Aum Shinrikyo

Abstract: This article discusses the category of 'apocalyptic violence', which has been frequently applied in recent studies of terrorism. It shows that the category is not self-explanatory because apocalyptic literature is traditionally determinist and rather dissuades their readers from taking action. A historical overview demonstrates that revolutionary forms of apocalypticism emerge only in early modernity, when mystical and humanist influences undermined the determinist creed. A more differentiated concept of 'apocalyptic violence' is then tested using the example of several cases of modern terrorism. The result is that the category is meaningful for understanding certain trends within modern terrorism, especially as it captures the symbolic self-interpretation of terrorist groups more adequately than the categories extremism and fundamentalism. However, the article also shows that the category has clear limits and is not suitable for a comprehensive understanding of the motivational and ideological grounds behind terroristic violence.

Terrorism studies has an enduring puzzle: how do terrorist organisations grow, persist and survive? Using the Japanese new religion Aum Shinrikyo as a case study, this thesis posits that three causal mechanisms—cultural transmission, social learning, and folklore—affect terrorist organisations’ survivability, success, or failure. Original contributions to knowledge include a new analytical theory of strategic subcultures in terrorist organisations, new tests using the qualitative methodology of process tracing, and a new causal analysis of Aum Shinrikyo’s initiatory, religious sub-system (which facilitated founder Shoko Asahara’s paranoid delusions, leadership elite deviance, and follower indoctrinability). A new research agenda is also identified.

In March 1995, the Tokyo subway attack by Aum Shinrikyo signaled the emergence of a new global trend in chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear terrorism. In July 2018, Japan executed the group’s leadership,
but it is reemerging both in Japan and overseas. Japan should criminalise Aum Shinrikyo as an organisation and its affiliated entities and continue to work with partners to dismantle the group’s structures overseas.

The following text is an attempt to look at the problem of new religious movements in terms of religious studies analysis. An undertaken analysis was carried out on the example of the syncretic religious group that it was born in Japan in the late 80s - Aum Shinrikyō. The main objective of the research is to reveal the essence of the teaching of religious cult leader Shoko Asahara. It has been applied methodology of the phenomenology of religion, since the text was used a reductionism: the purpose and intent of the author was not only a historical narrative about mentioned group or an attempt to analyze criminological conversations, related to the activities of the group, but only an attempt to look at the essence of faith and doctrine of the sect. As the research base is the foundation of the basic content of the Aum: evolution, silhouette leadership, structure. It all, however, was used in the implementation of the depths of theology movement, a better understanding of the ideological assumptions which, of course, evolved over time. In order to truly bring the pillars of Asahara’s thought, the method used was introspection the structural sources of exposure by the founder of the religious group. This all can pull conclusions about religiousness syncretic religious movements look closer to factors that may affect the acceptance of the proclaimed views and understand the main reasons for the success of this type of new spirituality within, it seemed to be quite a stiff mentality of people with strict religious traditions and cultural, which apparently may seem Japanese citizens.

Sol tabanlı radikal ideolojilerin 1960’lı yıllarda dünya genelinde ağırlık kazanması ile oluşan ortamının Japonya’daki bir yansıması olarak Japon Kızıl Ordusu, zamanının önemli ve tehlikeli terör örgütlerinden biri olarak kabul edilmiştir. 1995 yılında Tokyo’nun en merkezi metro istasyonuna sarin gazı saldırısı düzenleyerek uluslararası gündemde yer bulan Aum Shinrikyo ise, terörist grupların şiddet eylemlerinde ulaşabilecekleri tahmini sınırların yeniden çizilmesine neden olmuştur. Ancak, Japonya’nın geleneksel olarak uyguladığı uzlaşmacı ve yumuşak güç merkezli terörle mücadele politikalarının her iki örgütle mücadelede de kullanıldığı görülmektedir. Bu açıdan makalenin ikinci bölümünde de terör örgütleriyle mücadeleden sorumlu birimlerinin yapılanması ve uyguladıkları stratejiler incelenmiş, terörle mücadelede Japon Hükümetlerinin uyguladığı politikalar, 11 Eylül öncesi ve sonrası olarak iki dönem halinde analiz edilmiştir.

