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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