History and Glory

            Columbus  also sought the glory  and integrity of the apocalypse, and as with Himmler and Hitler, the struggle to create a total society created atrocities.  Like Newton after him, he believed the second coming was at hand, and even calculated 150 years to the date of the end, and put together a book, the Book of Prophecy, which claimed the end would come around 1850 and that all the Jews, Heathens and infidels would be destroyed who had not converted.[1] Many in Europe were sure the discovery of the New World was the herald of the New Jerusalem that was predicted in the Revelations of St. John. This book is almost certainly a psychotic document, which, in the hands of an institution as powerful as the church, becomes assimilated to global policies. It erects hatred of the world into a universal principle. In many respects it anticipates the horrors of Columbus to Nagasaki. The apocalyptic myth was graven in the imagination of Columbus and the other early Conquistadors. The myth anticipated, like a rehearsal, the  horror and terrible suffering they themselves would visit on Native Americans and Africans in reality. God was power and glory, and he and those who served him deserved gold. Those who stood in the way of this drive to  glory, truth and power must be infidels, and there was no reason to spare them, since their souls had little or no worth, except perhaps to work them as slaves until they might drop dead.The shadows of Christian and Greek ideals of supreme knowledge are long. The apocalyptic ideals of the French Revolution were both personal and political. On the one hand the symbol of Christ or equivalent symbols of the Goddess of Reason or the belief in total encyclopedic truth inspire the revolutionaries. They long for new life born from the corpse of the old regime, like Christ born from his corpse. But on the other hand, In the hands of Robespierre, the drive for apocalypse means that new life requires murder. The Reign of Terror killed some 40,000. Robespierre would grow increasingly paranoid, as did Stalin and Hitler, as he kills more and more people, trying to make his dream of total knowledge and revolution come true. The same would happen to Napoleon to some degree. The tyranny of the old regime was not ended, despite the change in clocks and calendars and the attempts, by Diderot and others, to create totalistic encyclopedias. The old tyranny was only supplanted by new tyranny.  A few brave men, like Tom Paine, had the insight to see that the apocalyptic drive was mistaken, and protested the Terror. But Paine was thrown into prison by Robespierre for his insight.[2] He nearly died there. Danton was killed for protesting. The same apocalyptic drama and descent into tyranny that occurred in the French Revolution would occur after 1917 in Russia and 1949 in China.

            Himmler expressed the glorious aspect of apocalyptic mass murder, or more accurately, the murderous nature of the search for glory, very well.  Speaking of "the annihilation of the Jewish people" to some SS leaders at a meeting, Himmler denounced the weak hearted who wanted to save "one decent Jew", and exhorted that

 most of you know what it means to see a hundred corpses lie side by side, or five hundred or a thousand. To have stuck this out [ the camps, murdering Jews etc.] and excepting in cases of human weakness, to have kept our integrity, this is what has made us hard. In our history, this is an unwritten or never-to-be-written page of glory[3]

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