Is the world getting more dangerous, or does it just seem that way? When evil robots pulverizing entire cities are box office favorites, AI looks capable of spinning out of our control, and cyber warfare threatens anyone and everyone, small wonder it feels apocalyptic. Which is odd when you consider that apokalypsis, in ancient Greek and biblical contexts, simply meant “revelation,” an unveiling, or disclosure (apo, meaning “away” or “off”, and kalypto—”to hide” or “cover”). Whatever happened to progress? The religious connotation of disclosing the time of salvation from worldly misery has devolved rather than evolved. It has come to imply that only Salvation Now can defer the End of Everything. As Middlebury College professors Erik Bleich and Christopher Star found when examining nearly 10,000 articles in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post between January 1, 1980 and December 31, 2023, “[t]he meaning of ‘apocalypse; has… expanded in recent decades from an exclusively religious idea to include other, more human-driven apocalyptic scenarios, such as a ‘nuclear apocalypse,’ a ‘climate apocalypse,’ a ‘COVID-19 apocalypse,’ or an ‘AI apocalypse.’”
Repurposing religious language for political purposes is standard demagogy, but in the post-truth era it has reached a whole new dimension. Exhibit A is arguably uber-cynic Vladimir Putin who, according to two Dutch professors of history, Beatrice de Graaf and Niels Drost, describe in their new book how for the past 15 years, has been styling himself a divinely appointed savior not merely of the Russians but the world. As journalist Barton Swaim wrote in The Wall Street Journal on June 5th, 2026, Dr. De Graaf observed that since winning his second presidential term in 2004, Putin and his immediate circle began to express, “a more eschatological, a more apocalyptic and violent vision.”
A violent vision is surely to be expected from a KGB officer; but eschatological? A word that first appeared in English theological literature during the mid-nineteenth century, derived from ancient Greek eschatos (last, or extreme) and logos (“word,” “reason,” or “the study of…”), it denotes end-of-time religious conceptions. Among them: What happens after we die? What happens after the messiah arrives? Is Putin suggesting that he is himself the messiah? Perish the thought.
It is standard coalition-building: hyperbole for dummies. Domestically, his antics appeal to a motley crew of nationalist Orthodox hardliners, octogenarians longing for Stalin and communism, and even some young people disillusioned by failed “reforms” introduced under the consistently inebriated, oligarch-manipulated, weak-willed Boris Yeltsin. Internationally, he seems to have succeeded in convincing American presidents of both parties that he has turned a new leaf, away from communism. Though unlikely to believe his justification for the relentless bombing of Ukrainian women and children, hospitals and schools as a crusade against “satanic” activity, they are willing to ignore.
Whatever his motivations, his tactics are working. Having “immersed himself in the triad of Russian state power: nationality, autocracy, Orthodoxy,” observes Dr. De Graaf, he justifies the attacks on Ukraine as a “Holy War.” Since the tsar was traditionally considered divine, he was thought to be endowed with “the power to define what is evil.” The diminutive multi-billionaire who murders with impunity, however, is but a prototype of the born-again anti-liberal atheist-in-sacerdotal rhetorical clothing. His former European colonies aren’t fooled, but does the West still remember the ideological history?
Hebrew Beginnings
It took centuries for those biblical concepts to be repurposed for the secular age, eventually coming to depart in almost ludicrously antonymic ways from their original contexts. At its most basic, it seems obvious that humans need to live with some hope that tomorrow will be closer to what we could imagine as an ideal (utopian?) end-of-time that may give life meaning, rendering death more bearable. As social creatures, we need one another, survival depends on specialization, and decisions must be made on behalf of a community. We want to trust in someone who can guide us with wisdom, who in turn is rooted in a Higher Law, a Higher Being, whose interest is not self-oriented, who will not hurt the innocent and benefit the ruthless.
