Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor’s recent essay article ‘The Rise of End Times Fascism’, published in April in The Guardian, has had an impact far beyond the usual reach of a single op-ed piece. For many, it has summed up a mini-spirit of the age, addressing a wide range of forces: aligning the red-hat MAGA enthusiasm, stern neo-con war-hawkishness, ebullient tech-bro cyber-evangelism, twentieth-century fascism, and the weird distortions of old-school apocalyptic sensibilities wrung through the mangle of latter-day christo-fascist partisanship. The authors’ primary concern is to illustrate how the enthusiasms of these very disparate projects meet and reinforce one another in their resort to authoritarian absolutism. All display an aversion, in some cases approaching anaphylaxis, to the spirit of pragmatic compromise once regarded as the very essence of representative democracy. One rhetorical element common to all of them, as Klein and Taylor point out, is the strident voice of apocalypse, which they all deploy in different registers. Their piece thus affords a useful focus from which to question this re-purposing of apocalyptic rhetoric, drawing on my own experience of traditional apocalyptic texts as both a reader and a teacher. Is it possible to understand the present mess by taking a big step back and considering it from a historical and literary perspective? Allow me to try, then, with a not-wholly-irrelevant digression.
Not long ago, an affinity for Anglo-Saxon literature was regarded in some academic circles as a faux pas, tantamount to wearing on your forehead a post-it note that reads, ‘Kiss me, I’m a closet fascist’. During the latter nineteenth century, German scholars figured prominently in the study of the Old English language and its literary remains. To lend historical heft to the emergence of the modern German state then taking shape, some turned to Old English texts in search of evidence for a primordial Germanic identity that could ground the new nation-state’s sense of itself. Some of the more enthusiastic Germanophile scholars would later lend their scholarly credentials to the less savoury nationalism of the Nazi party, whose pursuit of a violently assertive national identity seized on literary and popular vestiges of Germanic antiquity, from Beowulf to Wagner’s operas, as proof-texts for their racist, authoritarian and, ultimately, genocidal sensibilities.
In the fraught political landscape of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, neo-nazi activists have cobbled together a slew of misappropriated images and stereotypes, down to and including the mighty Thor of Marvel Comics renown, to invoke a faux simulacrum of an imagined alt-Deutsch past. Neo-fascist demonstrators riot behind cosplay shields adorned with the ethel rune, whose name means ‘homeland’ in Old English, in an appeal to nativist blood-and-soil sentiment. Recently, the erstwhile International Society of Anglo-Saxonists (‘ISAS’) has had to re-brand itself as the International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England (thus generating the less wieldy acronym ISSEME) because the organisation’s website had begun to attract toxic white nationalist posts from bloggers who were self-evidently not scholars.
The comic-book thuggery of Proud Boys and Oath Keepers draws a good bit of its urgency from long-running notions of an end of days, of some calamitous brink towards which the broad streams of time all bend. It has coloured certain precincts of Western thought for many centuries. Other ancient conceptions understood time cyclically. They anticipated not some cosmic finish line but more a kind of lap counter or an odometer that turns over from 99,999 to a row of five zeroes, only to start counting all over again. In contrast, the end-times scenarios that so fascinate the more extreme ranges of today’s political and evangelical activism have more recent origins.
So-called ‘second-temple’ Judaism (516 BCE–70 CE) was a period of great religious and political ferment in Judea. The return of the Babylonian exiles and their rebuilding of the destroyed temple of Solomon prompted controversy about both Jewish identity and its scriptural foundations. The Tanakh, which assembled a wide range of canonical texts into an authoritative omnibus,[1] began at this time to assume its final shape as temple worship was re-instituted in Jerusalem. However, the region subsequently fell under Greek domination after Alexander the Great’s conquests were divided among his generals upon his death in 323 BCE. The new rulers of Judea were aggressive Hellenisers who sought to impose Greek culture and values on their subjects. These provoked determined opposition. Greek religious and cultural practice outraged Judaism’s strict monotheism and prescriptions concerning ritual and moral purity, inflaming the Jewish community’s relations with their pagan overlords. Sporadic violence prompted harsh suppression, which culminated with the deliberate desecration of the temple’s inner sanctum by Greek soldiery. This, in turn, sparked a wholesale uprising led by the Maccabees, a family of priests and soldiers.
The two books of the Maccabees, preserved in the Greek Septuagint translation of the Jewish scriptures, record scenes from this tumultuous period that seem eerie anticipations of the decades of horrific violence that have rocked the Middle East since the end of the Second World War. Amidst the churn of insurgent resistance and authoritarian reaction, writers in dissident communities such as the Qumran sectaries, who composed and curated the Dead Sea Scrolls, began to shape a new mode of religious discourse, commonly identified as ‘apocalyptic’.
