Somewhat NP Argentinians bound for Germany

[Dave Monroe]

...no time to respond to all of this, but, very quickly, again, can't cover
everything everywhere, which is why I not only just try to get, read, even,
everything I can on any given I get interested in.  Started from "the West" as
that's where the A-Bomb projects satrted, although there are recent books on the
Indian and Israeli projects which seem to be becoming more and more relevant daily
... at any rate, well, I think when you are fairly specific about your subject, you
do have some entitlement to deal primarily with that, take up your problems with
Cockburn and St. Clair with Cockburn and St. Clair, I guess.  In the meantime, just
how many cases of aberrant behavior by imported Nazi scientists did you want me
personally to document?  Here or elsewhere?  There's a reason why I give my
sources--perhaps I'll have to start footnoting?  Bibliographizing?  Only so much
time, only so much I can type, have many, many things to deal with in any given
waking hour, and many of them are offline, even, offlist, certainly.  Am not sure
that I'm not being faulted here, and not only by you, for not sharing each and every
person's interests, obsessions, whereas I have that TV attention span when it comes
to just about anything, constantly changing channels, juggling, even.  At any rate,
I do not have the luxury of matching your access time, and I fear I am getting too
sidetracked as it is.  Will forward anything relevant as it crosses my path  ...

jporter wrote:

