Youth of the Apocalypse.
Part I. Chapter I.

CHILDREN OF WAR

IN the beginning when there was peace, mankind was given the fearful and noble gift of free will. This perfect gift of life was quickly subverted and brought about mankind’s death. Within this gift of freedom there were two paths, two choices: good and evil. Mankind chose evil. As an angel falling from heaven, like lightning the whole of mankind fell into the abyss of corruption and death

As children of war, this is our origin. We have come from thousands of years of sorrows–in hunger, in thirst, in nakedness, in imprisonment, and in death. With every step on mankind’s path of evil, man has almost entirely burned the bridge to his creator. And, in place of the creator, man has enthroned his own imperfect mind, his “system,” his machine.

With this machine, mankind has progressed into regression. The machine has proved dysfunctional and is now totally out of control, victimizing the youth of today. There is not one youth of the Apocalypse that has not been caught in the gears of Nihilism.

From war to war, from genocide to genocide; from holocaust to holocaust, our history can be summed up in one word: Death. From the first tribal wars to the first civil war; from the French Revolution to the Russian Revolution; from the wars of the ancient world to World War II; from Vietnam to the gulag to inner city gang wars, mankind has, in his freedom, chosen this path. Mankind has chosen this war of evil against good.

In this our history and origin, all these wars have come to a bloody end. But there is one war that man started in the beginning that continues unto this generation of youth. Every day, as our world steps further away from truth, the darkness of this war closes in on us. It will continue to become darker until we admit that the war we despise and the hunger and suffering it produces is in the battlefield of our hearts.

This war is not nation against nation or man against man, but is simply: Man against God.

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Chapter II.

APOSTASY

GOD is dead…. God has been dying in the hearts of men since the world began. As time moves on, the state of mankind gets worse. A history course is actually a course in the slow death of God. In the school of Nihilism, it is a course in the destruction of the world. This is our origin as children of war. We were born under the waters of apostasy and were raised to drown, and our many tears are mixed with this ocean.

When Cain murdered his brother Abel, this rain of apostasy began to fall. When the Egyptian Pharaoh enslaved a chosen nation, this cry was heard from beneath this ocean. When the Greek philosopher Socrates voluntarily drank of the cup of death for the sake of truth, his words drown in this poisonous sea. When Christ was crucified, his tears and blood outweighed this ocean.

The Emperor of what was known in the first century as the “whole of civilization” went mad and began to rage against those who sought and loved the truth. Emperor Nero began to play his harp as he watched his own people burn his capital of Rome at his secret command. Out on his balcony, watching the flames and listening to his people cry, he continued to play his harp. At this moment even the waters of apostasy were dried up and were changed into the flames of Nihilism. The frightening part about this history lesson is that this song of insanity has been playing until now, but it has gone from the beauty of a harp to total discord and distortion. Nero’s song was the beginning of the decline of western civilization.

Since then the distortion was amplified by the great schism of 1054 when western civilization broke off from the East. Because of this discord, the western part of the world summoned the “dark ages,” the bloodshed of the Crusades, the Renaissance and its rebirth of paganism. Man’s imperfect mind began to replace the dying God. Science replaced metaphysics; this world overshadowed heaven, and the war grew colder.

We have survived centuries of holocaust and are barely alive. We have lived through the philosophies of Voltaire and Rousseau, and witnessed the bloodshed of their philosophy in revolution.³ We have seen the old order of morality and tradition slain by their “new order.”⁴ We have experienced the ideas of Darwin and have embraced this faith by the masses; we have seen a glimpse of his ideas through the eyes of Karl Marx when, inspired by Darwin, he said, “The idea of God must be destroyed.” And Karl Marx’s son-in-law summed up the philosophy of the times when he said, “Darwin’s Origin of the Species took away from God His role as creator in the organic world.”⁵ Lenin and Stalin were then given the keys to the ‘kingdom” of this world. Stalin was a student of theology when he heard Darwin’s popular writings. He then came to the logical conclusion that people are the result of an evolutionary process in which ruthless competition reigns.⁶ This is the modern reality of “survival of the fittest” With this philosophy Stalin slaughtered over 40 million of his own people with the most cruel forms of torture ever known.

