Ectoplasm

[David Casseres]

I wrote

>> ...there was no profit in painting [the Nazis] as a bunch 
>> of wackoes and sadists and genocidal mass-murderers.  It would have 
>> detracted from the main order of business, which was to get these clowns 
>> back in line and working for Them as they were supposed to in the first 
>> place.

Now davemarc sez
>There was plenty of profit in depicting Nazis and their allies as wackoes,
>sadists, and genocidal mass-murderers.  There's loads of evidence that they
>were portrayed this way--just look at wartime comic books.  The suppression
>of evidence of death camps is puzzling in many ways, but I think it does an
>injustice to the nations that fought the Nazis to claim outright that they
>were fascinated by what went on in concentration camps.  That's much easier
>to post than to prove.

Touché.  I have maybe overstated my case, and I certainly can't prove it.  We paranoids never can, even when we think we can.

                                     BUT

Note that I am not talking about the nations that fought Nazism.  I am talking about Them, the transnational interests that have been manipulating events around the world, sometimes effectively and sometimes less so, since Oh, let's say the Industrial Revolution, though we might also say the Renaissance (there's that Ambrosian Bank, right?).  The fight against Nazism was conducted desperately, often heroically, by ordinary foax who would have died a lot less if They had been willing to oppose Nazism a few years earlier, instead of quietly encouraging it.

It is a fact that only when the Nazis went out of control and started annexing large industrial regions belonging to other governments did the Western European powers start to fight, and it was not until the Nazis' Asian Fascist allies went out of control and attacked the Pearl Harbor that the U.S. was willing to fight.  But the Nazis' trascendent evil was there for all to see, everything except the actual Final Solution.

So why was the news so muted (speaking of posthorns)?  Yes, the wartime comic-book propaganda did go after the Nazis as wackos and sadists -- but that was comic books.  As far as I know, the main thrust of Allied anti-Nazi propaganda was that they were stereotypically brutal and arrogant Germans, sometimes hulking peasants with beer steins in their paws and sometimes snotty Prussian aristocrats with monocles and duelling scars.

Never a hint of anything like the Himmler and Goering we eventually learned about; even when such people were targeted by name, they were shown as fools and clowns, guilty of being German and of thinking Germans should rule the world, but not as leaders of one of the very few truly evil ideologies history has ever come up with.  That indictment was being held in reserve for use against Communism, in the forthcoming Cold War; to apply it to the Nazis would have caused confusion.

Of course, the Nazis queered the deal for Them by the faux pas of exterminating several million civilians in cold blood and then not being able to hide the evidence, which They had known about for years before the story got out of controla and everyone found out.  And it was not until then that They, who had been willing to let Allied armies fight Germans for a few years without ever really knowing what their ideology was, were finally forced to denounce Nazism itself for what it really was, instead of just caricaturing it.

One of the main things about Gravity's Rainbow is that it's the only thing I've ever read that really addresses Nazism a) as a truly evil ideology and b) in context with the more diffuse evil that allowed it to come to power and to flourish.


Cheers,
David