Somewhat NP Argentinians bound for Germany

[Dave Monroe]

... well, you seem to have complained earlier that "always trying to see the
Holocaust reflected in Pynchon's representations of other (and Other)
histories (Herero, Argentine, the Dutch in Mauritius, Puritans in the US) is
somewhat [...] narrow-minded."  Now, I'm trying to work out exactly what it
is you and, largely, Doug are arguing about, but it appears to have gone from
just what might be read into that Argentinian submarine headed for Germany in
Gravity's Rainbow--and I largely agree with JBFRAME here, that tapping into
twen cen mythography thing, and no doubt one of the many, many little
pointedly comic reversals Pynchon pulls across his oeuvre--to who's denying
who's holocaust and/or Holocaust, and then I come across a comment like yr
"Other historians might call many of these 'fascist collaborators' something
like 'displaced persons,'" followed by a remark about this being an
"hysterical historical mentality," and yet ... and yet I still can't tell
just quite where you stand on even the issue you raise, as you then seem to
take issue with taking issue with the issue of considering "fascist
collaborators" as (yet more) "displaced persons."  Er, pro or con?  Not quite
sure, here, as the conversion from "fascist collaborator" to "displaced
person" is not quite the same thing in reverse, now, is it, and yet you seem
to make it a mathematically reversible equation ...

But you seem to misread Doug's "Pynchon seems clear on the Holocaust as part
of the context for the post-war devlopment of strategic theory which became
part of the 'conventional wisdom' [...] which would justify a small-h
holocaust in the right set of circumstances" as Doug "saying that Pynchon is
saying that the Cold War oligarchs consciously modelled their foreign policy
on the Nazi program of genocide."  It's a bit of a leap from "a part of the
context" to "consciously modelled," no?  You seem to have agreed with Doug up
until that point, can't figure out why, or even how, you suddennly disagree.
In the meantime, we (we Americans, at any rate) utilized ex(?)-Nazi
scientists in even our most conspicuous engineering undertaking of the
postwar decades, an undertaking with vast implications for, not to mention
applications to science, industry, engineering, consumer products, economics,
the military, politics, the popular imagination, and so forth.  We not only
had had our own wartime concentration camps, and had plans for more ca. 1984
(that Rex 84 alluded to in Vineland, see that David Thoreen essay in that
"Pynchon and the Law" issue of the Oklahoma City U Law Review (thanks again,
Doug, et al.)), but we managed to sit largely idly by through, say, massacres
in (to name the nonnuclear nations that come to mind) Cambodia (I think Pol
Pot slaughtered nigh unto half the Cambodian population, in cases for merely
wearing glasses (the obvious mark of an intellectual)), the former
Yugoslavia, Rwanda, you name it.   We've inured ourselves yet again to the
horrors or mass death with such phrases as "acceptible losses."  But getting
back to the more immediate point of, say, "facscist collaborators," Nazi
rocket scientists, and the US Gov't's involvement therewith, see, for
example, the following: Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, Whiteout:
The CIA, Drugs and the Press; John Gimbel, Science, Technology and
Reparations: Exploitation and Plunder in Postwar Germany; and, esp., Dale
Carter, The Final Frontier: The Rise and Fall of the American Rocket State.
But an attentive--or even an inattentive-- viewing of Dr. Strangelove, or How
I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb would bring out many of the same
points, so ... but, no, I'm certainly not equating the extinction of the dodo
with the Holocaust, with any such holocaust, nor is Pynchon, mentioned it
only as a reductio ad absurdum, though I think Pynchon's use of it in this
context might be problematical, might imply a certain elision, erosion,
levelling of not-so-fine distinctions, despite his intentions ...

... by the way, and I mention this because I'd hoped to find a few things
quickly and easily for use and/or mention here and it's been a very long time
for me since Gravity's Rainbow, anybody else here feel that (a) the index to
Steven Weisenburger's A Gravity's Rainbow Companion was not very well
assembled, and (b) the damn thing could have used a few pages of the ol'
dramatis personae, a "Whos Who in Gravity's Rainbow"?  Maybe there's a
project for soemobody (amybe even me) in there somehwere ...

jbor wrote:

> ----------
> >From: Dave Monroe <monroe at mpm.edu>
> >To: jbor <jbor at bigpond.com>
> >Subject: Re: Somewhat NP Argentinians bound for Germany
> >Date: Sat, Aug 5, 2000, 5:18 PM
> >
>
> snip
> > but is Pynchon hisself, are his texts, being somehow
> > made out to be relativizing all these events?
>
> Don't think so.
>
> > As if somehow they're being
> > equated with the extinction of the dodo dwelt upon within as well?
> snip
>
> The dodo sequence with Frans van der Groov (Katje's ancestor) presents an
> insight into the mindset of the perpetrator of a genocide. Are you
> relativising the significance of this (longish, recurring, thematically
> resonant) section of Pynchon's text?
>
> best