> > From: Dave Monroe <monroe at mpm.edu>
> >
> >
> > .... well, I'd been under the impression that, despite the Soviet headstart in
> > the space race (which no doubt parallelled the arms race), even as JFK, for
> > example, was touting a Soviet ICBM threat, the actuality of the matter was, he
> > was overstating the case (to some extreme--I think the USSR had something like
> > maybe four ICBMs) for the budgetary and PR benefit of the military.
>
> Four that worked. Me thinks you are understating the technological
> superiority of the Soviets w/r/t rocket technology. It's not just a matter
> of number, Dave, when it comes to H-bombs. I am sure the embarrasing launch
> pad failures of the first U.S. attempts to match Sputnik- with much smaller
> satellites- were not staged to demonstrate our deficienies. It does say
> something about the nature of our society, however, that we got to watch
> those failures in between *Howdy Doody* and The Mickey Mouse Club* Who knows
> how many failures occurred in the USSR prior to Sputnik, or how many
> Gulagees were worked to death to pay for them?
>
> > My next
> > step after the Nazi a-bomb project was to get to the Soviets, have things like
> > David Holloway's Stalin and the Bomb and Paul Josephson's Red Atom, as well as
> > James Harford's biography of Korolev (of Soviet space program fame), but he're
> > langushing in stacks right now.  Only so much time, esp. when one finds
> > oneself rereading much previous research ...
>
> Yes, but the fact that you have chosen to look west for boogey men before
> you look east does say something, doesn't it? I'm sure their is plenty of
> evil to be ferreted out on all sides, but before we begin the long march to
> truth it might be worth questioning the direction of our first step, if only
> to acknowledge our unavoidable prejudices.
>
> I commend the obvious thoroughness of your readings in this area. I do not
> have the luxury of matching your ardor, but I refuse to be swayed by reading
> lists alone. There is something to be said for commonsense and the memory of
> shared experience.
>
> > Still, the question is, Cold War expediency vs. I don't know, moral rectitude,
> > justice, whatever.  Certainly, the reason why Truman did an about face from
> > both Roosevelt's and his own previously stated policies against using Nazi
> > scientists was the Cold War.  Whether or not the American use of Nazi rocket
> > (and then some) scientists ultimately prevented, ultimately will prevent
> > Mutually Assured Destruction is a matter for history, alternate or otherwise,
> > to determine ((as) if it ever will, ever can be), but ...
>
> That the Cold War did allow for the creation of the internet, however, is
> not disputed. Whether or not the internet and WWW continue to be a means by
> which specialized information is taken out of the hands of elites, of all
> stripes, and used to empower those who would otherwise be beholden to those
> elites, is another question for history- appropriately decentralized in its
> recording, dissemination and interpretation.
>
>
> > .... but to note just one example (given in Cockburn an St. Clair's Whiteout),
> > under Operation Overcast, begun, by the way, before Truman had rescinded the
> > ban against the importation of Nazi scientists, aomngst von Braun's team there
> > was on George Richkey, slavemaster at the Mittelwerk, over the Dora
> > concentration camp labor used there--and Dora, while, I believe, not primarily
> > a concentration camp for Jews, nonetheless eventually did indeed have Jews
> > amongst its prisoners, certainly by the time that Gravity's Rainbow is set,
> > but the point is, it WAS a concentration camp, it WAS part of the Holocaust,
> > in which, indeed, groups beyond the Jews were perscuted, tortured, killed.
> > "In retaliation against sabotage in the missile plant--prisoners would urinate
> > on elctrical equipment, causing spectavular malfunctions--Richkey would hang
> > them twelve at a time, with wooden sticks shoved into their mouths to muffle
> > their cries.  In the Dora camp itself he  regarded children as useless mouths
> > and instructed the SS guards to club them to death, which they did." (Cockburn
> > and St. Clair, Whiteout, p. 167).  He went on to Wright Field, Dayton, Ohio,
> > where he oversaw security for Nazi researchers, and further served as the
> > translator for the Mittelwerk records.  "He thus had the opportunity, which he
> > used to  the utmost, to setroy any material compromising to his colleagues and
> > himself" (ibid.).  Such, er, "characters" abounded, and, i would note, we
> > didn't even really hold true to that Nuremburg code against using Nazi medical
> > research, say, experiments on (the living bodies and corpses of) concentration
> > camp prisoners in low-pressure chambers.  The next question might be, well,
> > why not extract some good from evil, some gold from shit?  The problem, well,
> > to redeem th Holocaust? "All's well that ends well"?  Not to my mind ..
>
> You won't find me defending horrendous behavior such as you allude to above.
> And I will even allow you the "Such, er, 'characters' abounded,..." which
> you tag on the end, but do not document. But all the gruesome details you
> provide serve to underscore the absence of a parallel investigation of the
> goings on within The Soviet rocket/industrial complex, and the gaping hole
> in the historical record of what happened to the tens of millions of people
> who were exterminated in its developement. At least The Holocaust is a
> reality that people can argue about. How many more millions of people would
> it take before it would no longer seem as if Kennedy, et. al, were
> "overstating" the Soviet threat?
>
> >
> > .... but why don't Cockburn and St. Clair discuss Stalin, the pogroms, the
> > gulags? Well, their book, Whiteout, IS subtitled "The CIA, Drugs and the
> > Press," it's specifically about the shady dealings of the CIA and its
> > predecessor organization, the OSS.  Can't cover everything everywhere.
>
> That seems unacceptable. Any investigative analysis which attempts to
> forcefully make the case for the culpability of the west- implicitly or
> explicitly- without a more balanced examination of the the historical
> context, must be suspect of being a work of propaganda to deflect attention
> from the Soviet activities at the time, or at least, of being a conscious
> choice to present a more marketable theme, No? Why?
>
> > Certainly, Stalin, the stalinist regime, was ultimately responsible for
> > killing far more Soviet citizens that Hitler, the Third Reich, was, for
> > killing Germans, but I think that perhaps the specificity of the Holocaust,
> > the Shoah, was in its unique bureaucratization, technologization,
> > industrialization of the process.
>
> I must respectfully disagree. Those processes were equally at work under
> Stalin, perhaps more so. Stalin, after all, may have been paranoid, but he
> was no mystic, nor did he harbor any quasi-religious sentimentality w/r/t
> "The Russian People" comparable to Hitler's "Aryanism". If anything, Stalin
> was even more bureaucratic and more dangerous. I am not at all denying
> Hitler's targeting of the Jews, nor the magnitude of The Shoah, but I do not
> believe it serves the jewish cause to assume the posture of eternal
> victimhood. In fact, that perpetuates Hitler's racism and clouds the facts.
> GR works against that process by empowering the marginalized rather than
> perpetuating their victimhood.
>
> jody