APOCALYPSE NOW?

December 22, 1999
		Paul Solman takes a look at religious and secular visions of the millennium's meaning.

Online NewsHour Special Report: Year 2000 Problem Dec. 21, 1999: A panel discussion on the status of the Y2K technology problem. Sept. 22, 1999: Senators Bennett and Dodd discuss the findings of their committee's Y2K report. Aug. 5, 1999: A report on hospitals' efforts to prepare for the coming "millennium bug." July 27, 1999: Paul Solman gives a Y2K update as potential problems move from myth to reality. June 1, 1999: A status report on the Y2K computer bug. March 2, 1999: Experts discuss the Senate panel's findings. Dec. 28, 1998: Social Security becomes Y2K compliant. June 11, 1998: A Primer on the Y2K bug. April 28, 1997: A Forum on the Y2K crisis Jan. 13, 1997: Reforming Social Security Browse the NewsHour's Cyberspace coverage   The White House Council on Year 2000 Conversion Dr. Ed Yardeni gives a financial approach to Y2K	ANNOUNCER: In moments, the year 2000 will arrive. In moments, the celebration will reach a fever pitch. In moments, an unprepared world may be plunged into chaos as technology decimates the 2000 time clock. PAUL SOLMAN: The Y2K crisis, as depicted in a cable TV infomercial. The main catalyst was expected to be what many people feared: A computer bug that would fritz out our technology-driven world economy. Of late, however, the focus of such ads has shifted to less mundane causes. But it's still January 1 as an apocalypse. ANNOUNCER: The impending worldwide panic could signal the end of the age, and Christ's glorious return.
	The end of the world as we know it?
	PAUL SOLMAN: Such prophecies aren't restricted to cable TV in America. In Israel, there's talk of rebuilding the Jewish temple in Jerusalem, potentially triggering a holy war with Islam. In China, there's the Falun Gong religious movement. And there's at least one expert who thinks these movements are all related to the phenomenon of millennialism. Medieval historian Richard Landes began as a Y1K expert. His latest book is about a monk who lived at the turn of the last millennium, in the year 1000. But four years ago, Landes founded the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University to chronicle the coming of Y2K. In offices at BU, Landes has built a new millennium archive, bulging with everything from scholarship to schlock. We asked perhaps Y2K's most diligent chronicler to explain the connection between technology and those with apocalyptic visions. Richard Landes, welcome. RICHARD LANDES: Thank you. PAUL SOLMAN: We first ran into your work when we were covering Y2K, the computer bug, and you were writing about it as a millennial phenomenon. What do you mean? RICHARD LANDES: Well, I first heard about it in the fall of 1996, and what struck me was the similarities between Y2K and various kinds of apocalyptic prophecies. And apocalypticism means the expectation that this radical transformation or the end of the world as we know it, is about to happen. And the other thing that struck me was that not only was Y2K in its own right a kind of an apocalyptic prophecy-- true or false, we don't know-- but it was a gold mine for the religious apocalyptic prophets. In other words, one of the basic arguments that religious millennial apocalyptic prophets make is that modernity is Satan's work, that this new world order that's coming is the work of the antichrist, and that all these things that come with modernity like the market and all these new toys and things are all forces of evil in this world. And Y2K was ideal because it not only appealed to their perspective, but it was also something that they could get to non-Christians or non-believers with. PAUL SOLMAN: In terms of the Y2K computer bug, it's not just an apocalyptic fantasy. RICHARD LANDES: No, no, no. That's what's so phenomenal. The point is that to some extent, the... the irony of having our magnificent obsession with the measurement of time, which among other things produced these computers which produced this incredible global culture that we have, but also this Achilles heel to this incredible global culture -- all of that should come down to a knowably dangerous moment at the nanosecond between 1999 and 2000. You know, I'm sorry, that's... that's millennial as far as I'm concerned.
	Millennial moments
	PAUL SOLMAN: To Landes, history's millennial moments haven't always been date related -- moments when, for example, an eclipse would foretell the end of the world. What's different now, Landes thinks, is that people the world over will be fixated on the same moment in time, and one that has long been associated in western culture with apocalyptic visions. SPOKESMAN: It's here. Get ready to meet the lord. He's coming. PAUL SOLMAN: The popular televangelists, Jack and Rexella Van Impe, have attracted an audience of millions with their vision of the 2000th anniversary of Christ's reign on earth. JACK VAN IMPE: When it's here, that's the beginning of the conclusion. REXELLA VAN IMPE: Okay. PAUL SOLMAN: To the Van Impes, it's made explicit in the New Testament, and one of the key events to expect is the sudden departure of true believers for a better place. RICHARD LANDES: There's going to be a seven year tribulation. Terrible time. You know, read the Book of Revelation, the opening of the seals, the stars fall from heaven, disastrous catastrophes -- millions of people dead, and so on and so forth. Just before that, according to one version, we get rapture. The believers get rapture. They get literally physically taken off the planet. SPOKESPERSON: A million conversations will end mid-sentence. Can you imagine that? Mid-sentence. People on television mid- sentence, they're gone. RICHARD LANDES: Halfway through, the antichrist comes, establishes the one world government. At the end of the period, the end of seven years, Jesus returns, destroys the forces of antichrist in the Battle of Armageddon and establishes the millennial kingdom. PAUL SOLMAN: And that's the second coming? RICHARD LANDES: And that's the second coming. And what's nice about Y2K is that if you begin the tribulations in 2000, they end in 2007, which is 40 years after the reunification of Jerusalem in the 1967 war which is their other great millennial time clock. There are no coincidences. Everything is planned by God and everything is a message. And if you know how to read it, you know what to do. PAUL SOLMAN: Now, there are signs galore of the apocalypse. The word means "unveiling," in the new testament's book of revelation: The four horsemen of the apocalypse, the tortures of the dammed, the whore of Babylon, the seven-headed beast, whose mark is 666, the cunning antichrist, who will look a lot like Jesus himself, Satan's agent who conquers the world before losing to Christ himself in the battle of Armageddon. All these have been popular images in western culture, from the renaissance to "the omen." That's Satan's 666 on the scalp of Gregory Peck's son. ACTOR: There is a war going on between angels of light and dark. PAUL SOLMAN: Recently "the omega code," first promoted through evangelical Christian groups, was a hit at the box office, as is the "end of days," in which Arnold Schwarzenegger tangles with the ultimate terminator. ACTOR: How can you expect to beat me when I am forever and you are just a man?
