Guest Post: Cameron on Millenarianism and the Paranoid Style
Charles Cameron has been guest blogging here in a series on radical Islamism and terrorism and is now branching out in to more general posts that touch upon apocalyptic or esoteric religious movements.. A former researcher with the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University, his most recent essay, an analysis of the powerpoint presentation of Ft. Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan, appeared in the Small Wars Journal.
Personally, I found this post very interesting because I have seen repeated – and in my view, nutty – speculation or argument by progressives that the U.S. military has a secret fundamentalist Christian agenda. Charles highlights a flipside form of paranoia below reminiscient of Richard Hofstadter:
Millenarianism and the Paranoid Style
by Charles Cameron
A major writing his thesis for the MMAS degree at SAMS / Fort Leavenworth a couple of years back took for his topic “Strategic Implications of American Millennialism”. He wrote about the impact that (eg) the expectation of Christ’s soon return to Jerusalem implying that the Israelis should rebuild the Temple on Temple Mount (and thus arguably displace the al-Aqsa Mosque and Dome of the Rock which currently stand there) might have on peace talks in the ME. And he thought that thinking of this kind was a poor foundation on which to build US foreign policy. I imagine he got the degree, since his monograph has been available on the web along with 2,500 others.
Strategic Implications of American Millennialism
It seems that early this week, a pre-millennialist Christian ran across the document an began to alert others. If you search Google for “Strategic Implications of American Millennialism” today, you’ll get 13,000 hits, including one on the blog of a prominent “prophecy” writer, John McTernan, and another on the “Worldview Matters” podcast of Christian Worldview Network, which offers an interview with McTernan. McTernan claims:
This … is an United States Army report about the literal believers of the Bible and how they affect American foreign policy. It is the most dangerous document to believers that I have ever read in my entire life. After reading this document, it is easy to see the next step would be to eliminate our Constitutional rights and herd us into concentration camps.
So a grad student’s monograph is being taken for something with the authority of a Field Manual, and thousands of Christians are concerned enough that their government is about to intern them that they read the monograph as strong evidence of that theory.
This ties in with late 1990s concerns that FEMA was about to herd people into camps. Indeed, a commenter on McTernan’s blog writes:
Why would the National Guard need so many “Internment/ Resettlement Specialist” for “FEMA camps”…in the USA? This administration recognizes there will be those who WILL NOT compromise their faith, military members included (about 25-50 million Americans according to some articles). So, these people (we) will have to be dealt with. Put two and two together: the radical thinking of this administration and the “FEMA camps” for those that need “reeducation
The FEMA concentration camp story has long legs — I first wrote about it in a paper on “web-based conspiracist and apocalyptic interpretations of the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency” back in 1999, when it was routinely tied in with Y2K concerns — and the degree of “connecting the dots” can be pretty impressive: one commenter on a FEMA camp scare site proclaims:
….the Bush Family are very strong supporters of the new world order and if viewed closely; resembles the Communest [sic] Manifesto
I don’t think we should read the sudden interest in concentration camps for evangelicals as pointing inexorably to some terrifying outcome, but it is becoming part of the scenery. What its impact on military personnel who regard people like McTernan as prophetic voices will be is hard to estimate — but Maj. Stuckert who as far as I can tell is currently deployed to Kabul, is in for a shock when he finds out that a paper he wrote now has him figuring as a principal spokesman for the US Army’s preparations to serve the Antichrist. And the same is presumably true for Col. Stefan J. Banach, the Director of SAMS, who is named as “Responsible Person” on the monograph’s “Report Documentation Page” — who has already fielded at least one irate phone-call on the subject, and is suggested as a target for such calls by McTernan.
One thing that might really help ease the situation would be for DOD or the School of Advanced Military Studies to post a note attached to Maj. Stuckert’s monograph, stating unequivocally that it does not represent Army policy but is one of 2,500 similar theses explored by students in the course of obtaining a degree, and as such presents one student officer’s views only.
December 19th, 2009 at 8:01 am
Heh, back in the late 60’s there were dark rumors that Nixon and Kissinger had concentration camps set up and the roundup of pinko peaceniks was imminent.
December 19th, 2009 at 8:40 pm
Does millenarianism make people paranoid or do paranoid people become millenarianists?
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Apparently the thesis says nothing about concentration camps. That was a gloss by those who were offended by it. This is just too crazy.
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I’m wondering how many millenarianists we have in the military and whether they believe this nonsense.
December 19th, 2009 at 9:15 pm
Good post. Conspiracy theories are a permanent feature of American life. Walter Russell Mead has a brilliant discussion of this in his book Special Providence. The locus of conspiracy was for centuries the Catholic Church, then the Kremlin and communist subversion (which had a fair amount of factual basis), and it has in recent years shifted to the New World Order (George Bush Sr. used this expression and millions of people said "Ah ha! He admitted it!") and international institutions and similar more diffuse sources of danger, real or imagined. The rock-bottom distrust that millions of Americans have of the United States government is nothing new. It takes many odd forms. The TV show "This Week in Bible prophecy", which I don’t think exists anymore, was a fascinating compendium of this kind of thinking.
