I wish to investigate the existential roots of apocalyptic violence, which implies several questions: 

(1) Can one single out a particular type of violence that can be called “apocalyptic violence” with respect to motivation, legitimization, and character?

(2) What are the existential roots of apocalyptic violence?

(3) If there are existential roots, how can they be detected and put into connection with violent acts?

First: We can observe excesses of violence in the twentieth century as well as during the last two decades that are connected with apocalyptic worldviews; the mass murder of Jews by the National Socialist regime and mass murder of so-called class-enemies by the regimes of Stalin, Mao Zedong and Pol Pot; and the atrocities of al-Qaeda and the so-called Islamic State.

Second: Many apocalyptic texts are charged with violence. The principal source of the western apocalyptic tradition, the Book of Revelation, prophesies the violent destruction of the old world, which is depicted as corrupt and evil--and the extermination of the “evil enemy,” who is guilty of causing the corruption.

Again and again the Revelation describes the destruction of evil men through terrible plagues. Many suffer particularly cruel torments: “And in those days men will seek death and not find it, will long to die, and death will flee from them.” Others will be humiliated even in death: “And their corpses will lie about on the street of the great city. . . . And many will see their corpses for three and a half days and refuse them burial. And those who live on the earth will gloat over them, make merry, and exchange presents.” (Rev. 9:6; 11,8-10)

There is verbal apocalyptic violence and factual apocalyptic violence. Is there a necessary connection between the two? Do apocalyptic worldviews with violent imagery necessarily lead to violent action?

The Revelation of John is the principal source of the apocalyptic tradition in Christianity. There is also a Jewish apocalyptic tradition generally referred to as messianism. And there is an apocalyptic tradition in Islam. These religious apocalyptic visions and worldviews can be distinguished from secular political ones.

The latter originated about two hundred years ago; they influenced the ideologies of modern Nationalism, National Socialism, and Communism. They can be called “apocalyptic” because of the similarity of structure, content and imagery with the religious models, although there is a decisive difference: in religious apocalyptic prophesies the destruction of the old world and the evil enemy is brought about by God himself. Whereas in the secular political apocalypses this task is ascribed to men. Now the agent of salvation is a nation, a social class or a race; the evil enemy is redefined in accordance with each; and the state of salvation is envisioned not as a “heavenly Jerusalem,” but as a “paradise on earth.”

Unfortunately, reality is more complex. There are transitions between religious and political apocalypses. On the one hand, there has been a tradition of quietist apocalypticism, from the Book of Daniel in Judaism and the Revelation of John in Christianity up to the present day; pious sects still quietly waiting for God or the Messiah to end history and carry through the last judgment.

On the other hand, there have been interpretations of apocalyptic prophesies which urge the faithful to assist God and fulfill his intentions by taking up the sword. In Christianity, the Revelation’s prophesy of a Millennium, a paradise on earth under the rule of Christ and the Saints, played an important role from the eleventh to the sixteenth century in numerous religious and social movements. Some took up arms against the official church and ruling powers.

Most famous were the Anabaptists in the city of Münster who established a terrorist religious regime between 1534 and 1535. Something similar we can nowadays observe in Islam. Al-Qaeda and even more so the so-called Islamic State interpret the apocalyptic tradition in Islam in an activist manner, following a-hadith (traditional reports) rather than the Quran. Accordingly, they maintain that the infidels, the kãfir, have to be defeated before the Mahdi can arrive and establish the universal reign of Islam. In the Sunni creed not only Christians and Jews are kãfir, but even Shiite Muslims.

Thus we have, apart from quietist religious apocalypticism, activist religious apocalypticism that uses worldly weapons. And on the side of secular politics, we have not only genuine political apocalypticism, but also political programs and propaganda that use apocalyptic rhetoric just for political purposes. I remind you of Woodrow Wilsons’s apocalyptic rhetoric in World War I, of Ronald Reagan’s condemning the Soviet Union as the “evil empire” in a speech addressing the National Association of Evangelicals (1983), and of George W. Bush’s State of the Union address of 2002 where he described governments which he accused of supporting terrorism and developing weapons of mass destruction as the “axis of evil.” In the following year the war against the Iraq began.

Apocalyptic visions and apocalyptic movements are historical phenomena, each of them has to be seen in its particular historical situation. Nonetheless, there are common features that make them comparable. Apocalyptic speculations emerged primarily in times of crisis, produced by men who felt threatened and humiliated, oppressed and persecuted in all spheres of existence: spiritually, politically, and socially. Convinced of their claim to truth and superiority, they perceived their oppression as undeserved and interpreted their suffering as resulting from life in a world devoid of meaning, utterly corrupt and evil. Such an interpretation fueled their longing for salvation and motivated the prediction that the old world and their oppressors would be destroyed and a new world, in which they would find their rightful place, would be established.