Just less than two thousand years after Nero played his song of destruction, the twentieth century mad prophet and philosopher of Nihilism, Friedrich Nietzsche, struck up the same song, stoking the same flame to burn even hotter. It was he who pronounced God “DOA” by his contempt of religion in general, and Christianity in particular. He’s the one who delivered the devastating blow to those who believed in God by saying, “God is Dead.” Nietzsche wanted to look life square in the eye, with no God to obstruct his vision, and what he saw was agonizing to his mind.

Nietzsche’s writings and philosophy opened the gates of hell not only to the belief in the non-existence of truth, but with his ideas of Nihilism he gave the long-awaited justification of murder. At the beginning of the twentieth century a certain man drew inspiration from what he read in Nietzsche’s philosophy and acted on this inspiration. This was Adolf Hitler.⁷ After reading Nietzsche’s philosophy that the inferior and the weak should be destroyed, Hitler personified the “superman” in his will for power and brought humanity to it’s knees. He, like Nero, burned his own people in his “Holocaust,” and fought mercilessly to be ruler of the world. Thus he introduced a second “World War.”

It was war that gave birth to the first “counter-cultures,” the first acceptable rebellions on a popular scale, the first protests of the “Beat Generation” and the new style of music called “Jazz” and later, “Blues.” They sang the songs that were the voice of a confused search for answers amidst a world of violence. They would detach themselves from the ways of the “modern” world that made no sense. But the cry in the progression of music got louder with the birth of “rebellious” music with a hard edge, called “Rock n’ roll,” or just “Rock.” It wasn’t long after this that the arguably most popular band in the world, The Beatles, made the statement that summed up the spirit of the times: “We’re more popular than Jesus Christ.”⁸

And then again war gave birth to another “counter-culture” and took it miles further than the “Beats,” with even greater ideals, yet still not fully defined. This “counter-culture” was called the “Hippie movement.” With “free love” they gave birth to the untraceable array of fashions and movements that comprised popular culture from the 20th century up to today. The generation of youth, today with the “counter-cultures” of outcasts, metal-heads, death-metalheads, punks, skins, crusts, hard-core kids, skaters, gangsters, ghetto youth, mods, scenesters, stoners, junkies, etc comprise this generation in search of identity, Generation X.[***]

Through all these different movements there is one element that ties them all together. There is one common cry; there is one message that they all preach: Nihilism. As time moves on the confusion increases and the machine gains speed, working harder and faster. The youth of today can’t help but be burned and scarred for life by this machine. There is no one to tell us that the fire burns; thus we must learn the hard way and hope that we don’t die in the process.

It’s too easy to say that we (the children of the modern age) are not affected by the history of Nihilism, yet we sit in ashes: an abandoned child in a wasteland of apostasy, lonely survivors of centuries of holocaust with no one to point in the direction of home, for all has been destroyed.

Nietzsche, the first voice of Generation X, in a frightening way portrayed these godless times and defined the experience if the youth of today in his parable, “The Madman”:

“Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the marketplace and cried incessantly, ‘I’m looking for God, I’m looking for God!’ As many of those who did not believe in God were standing together there, he excited considerable laughter. ‘Why, did he get lost?’ said one. ‘Did he lose his way like a child?’ said another. ‘Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? Or emigrated?’ Thus they yelled and laughed. The madman sprang into their midst and pierced them with his glances.

“‘Whither is God?’ he cried. ‘I shall tell you. We have killed him‚ you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backwards, sideways, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night and more night coming on all the time?  Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of God’s decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, comfort ourselves? What was holiest and most powerful of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed to great for us? Must not we ourselves become gods simply to seem worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever will be born after us‚ for the sake of this deed, he will be part of a higher history than all history hitherto.’

“Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they too were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke and went out….”

The youth of today also seem to have frantically searched for God, but in the innocence of their youth the world told them with laughter: “Why, did he get lost?” This, they threw their lantern to the ground and it too went out.