I would be well beyond stunned if anyone here besides me has ever heard of John Reilly. He was not an "important" thinker in the sense of Christopher Hitchens or Noam Chomsky, and my familiarity with his work was a matter of chance as much as anything. I can forgive anyone who wonders why I am posting this here. The answer, I'm afraid, is deeply personal.JOHN J. REILLY, JERSEY CITY, John J. Reilly of Jersey City, 58, passed away on May 30, 2012. Beloved son of Jean Reilly (nee Harkins) and the late John Reilly, dear brother of Donna Reilly (Dennis Goonan), Mary Spence (Jack Spence), Nancy Reilly Zollo (Louis Zollo) and Nora Reilly, and uncle to David, Jennifer, Elizabeth, Kathryn and Michael, he was also cherished by many compassionate friends, especially those with whom he worshiped at Holy Rosary Church. After graduating from St. Peter's College and earning his law degree from Georgetown University, he embarked upon a career as a writer, editor and attorney. His keen intellect and wry sense of humor resulted in many publications and a world-wide network of correspondents. His intellectual pre-occupations ranged from theology and in particular eschatology to politics, alternative history, and the philosophy of science and literature. He published four books including Apocalypse and Future, Notes on the Cultural History of the 21st Century. John regularly appeared in First Things, Kirkus Review, and had been an editor at Culture Wars before he with-drew in protest to a drift toward anti-Semitism which he publicly denounced. John also maintained a blog, The Long View, where John serenely surveyed the world and opined that, indeed, everything is going to be ok. John's intellectual interests also expressed themselves in various societies in which he was active including The Inter-national Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations, the Center for Millennial Studies, the Simplified Spelling Society, and American Literacy Counsel. A man of breathtakingly ecumenical feeling, he was without compromise a true and devout Catholic. It must have been his faith and his character formed by it and by his loving family that made him without a doubt the most optimistic expert on apocalyptic movements and dystopias. John explained himself thusly: After long thought, I realized that the most important thing in life is to be helpful. So, I have taken to explaining things, carefully and empathetically, and often at very great length 'Spengler with a Smile' is how I usually characterize the organizing principle. The loss of John's self effacing cheerful genius has left the world a darker place and for those who were privileged to share his company, a son, brother and friend whose absence will always be felt.
Many years ago, I was a newly-minted college Freshman let loose on a school in northeastern Los Angeles. My very first week of classes was truncated abruptly on its second day when 9/11 happened, and threw everything I had previously believed regarding the workings of the wider world out the window. The following months, roughly between 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq were, for me, transformative in a way I did not appreciate then. I saw students marching in solidarity with the Taliban, watched flag burnings and angry demonstrations, and heard much vile invective directed at those dissenting from such opinions (such as myself) that I'm sure everyone involved regrets to this day (we were all foolish college students, after all). My previous unthinking adherence to "Liberalism" (a concept I did not understand well enough to truly claim membership in) was progressively exploded in a series of strident, sometimes bitter, and occasionally even violent clashes. By the standards of what many, even on this board went through, such troubles were minor, but to me, at the time, they were significant. My car was vandalized, my life threatened by students and professors, and a burning rock was thrown through my window as I slept, all the perpetrators of which were officially excused because they were liberal and I was no longer. A man I had considered a friend attempted to poison to me in order to prevent me from "corrupting the country with Republican thought". These events, combined with the turmoil of the times, detached me from my previous intellectual underpinnings, and left me and the rest of us non-liberals with no anchor point. Most of the rest of the conservatives in my school became thoughtless neo-cons, doling out the same treatment they had received in equal measure, setting themselves against something rather than for it.
