Religious Fundamentalism in Orwell and Pynchon

[Bandwraith at aol.com]

In a message dated 5/17/2003 8:56:11 AM Eastern Daylight Time, 
tobylevy at juno.com writes:


> "The hatreds Orwell never found much worse than ridiculous have
> determined too much history since 1945 to be dismissed quite so easily."
> 
> 
> And this set me to thinking, where is the evidence of religious
> fundamentalism in the works of Pynchon?  Certainly there is much
> spirituality, but nothing like the problems of the middle east that have
> commanded oceans of ink in the newspapers since 1945.  Surely a worthy
> subject for a future Pynchon novel, no?
> 

There is an interesting parallel between Pynchon's description
of Orwell's motivations for not including the link, made painfully
obvious by The Holocaust,  between antisemitism/racism and
fascism, AND, the unavoidable awareness by Churchill, et. al,
early on, about The Holocaust, because Bletchley Park had
been reading Hitler's mail, if not thoughts.

       So good was the Allied ability to eavesdrop on
       a wide range of German communications that
       it has recently led to troubling questions about
       about how early in the war the Allies discovered
       evidence of the Holocaust.

[Body of Secrets, Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency,
 From the Cold War Through the Dawn of a New Century, James Bradford,
 Doubleday, 2001. p. 10]

and,

       According to a comprehensive NSA study undertaken
       by Hanyok, Allied communications intelligence would
       have picked up indications of this roundup from the cable
       lines and airwaves linking Vichy France with foreign
       capitals.(....) "Intelligence on the Holocaust was NOT
       critical to Allied strategy," said Hanyok.(...) "The real
       problem," he concluded, "was not interpreting intelligence,
       but the attitude by the Allies, and the rest of the world,
       that the unthinkable was actually happening." (p.11)

And their failure to act, apparently, which in the case of the
Intelligence Community would have meant not screaming it
out at the top of their lungs. Such action, of course, like the
warning of Coventry, among other things, would have tipped
the world off about Bletchley Park- not just the Germans, but
the Russians, as well- and given away their precious secret.

respectfully
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