This is roughly the biblical tradition going back to the Hebrews, which is predicated on a vision that despite obvious pain in this imperfect world, a state of righteousness and peace is possible, albeit – and here’s the rub – preceded by a great upheaval. Fortunately, a mortal intermediary to the Creator, a righteous messiah (Hebrew for “anointed”), will help his flock to overcome great challenges. The paradigmatic example was Moses, said to have been entrusted by God to shepherd a sizeable group of Hebrew slaves out of exile in Egypt. Despite his original reluctance, Moses accepted the task and was able to guide the slaves as their souls were being strengthened for freedom. Not all were able to survive. But God finally gave them the principles that should help them create a righteous and peaceful abode. Neither Moses nor the others of his generation would see the promised destination: Jerusalem. That, however, was only the beginning.
Life on earth was never meant to be easy. Free will comes with the ability and temptation to self-sabotaging pride and ill-judgment. It was the book of Isaiah that described in some detail the End of Time as blissful and happy. Not only will human beings “decide with justice for the lowly of the land,” showing mercy to the widow, the orphan, the sick, and other unfortunates; so too would other creatures coexist in harmony—notably, the lion will lie down with the lamb (Isaiah 11:3-8).
The twelfth century scholar-scientist Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, known as Maimonides, advised against an overly literal interpretation of both the written and oral traditions of biblical literature. He particularly cautioned against the illusion that the post-messianic world will depart radically from the present “or that there will be a change in the order of creation.” Dialogue, pluralism, variety, were not merely tolerated but necessary in a truly good society. To be sure, things will have to get worse before they were better. But hope in God’s grace was unquestioned.
With the passage of time, as war, conquests, misery and destruction, religious persecution, and despair, engulfed the world, post-messianic relief grew in urgency. People became increasingly eager for a signal (apokalypsis) that relief was imminent. It became easier to imagine that a messiah was just around the corner. A book estimated to have been compiled in the 2nd century BCE, Daniel, was the first to describe a cataclysmic apocalypse in frightening terms. But Hebrews were ready to welcome a savior.
The charismatic Jesus (Yehudah) of Nazareth seemed indeed to be The One. At least he was until Roman officials crucified him. But since disciples reported having seen him resurrected on the day after his burial, despondency was replaced by expectations of Christ’s (Greek for “anointed”) Second Coming. In Titus 2:13, Paul (born Saul of Tarsus), commonly known as Paul the Apostle, or St. Paul, referred to Christ as “the great God and our Savior,” thereby elevating him to a status beyond that of any other Jew. Throughout the following three centuries, the community of Christian worshipers expanded throughout Asia Minor and Europe, eventually including the Roman Emperor Constantine himself. In 380, Christianity became the official state religion of the Roman Empire. Thereafter, the Second Coming would be expected to follow another Apocalypse.
But first came the Dark Ages.
Slouching toward Eu/topia
The “darkness” was originally meant literally, reflecting a scarcity of written records from roughly the 5th to the 10th centuries. By the 14th century, however, it gained a cultural connotation, in contrast to the “lightness” of the Renaissance—not to be confused to the subsequent “Enlightenment,” also connoting light. Though such labels inevitably oversimplify an exceptionally complex set of circumstances, it cannot be denied that the fourteenth century was truly dark. The worst of times, it became synonymous with the most devastating pandemic in human history: the Black Death. Probably originating in Central Asia, the terrifying bubonic plague wiped out nearly two-thirds of Europeans and tens of millions in the East with stunning rapidity.
Witches, lepers, and above all, Jews, were blamed and massacred en masse. The Catholic Church, long accused of corruption, had already begun to be torn asunder in France as early as 1309. But things would get much worse for it, fast. Interpreting the epidemic as an indictment of the clergy, English philosopher and priest John Wycliffe (c. 1328-1384), contributed to the Bible’s translation into Middle English. Widely known as the “Morning Star of the Reformation,” he was soon joined by another Church reformer, Bohemian cleric Jan Hus (1370-1415), who translated the Bible from Latin into Czech, paying with his life. But none was more widely read than Martin Luther’s (1483-1546) revolutionary German translation of the New Testament from Greek and the Old Testament from Hebrew.
Their influence grew exponentially after Johannes Gutenberg (1393-1406) invented the printing press. Not only did Bibles proliferate, readily disseminated with extraordinary rapidity, so did a huge variety of new and older, newly translated ideas. Simultaneously, the catastrophic fall of Constantinople in 1453 prompted a migration wave of scholars in Greek and Roman philosophy who uncovered forgotten pre-Socratic philosophers, notably Lucretius and Epicurus. Known as the atomists, or Epicureans, their outsize contribution to the rise of secularism is brilliantly captured in Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (2012).
