Ectoplasm

[davemarc]

 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.

Just let me say this about Them.  I realize it's kinda fun to drop
references to Them around here and there, but sometimes it sounds a bit as
if it's understood here as more of a literal truth than a figurative one. 
I guess I haven't been persuaded that it's not more than a evocative
literary gesture.  (Don't know if my point's clear, here.  I'm sorry if
it's muddled....)
> 
> 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.

I completely agree with this, but naturally there are some sound "reasons"
why all this happened.  First, there was the issue of national sovereignty.
 Second, there was the hope of peaceful appeasement a la Chamberlain. 
Then, in the US, there was the political issue of internal controversy,
intervention vs. isolation.  On top of all of that, there's the sad fact
that the Nazis' evil was, as far as most of the world could see, not so
different from many other evils all over the place.
> 
> 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.

I think a missing explanation has to do with the intervention/isolation
debate.  Roosevelt's goal was to unify a US where there seemed to be enough
isolationist and pro-German sentiment that going full-blast in an
anti-German campaign would undermine his country's unity, undermine its
strength.  He obviously didn't feel that way regarding Japan and Japanese
Americans.  Partly because Japan actually bombed US possessions, and partly
because the Japanese Americans were much more of a minority and much more
marginalized too, the anti-Japanese propaganda was much more vicious.  (As
can be seen in the comic books.)  
> 
> 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.

Again, in a literal sense I have trouble with these references to They.  I
honestly don't see any sense in bringing Them into a historical discussion.
> 
> 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.

I agree that GR does this.

Cheers,

davemarc