ON THE morning of March 20th 1995 your columnist arrived at work to see the pavements outside his office covered with poisoned commuters. Some were unconscious. Some were twitching or choking, like soldiers in a Wilfred Owen poem. Men in hazmat suits were everywhere. Office workers sat in a nearby park repeating like a mantra: “It’s so terrifying.”
It was the worst terrorist attack in modern Japanese history. Members of Aum Shinrikyo, an apocalyptic cult, had released nerve gas on the Tokyo subway. Their targets were crowded trains that converged on Kasumigaseki, in the heart of Japan’s government district. The aim was to kill officials on their way into work, and somehow hasten the end of the world. Twenty-three years later, on July 6th, Shoko Asahara, the bearded guru who masterminded this atrocity, was hanged, along with six accomplices.
He was the first truly modern terrorist. As David Kaplan and Andrew Marshall note in “The Cult at the End of the World”, Aum was the first...Continue reading
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