Maybe I did too. We were all 18-22 year olds, not an age gifted with wisdom and discretion. But about three months after 9/11, I encountered the writings of John Reilly. First through his book reviews and polemical essays, and later through the periodic blog he kept concerning the great events of the day, and the philosophical underpinnings he ascribed to them. I had no idea who he was, just some anonymous face on the internet, but his writings spoke to me in ways that I had never before encountered. For one thing, he was easily the most erudite conservative thinker I had until that point ever encountered. Obviously one could point to others of greater stature and poetic turn of phrase, but my understanding of conservatism was Rush Limbaugh, and Reilly was to him as the Taj Mahal was to a mud hut. His writing was witty and complex, layered with esoteric references that he seemed to trust that you would either catch or look up on your own time, but never strident. Most polemical writers seem to be really screaming through their books, page after page of invective relentlessly drumming home points against some imagined enemy who obediently stands and is defeated. Reilly instead would disarm those he disagreed with with a single turn of phrase, exploding their buffoonery without actually dismissing the statements that the author made, preferring instead to take what was valuable (particularly in the realm of research), and selectively line-item-dispose of the idiocy surrounding it. Several of his more prominent quotes made it into my everyday lexicon, much to the confusion of many, I'm sure.
But it was the intellectualism of his work, coupled with the sheer breadth of study within his analyses that really hooked me. Reilly was the one who introduced me to the very concept of Macrohistory as a tool of historical (and in his case, futurist) analysis. Through him, I discovered the Helixical model of history that I still subscribe to (though not precisely in the way he did), as well as historical disciplines such as Eschatology that added great nuance to my understanding of the dates and events I had been researching for my degree. He was the first (and one of the only) historians I ever encountered who truly appreciated Alternate History (one of my passions) not merely as a childish game but as an invaluable tool for the study of Macrohistory. After having had so many professors ridicule alt-history to my face as pernicious, vile, and corrupting (in some cases in those exact terms), I found in the works of Mr. Reilly an analysis no less serious than that given to traditional historical models. Moreover, his overall models of political thought and history, though unquestionably conservative (heavily influenced no doubt by his devout Catholicism), were cogent, well-reasoned, complicated, and founded in sound principles and values I respected and eventually found I shared. In a world where both Liberals and Conservatives (as I knew them) expended all their efforts to define themselves against things in increasingly doom-laden regalia, it was beyond refreshing to encounter a thinker who not only seemed to effortlessly square the circle of progress and tradition, but posited (and in fact, argued the inevitability of) a future that one might wish to stick around long enough to see. Every other intellectual I knew of was so busy trying to describe the dystopian disasters that would overcome the world if their opponents "won" that they could not offer any compelling reason to endorse their method of thinking beyond "those who are against me rape puppies". Though he had strong opinions, Reilly wished, as I did, to speak of things other than puppy rape and the immorality of people whom he disliked.
I did not follow Mr. Reilly forever, nor in all things. He was, and remained always, Pro-Life (again, the Catholic in him was no doubt speaking). I was, and remain, Pro-Choice. He and I parted ways around 2006 or 7 on the issue of the continued War in Iraq, and its macro-historical meaning. He was, at least in passing, attached to causes that were to me either meaningless (Latin Mass in the Catholic Church) or entirely wrong-headed (English Spelling Reform). Eventually, I diverged from his models of Macrohistory (Reilly was a high apostle of Spenglerian-Cyclical history, while I gravitated to the straight-end of the Helixical spectrum, spiced with a dash of the Great Man theory). But never did I dispense with his wit and intellectual verve entirely. I avidly read everything he posted or published, even on subjects I had no knowledge of or interest in. More often than not, he expanded my intellectual horizons this way.
John Reilly's passing will not be noticed by anyone on the national scale. CNN or Fox will offer him no tributes. The torchbearers of the modern political system, be they brilliant or inept, have likely never heard his name. I don't imagine any of you ever have. But for whatever it might or might not be worth, John Reilly was one of the reasons I became the person I am. His work shaped my thoughts for a decade, and his level-headed, reasonable analysis, come hell or high water, will be sorely missed by me if not by the wider world. He was to this day the only Conservative academic I could point to without hesitation as a man worth reading and considering whenever I was asked why I persisted in labeling myself one. For his insight, wisdom, intellect, humor, and skill at writing, I shall miss him dearly.
