With Both Hands

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The Long View

The Long View 2002-04-11: Tobacco, Guns, and Slavery Reparations

This was John's specialty, and it shows. Twelve years later, these topics are still topical, although they have evolved in interesting ways. Tobacco has become quite the pariah following the capitulation of the tobacco companies, but it isn't done yet. Hipsters insist on smoking even though

The Long View: Earthly Powers

Some of John's central ideas about the Papacy are contained herein. The 18th and 19th centuries were a time of rampant nationalism in Europe, and the Pope was the head of the last institution that could effectively resist the nation-state. As the latter half of the nineteenth century

The Long View: Werwolf!

Werwolf wasn't the only partisan organization organized in post-WWII Germany. However, Werwolf was probably the best known. Here, John imagines what might have been if the remaining Nazis in 1945 hadn't been too otherwordly to be effective. Werwolf! The History of the National Socialist Guerrilla Movement,

The Long View 2002-04-03: The Necessary Man

As it turns out, we now have an excellent idea of just what evils were occasioned by deposing tyrants in the Middle East. However, John was correct in pointing out that the Ottomans were less likely to bribe their problems to go annoy their neighbors. Twelve years on, I'

The Long View: Soft Landings

John was an unaffiliated, but not wholly unrespectable scholar, of millennialism and millennial movements. Here is one of his conference papers on millennialism, tying together his interests in millennialism, cyclical models of history, and books. Presented at the Fifth Annual Conference of the Center For Millennial Studies Boston University October

The Long View: Warriors of God

It is hard to remember now, but Palestine was a sleepy backwater in the domains of the Romans, and then the Ottomans for a very long time. It was not locally ruled any time in the previous twenty centuries except for the longer Hasmonean Dynasty and the very brief Bar

The Long View 2002-03-01: Black Easter

Black Easter is one of the most terrifying books I have ever read. I too am glad that most Americans' idea of ritual magic mostly centers around Dungeons & Dragons and Harry Potter. They do not know what they are missing, and the world is a better place for