Religious Fundamentalism in Orwell and Pynchon

[Terrance]

jbor wrote:
> 
> 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'm not sure either. 

On the other hand, Orwell did not foresee such exotic developments
as the religious wars with which we have become all too familiar,
involving various sorts of fundamentalism. Religious fanaticism is in
fact strangely absent from Oceania, except in the form of devotion to
the party. 

You mentioned Ireland. Could be. Israel, Pakistan. 

But I'm guessing that P is talking about the identity of
religion                       with national states after the breakup of
the Soviet                                    (Russian) empire. 

Want something exotic? How about the disintegration of Yugoslavia and
the conflicts inside and outside. 






> 
> 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