John's website, in all its laughable ineptitude (the thing looks like it was designed in 1995 and never touched again), can be found here. And so, rather than ramble further, I'd just like to leave you all with a small selection of some of my favorite quotes of his, drawn from essays and reviews he wrote on any number of subjects:
From his essay on If the July 20 Plot had Succeeded
My guess is that the end result of von Stauffenberg's bomb would have been to bring Himmler to power. (This was a possibility of which the conspirators were aware, and which apparently stayed their hand at earlier points in the war.) It is not impossible to imagine Himmler negotiating peace with either east or west. Of course, it is also not impossible to imagine him using nerve gas on the eastern front. For that matter, it is not impossible to imagine him making human sacrifices to Odin under the Brandenberg Gate. Perhaps the oddest fact about the very odd history of Nazi Germany is that Hitler was a moderate Nazi. Far more than Goebbels or Roehm, say, he was content to let civil society be, so long as his primary goals of expansion in the east and the extermination of the Jews were carried forward. Himmler, in contrast, may have been the most radical Nazi of them all. The regime he might have created would not have lasted long, but it would have been uniquely extreme.
From a review of Gavriel Rosenfeld's The World Hitler Never Made
From an essay on the Turner DiariesEvery generation gets the space invaders it deserves. In H. G. Wells’s day, they were aggressive railroad trestles armed with late Industrial Revolution death rays and poison gas. By the 1950s, they were subversive vegetable bodysnatchers that tried to appear 200% American. Now comes Gavriel Rosenfeld, a historian at Fairfield University who specializes in the postwar reception of the Third Reich, to propose that every generation gets the alternative Hitler it deserves. We can learn quite a lot about how Western society has dealt with the memory of the Nazi regime, he suggests, by examining the speculations that have appeared over the years about how that stretch of history might have been different. Most important, by noting how these speculations have changed, we can make some useful inferences about the working of historical memory and about the political cultures of the several nations in which these speculations have appeared.
[...]
Finally, there is the fate of Hitler himself. In his earliest postwar allohistorical incarnations, he is up to his old tricks: inciting neofascist movements and devising superweapons in jungle exile; in one American television drama he is the colleague of the insidious Dr. Fu Manchu. By the 1970s, he is portrayed as a decrepit old man, almost pitiable. Revenge against such a creature seems irrelevant in comparison to the magnitude of his crimes. In his most recent metamorphosis, though, he meets as strange a fate as any allohistorical scenario: he has become a clown. Increasingly over the last 30 years, der Führer has been appearing in comedy sketches and comic books, where he displays a short temper and a certain talent for explosive epigram.
Hitler’s final state may be that of Mad Baggins, who, as Tolkien tells us, used to vanish with a flash and bang in fireside stories and became a favorite character of legend after all the true events were forgotten.
It may be allohistory, but you can’t make this stuff up.
The true participants in the cosmic drama are the members of the Order and the (presumably Jewish) masters of the System. The mass of the people, even of the racially favored, is simply the medium in which these two elites fight. There is a strong anarchist streak in the strategy of the Organization. While the Organization is of course closely disciplined itself, for society as a whole the principle is "the worse the better." The assumption is that very few people really have political opinions, but simply support the powers-that-be because that is the easiest way to remain comfortable. Revolutionaries should therefore attack people's livelihoods, because then the people will have no reason to support the system. It should also seek to kill prominent establishment figures of all descriptions, simply to demoralize the rest.
When there is sufficient chaos, the next step is not persuasion but fear. That is why the Organization begins its administration in southern California with public mass executions. Turner sees the value of the Stalinist principle that the law should be so phrased that anyone can be arrested at any time. The fact that almost everyone is a "race-traitor" for having cooperated with the System is necessary to help establish the new regime. The Organization and the Order do, of course, need to recruit. However, even when the regime is in power, it is no part of statecraft to seek popularity in the electoral sense.
Despite the many connections between "The Turner Diaries" and familiar books and ideas, even the best-informed readers are likely to find that their horror is tinged with puzzlement. The ability to compile an implied bibliography for a book is not the same as understanding it. Where does this story come from? The killing of the Jews is nowhere argued for: it is just assumed to be obviously the proper thing to do. One can only assume that this is the case among the audience for which it was written. As to the book as an apocalyptic document, we are faced again, on a smaller scale, with the mystery that surrounds the Third Reich itself. What is the great historical imperative that made all this misery necessary? What were they really trying to do?