Adnan Oktar (Harun Yahya)

In 2001, jet planes were crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, injuring and killing thousands. In the days following these attacks—totally unexpected in their timing and method, aimed at the world's only superpower—the world began debating the concept of terrorism that lay behind them.
An atmosphere of fear and panic grew, especially in the United States. But that did not last long: Soon the entire world began wondering how best to combat terrorism. No longer could any country stand apart from the fight against terrorism and declare, "Those attacks weren't aimed at us." Citizens of every nation realized that the dark face of terrorism could confront them at any time, whether asleep in their beds, while watching television, taking their children to the park or at work in the office.
The terrorists' aim, they realized, was to paralyze society, making civilians reluctant to venture into the street, much less use public transport or go shopping—in short, to create a permanent climate of fear. As soon as America recovered from the shock of 9/11, it joined a large number of other countries to launch a worldwide war on terrorism. From the beginning, however, officials of this powerful coalition declared openly that it would not be enough for them to fight on the military battlefield alone.
How should the struggle against terrorism be pursued? To answer that question, we need to identify terrorism's roots. To do so, we must examine the course of the past century, during which terrorism first emerged as a major threat.

DUKE University -- The Franklin Humanities Institute

Politics and Religion: a Humanities Futures Cross-Departmental Seminar

December 3, 2014 - 1:00pm - 5:00pm

See more at: http://www.fhi.duke.edu/events/fhi-mellon-seminar-political-theory-religious-studies#sthash.L7JH1kdc.dpuf


A number of eminent philosophers, historians, and political theorists have described modern conceptions of history as secularized apocalypses. They argued that the progressivist ideologies of Enlightenment, positivism and communism had adopted from the apocalypses the linear and future-oriented conception of history and had replaced the expectation of a beyond with the promise of innerwordly fulfillment. Recently, a number of comparative studies on terrorism and sectarian violence have concluded that the one unifying element in such diverse groups as American far-right activists, the Japanese Aum Shinrikyo sect and radical Islamists, is their apocalyptic conception of violence: Religious terrorists see their own activity integrated in the scenario of a global war of good against evil. Employing a similar argument, other researchers have stated that the rhetoric of the Cold War and the “War on Terror” is clearly apocalyptic. Thus the question arises: Is then everything apocalyptic? The apocalypse is certainly in fashion in modern social science. However, some basic paradoxes of the above claims have been almost completely overlooked: How can modern narratives of progress draw on the apocalypses, if apocalypses traditionally offer a narrative of decline? How can activist and revolutionary movements be called apocalyptic, if apocalypses traditionally dissuade their readers from any engagement in politics? If the ideologies of the 19th and 20th centuries result from a secularization of the apocalypse, why are the apocalyptic activists of the early 21st century suddenly religious again? How can it happen that a decidedly Jewish and Christian symbolic tradition becomes integrated into Islamic and even Buddhist narratives? How is it possible that, after two millennia and despite multiple religious, political, social, and cultural transformations, the symbolic lore of the apocalypses is still with us today? My paper will show that there are answers to these questions and that they are highly relevant for modern political science. However, they require two preconditions which are often missing from the way in which political science is practiced and taught at universities today: 1) a long-term historical perspective, which reaches back to the formative periods of symbolic complexes; 2) methodological flexibility, which overcomes the fragmentation of modern academic disciplines.

This article records observations on Aum Shinrikyō and media coverage concerning it, in Japan, notably in the year 1995. At the time, some were asking how specialists in "the study of religions" can react to, and write about activities of urgent social interest. Apart from the immediate documentation,  Aum is  also considered here in the perspective  of the history of religions (for example with respect to its claim to be Buddhist) and an evaluatory stance is adopted on certain matters. It is therefore a case study of how fieldwork in religions can be a responsible and at the same time an independent discipline. Reference to this article should refer to its journal Religion, using the page numbers indicated.

