Microkhan by Brendan I. Koerner

Entries Tagged as 'The Bulletproof Project'

Bulletproof: The Lumpas

May 13th, 2010 · 2 Comments

As long promised, we’re finally bringing back The Bulletproof Project, our series on mass movements that instructed their followers that magic could counteract modern weaponry. Today’s entry is one we’ve been researching for ages: Northern Rhodesia’s Lumpa Church, a messianic Christian movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s headed by a woman named Alice […]

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Bulletproof: Jimmy Rasta and the Malaitans

March 3rd, 2010 · 4 Comments

The long spell of political violence that rocked the Solomon Islands last decade, commonly referred to as “The Tensions,” is an episode we know far too little about. We were thus delighted to stumble across this excellent post-mortem from New Zealand’s Sunday Star-Times, which details how the conflict’s aftermath still lingers in a major way. […]

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Bulletproof: Indians in the Civil War

January 14th, 2010 · 2 Comments

The way that Civil War history is written, you’d think that the conflict was confined to the easternmost quarter of the nation. But though few significant battles took place on the western frontier, the region wasn’t exactly unscathed. In the vast area known then simply as “Indian Country,” for example, tribes split along factional lines—many […]

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Bulletproof: The Tadtad

December 17th, 2009 · 2 Comments

Our semi-regular Bulletproof Project today takes us to the southern Philippines, specifically the perpetually conflict-addled island of Mindanao. It is there that a family of quasi-Christian cults collectively known as the Tadtad (“Chop Chop”) flourish, and occasionally wreak bloody havoc on the unfortunate populace. The Tadtad remind us a bit of Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army, […]

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Bulletproof: Cambodia, 1972

December 3rd, 2009 · 3 Comments

Believe it or not, the whole of journalism’s history has yet to be put on the Web. And so we found ourselves at the New York Public Library last week, manning a microfilm reader in search of tidbits from the early 1970s. In the course of panning past endless panels from newspapers of yore, we […]

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Bulletproof: The Boxers

November 24th, 2009 · 8 Comments

It is to the turn-of-the-century media’s great discredit that they referred to China’s quasi-Luddite rebels as “Boxers.” Had the minions of William Randolph Hearts been more adept at understanding Chinese, they would have realized that the rebels’ secret society translated more literally as “Fists of Righteous Harmony,” a far more poetic moniker for an organization […]

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Bulletproof: The Mai Mai

November 12th, 2009 · Comments Off on Bulletproof: The Mai Mai

Our second installment of the Bulletproof Project takes us to the eastern Congo, where Mai Mai militiamen have been wreaking awful havoc for years now. These soldiers are known not only for their brutality, but also their unwavering faith in dawa, or sinister magic. This belief became apparent to Western observers during the violent upheaval […]

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The Bulletproof Project

November 6th, 2009 · 13 Comments

If you’ve yet to read this jarring New York Times piece, do yourself a big favor and click over stat. It’s a damning account of how the Iraqi cops have been duped into buying a handheld “bomb detector” that apparently works no better than an old-school divining rod. Scary stuff, considering that so much of […]

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