Demonstrating their exceptionally wide impact, even the Catholic chancellor of England, Thomas More (1478-1535) refers to these proto-materialists, however obliquely, in his book On the Best Form of a Commonwealth and on the New Island of Utopia. Published in 1516, Utopia, as it came to be known, was precipitated by the immensely popular explorations in the “New World” by Amerigo Vespucci, where More set his imaginary island. Though not translated from Latin until 1551, the original version was widely read in elite circles, eliciting immediate interest and considerable consternation, despite being billed as a satire and written in the then-popular form of a fictional conversation.
The self-contradiction embedded in its name is pure genius. The book’s motto notes that two similar-sounding Latin words may both apply to the island: utopia (no-place) sounds remarkably like eutopia (good place). Playfully personified as the poem’s narrator, the island herself explains that she had been “called once ‘No-place’ because I stood apart,” but having now been acknowledged as “the best in people, wealth, in laws by far the best,” she demands a name change: “‘Good-place’ [eutopia] by rights I should be called.” Greenblat is most likely right that the whole point “of More’s celebrated fable is to imagine those conditions that would make it possible for an entire society to make the pursuit of happiness its collective goal.” Accordingly, it is easy to see why “[f]or More, those conditions would have to begin with the abolition of private property.”
But More imagines this egalitarian society being ruled by a King called Utopus, who “solemnly and strictly forbade that anyone should sink so far below the dignity of human nature as to think that the soul dies with the body or that the world is ruled by mere chance and not by providence. And for this reason, they believe that after this life punishments are ordained for vices and rewards for virtues.” More couldn’t imagine that no matter how altruistic humans might become, the abolition of property and universal labor would suffice to guarantee moral behavior. The narrator Raphael, speaking for More, thus declares that the first and most important law of a society that has even a chance to promote the happiness of its members depends on a belief that justice will be met eventually, in an afterlife. Belief in eschatological utopia is thus nonnegotiable.
Secularism was still a long way off so long as both humanists and Christians agreed that God’s omnipotence not only did not diminish man’s power, but it also enhanced it. But eventually, the two approaches were bound to clash. Humanism, explains Duke University professor Michael Allen Gillespie, “put man first and interpreted both God and nature on this basis. The Reformation, by contrast, began with God and viewed man and nature only from this perspective.” These irreconcilable differences, which lay at the heart of Christianity from the beginning, “played an important role in the cataclysmic wars of religion that shattered European life in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.”
The enormity of that cataclysm reverted to some extent the attention of most historians of early Europe from the plight of the Jews, whose outsider/pariah status had been pretty much standard fare for centuries. Yet something important had changed. Martin Luther’s venom against them reverberated into the following century, when the Viennese catholic preacher Abraham a Sancta Clara (1644-1709), “like Luther, declared that Jews had changed God Himself into the devil and were themselves devils,” according to the great student of antisemitism Robert Wistrich.
It is no small irony, observes Wistrich, that even “at the intellectual heights of European Christendom, as in its lower depths, Jews ceased to be human beings. They had been ineluctably transformed into a theological abstraction of diabolical perversity and malice.” The ideological underpinnings of modern totalitarian political religion were thus ominously congealing into a satanic lava, about to change civilization forever.
Apocalypse as Revolution
Luther initially reached out to the Jews in hopes of converting them. But after they demurred, he turned against them with unbridled fury. “We are at fault in not slaying them,” he admonished his countrymen. Remorseful, he sought forgiveness, pleading piety: “O God, beloved father and creator, have pity on me who, in self-defense, must speak so scandalously . . . against your wicked enemies, the devils and the Jews.” He felt utterly besieged. As Dartmouth historian Robert Michael observes, “Luther’s enemies’ list changed from time to time but usually included his Protestant and Catholic rivals, unruly German peasants, the pope, the Antichrist, the devil, and the Turks, whom he called ‘Red Jews.’” That Luther sometimes wrote as if the Jews headed the list is odd, given that they were among the most vulnerable and impoverished of his contemporaries. Was the danger philosophical?
