Andrew McKillop
21st Century Wire
The turn of the century has ushered in a golden age of cults.
There are literally hundreds of them, and we’ll talk about some of the main ones in this article, but first we must understand why they are so pervasive in our society.
Those on the ideological Right and Left will often fight to the death to prove that their end of times cult is the biggest threat to civilisation.
In 2014, for the Right, it’s Islamic terror, and for the Left, it’s climate change. In reality, genuine threats could be things completely different, like Fukushima, Geoengineering, or Ebola. As far as 21st century death cults go, if there is any promising money-making economy attached to the doomsday threat and the potential to polarise society, then it has a much greater chance of gaining mass traction – in other words: elites will love it!
What is a Millennial Cult?
Millennarianism, or the frequent eruption of millennial cults in society is often associated with the study by anthropologists of non-western “primitive” societies, especially South Pacific islander societies but its historical outbreak in western society are very well known.
Remember the Y2K hysteria in 2000? Or the Maya 13th Baktun of December 2012, after which time the world would surely end?
They threatened “potted disaster”, but in those two cases the political handle was hard to spot, even by seasoned conspiracy theorists. Unconvincing attempts included claims that the 13th Baktun coincided with particularly intense experiments in the US HAARP (high frequency auroral research) program, which would cause complete collapse of all electric power grids, followed of course by the declaration of martial law and the start of the New World Order, which itself is an elite millennial cult – not unlike like global warming.
Neither the Y2K, nor 13th Baktun instant apocalypses generated any commercial spin-off – for example plastic replica silex knives of the type used by Mayan priests or scale model power grid lines to fry with a dose of current in the safety of your home while munching a takeout pizza. Y2K was hugely profitable though for those who were ready to cash in, and score of I.T. programmers managed to retire early having made so much money off of the scare.
Not long after Y2K we had September 11th, 2001, commonly known as “9 / 11”, which was a genuine millennial apocalyptic cult with about 3000 human sacrificial victims. The symbolism of 9/11 was unrivaled. It was biblical. Ever since then, it’s celebrated by Americans annually, with an endless string of monuments, memorials, and television retrospectives to rehash the gory details of that fateful day.
Staying with the Mayans, we can get nearer to a definition of millennial or millenarian cults. Of course Mayans seemed strangely fascinating. They were well ahead of ISIS psychopaths for running mass executions. Their priests used silex knives to slice open the rib cages of hundreds of victims a day, to rip out their still-beating hearts and before rolling their severed heads down from high up the Mayan pyramids. The gods invented by the priesthood elite were numbered in dozens, and were mostly evil, so these gods could only love and approve of mass slaughter – and promised also to Save the World!
In any Millenarian cult, the defeat of logic is paramount. Up is down, and down must be up, just like daytime is dark and nighttime is bright. How would mass slaughter save the world? How does “quantitative easing” or the massive and constant printing of chaff money by the central banks Save the Money? The answer is the same now as it was then: it doesn’t and it can’t, but that is logical so it is haram (as in ‘Boko Haram’, roughly translated as ‘Everything is Haram’).
In this world of doomsday cults, reality and truth are dangerous, unclean, or at very least must be shunned whenever possible.
Do you see a pattern emerging?
Long Before the Wilting Polar Bear
Interestingly enough, among the more-degenerate political leaders of the recent past in western society, Lady Margaret Thatcher was right on the button with the “epic menace of global warming”, by as early as 1989. In her case, after telling Britain’s youth they had “No Future” and could crawl away to the nearest gutter, she explained her heartfelt anguish for Antarctic penguins, supposedly threatened by global warming.
Is man really killing the penguins and the polar bears? Even NASA, which allegedly “believes in global warming”, is however forced to admit that current satellite surveys show that Antarctica’s ice-covered area has in 2014 reached its largest extent since the very start of NASA’s surveillance in the early 1970’s. It’s true. But do fact really matter? True believers in the cult will simply respond by asking, “Why would we be interested in a trifling fact like that? How could it concern us? We already believe in global warming”.
