Prophecies for Empire: the Book of Revelation and National Security

This project brings into focus the inheritance of the Book of Revelation in the narrative structuring of Western military imperialism. I weave genealogies of apocalyptic imaginaries— from Christopher Columbus’ Book of Prophecies into the nuclear age—to contextualize the end times imaginary of the present. As state leaders, military officials, and venture capitalists speak the terms of the Euro-Christian apocalypse to justify war, genocide, and settler-colonialism, they also fortell redemption through a technologically perfected future. I argue that the Book of Revelations and its interpreters provide a formula out of which the national security doctrine makes and withholds personhood; this redemptive campaign characterizes the longue durée Euro-Christian empire, resulting in a necropolitical, technologically driven scheme framed through both moral and divine purposes.