By contrast, German peasants were indeed violent, with none more unruly than Thomas Müntzer (1485-1525), pastor to the town of Mühlhausen. His role in starting a rebellion would later be immortalized courtesy of Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Friederich Engels (1820-1895). In his 1843 pamphlet “On the Jewish Question,” Karl Marx had inferred from Müntzer’s outrage against the way “all creatures have been turned into property, the fishes in the water, the birds in the air, the plants on the earth; the creatures, too, must become free,” that the German priest had been a proto-communist and, by implication, also an antisemite. For Marx considered “[t]he view of nature attained under the domination of private property and money is a real contempt for, and practical debasement of, nature” a core tenet of “the Jewish religion.”
Friederich Engels also declared Müntzer an early communist, citing his appeal to the passage in the Gospel of Luke stating “[b]ring hither mine enemies and slay them before me…. We must uproot the weeds in God’s vineyard at harvest time” prepared to take up the sword to eradicate the old corrupt regime. Müntzer’s program, wrote Engels in his 1850 pamphlet “The Peasant War in Germany,” was not merely a compilation of peasant demands but “a visionary anticipation of the conditions for the emancipation of the proletarian element that had scarcely begun to develop among the plebeians.” He added: “By the kingdom of God, Müntzer understood a society without class differences, private property, and a state authority independent of, and foreign to, the members of society.”
Engels considered this a prototypical “example of how Christian apocalyptic thought becomes secularized,” observes historian Ben Jones in Apocalypse without God (2022). Jones agrees with Engels that the volatile young preacher’s “vision for societal transformation embodies all the elements of cataclysmic apocalyptic thought – beliefs in present corruption, impending crisis, a divine force guiding crisis, and finally utopia in the form of the kingdom of God.” Though little-known today, in fact the Peasants’ War of 1525 had been the largest popular uprising before the French Revolution, two and a half centuries later.
But utopian salvation for all humanity still failed to arrive. The original euphoria that accompanied the fall of Bastille on July 14, 1789, turned sour within a mere three years. The revolution that had begun in what seemed like a democratic spirit, somewhat along the lines of the American, fell into disarray. Having sought to replace corruption with a political system designed to secure liberty, fraternity, and equality by giving power to “the common man,” the country inevitably descended into chaos.
On April 6, 1793, a euphemistically labeled Committee of Public Safety (CPS) launched a Reign of Terror (La Terreur), promulgated by the fanatical Jacobin Maximillien Robesspierre (1758-1794). Together with a plethora of Jacobin clubs that mushroomed across France, the Reign also instituted ruinous price-controls that ultimately turned key artisanal elements of the humble, egalitarian, and patriotic sans-culottes, against the nobles and the regime. They undoubtedly also did not like the plan for compulsory education in boarding schools, designed to protect children from “reactionary ideas” they might pick up from their parents—a precursor of the Maoist “re-education camps.” France’s catastrophic collapse ended only when Napoleon at last declared himself Emperor in 1804, establishing French hegemony over continental Europe.
That still left plenty of time for the socialist/totalitarian experiment to metastasize. After Robespierre’s decapitation in 1794, it fell to the French communist Gracchus Babeuf (1764-1797) to institute price controls and ideological uniformity. In his Plebeian Manifesto inspired by the sinister Robespierre, Babeuf sought total equality and the end of politics as such. The state itself was the enemy. Defiantly anarchist, he called for “bouleversement total” (total upheaval): “May everything return to chaos, and out of chaos may there emerge a new and regenerated world.” Is there a better description of apocalypse? There would follow a utopian “great national community” in which all goods were held in common and shared equally.
The Manifesto anticipated its Marxist sequel by making “manifest,” (apokalypsos?) what was needed to bring about “equality in fact” and “the common good,” while at the same time inciting violent upheaval, “une manifestation,” grandly described as “more solemn, more general than has ever been done before.” Together with a small circle of radicals calling themselves the Club of the Pantheon, they soon attracted seventeen thousand, becoming a veritable recruiting ground for rabble-rousers. Renamed The Conspiracy of Equality, their group sought to provoke an armed uprising of the masses against what they considered an insufficiently egalitarian regime. Their aim was a dictatorship meant to usher a “pure democracy” and “egalitarian communism.” Who knows how far they might have gone had an informer not denounced them in May 1796; their leaders, including Babeuf, were executed a year later.
