Apocalypse as Archetype
How do we consciously assimilate this dangerous idea before it explodes on us?
I hope you are having a lovely July 4th weekend, celebrating whatever is left to celebrate about America at this strange juncture, or just taking time with friends and family. Below is the continuation of my serialized book, Why We Need an Esoteric Left. In this section (the end of Chapter Two), I take an uneasy and uncomfortable look at the United States’ military integration with Israel, including some dark reveals from the Epstein files. I then return to considering the Apocalypse as a Jungian archetype embedded in the Western Psyche. I argue that only an esoterically informed Left has the intellectual capacity to engage with this archetype at the necessary level of depth to avert the most dire prospects for the mass catastrophe we seem to be rushing toward at high speed. I hope you enjoy it and would love to hear your thoughts and comments on this.
For the authoritarian and Christian-nationalist Right in the United States, Israel is not only a prophetic bellwether. It also provides a working model for a religious ethno-state able to suppress and even eliminate disenfranchised populations with impunity. When figures on the American Right look at Israel’s walls, checkpoints, biometric surveillance, mass detentions, targeted assassinations, and tiered legal system, they don’t see a hellish dystopia. They see a template for what they want to build at home. Within the pending 2027 National Defense Authorization Act, a contested provision known as the United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative seeks to establish a permanent executive office to weld together the two nations’ defense industrial bases across artificial intelligence, autonomous drone networks, and real-time battlefield intelligence.
Surveillance as well as assassination is increasingly automated. In 2024 the Israeli outlet +972 Magazine exposed the military’s use of an artificial-intelligence targeting system called Lavender, which sorted vast quantities of surveillance data to generate lists of tens of thousands of suspected militants, then fed them into the bombing campaign, in many cases tracking targets to their family homes. The American data-analytics firm Palantir, which signed a strategic partnership with Israel’s Ministry of Defense in 2024 “in support of war-related missions,” has denied any role in Lavender specifically. In any case, the same kind of precision surveillance and targeting technologies developed by Palantir are sold to United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement and police departments across the country.
International students have been detained and pushed toward deportation for protesting the war. The State Department runs a program, reported under the name “Catch and Revoke,” that uses artificial intelligence to scan visa-holders’ social media for pro-Palestinian speech. A government that can expel students for protest today has built a procedure it can apply to other dissidents tomorrow.
The alliance is more bizarre and less stable than it appears, because many of the Christian nationalists and White supremacists in the U.S. are also anti-Semites and Nazi sympathizers. Over the last few years, we have watched prominent figures on the Right — among them Elon Musk, Steve Bannon, and Kanye West — make gestures meant to evoke fascist salutes, or express open admiration for Hitler. This would have been inconceivable ten years ago.
When Western governments back Israel’s war and move to silence its critics, they give life to the oldest and most dangerous conspiracy theory in the West: that a hidden Jewish hand governs the world from behind the scenes. While I do not think there is a cabal or a unified, invisible “Jewish power,” there is something extraordinary about the leverage held by this relatively small population. Historically, during the Middle Ages, Jews in Europe were barred from owning land and joining the guilds. They were pushed into finance, trade, the sciences and other forms mental labor — occupations that, with the rise of bourgeois society, constituted the center of a modern economy. Jews attained proficiency in banking, law, media, literature, the sciences, the academy, and other forms of highly rewarded knowledge work. At the same time their marginalized and endangered status intensified their sense of solidarity as a people. Their religious belief in themselves as a “Chosen People” can support a sense of superiority.
One possible danger is that a predatory global elite — one that is multi-ethnic, multi-national, and bound together by nothing but money and appetite — gets stereotyped as “the Jews,” passing on the blame. This could lead to demonization of Jews who have no connection to those elite precincts of power. We are already seeing a rise of hate crimes against Jews around the world. And among that small Jewish power elite, there are some real shadows, as the Jeffrey Epstein files reveal.