However, the authors of apocalyptic speculations very often tended to overestimate the meaning of their particular historical situation and to exaggerate oppression and persecution. Some political apocalypses even created fictitious scenarios of oppression. Hitler, for instance, denounced the Jews in Mein Kampf as the “evil enemy of mankind.” He and other leading Nazis maintained that the Jews were about to dominate mankind, especially the “Nordic race.” Hitler concluded: “If our people and our country become the victims of these bloodthirsty and greedy Jewish tyrants, the entire world will fall into the clutches of this octopus; but if Germany can free itself from its grasp, then we may regard this greatest of all dangers as eliminated from the whole world.”

We can now answer the questions raised initially. First, the main feature of apocalyptic violence is not outrageous cruelty, as one might assume at first, though apocalyptic violence may be extremely cruel. The main characteristic of apocalyptic violence is its connection with the justification of violence; it is the underlying apocalyptic interpretation of the world that has particular consequences. This interpretation includes the incontrovertible division between the faithful or the representatives of the new society and the enemy, as well as the conviction that the enemy must be destroyed.

The apocalyptic interpretation of the world turns the enemy—the “power of evil”—into something of an abstract category; the enemy has no individual human face. Additionally, the portrayal of the enemies as beasts and vermin or as kãfir deprives them of their human status. These interpretations allows the violence against the enemy to assume a categorical, abstract quality, as exemplified by the factory-like mass-murder of Jews in the extermination camps or the enslavement or murder of women and children by ISIS.

The apocalyptic worldview constitutes a value system that provides meaning for one’s life, rules for one’s behavior, and legitimizes massacres and genocide. The most important feature in this value system is a “superior law” to which the believers and the perpetrators of violence can refer to.

For faithful Nazis this superior law was the “law of race.” For adherents of ISIS it is the purity of Islamic faith and behavior as represented by the sharia and by a-hadith, even more than by the Quran. (The Quran prohibits killing of Muslims and innocent people.) If mass murder is based in a moral code, it is particularly effective.

Whether a certain psychic disposition, particular biographical circumstances, combined with an apocalyptic worldview, almost automatically motivate violent acts, cannot be proven. There is no necessary connection between motive and action, and apocalyptic worldviews do not necessarily lead to violence. Between imagination and real action there is a sphere of existential freedom to use violence or not. What, at the most, we can determine, is a certain difference between the leaders of apocalyptic movements and the actual perpetrators.

The propagators and leaders usually do not commit violent acts themselves. Neither Hitler nor Goebbels killed Jews with their own hands. Nor did Osama bin Laden or Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the commander of the ISIS, participate in beheadings and crucifixions. Many of the leaders, although not all of them, are well educated: Goebbels had a Ph.D., Abu Bakr is a trained theologian. They are intelligent enough to act reasonably and pragmatically at the same time that they believe in their apocalyptic worldview. This is no contradiction.

The perpetrators also believe in the apocalyptic worldview, and behave accordingly, obeying their leaders. Very often they are ill-educated, young men who had problems to start a professional career, and who sometimes had a criminal record. Examples are Rudolf Höess, commander of the Concentration Camp Auschwitz, or Karl Fritzsch, SS-Hauptsturmführer in Auschwitz--who first made use of Cyclon B for gassing Soviet prisoners of war and then Jews. In the twenties, the Nazi party rescued both of them from their predicament.

The terrorists and suicide-bombers of the ISIS often have a similar biographical background: precarious social situation in their teens and as young men, early delinquency, drug dealing, etc., and then the “saving conversion," as it were, to the fundamentalist and apocalyptic version of Islam. Examples are, for al-Qaeda, Abu Mus’ab az-Zarqawi, a particularly brutal terrorist in Syria and Iraq, for ISIS Anis Amri, the terrorist of the Berlin Christmas Market in 2016, or Salman Abedi, the suicide-bomber of Manchester in May 2017.

We may conclude that there are many cases where there are connections between violent acts and an existential background imbued with apocalyptic belief. If we wish to answer the questions raised at the beginning, than we may say that the existential root of violence is indeed the apocalyptic belief of the people who exercise violence, including the articles of faith provided by authoritative interpreters of apocalyptic scriptures.