The important fact is that millennial cults either have no interest at all in the real world, or deny that it exists, and just like in Pol Pot’s devastating ‘Year Zero’, radical millennials will eventually demand that “conventional reality” be destroyed. They insist that, “it is evil”, or “it is haram”, and must be disposed of ‘for the greater good’. By denying and attacking reality – at one and the same time, the magical underpinning of millennial cults reveals itself. Reality is first denied as existing, but then it is attacked.
THATCHER’S CHEMISTRY CLASS: Junk science has been the chief driver of the global warming cult.
The issues and subjects may change through the ages, but the principle techniques of cult leaders remain the same. In Thatcher’s case, with her vaunted scientific background of a college chemistry degree, all she had to do was deny reality before attacking Britain’s youth who should “get out and clean windows” as part of her magical “Neolib” revolution.
Millennial cults in Europe date back at least 1000 years and the year 1000 AD was also a key moment simply due to the number 1,000 and its supposed magical powers, from which the word “millennial” is derived.
Certainly the role of Peter the Hermit “calling” the First Crusade of 1095 long before the Catholic hierarchy, was a millennial cult leading to the death of probably more than 75,000 persons who marched, in winter, across Europe and through modern Turkey to the Holy Lands, apparently to fight Satan.
Certainly the religious wars inside Europe and the peasants revolts stretching for more than 250 years in Medieval Europe, were Millennarian in nature.
These religious conflicts and peasant revolts were often merged, or fused into a direct challenge to established Church hierarchies, political authorities and the rich elites of the day. The Schwarmerei Riots and low-level civil wars in future Germany and outside it, so frightened both Protestant and Catholic ideologues that they reaffirmed Saint Augustine’s anti-millennialism. One reason was that all religious hierarchies were at that time either the State themselves or close-linked to it. Each of the three main Protestant traditions of the sixteenth century – Lutheran, Calvinist and Anglican – had the support of the state and reacted to the threat of Millenarianism “from below”.
Both Luther and Calvin were fearful and suspicious of millennial riot and rebellion. Calvin declared that those who engaged in “calculations based on the Apocalyptic portions of Scripture” were ignorant and malicious, and even Satanic. In the same way today, some moderate Islamic theologists condemn the apocalyptic killing spree of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.
In many cases in Medieval Europe reaction and response by the state led to show trials of millennarians, often followed by their public execution, such as the Augsburg Confessions and the Westminster
Confessions. Also in the Protestant case, the challenge of millennial movements led to the identification of the Papacy with the Antichrist. Canonical doctrine was less-than-subtly altered, for example what became Lutheranism.
FIGHTING CLIMATE CHANGE: How can you fight a theoretical concept? Doesn’t matter – the millennials are really into it.
Saving Polar Bears in New York
As we know from the rather feeble run-up to the UN-sponsored climate conference in New York – hosted by fringe entertainer Ban-Ki Moon this week, it is still cool to save polar bears from too much heat. Warmers still insist that the furry ones are threatened by coal-fired power plants thousands of miles away from them, which “spew” carbon dioxide into the atmosphere the same way that Al Gore’s Gulfstream 5 jet “spews” jet fuel kerosene residues into the lower stratosphere. It’s also worth pointing out with all cults, the cult leaders are normally given a ‘free pass’ by the congregation, like Al Gore.
Coinciding with the UN festivities in New York this week was the Big Giant Climate March in New York. In order to survive, the climate cult has had to absorb more traditional environmental concerns like ‘social justice’ (making climate a class issue), clean air, toxic pollution and ‘corporate greed’. Even though these are mostly unrelated in fact and theory, they are all piled-up under one banner: “Climate Change”. Just ask any cult member, “Hey, isn’t the earth’s climate is always changing?” – and you will probably get either a nasty, or a blank look in return. They’re too busy marching for new Carbon Taxes and more apocalypse mongering. Remember: no more reality.
