Stalin's Murders and the West

[Dave Monroe]

... pardon me for responding further to this under a different thread, but it seemed
better suited there, although the "Somewhat NP Argentinian" heading did indicate
that we've drifted a bit downsteam here.  Would like to reconnect back to Gravity's
Rainbow, perhaps even the representation of the Holocaust therein, somehow, but ...
but, indeed, there were apparently some spectacular failures in the Soviet space
program, not to mention no small suffering, but, again, Stalin had the luxury of
rather better spin control than the US.  Not to say that "Freedom of Speech,"
"Freedom of the Press" opeartes ideally here, and certainly not in the 50s-60s, but
the American public was certainly far etter informed about such things than the
Soviet proletariat.  Don't think that was disputed here ...

... "chosen to look west for boogey men before [looking] east" ... well, feel as if
so much chaff is being strewn in my path here, but ... well, a few issues.  One
could start with that "West/east" binary, say, well, why not complain I haven't
investigated Mao, Imperial Japan, Cambodia, Iran under the Shah, Iran under
Khomeini, Iraq under Hussein, and so forth and so on.  And you perhaps will.  Well,
again, one simply cannot cover everything, nor should one be expected to, although I
will note I've managed to at least note in the margins that which I might have
marginalized here.  In general, i think your objection is a fair one, although I'm
not quite sure how pertinent it is to a discussion--such as it has been--a
consideration, at any rate, of the representation of the Holocaust in Garvity's
Rainbow.  But, as I do take it to be a novel in no small part of the Cold War, and a
particularly apocalyptic one, at that, I am very interested in anything anyone might
have to say about how it might figure US/USSR relations ...

One could also take the "examine the plank in your own eye before removing that in
your neighbor's" line, which is largely the line I tend to take.  I'm largely more
accustomed to seeing, hearing, even, complaints about the privileging of America, of
"The West" (and I'm not so sure that the USSR, Russia, should be entirely excluded
from "The West"), in discussions of political violence, atrocities and the like.
The Native Americans, slavery, the US's various involvements, support of brutal
totalitarian regimes, in South America, South East Asia, the Middle East ... if, as
Eddie Izzard apparently put it, Stalin killed his own, Hitler killed neighbors
(although largely by banishing his own to the servant's quarters), well, one might
say that the US first went after the previous tenants, shnaghaied some folk from
crosstown and locked 'em in the servants quarters, and in the meantime
surreptitiously incited the neighbors to do all of the above.   But we've (as an
American citizen) certainly not had such singular figures as Hitler and Stalin when
it comes to such matters, that's for sure, and I certainly do not mean to imply that
H and S were no worse in their singularity than US policy and practice has been
along its history ... at any rate, seems to me that self-examination is the "first
step ... to acknowledg[ing] our unavoidable prejudices" ...

.. "memory and shared experince"?  In what sense?  How so?  As if I haven't lived,
am not living, still, under the threat of nuclear annihilation?  As I we all
aren't?  But I do my reading, and will continue to do so.  Again, was already headed
along a path you seem to have already taken, albeit perhaps not in the same
direction.  Though I seem to be toting around an awful lot of stuff on Pynchon, the
Holocaust, and that V-2 project these days already ... again, only so much one can
read, one can have read, one will read.  Consider, investigate, research, whatever.
Examine the blind spots in one's own research, I guess.  I wasn't really planning on
returning the favor for anyone here, but ...

... well, Arpanet to the Internet, thank the Cold War for instant pornography,
relentless advertising and the ability to rant and rave to a potential public of
billions (dozens, more likely, I realize, but ...).  No, I'm not that cynical, I
guess, but I would take with a grain of salt (if not SALT) any and all claims for
the unambiguous subversive, liberatory, antihegemonic, whatever, qualities
"inherent" in the Internet.  That tension betwixt the centrifugal and the
centripetal, the center(s) and the margin(s), stragtegies and tactics (Michel de
Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life), the panoptic and the resistant (Michel
Foucault, Discipline and Punish, or George Orwell's 1984, for that matter).
Apparently, this list itself is under surveillance ...

... and, again, I've noted a few recent works on the Soviet space, ballistics and
nuclear programs, and I imagine there's far more where that came from.  Have you
gone looking?  Again, will let you know what I find, at any rate.  But there's only
so much that I can, that I can be expected, to document here.  You make some unusual
demands here,  demands which I'm not sure you feel necessary to live up to yourself,
in re: research, the summation and presntation thereof.  I list my sources so that
they can be consulted, but, then again, I'm the kind of guy who tends to read the
footnotes, the bibliographies, and to follow up to the extent that i can, that I can
afford to, that I can find the material, that i have the time, that I have the
inclination.  And I've been trying to pursue this question of teh Holocaust in
Garvity's Rainbow, so ...

... and we seem to be largely discussing what ifs? here, alternate history,
something which is of no amll interest to me, but something which we, almost by
definition, will not be able to come to any conclusions about.  The US had taken
most of the major figures in the Nazi rocket program, much of the equipment, the
Russians had Nordhausen, some minor figures, did make overtures to von Braun et al.,
got at least one bite (one Helmut Grottrup, see the "Epilogue" to Michael Neufeld's
The Rocket and the Reich), but the Germans apparently ended up being frustrated by
their marginalization in teh Soviet program, the apparent result of Soviet paranoia
about the foreigners, and were sent home (to East Germany, I imagine) in 1951 ...

... now, on Nazi mysticism and engineering, by all means, do by all means see
Jeffrey Herf's Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar
and the Third Reich, as well as the first essay, by the editors, in Moika rennenberg
adn Mark Walker, eds., Science, Technology and National Socialism.  Don't have
either at hand, but both discuss at length (see Chapters 5 and 6 in the Herf book)
the reconcilition of Nazi irrationality with presumably rational engineering,
presumably rationalized bureacracy.  I agree, the Nazis and the Soviets were indeed
loons of a different feather, though I think that Stalin's plumage was rather more
similar to our (the US's) own, at least in that regard.  But I don't know that I
siether stated or implied anything about "the perpetuation of Jewsih
victimhood"--you're entitled to your own editorializing, of course, but I would like
somehow to get back to Pynchon here, think perhaps this Cold war line, not to
mention the "empowering of the marginalized" might be the way to do it ...

jporter wrote:

> [quoted material trimmed - Ed.]