Books like The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages

ISIS AND THE TALIBAN – JUST A LITTLE BIT OF HISTORICAL CONTEXTWhat has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.Ecclesiastes 1:9This book is a brilliant account of the really crazy cults which sprang up all over Europe during the Middle Ages. Whatever Isis is now doing, the Christian cults did in the 16th century, although they didn’t have ground to air missiles. I think it’s worth putting Isis into this context. Christianity hardly ever refers to its extremely violent past but it has one all right. I might add that in retrospect it does now look like the Puritans in the English Revolution (and Puritans elsewhere) in the 17th century were the Christian Taliban – in England, for example, they abolished the celebration of Christmas and closed all theatres; and they also smashed what they considered idolatrous images inside churches. Stained glass was out, large public crosses were destroyed. And now back to my usual book-review-as-comedy-sketch mode.****ORIGINAL REVIEW:It's late here, everyone gone to bed. No one here to talk to except my own fears. Such as my fear of becoming caught up in a revolutionary millennial cult in the 14th century. That is a major fear of mine. This was a brilliant yet depressing book. Imagine five hundred David Koreshes, five hundred versions of Jim Jones' People's Temple, five hundred rancid little messiahs running about convincing the pitifully ignorant with their sincere madness and then - well, whoops - establishing themselves a little harem full of buxom hausfraus once they'd taken over some reasonable sized place like Munster or Zaanstadt or Prague. It's kind of interesting and also really fantastically boring to notice that the cardboard prophets of the middle ages did exactly the same thing that little Charlie Manson, David Koresh, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, Elijah Muhammed and all the rest of them did. Once they were boss they wanted to shag lots of women! Makes you think that was the main point, rather than establishing God's kingdom on earth.Plus ca change, plus le meme chose, eh, you bastards?These days you have to be a bit careful with your self-harming but in those days, huh, you had the option of joining any passing procession of flagellants, those classic Disney masochists who walked from place to place whipping each other's backs as they did so - I assume the guy at the end of the line would switch places with someone else or he'd feel all left out - did you ever see that Ken Russell movie called The Devils? If not, you really should - where else are you going to see a whole crowd of naked nuns doing unspeakable things to themselves with crucifixes!! (oh, what's that you say? there's a whole series of that kind of stuff on Redtube? gosh, I can be so naive) - anyway, from what this book says, for about 600 years that's what all of Europe was like - like a Ken Russell film - and just so Americans don't feel smug, America would have been like it too if Europeans would have gone there sooner.I know that my bookshelf is called History Will Teach Us Nothing, which is a nice Sting song (sorry, what was that? what did you say? there is no nice Sting song? What about the one where he mentions Vladimir Nabokov - you must like that one) and also a very true statement, but this history book does teach us something : don't believe anything those mystical 14th century idiot apocalyptical loonies tell you! \ It won't end well!\