Somewhat NP Argentinians bound for Germany

[jbor]

----------
>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, 8:41 PM
>

> ... 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."

An observation rather than a complaint.

> Now, I'm trying to work out exactly what it
> is you and, largely, Doug are arguing about,

Who's arguing? millison accuses people of being Holocaust-deniers on the
basis that they read a section in the novel which contains no overt
reference to Nazis, Jews, death camps whatever -- apart from 1 *"hijacked"*
U-boat -- as not having any overt reference to Nazis, Jews, death camps et.
al. And you're taking *me* to task?

> but it appears to have gone from
> just what might be read into that Argentinian submarine headed for Germany in
> Gravity's Rainbow

Love that passive tense. millison (as usual) changed the subject and upped
the ante:
"previous denial of Pynchon's
very obvious depiction of Nazi crimes in GR"
"a short
distance to full-blown Holocaust denial"
"denying or minimizing Nazi crimes is not part
of Pynchon's project"
"the current neo-Nazi project"
"academic doubletalk as a
tool for Nazi apologists"

> --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--

Are you saying that it's a myth or agreeing with millison that it isn't a
myth? I'll say it again -- check out the Rucksichtslos if you want something
a little more germane to what you seem to be trying to prove.

> 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,'"

Indeed they might. "Tens of thousands" of Nazis is a pretty hyperbolic claim
on the scant evidence ("several confirmed reports", one spy, one
"informant", and unspecified and uncorroborated US secret intelligence
"documents") provided in the passage cited. Hardly historical empiricism, is
it.

> followed by a remark about this being an
> "hysterical historical mentality,"

eg "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
... " etc

> and yet ... and yet I still can't tell
> just quite where you stand on even the issue you raise,

Which issue? I think the scene about the Argentine anarchists in the
hijacked U-boat in *GR* is about Argentine anarchists in a hijacked U-boat
and not about Auschwitz or Mengele.

> as you then seem to
> take issue with taking issue with the issue of considering "fascist
> collaborators" as (yet more) "displaced persons."

Wha?

>  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 ...

Again, wha? This is just semantics.

> 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?

So, what does "part of the context" actually mean in terms of the statement?
You tell me, OK?

> You seem to have agreed with Doug up
> until that point, can't figure out why, or even how, you suddennly disagree.

Obfuscation. The Holocaust is depicted by Pynchon as but one sign or symptom
-- amongst many -- of a much larger and less comfortable-to-acknowledge
Western malaise. millison views the Holocaust as the be-all and end-all of
the entire novel. To do this he needs to read the novel selectively, which
is fine for him, but ridiculously blinkered. And, such a reading actually
relativises all those other holocausts -- Herero, Hiroshima, Central Asian,
Gnostic, African-American -- which Pynchon foregrounds in his text.

> 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."

I agree with you. And don't forget Korea, the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, El
Salvador, Nicaragua etc etc and all those other little imperial escapades in
which the US was the fascist bullyboy. But millison had said that there were
"subs full of Nazis headed for Argentina and other South American
countries". This is a rather gratuitous over-simplification, if not
thoroughly false. I pointed out that von Braun had gone to America. But,
even so, I'm not sure that it's possible to say that *GR* offers an outright
condemnation of either von Braun or the fictional "Nazi scientists" in its
cast, such as Pokler, Achtfaden et. al. Let alone the "tens of thousands" of
Nazis whose blood you and millison on your bandwagon seem to be clamouring
for. Again, who are they, and where are they in *GR*? NASA had to be a joke,
surely?

> 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,

No?

     To some, it made sense. They saw the stumbling birds ill-made to the
   point of Satanic intervention, so ugly as to embody argument against a
   Godly creation. Was Mauritius some first poison trickle through the
   sheltering dikes of Earth? Christians must stem it here, or perish in
   a second Flood, loosed this time not by God but by the Enemy. The act
   of ramming home the charges in their musketry became for these men a
   devotional act, one whose symbolism they understood. (110.12)

> 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 ...

I disagree.

> ... 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 ...

I think it's been done. See for eg Scott Simmon, '*Gravity's Rainbow*
Described' and 'A Character Index: *Gravity's Rainbow*, *Critique* 16.2,
1974. See also re. Tim Ware's Web Guide at
http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/gravity/gravity-f.html