Nazi ideology

[Coffey, Mitchell R]

>-----Original Message-----
>From: Paul Mackin [mailto:pmackin at clark.net]
>Sent: Monday, June 05, 2000 3:58 PM
>To: pynchon-l at waste.org
>Subject: Re: Nazi ideology
>
>
>I don't have the book. Just heard the two authors discussing it on TV.
>The main things seemed to be thank god the enemy planned and 
>performed so
>poorly or the Allies might not have won the war. Ike gets praise. Blood
>and Guts, Monty and Bradley were all disasters.
>
>				P.

Yes, when I grew up it was commonly assumed that Nazism was efficient,
whatever it's, uh, faults.  (There was even an original Star Trek
episode based on this notion!)  In fact, the Nazis probably lost out 
of shear incompetence and corruption.  

Interestingly, one of the few people to grasp this fact in the war's
immediate aftermath was John Kenneth Galbraith.  Returning from 
Germany, having taken part in the US Bombing Survey, and the 
debriefing of Albert Speer, etc., he wrote an article (for Fortune
magazine, I believe) titled something like "Guess what: Nazi Germany
Didn't work very well."

Any case, connoisseurs of human perversity might consider the following 
progression.  Hitler, unable to defeat his third most powerful 
potential enemy, the UK attacked, unprovoked, his second most powerful 
potential enemy, the USSR.  Having failed to defeat Russia, then after 
Pearl Harbor, when the US declared war on Japan, but not Germany, Hitler, 
in a completely unnecessary response to his _defensive_ treaty with Japan, 
declared war on his most powerful potential enemy, the United States.



Mitchell Coffey
_______________________________________________________
Slim Pickins rode the bomb down laughing
Bucking to oblivion
In gravity's rainbow rodeo

 - Found anonymously felt-penned onto a wall
   in the Bancroft Library on the UC Berkeley
   campus, c. 1977