"In situations of mass disorientation and anxiety, traditional beliefs about a future golden age or messianic kingdom came to serve as vehicles for social aspirations and animosities," he wrote.
This vision, he suggested, passed among cultures and languages and from religious to secular discourse without losing its coherence or power to jolt the downtrodden to rise up. Messianic leaders like Stalin and Hitler appealed to the deep, biblically inspired belief that after intense struggle history would end, and an elect of believers would inherit paradise.
"The old religious idiom has been replaced by a secular one, and this tends to obscure what otherwise would be obvious," he wrote. "For it is the simple truth that, stripped of their original supernatural sanction, revolutionary millenarianism and mystical anarchism are with us still."
---SPSmith
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