Still, we can draw a direct line between Chinese medicine (another form of loony magic, at least in almost every form I’ve encountered living here in Korea, where it’s still very big business) and modern arms: sulfur and saltpeter were ingredients in longevity potion research, except their other properties were discovered by accident (ie. big fires) and finally, eventually, put to other uses. So yeah, the roots of this stuff go waaaaay back. Hell, our oldest stories often have coded justifications of rule by the powerful and so on.

I think, on reflection, that what interests me here is the particular flows of influence between imaginative literatures and wider social nuttiness on our social fringes (and seemingly in the halls of power). Also, the degree to which our dominant imaginary genre links to all that. But of course, to do this justice, we should also look back at the stew of where our SFnal ideas come from. The Singularity is often just The Millennium repackaged. (It can be more than that, but it often isn’t.)

This also leads me to the question whether SFnal tropes just adapt worse to non-Western societies than fantasy ones not just because most cultures have a “heroic-adventure” tradition of stories, or because SFnal tropes are so particularly a combination of specific Judeo-Christian, imaginative sensibilities about the world, the future, and so on. Maybe those cultural variables equally affect the adoption rate of SF as an imaginative genre and the rate of development of newer native (or adoption of newer foreign) cults.

Mind, there are exceptions: several cults or new religions have cropped up in Korea, but they usually are syncretic — fusing, say, Christian and Buddhist ideas, or Christian and Korean-Confucian ideas. The Moonies are only the most famous example, but like lots of other “weird” religions in Korea — and unlike Raelism — they’re very clearly offshoots of already-popular religions.

Then again, Christianity here is also very popular and would have been to many Koreans a mere hundred years ago, a new and foreign cult. But then, I’m blabbered about the Confucianization of Korean Christianity elsewhere. (In a post that seems to have gotten lost somewhere along the way.)

Alternatively, they could just go back to Rasputin. And the sort of weird research the Nazis did that inspired Indiana Jones movies.

Where do you draw the line between what are often deemed high-art concepts which influenced political movements, like the concept of the Ubermensch, and their low-art (or art for the masses, since ultimately the distinction is about class) equivalents which did similar things and got their virii into more heads…(I’m resisting uncharitable comparisons…because a lot of sf writers liked that Ubermensch idea).

Ok, I wandered a bit. But do you see my point?

If it’s the latter, well, he perhaps was thinking of a much older precedent?

That was what came to mind first for me, though in that case, the rumors seem to have been spread by Muslims and Hindus in order to motivate the masses for a rebellion.

I bet when Pershing studied history, the dietary taboo bit was actually emphasized as the main cause of the uprising. (It still was when my father studied it in the late early-to-mid-1950s, I think: I seem to remember him telling me so, though my father was in a school in what still was, or very recently had been, depending on what year he studied it, a protectorate of the British Empire. I imagine the British textbooks were different that the American ones, but I’d be curious to see how differently Americans studied British colonial history, given the mess of different sympathies in play: did they sympathize more with the rebellious (but nonwhite) colonials, or the damned British (who are more like us than the Indians)?)

Ah, thus is the stuff of PhD theses in, er, educational history or literature or something. But I just wanna see someone else’s 5-page article on the subject, I don’t want to research it myself. Well, maybe if I had time enough and money to burn.

PS: By the way, Ronson doesn’t mention Pershing or many other precedents for this nuttiness. He seems to want to imply it all starts with The First Earth Battalion, which is unfortunate since the history of nutball ideas and militaries is probably long and very deep. (Hell, I even remember thumbing through some paperback about psychic research behind the Iron Curtain as a kid, when I was still in my Whitley Strieber/Jane Roberts-as-Seth/Erich von Däniken phase…)