A committed atheist and materialist who viewed religion as nothing but a tool of oppression, Babeuf’s tactics would become a model for radical movements throughout the following century. His journal, The Tribune of the People, founded in 1795, became the model of Vladimir Lenin’s Iskra (Russian for “The Spark”). Both publications were used to set a coherent line for the vanguard and through them, everyone else. Wrote the noted historian of comparative revolutions James H. Billington: Babeuf’s Tribune “was the first journal in history to be the legal arm of an extralegal revolutionary conspiracy.”
Utopia Now
The theocidal fervor in Europe had barely begun when it turned genocidal. Religion in general would become forever stigmatized with unequaled panache by the master rhetorician Karl Marx, who denounced it as “the opium of the people.” But despite being an equal opportunity opponent of all religions, one above all earned the deepest contempt of this heir of distinguished rabbis: his own. Wrote Marx in “On the Jewish Question:”
What, in itself, was the basis of the Jewish religion? Practical need, egoism. Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of man – and turns them into commodities…. The god of the Jews has become secularized and has become the god of the world. The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew.
The “question” answers itself:
Once society has succeeded in abolishing the empirical essence of Judaism – huckstering and its preconditions – the Jew will have become impossible, because his consciousness no longer has an object, because the subjective basis of Judaism, practical need, has been humanized, and because the conflict between man’s individual-sensuous existence and his species-existence has been abolished. The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism.
The great British historian Paul Johnson described this as almost a “classic anti-Semitic tract,” adding that in effect, it also “contains, in embryonic form, the essence of his theory of human regeneration: by abolishing private property society would transform human relationships and thus the human personality.” That attitude would soon spread like wildfire among those who called themselves either socialists or communists, nationalists or internationalists.
Convinced of the need to find the best ways and means of distributing collective goods, what they all shared, writes the Italian historian Luciano Pellicani, “was a therapeutic diagnosis of the intellectual and moral anarchy that Europe had fallen into [which showed] a glimpse of opportunity to materialize the Christian dream of universal renovatio.” Both atheist Communists and secular socialists were heirs to the biblical vision. An earlier Italian historian, Antonio Labriola (1843-1904), for example, though never an activist, had believed that
[W]e socialists are going back to the Christian idea of society as an institution of the poor: not providence in the next world but providence in this world. We socialists have the holy audacity to declare ourselves more Christian than the priests, indeed the only Christians of the century. We are the true disciples of Jesus of Nazareth, of Jesus who announced the Kingdom of God who will come in peace and love and will be made thanks to, and by virtue of, our sentiments.
Babeuf himself had claimed, at his trial, that he was a Christian in some ways, given that Jesus had been a radical motivated by disdain for the rich.
The rapid accelerating pace of industrialization throughout the nineteenth century, especially in Western Europe, was drastically changing social dynamics, geopolitical realities, and assumptions about the very nature of man, leading to rising anxiety. As agricultural production became more mechanized, more food could be produced more cheaply, driving farmers to urban centers. There, the increasingly disparate conditions of factory owners and their employees would drive many a compassionate soul to seek ways to close the gap. The sight of billowing black smoke, emerging from chimneys spewing soot, was hellish. But… wasn’t this Progress? If so, what did that mean?
The idea of a World Spirit driving history in directions that seemed inevitable, propagated by the most famous and influential German philosopher of his time, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), took on like wildfire, notwithstanding his nearly inscrutable prose. At a time when people felt especially helpless, they appreciated his grand vision of unstoppable, ubiquitous Will, bound to culminate in an End envisaged as Absolute Freedom. Eden on Earth, Heaven reified in the State. In that sense, he presaged Russian revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin’s (1814-1876) realization that “the differences between revolutionary dictatorship and statism are superficial. Fundamentally they both represent the same principle of minority rule over the majority in the name of the alleged ‘stupidity’ of the latter and the alleged ‘intelligence’ of the former.” In different ways, Hegel and Marx share a unitary conception of the end of history predicated on political religion, a term coined by German philosopher Eric Voegelin.
