this story because of a recently-released United Nations report about the cost of invasive species on the world’s economies. According to the study, which was produced by everyone’s favorite globalist entity, some $423 billion are lost every year because of these pesky critters.

Whether it’s the Daily Digest predicting the end of humanity by 2100, or speculation about the less than clandestine transportation of nuclear weapons at night, invocations of apocalyptic doom are continually presented throughout our culture. This small collection of apocalyptic headlines plucked from various news outlets and other sources tell us that even seemingly secular movements acknowledge the galvanizing power of the End Times. The Left use it constantly to further their climate and migrant agendas. The dissident Right is not averse to exploiting these tendencies, either — but the difference is that we have the truth on our side.

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Notes

[1] Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 13.

[2] Ibid., 21.

[3] Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology (London: Tauris Parke, 2011), 80-81; Norman Cohn, Cosmos, Chaos, and the World to Come: The Ancient roots of Apocalyptic Faith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), ix.

[4] Lorenzo Ditommaso, “Apocalypticism in the Contemporary World,” in The Cambridge Companion to Apocalyptic Literature, ed. Colin McAllister (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 316-342.