THE FINAL SOLUTION

There are many fine books to read on the subject, but one of the most prescient is R. F. Dietrich's The Final Solution, a novel that prophesied a terrorist-inspired global war before the September 11th attack. In this novel you will meet a character named Wolf Berlin, author of a book called Holy Wars, who sees the horror of a man-made Armageddon coming and who ultimately discovers that the Osama bin Ladens of the world are merely the front for an even more apocalyptic plot developing behind the scenes. Because he knows no one will believe him, especially in our complacent government, he takes desperate measures to get people to listen to him. Out of this come realizations about the historical roots and causes of Armageddon-lust that everyone now needs to contemplate. While the anti-terrorist campaign is underway, we need to understand better how the world got to this point and to consider ways out of what may turn out to be a fatal trap.

As you read Wolf's tale of his being locked in apocalyptic combat for the soul of the planet, you will hear echoes of ancient and recurrent religious battles, of "Final Solutions" past, that remind us of how the greatest evils are often committed by the most righteous, those who think themselves the most pure, as Osama bin Laden and the Taliban do. Let us remember that the Nazis who coined this term--"The Final Solution"--seriously thought of themselves as knightly champions of a purifying religious quest, in which, in their own version of Judgment Day, they were saving Western Civilization by purging it of "impurities." This idea they got from the Book of Revelation, which got it from the Old Testament, which got it from Persian religion, which got it from--well, who knows how far back this idea goes?--but this obsession with cleansing the world of "the impure" or "the infidel" seems to have been a founding stone of almost every religion in the last four thousand years. Is secularism the only answer to the seemingly inevitable destructiveness of religion?

The tale told by Wolf Berlin is first and foremost of his despair at realizing that his secularism's failing to civilize the world and satisfy spiritual needs has opened up a vacuum into which religious fanatics are rushing from all directions. As the impasse that has held for over a century--among religions and between religion and secularism--collapses beneath the weight of on-rushing fundamentalisms, Wolf embarks on a last-ditch effort to give Secularism the spiritual dimension it is said to lack by making a religion of it. Almost simultaneously, we're told, he's startled to encounter another would-be messiah, an old soul-mate of his he had lost track of, who has a radically different and far more apocalyptic plan for the world, to which Wolf is invited to contribute as the Peter and Paul of a post-Apocalypse religion. But Wolf discovers that his old friend has concocted a demented plot to purge the world of its poisons by first using Moslem-faced terror and Western counter-terror to get all the world's hatred out into the open, and then to save the world through a climactic act of sacrifice that will make the crucifixion of Christ look small and tame! What ensues is a harrowing tale of conflict between two would-be messiahs obsessed by differing views of Jesus (as suggested by the pictures below) and by their desire to break through the religious impasse of our times and simultaneously pre-empt the fundamentalists by devising a new, world-conquering religion of their own. You'll be amazed at the parallels between the fictional world of this novel and our present world, and you'll be more stunned at the possibilities of where this could go than you were on seeing the actualities of September 11th, 2001. This novel implies that "we ain't see nothin' yet."