People of genuine religious belief know that the people who have power and influence in this country consider them to be dangerous, even subhuman, imbeciles. The relentless mockery and contempt shown to Gov. Palin was taken as proof by many that all the powerful institutions in American life are the enemy of millions of people who go to church. It is a short step to thinking that the government would act on this most basic belief of the kind of people who staff its higher ranks, and take steps toward active oppression.
December 19th, 2009 at 9:58 pm
Lex you said: "People of genuine religious belief know that the people who have power and influence in this country consider them to be dangerous, even subhuman, imbeciles." You hit the nail on the head. The step is indeed "short" between observing the treatment of Palin and drawing the conclusion that Christian religious people have no seat in the halls of influence. Of course it doesn’t help that the true "nitwits" among Christian religious people are regarded as representative of the whole. Lex, still reminds me of the danger of ambiguity; the unknowns which cause peoples to follow the wrong gods home (the William Stafford ref). Good post…stay tuned.
December 19th, 2009 at 10:02 pm
While DFW airport was being built Dick Gregory spoke of it at being a concentration camp.
December 19th, 2009 at 11:02 pm
FWIW, there is also some jeering and cheering from those on the "opposite side" of the culture wars:
http://www.witchschool.com/profiles/blogs/strategic-implications-of
December 20th, 2009 at 7:37 pm
"Does millenarianism make people paranoid or do paranoid people become millenarianists?"
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Cheryl asked a great question here. I do not know the demographics of millenarians but my intuition is to say "yes" to both.
December 20th, 2009 at 11:17 pm
Stephen O’Leary, in the opening pages of his Arguing the Apocalypse: A Theory of Millennial Rhetoric, writes that Hofstader "identifies an affinity between the apocalyptic mentality and that of the conspiracy theorist" (p. 7), and later quotes from the book version of Hofstader’s essay, which I don’t have easy access to. The Harper’s version is online, however, and I’ve drawn these paragraphs from it:
And:
So Hofstader thinks he discerns a single "persistent psychic phenomenon" which can express itself either in religious and or political beliefs and movements, which are then labeled as "millennial" (if religious), or "paranoid" or even "conspiracist" is political, the latter distinction being one of apparent degree. As Cheryl points out, the thesis says nothing about concentration camps. But this gloss is not just an add-on, it is a matter of considerable significance — because without a preceding conspiracist sense that American Christians were about to face persecution from their own government, the Luckert monograph would hardly have appeared as the "proof of concept" that to McTernan and others it clearly is. Cheryl’s third point, wondering "how many millenarianists we have in the military and whether they believe this nonsense", opens up a set of issues that I hope to address in a follow-up post.
December 21st, 2009 at 7:27 pm
esoteric mixtures of paranoia, conspiracy, and apocalyptic and millenarian conjecture are routinely evident in the AM radio program "coast to coast" that runs for hours deep into each night on stations across the country (here in los angeles area, on the major talk-radio station). the program (and its website) often concerns UFOs and ghosts. but it also voices guest’s concerns about the "new world order" and secret elites, not to mention gun laws.
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when i’m having difficulty sleeping, it’s more entertaining as a background drone than my usual staples: NPR or BBC news on the FM band. i gather it has quite a following, though i don’t know how to verify that.
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also, btw, here’s an interesting article that just showed up at WSJ about conspiracy thinking by david aaronovitch, based on book he’s done:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704238104574602042125998498.html
December 21st, 2009 at 11:41 pm
Fascinating on several levels, Charles.1: interesting to see the focus on those holy places in the thesis. Do this week’s reactions pick up on that?2: another case of a single military person’s document being assigned to the entire military. I recall similar cases with contingency plans. It’s a form of argument from authority.3: how likely is it that such a textual circulation would have happened, pre-Web?
December 22nd, 2009 at 1:39 am
Thanks for pointing this out. I can only take comfort that these people have marginalized themselves through their extremist rhetoric, but the fact that this guy has such a following does disturb me a little.
December 22nd, 2009 at 7:01 am
Hi, Bryan — glad to see you posting here: .On your first point… The "holy places" gets a bit of a glancing blow in the actual document — he’s just getting into the subject, then pulls back and goes on to something else — but I picked up on it because as you know I think that’s the major flash-point. And he’s read Gershom Gorenberg’s The End of Days and includes it in his bibliography. .Point two.. Yes, I think scenario planning (as an exercise) is sometimes mistaken for intent to act. . Point three? I think the monograph would have been unlikely to surface, pre-web, but if someone had run across it, and pointed it out to an apocalyptically inclined author, it might still have received pretty wide quotation via the printed page. Hal Lindsey, John Hagee and the Left Behind folks sell an impressive number of books…