GRGR: Nazi slave labor

[Doug Millison]

At 7:57 PM +0200 8/18/99, Lars Frehse wrote, re IG Farben's lame post-WWII
performance:
>One more reason to be ashamed being a german, I guess...

Or, perhaps better, one more reason for Germans to take IG Farben to task
in the present and force them to live up to their responsibilities. I don't
take personal responsibility for the various crimes committed by the US
government and its agents,  but I can take part in processes that force
them to be accountable and responsible for their actions.

On a related note, it was interesting to see on my recent visit, as I did
when I lived in China back in the 80s, how Chinese government propaganda
continues to stir the anti-Japanese pot, with constant TV programming and
articles in newspapers and magazines about the Japanese atrocities in China
during WWII. Among other things, a current book, featured prominently in
bookstores and in ever-present media reviews this summer, offers the
confession of a Japanese war criminal in China. I guess the equivalent
might be if in present-day Israel you saw daily TV programming and
newspaper/magazine articles about the Holocaust, rehashing specific crimes
and incidents and making specific accusations -- having never visited
Israel, I don't know if that occurs. Chinese people I talked to make the
point that Japan has never officially or formally apologized for its crimes
in China, and that various elements of Japanese society continue to try to
whitewash WWII history or to revive the nationalist elements that carried
out the atrocities (as in the current reinstatement of the Japanese
national anthem, and the recurring controversies over school textbook
treatment of Japan's past actions).

You could write a book about how successful the Chinese government has been
in installing mental policemen in the brain of each citizen, too (a theme
with definite Pynchonian overtones, it seems to me) -- it was amazing to
watch people come out of the woodwork to denounce the latest enemy of the
Party, Li Hongzhi, leader of the Falun Gong meditation cult, and not just
the people who came out and spoke against Li on TV and in the press in the
orchestrated media campaign but also ordinary people I encountered, who, as
soon as the Party outlawed Falun Gong and declared Li a wanted man,
suddenly remembered anecdotes involving people they knew that demonstrated
how dangerous the cult is -- the sick friend or relative who recently died
and who, they now recall, had some Falun Gong experience, the  friend (or
friend of a friend) whose marriage deteriorated when the spouse started
practicing Falun Gong, & etc. My 12-year-old son was reading Orwell's
_Animal Farm_ for a school summer assignment during our trip, and he was
able to look around and see how a similar dynamic was at work around him.
Good preparation for his reading of Pynchon, who deals ever-more-subtly
with the colonialization of the mind by the powers that be.

d o u g  m i l l i s o n  http://www.online-journalist.com