Historical Entropy

[Steelhead]

In a post that packs in a good number of salient points, David Casseres
concludes with this one:

>Nazi, no, but something utterly evil.  There's more than one kind, I'm
>afraid, and it reinforces my certainty that like Kahn, the Nazis
>themselves were only creatures of the forces that for convenience we call
>Them.

I agree. The Nazi's were merely a frightening subset of a much larger evil
that has continued to evolve into entirely new totalitarian experiments in
cultural horror and human and ecological mutilation.

Perhaps it was misguided of me to use the Nazis as a metaphor for this
unique brand of 20th Century Evil. Afterall, Pynchon correctly points out
in V. and GR that the genocidal impulses of this century didn't begin to
beat with the Nazis, but with the extermination of the Herraro, with the
Brits rounding up undesirables in concentration camps in the Boar Wars,
with the genocide in Turkey which became a model for the methods of
Eichmann, Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich. And on and on.

Wiener's adoption of "Eliminationist" notions, however, seems a fairly
direct parallel to the horrifying discussions at the Wannsee Conference.

Dr. Kissinger's malignity, I admit, is of a far more developed character,
which is why Pynchon skewers the murderer in Vineland. Yet, Kissinger's
obsession with re-building a "strong and vibrant West Germany" and with
adopting former SS officers as US intelligence operatives against the
Soviet bloc does raise some interesting questions regarding the good
Doctor's philosophy of *RealPolitik*.

What has largely been missed in this discussion is whether Norbert Wiener's
rather chilling notions should prompt a re-evaluation of Pynchon's
"enormous debt to Wiener," attributed by so many critics from Slade to
Mendelson to Tanner.

Upon reflection, Wiener's view of entropy-as-metaphor seems to subscribe to
a kind of overarching determinism which Pynchon strives, perhaps futilely,
to subvert. Translate Wiener into historiography and you end up fairly
close to the demented notions of Oswald Spengler in that Textbook of the
Third Reich:  the Decline of the West.

Steely