This article analyses the discussion of Aum Shinrikyō in letters to the editor of one of the major Japanese newspapers, Asahi Shinbun, through the method of qualitative content analysis. The examination focuses on two aspects of the letters in order to uncover how Aum is understood and localised in a bigger context: first, how Aum itself is discussed, and second, what topics are brought up in relation to the group. The analysis reveals that Aum was rarely referred to as a cult or a false religion, but more often merely as a religion, which is subsequently associated with negative notions. The majority of letters, however, did not specify the nature of Aum at all. This is congruent with the topics covered in the letters, since the content of a large portion of them is not concerned with Aum directly but with a more abstract critique of society and authorities. Letters to the editor of Asahi Shinbun for a large part do not make use of sensationalist wording, all the while expressing a critical stance towards the movement, and additionally they focus on a critique of the dealings with Aum prior to and after the subway attack in 1995.

Terrorism studies has an enduring puzzle: how do terrorist organisations grow, persist and survive? Using the Japanese new religion Aum Shinrikyo as a case study, this thesis posits that three causal mechanisms—cultural transmission, social learning, and folklore—affect terrorist organisations’ survivability, success, or failure. Original contributions to knowledge include a new analytical theory of strategic subcultures in terrorist organisations, new tests using the qualitative methodology of process tracing, and a new causal analysis of Aum Shinrikyo’s initiatory, religious sub-system (which facilitated founder Shoko Asahara’s paranoid delusions, leadership elite deviance, and follower indoctrinability). A new research agenda is also identified.

This article argues that belonging can be characterized by absence. It explores this as experienced in two different geographical and historical contexts by two groups of actors: members of the early Tibetan diaspora in India (1959–1979) and former members of a religious group (Aum Shinrikyō) in Japan. The absence we conceptualize is double: it is not solely a spatial absence, but also a temporal absence in terms of the irreversibility of time. It is felt and articulated through emotions that play decisive roles in the constitution and sustaining of these communities. These communities as feeling communities are characterized by absence, but absence is simultaneously what makes them a community. This simultaneity allows our actors to create complex temporal frameworks by relating to reimagined pasts, different presents, and potential futures. Therefore, the article contributes to discussions of belonging by retheorizing the relationship between absence, emotions, and time.

It is not an easy task to develop a working framework for analyzing the WMD terrorist threat as inherently, the debate has two sides to be mentioned. In this context, the scope of this article is to search for a better assessment of the threat of WMD terrorism while executing an in-depth analysis of contrasting perspectives belonging to skeptics and conventionals trying to find whether the issue is hype, or not.

The terror program, considered within the framework of Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory, serves to contradict society in many ways, functioning as a form of saturnalia to expose paradox. Though terror and terrorism have roots in antiquity, modern differentiated systems of communication and society’s oppositional/terrorist organizations have evolved into distinct forms, and terrorist events can trigger information processing in a variety of society’s subsystems, including but not limited to the political system. Charles Manson and his Family, considered alongside the groups Aum Shinrikyo and ISIS, serve to illustrate the ongoing terror program as manifest in modern society. Despite the best efforts of security analysts and related system observations, the evolution of these violent communications is highly unpredictable. Though terrorism that achieves quasi-state (‘successful insurgency’) or full state authority (a ‘terror regime’) may reduce complexity or distinctions among modern political, legal or other subsystems, the same destabilizing operations conducted by terrorist organizations that fail to achieve the authority of states may nonetheless influence the increasing complexity of modern society.

Aum Shinrikyō looks set to becoming a textbook case for considering the relationship between a descriptivisst approach to the study of religion and the need for critical awareness and evaluation. Using materials from the field in late 1995, Aum Shinrikyō is characterized and set in perspective, for example in its misleadingly claimed relationship to Buddhism. The impact of the Aum shock on the current religious situation in japan is assessed. In addition an evaluaatory stance is adopted on vaious issues which arise, thereby illustrating how the Religious Studies specialist may proceed in a socially responsible manner without compromising the hard-won independence and integrity of the discipline.

... As Shimada Hiromi later pointed out, the fact that they looked like Aum devotees, who were sometimes shown in the media dressed in white ... Founded in 1969, GLA's aim, according to its Kansai region-based website, is to bring about a revival of “the spirit of compassion as ...