Religious Fundamentalism in Orwell and Pynchon

[jbor]

>>> I'm not sure what, exactly, Pynchon means by "the religious wars with which
>>> we have become all too familiar, involving various sorts of fundamentalism".
>>> 
>>> Ayatollah Khomeini? Pakistan v. India?
> 
> 
> 
> Too bad P didn't say more about this.
> 
> In the Luddite essay he hooks it up with the machine.

In the Foreword he hooks it up with anti-Semitism, which might imply that
he's referring to the long-standing conflict in the Middle East. If he is,
it's not really "fundamentalism" or a "religious war" like, say, the
Crusades were religious wars.

It might have been lucky that he didn't say too much more about this and
that he just left it as a hopelessly vague assertion ("involving various
sorts of fundamentalism"), because I don't know that it holds up to much
scrutiny. It would have been an opportunity to connect fundamentalist
attitudes with ideology as a primary motivation behind post-1945 wars and
uprisings - capitalism, communism, nationalism, civil struggles between
different ethnic groups and interests etc, as variants of "fanaticism"
(though not really "religious" in any sense of the word) - but he doesn't do
that at all.

best