Judas Unchained, Ruminations

As mentioned in the previous post, I'm reading Judas Unchained, the follow up to Pandora's Star. Ignore this if you are super spoiler sensitive, though I don't spoil any details from the current book, the quoted discussion could be considered a spoiler for the first book in the series (a third chapter is planned).

Here's something I find interesting on page 53 (no big plot details, unless you haven't read Pandora's Star yet, but really what happens isn't much of surprise). It's a question of language choice:

"War by its nature cannot be a static situation." he continued, meeting her stare levelly. "They know that we will never accept the loss of those twenty-three planets. Either they continue to expand across the Commonwealth, wiping us out of galactic history, or we will do the same to them."
"Are you suggesting we commit genocide against them?" Ramon DB asked lightly.
"Are you suggesting we become the victims of genocide?" Wilson countered. "This is not a war as we have fought them before. This is not a strategic struggle over key resources; we're not fighting for control over tribal lands, or trade routes to the new colonies. Both us and the Primes are intersolar, there is no shortage of anything in the galaxy. They came here with one purpose, to kill us and to capture our worlds."
"In that case we have experienced an analogous war in our history," Hans Braunt said. "It would seem as if they are waging a religious crusade against us."
"You could be right," Wilson said. "Religion or some ideological variant of it was certainly one of the more popular theories among the strategic analysis teams. Their motivation can't be easily be explained any other way."

Lengthy, hopefully non-infringing quote there. A note about the people conferring, most of the people conferring 400 years in the future are alive today (through the magic of memory storage and body rejuvination) so they would have survived and participated in the crises of this century. Also the Primes they are contemplating wiping out are alien life discovered in the first book that are controlled by a single consciousness controlling all life across many stars who considers all other life incompatible with its own existence and therefore subject to destruction.

I find it odd that people who grew up today would go with the word 'crusade' rather than jihadism to describe religious fanaticism.

Pandora's Star was released after the attack on the WTC on 11th of September, and most likely written as a response with its lurking menace, incompatible with western Capitalism (now spread over a good size swath of the galaxy), unleashing a surprise attack.

I can understand the author's choice here, had he used the word jihad then the parallels become explicit rather than implicit and the book to this point becomes a 'racist' screed against Islam to some (cause apologists for jihadis always like to cry racism and assume anyone attacking Islamofascism is also attacking Islam in general). But I still find it inconsistent that folks growing up in the 21st Century would choose 'crusade' over 'jihad' to describe a religious war.

It doesn't ring true to me. If my consciousness still exists in the 25th century you can bet I'd still recall the tribulations of this century and refer to a struggle between incompatible ideologies with religious overtones a 'jihad' instead of a 'crusade', but that's just me.

UPDATE: In the comments Pooh makes a case for crusade over jihad:

Picking nits here, but crusade (with a small "c") is not completely denominational, whereas "jihadism" is explicitly islamic in nature. Not to say "crusade" is not a loaded word (hence the 9/14 wince), but it certainly is more broadly applicable.

But the thing is, the crusades weren't to wipe out utterly and completely Islam, instead it was to eject them from (rightly or wrongly) Europe and then the Holy Lands. Whereas jihad isn't territorial it's global. And again, someone growing up today would be more likely to think in terms of jihad than crusade, that's just the way it is. Whether you agree with the current war on terror or not, it will be the defining feature of this century. Just as the expansion and fight against fascism and communism defined the 20th century, the expansion and eventual defeat of this current iteration of fascism will define the 21st century. I think that analogy would come to mind more readily for people from this time, especially those from the 'winning' team. The jihadis are nihilistic fascists, they prove that over and over again (bombing the Golden Dome, targeting civilians, etc). The crusades fit the definition of a territorial, tribal conflict mentioned as being unlike the conflict the Commonwealth faces against the Primes, a much more precise analogy is the current conflict. The jihadis want to run a global caliphate purged of all non believers, few Crusaders were ever that extreme (though later, the Spanish Inquisition certainly can be compared to Jihadism, bet you weren't expecting the Spanish Inquisition) . The jihadis are the ones who have taken the arabic term for the inner struggle a person faces while keeping faith and perverted it into a term representing the anihilation of competing viewpoints. I think that perverted definition will stick, especially with folks living today.

I continue to assert that this alteration, " Hans Braunt said. "It would seem as if they are waging a jihad against us." sounds perfectly natural and more fitting with the tenor of the rest of the passage, as well as more likely to spring to mind from someone who lived during these times to use when they see analogous times a few centuries from now.

It's a minor point, doesn't detract from the novel in any way, and I can understand fully using the term crusade over jihad, but I suspect a bit of political correctness may have influenced that decision when the rest of both novels draw such strong parallels to current conflicts and issues.

(dude, that got lengthy, maybe I need to convince someone to volunteer as an editor)