Political Religions: Socialisms with an Anti-human Face
His book The Political Religions was published in Vienna in 1938, the year Nazi Germany invaded Austria, where Voegelin had resided since 1910. He sought to capture the essence of the new menace: when secularism replaces God, the desire for meaning is deflected onto utopia, and some semblance of transcendence is fulfilled by ideology. Suffering and despair must be eradicated, burned to the ground, to be replaced by light and joy: that’s the shpiel.
Thus, do political ideologies appropriate the apocalyptic symbolism of the Middle Ages, which “lives on in the symbolism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,” wrote Voegelin. It is transposed onto “Marx and Engels’s philosophy of history, in the Third Reich of National Socialism, and in the fascist third Rome of antiquity… and the belief in the ‘withering away of the state’… [in short,] in the figures and myths of leaders in our time….” In this respect, as in most others, Nazism and Communism are essentially indistinguishable.
Nearly a century later, Voegelin’s insights apply with equal validity to several additional political religions: the virulently Bolshevist/Islamist fanatical totalitarianism exemplified by the Islamic Republic of Iran, complete with “proxies,” founded by the KGB-trained Ayatollah Khomeini; the state-capitalist a.k.a. communist dictatorship of the PRC—the People’s Republic of China; the idolocratic Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, run by a hereditary absolute dictator; and assorted Third World kleptocracies that vote in the United Nations General Assembly alongside the totalitarian utopianists, whose populations are routinely massacred by members of terrorist groups, notably al-Qa’ida affiliates Al-Shabaab and Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam, Boko Haram, and Ansaru, among many others.
But how can “religious” apply to atheist and even theocratic ideologies used by ruthless elites, regardless of motives? Voegelin explains:
Humans live in political society with all traits of their being, from the physical to the spiritual and religious traits. … The language of politics is always interspersed with the ecstasies of religiosity and, thus, becomes a symbol in the concise sense by letting experiences concerned with the contents of the world be permeated with transcendental divine experience.
And perhaps to some of them, it is as close as they can get to an experience that feels transcendent.
The Russian dissident writer Andrei Sinyavsky (1925-1997) wondered what the utopianists who brought about the end of Russian tsarism might have thought, and felt:
How is the revolution viewed by its instigators, its true believers? Like the Apocalypse. As if history had ended and ‘a new heaven and a new earth’ were beginning. The Kingdom of God, Heavenly Jerusalem descending, promising paradise on earth. Yet not by God’s will but by man’s exertion. This isn’t a dream, but a historical law, scientifically proven by Marx, an ineluctable law that will prevail, like it or not.
Logically, therefore, apocalyptic revolution is also necessary.
The paradox of invoking Judeo-Christian ideals to justify annihilating its followers was perfectly captured by Ruth Wisse, Harvard Professor Emerita, Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Tikvah Fund, and member of the Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM): “The communists said, listen, we are the apotheosis of Judaism. Everything that is implicit in Judaism has now come to fruition in this modern form of equalization that we represent.” That made communism, she says, “a moral threat and an intellectual threat in a way that fascism never could be and never was.” Not that it didn’t try.
The Marxist-Leninist approach claims to be simultaneously empirical and logical, yet also normative—even as it denies the reality of anything non-material. The laws of History are like the laws of physics (Nature): it would be foolish, impossible, very bad, to not follow where the trajectory inevitably leads. There’s just one problem: the “material conditions” may not be manifest to all those being asked to implement those iron-clad laws as directed by the expert-vanguard. Assuming they are well-intentioned and altruistic, what makes those expert-philosopher-kings so clairvoyant? Besides, the masses are expected to trust not only what they know and how they know it, but also what they say.
That’s a lot to ask when language outruns truth, observes Dr. Moshe R. Manheim, who has learned in his four decades of practicing and teaching psychotherapy that humans are “collectively vulnerable to fear-inducing innuendo and misinformation, intentional or accidental. This might be the defining danger in the contemporary public square. …Modern narratives increasingly compete not simply to persuade, but to activate fear.” Fear, in turn, triggers violence. The tragedy of Hamas-led terrorist attacks on October 7, 2023, for example, “demonstrated how quickly unverified wartime claims, emotionally aligned with an emerging moral narrative, can acquire institutional legitimacy before evidence is fully examined.”
