Dr. Juliana Geran Pilon examines the eschatological rhetoric showing up in modern politics.
Is the world getting more dangerous, or does it just seem that way? When evil robots pulverizing entire cities are box office favorites, AI looks capable of spinning out of our control, and cyber warfare threatens anyone and everyone, small wonder it feels apocalyptic. Which is odd when you consider that apokalypsis, in ancient Greek and biblical contexts, simply meant “revelation,” an unveiling, or disclosure (apo, meaning “away” or “off”, and kalypto—”to hide” or “cover”). Whatever happened to progress? The religious connotation of disclosing the time of salvation from worldly misery has devolved rather than evolved. It has come to imply that only Salvation Now can defer the End of Everything. As Middlebury College professors Erik Bleich and Christopher Star found when examining nearly 10,000 articles in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post between January 1, 1980 and December 31, 2023, “[t]he meaning of ‘apocalypse; has… expanded in recent decades from an exclusively religious idea to include other, more human-driven apocalyptic scenarios, such as a ‘nuclear apocalypse,’ a ‘climate apocalypse,’ a ‘COVID-19 apocalypse,’ or an ‘AI apocalypse.’”
Repurposing religious language for political purposes is standard demagogy, but in the post-truth era it has reached a whole new dimension. Exhibit A is arguably uber-cynic Vladimir Putin who, according to two Dutch professors of history, Beatrice de Graaf and Niels Drost, describe in their new book how for the past 15 years, has been styling himself a divinely appointed savior not merely of the Russians but the world. As journalist Barton Swaim wrote in The Wall Street Journal on June 5th, 2026, Dr. De Graaf observed that since winning his second presidential term in 2004, Putin and his immediate circle began to express, “a more eschatological, a more apocalyptic and violent vision.”
A violent vision is surely to be expected from a KGB officer; but eschatological? A word that first appeared in English theological literature during the mid-nineteenth century, derived from ancient Greek eschatos (last, or extreme) and logos (“word,” “reason,” or “the study of…”), it denotes end-of-time religious conceptions. Among them: What happens after we die? What happens after the messiah arrives? Is Putin suggesting that he is himself the messiah? Perish the thought.
It is standard coalition-building: hyperbole for dummies. Domestically, his antics appeal to a motley crew of nationalist Orthodox hardliners, octogenarians longing for Stalin and communism, and even some young people disillusioned by failed “reforms” introduced under the consistently inebriated, oligarch-manipulated, weak-willed Boris Yeltsin. Internationally, he seems to have succeeded in convincing American presidents of both parties that he has turned a new leaf, away from communism. Though unlikely to believe his justification for the relentless bombing of Ukrainian women and children, hospitals and schools as a crusade against “satanic” activity, they are willing to ignore.
Whatever his motivations, his tactics are working. Having “immersed himself in the triad of Russian state power: nationality, autocracy, Orthodoxy,” observes Dr. De Graaf, he justifies the attacks on Ukraine as a “Holy War.” Since the tsar was traditionally considered divine, he was thought to be endowed with “the power to define what is evil.” The diminutive multi-billionaire who murders with impunity, however, is but a prototype of the born-again anti-liberal atheist-in-sacerdotal rhetorical clothing. His former European colonies aren’t fooled, but does the West still remember the ideological history?