There is a type of nightmare in which fear after fear is realized and then finally the monster catches you. "The Turner Diaries" has this quality. It starts with a liquor store robbery and ends with the incineration of most of Eurasia. The book is not hard to read, but the experience will please few people. The problem is that it is not safe to simply turn the book over to the psychologists. The nightmare has repeatedly proven its capacity to leak into daylight.
From a review of Niel Fergusson's The Pity of War
Interesting though they are, these special studies are deployed in support of what is not just a thesis about the origins of the First World War, but what in effect is a theory of history. Ferguson apparently does not like "deep causes." No historical trends and movements of history for him. Apparently, even notions like exhaustion and despair are too metaphysical. The only kind of historical causation he seems altogether willing to credit requires specific people making an explicit decision on a particular occasion. (It helps if the relevant discussions are minuted and the minutes are time-stamped.) The outcome of such a decision will never be "inevitable," because "other choices were possible." This goes beyond the documentary approach to research. What we are dealing with here is the "Stupid Man Theory of History."
One stupid man was General Erich Ludendorff, who was in effect the military dictator of Germany in the final stages of the war. According to Ferguson, the Germans did not seek an armistice in the fall of 1918 because they were starving from the blockade; Ferguson seeks to prove statistically that man can live on potatoes alone. Germany's Austro-Hungarian allies were suing for terms? So what? Incredibly, he also dismisses the effect of the British Summer Offensive and the fact that large number of German soldiers had been surrendering since August. Hadn't the Germans in fact succeeded in reestablishing their line?
The reason for the collapse was that Ludendorff, in a fit of panic that Ferguson renders inexplicable, offered his resignation to the Kaiser in August. It was rejected, but the German government began seeking an armistice. Long before the official announcement of negotiations in October, the German armies lost interest in fighting. Some surrendered, some just went home. There was "another choice" that Ludendorff should have made, according to Ferguson. The Germans had more than enough material and manpower to conduct an orderly retreat from Belgium, the violation of whose sovereignty was the nominal reason for British belligerency. Then they could have established impregnable defenses on their own borders and offered to negotiate a peace on the basis of the status quo ante in the West.
There is a sense, I suppose, in which such a course of action would have been possible. It would also have been possible for pigs to fly in those days by loading them into the muzzles of Big Berthas. That opportunity was missed, too.
And finally, from a review of Frank McLynn's Marcus Aurelius: A Life
Requiescat In Pace, John J. Reilly. 1954-2012However, the author repeatedly reminds us that Marcus was on the side of the “big battalions,” of the class of large landholders for whose benefit the empire more or less openly operated. Even the kind of land reform that had occurred at earlier stages of the empire seemed beyond the range of possibility, or maybe beyond the range of imagination. Citizenship became increasingly devalued as the empire aged. In the first half of the first century, the author reminds us, the Roman citizenship even of the provincial tent-maker St. Paul was enough to activate an elaborate system of due process that kept him alive for many months until he could be tried at Rome. In Marcus's day, such a man would have been given a short hearing locally and probably executed on the spot. A few decades after Marcus, and citizenship would be bestowed on all freemen in the empire alike, not as a matter of civil equality but to spread the liability for direct imperial taxes. Under Marcus, the law increasingly recognized wealth and birth as dispositive of the rights individuals enjoyed and the duties to which they were obligated. A process of 500 years of legal evolution toward universal citizenship reached its logical limit at about the time it became irrelevant. This was just the kind of phenomenon that Marcus's anti-historicist education disabled him from seeing.
Keeping as always his attention on the things he could actually control, Marcus adopted one Lucius Verus as his junior colleague. He thereby honored Antonius's wish to honor the plan of Hadrian to include Lucius in the succession plan, though Hadrian seems to have been the only person in antiquity who saw much merit in Lucius. Lucius was not a vicious man, but he was a party animal (“pansexual debauchee” in the author's delicate phrase). The emperors maintained separate courts at Rome, which from their descriptions must have been a bit like meetings of the Sensible Party and the Silly Party respectively. At Marcus's court philosophers of various sorts, usually as bearded as Marcus himself, could be found holding seminars on the perennial questions. Some shaved their heads as an added sign of seriousness. Lucius's court, in contrast, was Animal House with real togas.
