Apocalypse at the Millennium

Summary

Introduction

The closing decade of the twentieth centure witnessed an outpouring of millennial fears and expectations quite unprecedented in the modern world. In an era in which Francis Fukuyama (1993) was celebrating the post-Cold War “end of history” and arch-postmodernist Jean Bauldrillard (1995) was declaring ironically that the year 2000 would not happen—time's arrow having gone into reverse at some point in the 1980s—many, even if they did not embrace a Christian eschatology, still looked towards the transition from 1999 to 2000 (or 2000 to 2001 depending on their position) with a sense of trepidation. This was not, of course, a free-floating anxiety. A number of events that took place, or issues that emerged, in the 1990s played on fears of an apocalyptic dénouement to the century whether by the effects of extreme weather conditions, the AIDS epidemic, ebola and other viruses, the Y2K “Millennium Bug”, variant CJD (Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease), or the actions of some “apocalyptic cult” such as the Branch Davidians, Aum Shinrikyô or the Order of the Solar Temple (see for exle, Dunant and Porter, 1996; Wojcik, 1997; Walliss, 2004). Indeed, to take just the latter example, such was the concern among law enforcement agencies that the shift from 1999/2000 would herald a literal explosion of violence by apocalyptically-minded groups that several, most notably the Federal Bureau of Investigation (2002, 28) and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, produced reports for their agents on what the FBI report, Project Megiddo, referred to as “individuals or domestic extremist groups who profess an apocalyptic view of the millennium or attach special significance to the year 2000”.