The Other, Forgotten Apocalypse of 2011
Oakland minister Harold Camping is betting that the world will end at the close of the work week—although he does seem quite a bit less certain this time around.
Earlier this year, Camping captured the intrigue of North American cynics, believers, and the generally curious alike with his end-of-days prediction and the rapture of all repentant Christians on May 21, 2011. Those he managed to convince donated tens of millions of dollars from their emptied bank accounts, dropped out of school, and left their jobs in order to warn others of the impending destruction. On the morning of May 22, the credulity of Camping’s followers left them to be derided or pitied, and Camping himself allowed that he was “flabbergasted.” The apocalypse didn’t come. In the minds of many, they simply had been duped.
But this is only part of the story; specifically, the Western part of the story. On the other side of the world, there were some for whom the Apocalypse not only came, it arrived early.
A Land of Their Own
In late April and early May 2011 thousands of Christians gathered to await a cataclysmic event. They had journeyed to a hilltop in the rural north-western highlands of Dien Bien, Vietnam. Translated short wave radio broadcasts sponsored by Camping’s Family Radio told them that the land of the sinful would be destroyed. The righteous, those who had accepted God’s forgiveness offered in Jesus Christ, would be saved in this radical reordering. That would give the Hmong what they have been waiting for — a land of their own. The promised apocalyptic reordering was good news.
They did not have to look far to set their sights on who stood in the way of their promised land. Vietnamese government troops, ordered to put down the Hmong “uprising”, arrived in early May. What followed was a rare, violent confrontation between the Hmong and the Vietnamese government.