54. Inside the Insane Doomsday Cult that Tried to Destroy the Planet

In March 1995 members of a doomsday cult released sarin nerve gas on subway lines all across Tokyo killing 13, and injuring more than 1,000 others. Shoko Asahara, the leader of Aum Shinrikyo, taught that an apocalypse would return the world to a pristine state. This end-times ideology eerily mirrored the accelerationist beliefs of the present day technological elites who aim to break down present day economic and social systems to establish a techno-futurist New World Order.Aum Shinrikyo is a cautionary tale of how far independent religious organizations can go to carry out destructive ends. Still, few people know how far the group was really willing to go. Over the course of several years the group raised more than a billion dollars, recruited biological, chemical and nuclear scientists and set them to work developing truly catastrophic plans. They bought a ranch in the Australian outback dedicated to weapons testing. They eventually accumulated thousands of tons of both Sarin and VX. They used the gas in both subway attacks and in targeted murders.While those details are well-known, there is evidence to suggest that Asahara was working on even bigger plans — ones that seemed to be pulled right out of the pages of science fiction. In the early 1990s Aum Shinrikyo sent emissaries into the former Soviet Union to train their group with discarded military weaponry. Intelligence analysis reported that they also made efforts to acquire several of the hundred suitcase sized nuclear weapons that disappeared after the fall of the Berlin wall. The plan may have been to turn the device into a seismic weapons that would set off a cataclysmic earthquake in Japan which, they believed, would also begin the world down the path of nuclear war.In the video above I discuss the evidence, history and science behind tectonic weapons and show how Aum Shinrikyo was probably trying to make one work.While the world ultimately didn’t end, Aum Shinrikyo’s tactics and capabilities need to remain at the front of our mind. The barriers to creating world-ending technologies through gene-editing, autonomous drones, nuclear weaponry and biological agents get lower every year. As more groups adopt extreme ideologies it is easier than ever to find one who might take the next step.#cult #accelrationism #prophecy #aumshinrikyo