Somewhat NP Argentinians bound for Germany

[Dave Monroe]

... well, you know, I get so much to read on this list alone, I must confess to
not necessarily follwoing each and ev'ry thred in the detail it might deserve,
esp. given the offlist conversations generated as well.  And there's only so
much someone whose time, resources and abilities are as limited as mine can
respond to.  But, on the eve of the 55th anniversary of the a-bombing of
Hiroshima (for starters), it seems to me that this thread is, indeed, worth
attending to.  I THINK this started in re: that parodic indeed submarine full
of Argentinian anarchists bound for Germany--and I think here that notes toward
the nazis in the popular imagination, as well as notes about actual Argentinian
anarchists, are relvant indeed--but, as it's led to, I don't know, "Pynchon and
the Holocaust," "Pynchon and holocausts," well, indeed, plent of both in the
texts of Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr., no?  Is that somehow being contested
here?  Can't imagine how--Peenemunde, for starters, on the capital-H end, the
Herero genocide, and, indeed, that trace of the Hiroshima bombing (not only
that headline sous rature, but the city IS named in GR; consult yr text and/or
yr  Weisenburger) on the other.  I'll leave it to someone else to provide the
listings in full, but ... but is Pynchon hisself, are his texts, being somehow
made out to be relativizing all these events?  As if somehow they're being
equated with the extinction of the dodo dwelt upon within as well?  All such
events are dealt with in their specificity, albeit as part of a large-scale
mapping of the large-scale holocausts and potentialities for more of the same
(see those final pages of the novel, for example) in this, our (not quite
finsihed, you'll note) tumultuous twentieth century.  But my initial gambit
here will be to suggest that Pynchon indeed--and I think this is registered in
his foregrounding of the Holocaust--sets forth the Shoah as a particular
harbinger of things to come, or, more precisely, thinks already en route,
things already arrived, even, at the time of Gravity's Rainbow.  I think it is
not out of line here to evoke Hannah Arendt's discussion of the "banality of"
specifically Nazi "evil" in her Eichmann in Jerusalem, and to connect it with
Max Weber's discussion of the bureacratization, routinization, banalization,
perhaps.  of power in his The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,
which, as often noted here and elsewhere, is no doubt an overt influence on
Pynchon's own sociology, historiography ... and, given the novel opens with a
quote from Herr Doktor von Braun, the sonic trace of one of his
vergeltungswaffen "screaming across the sky" shortly thereafter, and a whole
buch of stuff about Peenemunde, Nordhausen, Dora, whatever, thereafter, well, I
think it undeniable that Pynchon had atken no small notice of the traces of the
Reich in our own rocketry, weapons programs, starting (but by no means limited
to) the 'intellectual reparations" the Allies claimed in Operation Paperclip
... where are those Nazis?  Well, they start of in WWII there, and end up at
NASA, apparently ...

jbor wrote:

> ----------
> millison:
>
> > You make my point.
>
> bwahahahaha
>
> > As Pynchon says in the passage quoted from his
> > Luddite essay, fears of a nuclear holocaust now can be taken
> > seriously in part because of the historical Holocaust (as he says
> > here) that took place then.
> > Three of the things he mentions here  --
> > "the death camps", "the German long-range rocket program" and "the
> > Manhattan Project" -- he has brought together in GR, which also
> > includes  the nuclear attack on Hiroshima and seems to look forward
> > to the sort of small-h holocaust he mentions here.  He showed us in
> > GR how the powers-that-be (on both sides, although part of what he
> > does in GR is to show that this notion of opposing "sides" was in
> > fact a fiction) proved themselves capable of horrible crimes in WWII,
>
> Yes, axis *and* allies, miltary and civilian.
>
> > he says here that they could do it again.
> > This fear was strong enough
> > in the mid-60s -- when Pynchon was writing GR -- to defeat a U.S.
> > Presidential candidate who spoke openly of such strategic realities;
> > the wheel turned and we had a President (Reagan) who brought such
> > threats of annhilation to a new peak in the era in which Pynchon
> > writes this essay.
>
> Right-o.
>
> > Yes, Pynchon seems clear on the Holocaust as part
> > of the context for the post-war development of strategic theory which
> > became part of the "conventional wisdom" that he savages in this
> > essay, strategic theory which would justify a small-h holocaust in
> > the right set of Cold War circumstances.
>
> Sadly, this isn't clear at all. It is deliberate obfuscation to make *your*
> point. You're saying that Pynchon is saying that the Cold War oligarchs
> consciously modelled their foreign policy on the Nazi program of genocide,
> or by virtue of the Holocaust were able to justify the Arms race et. al.
> They didn't, you know. Pynchon certainly knows.
>
> > Nazis escaping Europe by U-boat -- certainly part of both the
> > mythology and the reality of the ratline, as documented by Hollywood
> > and historians alike:
> >
> > "By September 1944, there were several confirmed reports that German
> > submarines were taking both people and plundered capital from Spain
> > to South America. Self-confessed Nazi spy Angel Alcazar de Velasco
> > later acknowledged that several hundred million pounds of gold and
> > other assets had passed through ports on the sourthern coast of Spain
> > en route to Argentina. ... ODESSA [Organization of Former SS Members]
> > -- the fabled postwar Nazi network whose alled exploits have
> > generated profuse literary and cinematic embellishments: CIC [U.S.
> > Army Counterintelligence Corps] documents confirm that a Nazi 'Brown
> > aid' network actually existed. ... Many names have alluded to this
> > shadowy Nazi underground -- die Spinne (the Spider), Kamradenwrk
> > (Comradeship), der Bruderschaft (the Brotherhood). ...Curious as to
> > where the ratlines led, a CIC mole arranged the escape of himself and
> > two inmates from Dachau. The experience of this informant provided
> > additional corrpoboration of 'an underground movement, bearing the
> > codename of ODESSA.' ... The Polish prison guards at Dachau, hired by
> > the U.S. Army because of their presumed anti-Communist reliability,
> > were small cogs in a far-flung escape mechanism that delivered tens
> > of thousands of Nazis to expatriate communities in Latin America and
> > the Middle East after the war. Some ODESSA operatives secured jobs
> > driving U.S. Army trucks on the Munich-Salzburg autobahn and hid
> > people in the backs of these vehicles. Aided by men of the cloth, the
> > well-traveled southern escape route consisted of a chain of
> > monasteries throughout Austria and Italy. A Vatican-run way station
> > in Rome dispensed false papers to fascist fugitives, who were farmed
> > out to distant pastures. ...Another major ratline -- ODESSA North --
> > stretched through Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, where an underground
> > network of SS veterans and Werewolves smuggled Nazi renegades over
> > land and sea until they were picked up by ships heading to Spain and
> > Argentina. ... Of course, the wholesale emigration of fascist
> > collaborators would not have been possible without the tacit approval
> > of the U.S. government, whose efforts to bring war criminals to book
> > waned as the Cold War intensified."
> > --Martin A. Lee, _The Beast Reawakens_, 1997, pp. 24, 41
> snip
>
> Other historians might call many of these "fascist collaborators" something
> like "displaced persons". Lotta scenes featuring those DPs in *GR* too. To
> this sort of hysterical historical mentality Katje is a "fascist fugitive"
> and "Nazi renegade" too, smuggled out courtesy of the "ratline" provided by
> Pirate.
>
> Who are these "tens of thousands of Nazis", and where are they in *GR*?
> Certainly not on that Argentine U-boat ...