Millennial cult leaders, in the Medieval European case, often personally profited from deluding “the mass” with the hysteria and hypocrisy that they “spewed”. Sure, cults need money, but so do churches. If they are really successful they will have customised economies attached to them. No cult has seen anything quite like the Global Warming-Climate Change gravy train, complete with its own commodity/currency by somehow reverse-monetizing carbon emissions. On top of this you are an endless career/jobs machine for Green Mandarins working as academics, professional activists, community organisers, journalists, NGO operators, regulators, auditors, inspectors and charity muggers – all working in congress to keep their show on the road.
Mrs Thatcher was almost inevitably an early bombastic proponent of extreme junk science theories predicting the Heat Death of the Planet, of the same type that presidents Obama, Hollande, and a decreasing number of other learn-nothing-forget nothing “leaders” still find time to gurgle about in 2014.
Man-Made Global Warming Theory, which was the core engine of the cult no longer draws the same crowd it did in back in 2006 or 2008, but it’s still brings in residuals from it’s brand recognition. Millennials and present school leavers were more or less brain washed with the creed during their school years so their politics on the matter are hard-wired compared to older individuals. Still, politicians will keep surfing that wave of brand awareness until it’s so small that all the political leverage is gone. Like the neoliberal cult of economic revolution of the 1980s, the elite global warming cult rapidly became millennarian, that is “extra historic” – and thus totally immune to such trifling things as facts and figures.
In the space of less than 20 years the global warming doctrine, its creed and cult mutated and transformed itself into a fact-free set of beliefs – or a faith-based doctrine. You believe it because, ‘it’s what you feel is right’. For example president Obama’s chief scientific adviser, John P. Holdren, could say that extreme cold weather in the USA in early 2014 “was due to global warming” and true believers will not question his inverted logic (commonly referred to as a scientific ‘work around’). Don’t forget the “Vortex Effect”!
We might imagine that if there was extreme hot weather, he could say this is due to global cooling (laugh now, or cry later).
Here’s a quick IQ pop-quiz for climate marchers and junk scientists: which is a bigger threat to human existence on earth, global warming, or global cooling? Here’s a hint – one of these you can grow food, and the other you can’t.
MILLENNIAL PERFORMANCE ART: Lots of performance art, no results. But millennials are having fun, and that’s what counts.
Another characteristic of the elite global warming cult is that it is rigorously illogical and notably features the desired and magical “return to a stable climate past” – a totally undefined or mystic past which in simple reality has never, ever existed. There was no long idyllic period when climate was “only normal”. As we can imagine, the return to a past which never existed, and is not given any date or range of “best by” dates, is not only completely absurd but is obviously millennial and can only breed massive confusion.
To probably a large extent, due to this confusion and despite global warming being an elite theme or meme, which is “official” and “backed by the government”, and which is obligatorily and supinely supported by the glove puppet media with “iconic” images of polar bears and coal-fired power plants, neither this cult nor the elite cult of “free flowing markets ensuring prosperity for all” has successfully percolated throughout society. Both claim a lot, but cannot prove anything.
Despite the cult of global warming penetrating the minds of youth in western society of today, it has either been completely rejected, or has had no significant reach in Muslim-dominant societies or in the societies of the giant emerging countries, China and India – whose combined population is nearly 5 times that of the European Union – where global warming remains an official cult and elite creed. In the developing world, the only bandwagon jumpers are those who can see a career in it or some guilt funding from the west.
Outside the west, this cult is perceived as the work of zealots, or western millennariaism. It’s seen as delusional. It profits a high priesthood of liars and fanatics and has a complete contempt for reality.
Yes, this is the age of cults. The only question left is: are you in, or are you out?
READ THE TRUTH ABOUT CLIMATE AT: 21st Century Wire Climate Files