Religious Fundamentalism in Orwell and Pynchon
jbor
jbor at bigpond.com
Mon May 19 16:24:39 CDT 2003
on 20/5/03 1:22 AM, Terrance wrote:
> But is it a religious war form the Bush government's (USA) perspective?
> The fact that Osama bin Laden is a fundamentalist and his war is
> religious is easy enough for anyone to see.
He and his ilk have tried to incite a "holy war", still are with terrorist
bombings recently in Islamic countries allied to the U.S., such as
Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and Morocco, but they're not getting anywhere. An
Islam v. Christianity "war" isn't a goer. I still have no idea which
"religious wars" we're supposed to have "become all too familiar" with since
WW II.
I don't know that it's at all possible to conflate Pynchon's idea of "the
War that never Ends" from _GR_ with the reference to "religious wars" in the
Foreword either, but the former conception certainly does match up with the
way that Oceania in _1984_ is constantly warring, or representing itself as
being at war on the telescreens, domestic economic and patriotic motivations
to the fore, with either Eastasia or Eurasia. Another Orwell connection. And
it's bizarre that Pynchon says that there isn't "racial hostility" in _1984_
when there is, in the way that the propaganda vilifies the enemy in
explicitly racial terms, images of "Mongolian" faces and hordes blazoned
across the telescreens, an integral component of the Two Minutes Hate, and
the way the proles respond in a racist frenzy to the prisoners-of-war
subsequently paraded through the streets. The "religious wars" paragraph in
the Foreword is a really bad one on several counts.
Bu the larger argument, that Pynchon in the Foreword is comparing Bush to
Big Brother, the USA "circa 2003" to Oceania, is truly absurd. I noticed
recently a subject header which pronounced "1984 evoking 9/11". If that is
the assertion then it has to be asked, for whom is this evocation occurring?
Pynchon, ensconced, comfortably one might infer, in Manhattan."[T]hose among
us", ensconced, comfortably one might infer, in liberal democracies around
the globe? (The publishers ... ? Orwell's Estate ... ? The American
book-buying public ...?) Or, let's say, the Iraqi Kurds? Compared to what
that group of people have endured - massacred, prevented from even having
basic shelter or electricity - how does the experience depicted in the novel
or the experience of Americans since Sept. 2001, inherently incompatible as
those two are anyway, how does either compare one iota to life under the
likes of Saddam? I daresay, with nothing specific in the Foreword to support
the argument, that this abject failure of common sense is not Pynchon's.
best
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