Though we can only speculate cautiously about the psychology of ancient peoples, it seems reasonable to infer that apocalyptic literature first arose in response to the particular circumstances of Judea in the second and first centuries BCE. Both sides of the Maccabean conflagration committed atrocities. Jews who refused to accept the foreign culture their Greek governors sought to impose were periodically massacred for stubbornly clinging to their ancestral faith. It was not a good look: the God of Israel was allowing his chosen people to be slaughtered for their devotion to him. Upon their return some centuries previously, the Babylonian exiles had reshaped their scriptures into a narrative of the violated covenant. In their post-facto account, even under Moses’ prophetic leadership, the people of Israel proved an awkwardly wayward flock, ready time and again to accommodate other peoples’ gods (whom their prophets regularly denounced as cosmic nullities), up to and beyond the days of David and Solomon and the kings of Israel and Judah who succeeded them. Eventually, God vented his wrath on their constant backsliding by allowing the Babylonians to overwhelm them. In this way, post-exilic Judaism shaped a retro-fitted rationale for why the God who had chosen them had also abandoned them. The harsh reality of that trauma was thus harmonised with the otherwise baffling riddle of a God who serially elected and rejected a people who regarded themselves as his ‘Chosen’, relegating them to a profound desolation.
The returned exiles sought to redress the awful lapses of their ancestors by returning to a rigorous observance of the old Mosaic covenant. In the time of the Maccabees, those martyred for their devotion to the true law, sometimes in great numbers, demanded further adjustments to their people’s theology. Traditional Judaism had never expounded a clear vision of any kind of afterlife. Speakers in various Psalms, some of which are the oldest texts in the Jewish canon, speak of a quasi-place they call sheol, an underworld realm where the spirits of the dead sink to a reduced echo of their earthly existence, bereft of sensual experience, coherent identity and warm vitality. It is a place of deprivation rather than judicial torment, closer to the Greek Hades than to the Christian hell.
But thereby hangs a tale. Because Jewish writers began at this time to expand this greyed-out, oppressively neutral (or, better, neutered) vision of post-mortem existence into a judicial extravaganza that reflected God’s judgement pronounced on every soul’s conduct between birth and death, which allowed some measure of justice both for all those untimely slain and for their tormentors. Originally a Jewish innovation,[2] such visions would subsequently inform the earliest Christian conceptions of post-mortem judgement.[3] But the great stresses of the Maccabean insurgency drove such speculation even further, into territory now recognised as ‘apocalyptic’. The strict meaning of the word ‘apocalypse’ was originally derived from the Greek verb apokalyptein (‘to uncover’, ‘disclose’, ‘reveal’). It is an approximate synonym of the Latin revelatio (‘revelation’, ‘unveiling’), which gave the New Testament’s final Book of Revelation its name.
The apocalyptic tradition generated scores of texts, of which only a handful found places in Jewish and Christian scripture.The largely apocalyptic book of Daniel is not included among the recognised books of prophecy in the Tanakh, instead relegated to a less distinguished place in its catch-all third grouping, the Ketuvim (‘writings’). The Book of Revelation was the last to be admitted to the Christian canon after a long debate about its validity. The rabbinical and patristic authorities who oversaw the consolidation of either canon clearly considered such wildly speculative productions uncertainly inspired, possibly heterodox. Apocalypses typically comprise visionary scenarios in which their narrators are swept from mundane circumstances into scenes of cosmic conflict, where bizarre menageries of phantasmagorical creatures engage in celestial combats which shadow the plagues, wars and other global disasters that befall the nations of the Earth.
Thus (in a very simplistic nutshell) is the historical aspect of apocalyptic writings. Their symbolism is often deliberately obscure since calling out oppressive earthly powers by name could lead to fatal consequences for the caller. Most New Testament scholars reckon the Book of Revelation’s repeated denunciations of ‘great Babylon’, whose eventual fall it depicts, are coded references to Nero’s Rome, which at the time was fiercely persecuting the young church. Such sly indirection of a revolutionary in-group speaking only to its own, in a language opaque to outsiders, lends apocalyptic discourses broad appeal to extreme sensibilities long after the crises that shaped them have been forgotten.
