When I was younger I wasn't one of those kids that had free reign of watching the telly. I remember being about 6 and sneaking into my brother's room to watch Dead Calm and my mum going ape shit. Robocop was a film that by some miracle I managed to watch the entirety of at a young age and it still kind of disturbs me to this day. By and large though my mum had a good idea what I was up to and did her best to shield me from cinematic horrors, for all the good it did. One thing she was inevitably incapable of however was shielding me from the horrors of the real world and what one human being could do to another. I remember being about 10, and starting to see the world for what it was, the crises in Kosovo and Sarajevo, the chemical attacks on the Kurds, mass starvation and civil war in Ethiopia. Then out of the blue I saw new faces on the television. Not refugees: old ladies in headscarves wailing and bony, bloated children with flies on their face, but instead businessmen and commuters with blood seeping from every orofice, killed on their morning commute to work by an invisible killer. Nerve gas they called it. In no time at all the news was going on about this Japanese death cult that masterminded the attack and wanted nothing more that the apocalypse. Needless to say I was terrified.
Aum Supreme Truth was an international movement boasting hundreds of thousands of initiates with membership including Japanese government officials, Yakuza, and even Russian military officials. A 'blind' guru, Shoko Asahara was the head, and talked constantly of armageddon. The majority of his followers were highly intelligent scientists and engineers, most of them poached from university, jaded by Japanese adult life and seeking some sort of higher purpose. Asahara combined traditional Eastern religion such as Hinduism and Buddhism with apocalyptic Christian Revelations and Science Fiction, citing Shiva as some kind of earthy end-bringer. Aum's beginnings were more modest, but Asahara eventually managed to use the cult as a way of generating millions of Yen in revenue, but it seemed the more scrutiny was put upon the cult, the more Asahara quoted the end times, and apocalyptic war at the hands of Aum as some sort of spiteful retribution on a world-ending scale.
Good news for Holy Terror bands wanting to create an authentic lyrical experience; The Cult at the End of the World is clearly well researched by David Kaplan and Andrew Marshall, with a multitude of accounts from cult members, critics and victims alike. The book explores Asahara's life and the timeline of Aum from it's modest beginnings in a single Yoga class, to a worldwide terrorist organisation responsible for a number of murders spanning years, culminating in a sarin nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway. The relatively short lifespan of Aum is rendered in great detail, and some of the motives for such terrible acts of mass killing are explored as the book progresses. Aum experimented with all sorts of drugs and brain surgery, they lobotomised and permanently disfigured scores of people, and murdered anyone that tried to speak out against them, almost with entire impunity, thanks largely to the inability of the Japanese authorities to pin anything on them (as well as the subterranean ovens Aum disposed of the bodies in). It is truly terrifying to imagine that Aum were in talks with current and ex Russian military personnel with the aim of acquiring long range missiles and even nuclear material. Aum purchased an attack helicopter but never succeeded in constructing it.
The Cult at the End of the World is certainly sensationalist in parts, part of the difficulty in keeping a reader's interest in current affairs books I suppose is to write in such a manner as to maintain interest. One such example is the quote below, which could quite easily chill the blood, especially considering 9/11, 7/7 etc. It is worth keeping in mind just how infrequent terrorist attacks are however, at least in comparison to car accidents, heart attacks, etc. If it's of any comfort, you certainly will die, but it's not that likely going to be from Chechnyan rebels launching mustard gas or the IRA putting the ebola virus in bottles of fanta.
It would be easy to dismiss Aum as a peculiarly Japanese case, and indeed, there are conditions in Japan that shaped the cult's unique character. The straitjacket schools and workplaces, the absentee fathers and alienated youth no doubt helped fuel Shoko Asahara's rise to power. But to suggest that what happened in Japan could not happen elsewhere would be a dangerous mistake. Ineffective and bungling police, fanatic sects, and disaffected scientists are hardly limited to the Japanese.
Aum's forays into conventianal weapons - its explosives and AK47s - were alarming enough, as were the cult's eerie experiments with electrodes, drugs and mind control. But where Asahara and his mad scientists charted new ground was in their pursuit of the weapons of mass destruction. This, unfortunately, will prove Aum Supreme Truth's lasting legacy: to be the first independent group, without state patronage or protection, to produce biochemical weapons on a large scale. Never before had a sub-national group gained access to so deadly an arsenal.
As the Cold War recedes into history, we leave behind a strange stability from the balance of terror that once existed. It was a time of mutually assured destruction, when communist and capitalist superpowers divided the world neatly into two well-controlled camps. Terrorism was by and large state-sponsored and politically motivated. Now, as the new millennium approaches, we face another kind of threat, one of unrestrained killers and renegade states armed with the deadliest substances on Earth.
The word is out. A college education, some basic lab equipment, recipes downloaded from the internet - for the first time, ordinary people can create extraordinary weapons. Technology and training have simply become too widespread, too decentralized to stop a coming era of do-it-yourself machines for mass murder. We are reaching a new stage in terror, in which the most fanatic and unstable among us can acquire the most powerful weapons.
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