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In Reply to: Re: TF had refuge farms in Australia too posted by susie on October 19, 2006 at 22:58:59:
The Pilgrims who first settled our east coast believed they were on a mission from God to build a New Jerusalem in the New World. The historical precedent for this beleif was the Israelites' exodus from Egypt. That, I believe, is one of the cultural threads in our end-of-the-world survivalist thing. Heaven and earth will pass away, but a remenant will survive in the wilderness.
We still have quite a lot of wildnerness in North America.
The U.S. has also given rise to several millinialist movements over our relatively brief history of 230 years, most notably, the Millerites in the 19th century. These folks are the ideological forebearers of Berg & Company. So yeah, the doom-and-destruction survivalist thing is uniquely American in that way.
The way I see Berg's obsessions with the end of the world nowadays is this: He was a narcissist who couldn't imagine the world going on after he died. Knowing he was going to die (like all the rest of humanity), he could only imagine that someone as special as he was would go out with a bang and take the whole magilla along with him. Surely if the center of Berg's universe ceased to exist, then the universe itself must collapse as a result for all the rest of us. It's classic narcissistic thinking.
