    37

    And G

    od rewarded his servant every few days by allowing Oliver to

    carve up his fellow men.

    The voice of his Lord was good to Oliver Cromwell.  The fighter

    had a startling tendency to win his bloody encounters.  He rose rapidly

    in the army.  Eventually he became its leader.  When Oliver's side

    defeated the forces of the King, Cromwell took over England's reins of

    power.  The old monarch, Charles I, lost his head.  It was severed from

    his body by a Puritan.  And Oliver Cromwell became the new ruler of

    Britain.

    The superorganism the Puritan meme had pulled together would

    soon reveal the depths of its hunger.  How?  By giving Cromwell the

    opportunity to live out his Irish fantasy.  In 1649, Oliver took his

    squadrons to the shores of the ill-fated isle.  He laid siege to one Irish

    town after another.  His men plundered and killed.  Cromwell

    sometimes asked his troops to exercise restraint.  But how could

    English Puritans contain their fury at the hellish folk who had

    performed such foul atrocities?  When the God-fearing men of

    Cromwell broke through an Irish city's walls, they swung their swords

    indiscriminately at men, women and children.  The soldiers declared

    the massacre just.  After all, when they'd gone through the corpses, the

    victors had found that many of the Irish had long and hideous

    tails--the marks of the devil himself.54

    Cromwell's dream of replanting Ireland came true.  His armies

    removed the Irish by force from two-thirds of their land.55    And  the

    warriors of holiness handed the territory over to pious Puritans.  Like

    rats in the cage, the Puritans had cleared Ireland.  A country had been

    attacked and its inhabitants slaughtered...all in the name of a meme.  A

    defeated knot of ideas--that of the Catholics--was beaten into

    temporary submission.  And the Puritan meme had used violent battle

    and the dark impulses of the animal brain to radically increase its

    sway.

    Cromwell's personal rewards were enormous.  He acquired huge

    amounts of acreage.  Eventually, The Lord Protector (as he was now

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