	Clash in the Middle East?
	PAUL SOLMAN: Now all of this should come as no surprise, considering a recent "Newsweek" poll, saying 40 percent of Americans believe the world will end, as revelation describes, in the battle of Armageddon. And many see that battle beginning in the Middle East. In part, that's because some fundamentalist Christians see the founding of the state of Israel as a key precondition for the second coming. Another one is the rebuilding of King Solomon's first Jewish temple in Jerusalem which, according to legend, was rebuilt as the second temple, then destroyed by the Romans in 70 A.D. Only its western or wailing wall is left, where Jews wail over the temple's destruction. These days, some fundamentalist Jews want to rebuild it as the so-called third temple, on the same location as the other two, Jerusalem's temple mount. But that also happens to be the site of one the holiest places in Islam. The mosque on the temple mount, the dome of the rock, built in 687, marks the spot from which, Muslims believe Mohammad ascended to heaven. Now, some say the third temple could be built alongside the mosque, but according to many extremist Jews and Christians... RICHARD LANDES: The mosque would have to go. PAUL SOLMAN: And if that happened? RICHARD LANDES: I think you could expect a major war. PAUL SOLMAN: A major war. RICHARD LANDES: Oh, yeah. PAUL SOLMAN: As a betting man who's slightly disturbed by some of what you're saying here, if I say that Y2K computer bug from the people I've talked to has a degree of seriousness of 3 on a scale of 1 to 10, how serious is the likelihood of a major war in the middle east? RICHARD LANDES: I think the odds that the third temple crowd is actually going to go ahead and try and build the third temple is small, but the odds that we're going to get some serious incidents in Jerusalem, that weird things are going to happen, I think are fairly large. PAUL SOLMAN: Israeli authorities are bracing for the worst next year, when millions of millennial celebrants are expected to visit Jerusalem. Already thousands of devout believers have flocked to the city, among them, members of a Denver- based doomsday cult, concerned Christians, led by Monte Kim Miller, who has predicted that he will die in Jerusalem in December, and be resurrected three days later. Landes and his followers are keeping tabs on such groups. SPOKESMAN: I believe a modern prophet may have an element of manipulating society. PAUL SOLMAN: To those at the center for millennial studies, the biggest fear is that cult leaders could use violence to hasten their dire predictions. RICHARD LANDES: The danger comes when you make a prophecy and it doesn't come about. How do you deal with that? If you've got a sense of humor, you can laugh it off. If you don't, and megalomaniacs tend not to have a good sense of humor about themselves, if you don't, then you feel an enormous amount of aggression. Is that aggression directed inward or outward? If it's inward, you can end up committing suicide, which is aggression against the self. If it's outward, you can end up like the nazis wanting to destroy whole races of people as a way to bring about what isn't happening. PAUL SOLMAN: But if on January 1, 2000, nothing happens, and we don't see people becoming extremely aggressive when their prophecies fail them, then are we okay? RICHARD LANDES: Yeah. See, it's not going to happen right away. I mean it's like that cut that, that doesn't bleed immediately. Because god hasn't delivered the punishing blow the way you handle the delay, God's delay, is you're his agent. You have to deliver the punishing blow, you have to set off the mass destruction that God wants -- Armageddon as proof of prophecy.
	Millennium mayhem
	PAUL SOLMAN: And so millennial scholars like Landes worry that the self- fulfilling prophecy of Armageddon could spell disaster for millennial believers and cultists of many persuasions, many lands, as we all reach a significant date at the same time: The year 2000. PAUL SOLMAN: Is there something about the way the world works scientifically in terms of the powers of destruction that now exist-- nuclear war and so forth-- that makes the year 2000 quite a different matter than previous times? RICHARD LANDES: Yeah, yeah, no absolutely. I mean, in the year 1000, in order to believe the end of the word was coming, you had to believe in God. In the year 2000, you don't have to believe in God to be apocalyptic. And there are all sorts of good scientific reasons to worry that we could self-destruct and what's really sad about it is that at least for the religious, the millennium has an upside as well as a downside. The secular apocalypse is essentially destruction without redemption. PAUL SOLMAN: Richard Landes, thank you very much. RICHARD LANDES: Thank you.