Klein and Taylor’s piece identifies an apocalyptic strain in the tech-bro aspirations and declarations of figures such as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk (among many others). In an unsettling convergence of sensibilities, high-tech exuberance, millenarian optimism (of a sort) and libertarian aspiration (that conceals an authoritarian dagger under its cloak) all join hands in a quasi-apocalyptic circle-dance. An obvious (if ridiculous) instance of this is Thiel’s oft-cited characterisation of Greta Thunberg as the antichrist. Such over-the-top denunciation is a hallmark of most apocalyptic modes, but it begs the question of why a presumably canny West Coast tech squillionaire should be borrowing his cat-calls from a two-thousand-year-old playbook.
It is a childish example of how, for more than two millennia, apocalyptic texts have been screaming ‘red alert!’ at the top of their lungs, as if, from long before the invention of the internet and social media, that had been the goal of the whole show all along. But while the apocalyptic authors of Qumran or the island of Patmos sought, in their extreme fashion, to imagine the end of violent persecution they and their people had suffered, many of today’s tech-moguls have appropriated their language and manner to unfold click-bait-worthy visions of unaccountable survivalist schemes, wholly secular, whose primary aim is to secure a viable future for a select few while abandoning most of humankind to looming chaos of climate-driven environmental and social breakdown.
Klein and Taylor regard broad-spectrum tech ego Elon Musk as a bitter distillation of this yearning for some kind of secular ark capable of wafting those select few to new homes among the stars—or at least among some dug-in frozen hell-holes on Mars:
Much like religious end-timers who long to escape the corporeal realm, Musk’s drive for humanity to become “multiplanetary” is made possible by his inability to appreciate the multispecies splendor of our only home. Evidently uninterested in the vast bounty that surrounds him, or in ensuring Earth can continue buzzing with diversity, he instead deploys his vast fortune to bring about a future that would see a handful of people and robots eke out survival on two barren orbs (a radically depleted Earth and a terraformed Mars).
Characters such as Thiel and Musk (and their many collaborators) have hitched a ride on the apocalyptic bandwagon to exploit its revival-tent passions for their own wholly secular and amoral ends. They seek freedom from sane governance, which they characterise as diabolical persecution, with a blithe disregard for how their deregulatory, resource-intensive agendas will only accelerate the processes of social and environmental decline they claim righteously to be addressing. Like some socioeconomic black hole, they have condensed their unprecedented command of capital into an unforthcoming bolus that swallows still more, swelling and tightening its grasp on the material dimensions of existence to the exclusion of practically all else. The dull, humourless thud of all their high-tech survivalist rhetoric is the sound of the worlds they would have us inhabit. Mark Zuckerberg burnished his alpha-male credentials by telling Rogan workplaces need more ‘masculine energy’. Steve Bannon’s bleak witticism that ‘Darkness is good. Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That’s power’. Elon Musk’s ‘Occupy Mars’ t-shirt. It’s all boy’s club fantasy that reduces an infinitely complex world of intimately networked phenomena and processes to the two-dimensional screen of a late-eighties video game whose worst outcome is GAME OVER. PLAY AGAIN?
Such bonnes mots would sit snugly in any of a number of gamer chat rooms, with little wider consequence, were they not proffered by some of the modern world’s wealthiest men, whose net worth lends them undue weight in public discourse. Zuckerberg, Musk, Bezos, et al. sat, on prominent display, in the front row of the attendees at Donald Trump’s 2025 inauguration, ahead of political grandees and Supreme Court justices, a clear sign of just whose priorities would direct the new administration’s policies. The erratic course that these have since plotted (to put it mildly) reflects the catch-as-catch-can, move-fast-and-break-things ethos (if I may use the word) of these unelected oligarchs, whose outsize presence has reduced the president’s official cabinet picks to sock-puppet mimicry of Trump’s ham-fisted authoritarian tendencies.
It is a curious quality of most apocalyptic writing, whether ancient or modern, that it presents its horrific tableaux of breakdown and catastrophe with a kind of febrile eagerness, as if keen to get on with the show. In response to a sharply deteriorating now, it yearns for a future restoration: however painful the process is, the sooner the pending cataclysms can be got through, the sooner that restoration can be realised. That, at least, is the temper of the traditional apocalypse. Its vagrant modern by-blows have eviscerated its original spiritual energy and replaced it with a kind of tech-idolatry that worships the machine while blandly dismissing the merely human as a messy and inefficient sideshow. This may seem an exciting prospect if you imagine you are the engineer in charge of the levers. The rest of us may have other ideas.
[1] Later appropriated and adapted by Christianity as its ‘Old’ Testament.
[2] Though Egyptian mythology does imagine a scene of judgement in which a dead man’s heart is weighed in the presence of Thoth, the god of writing and record-keeping.
[3] And still later Islamic imaginings.