Religious Fundamentalism in Orwell and Pynchon

[pynchonoid]

--- pynchonoid <pynchonoid at yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- jbor <jbor at bigpond.com> wrote:
> 
> > I can barely believe 
> 
> I can well imagine. 
> 
> Born-again Bush, Slayer of Evil-doers vs. Osama bin
> Laden and his band of Islamic terrorists is one
> religious war that has received a lot of attention
> recently.  That's the religious war that forms the
> "circa 2003" context for Pynchon's _1984_ Foreword. 
> 
> > The sentence we're talking about, the one which
> > addresses "religious wars"
> > and "fundamentalism" (xvi), explicitly refers to
> > "exotic developments" since
> > Orwell's time.
> 
> I'd say the attack by Islamic fundamentalists on the
> Twin Towers has been a rather "exotic development",

... make that "plus what Bush calls...." 

> what Bush calls the "battle of Iraq" in the ongoing
> "War on Terrorism" (where the terrorists are Muslim
> and the US is a Christian nation fighting Bush's
> crusade).  I guess you don't see it that way.

Note also that Saddam Hussein reframed the US invasion
as a religious war when he called on Muslims to
struggle against the infidel.


> 
> > I'm beginning to wonder whether Pynchon's working
> > with the same definition
> > or understanding of "war" as the rest of us, or
> > Orwell for that matter, let
> > alone "religious" or "fascism" or anything else!
> 
> Pynchon has you thinking, at least. (Combine
> cogitation with an open mind and Lord knows what can
> happen!)
> 
> Pynchon's been pretty explicit about what he means
> by
> War:
> 
> 
> 
> "Don't forget the real business of the War is buying
> and selling. The murdering and the violence are
> self-policing, and can be entrusted to
> non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death
> is
> useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as
> diversion from the real movements of the War. It
> provides raw material to be recorded into History,
> so
> that children may be taught History as sequences of
> violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared
> for the adult world. Best of all, mass death's a
> stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to
> try 'n' grab a piece of that Pie while they're still
> here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration
> of
> markets." (Gravity's Rainbow, p. 105)
> 
> "It means this War was never political at all, the
> politics was all theater, all just to keep the
> people
> distracted . . . secretly, it was being dictated
> instead by the needs of technology . . . by a
> conspiracy between human beings and techniques, by
> something that needed the energy-burst of war,
> crying,
> 'Money be damned, the very life of [insert name of
> Nation] is at stake," but meaning, most likely, dawn
> is nearly here, I need my night's blood, my funding,
> funding, ahh more, more. . . . The real crises were
> crises of allocation and priority, not among
> firms--it
> was only staged to look that way--but among the
> different Technologies, Plastics, Electronics,
> Aircraft, and their needs which are understood only
> by
> the ruling elite . . . " (Gravity's Rainbow, p. 521)
> 
> "There's something still on, don't call it a 'war'
> if
> it makes you nervous, maybe the death rate's gone
> down
> a point or two [...] but Their enterprise goes on"
> (Gravity's Rainbow, p. 628)


=====
<http://www.pynchonoid.blogspot.com/>

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