What Islamist ideologies have in common with secular utopianisms is the double-headed monster of Apocalypse Now (liquidating Israelis and, in general, Jews, and their allies) as the necessary precursor to [e]Utopia now (Islam Uber Alles). The former is meant to fuel, instigate, capitalize upon, and exploit fear, anger, and hate, while the latter serves as bait, justification, and anesthetic against any lingering pangs of conscience. But political expediency aside, “[w]hat antisemitism does to a society,” argues Wisse, “goes deeper than hatred. What you do is you invert the culture. You invert good and evil. You invert right and wrong. But you invert truth and falsehood, which is more elemental even than good and bad.”
Not all or maybe even most ideologues, whether in the leadership or as followers, are necessarily aware of the dynamics or consequences of their words or actions. They may be deluded, ignorant, psychopathic, or merely cowardly. But the possible outcome, however inadvertent, should terrify us enough to remember that no good can come from fear, anger, or hate justifying lies, violence, even murder. Too many Americans seem oblivious to the antizionism cum antisemitism in their midst. And it is gaining strength.
So thinks Aber Kawas, a Democratic Party candidate to the New York State’s Senate representing Queens: “It really does feel like it’s the result of the political moment that we are in, where we are seeing such a rise of fascism and a rise of an authoritarian government that, in many ways, wants to destroy the livelihoods of so many people in our communities.” As reported in the DSA journal The Democratic Left, Kawas is no gradualist but “looking for systemic change,” encouraged that “we are seeing more people speaking in support of democratic socialism than ever. More people are speaking out against war, speaking out about justice in Palestine,” adding: “it’s been interesting to see the makeup of the organization change, and like when you go to this rally, you’re seeing so many people wearing keffiyehs. You’re seeing so many people who want to be part of this movement.” means that I stand in solidarity with all oppressed people, especially Palestinians.”
Like the swastika, a millennia-old sacred emblem of good fortune now exclusively a symbol of Nazism, the keffiyeh is a garment traditionally worn mostly by Bedouins, which after the 1936 Arab uprising served as a political statement. In the 1960s, it was adopted by Yasser Arafat, a KGB-trained and armed terrorist, leader of the PLO. It has since become a trendy fashion statement, very “in” with the Ivy League patricians who vote for socialist ideals and applaud the murderers of October 7. As one pro-Hamas campus protestor told NPR shortly after the horrifying massacre, to him wearing the keffiyeh “means that I stand in solidarity with all oppressed people, especially Palestinians.” No point in arguing, because he states, categorically, “I’m never taking it off.”
Violence and radicalism are escalating because they are normalized with breathtaking rapidity. The DSA, the communist Chinese front Party for Socialism and Liberation, the Answer Coalition, and other far-left groups, are operating with impunity. Earlier in June, the DSA’s National Political Committee formally adopted a newly rebranded platform “Workers Deserve More!” that in effect abolishes the American system of government. That the DSA intends to “win the battle for democracy, draft a new constitution, and create a democratic socialist republic” no longer shocks. Nor does “building a new society from the ground up.”
As The Wall Street Journal reported on June 26, 2026, all the DSA-backed congressional candidates from New York State expected to win this November ran “campaigns focused on claims that Israel is committing a ‘genocide’ in Gaza. As the ‘Free Palestine’ chants suggest, their closest supporters also believe this election reflects a global radical movement.” The question is not whether they really believe they can build a utopian “new society.” It’s whether they succeed in their immediate goal of razing the old one to the ground.
This monthly series is presented by George Violin
Dr. Juliana Geran Pilon is a Senior Fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization. Her first book, Notes from the Other Side of Night: From Communism to a Fragile Freedom, will be published with a new introduction in September 2026. Her previous books include An Idea Betrayed: Liberalism, Jews, and the American Left; The Utopian Conceit and the War on Freedom; The Art of Peace: Engaging a Complex World, among others. She has also taught at Emory University, St. Mary’s College of Maryland, Johns Hopkins University, George Washington University, American University, and the Institute of World Politics.