NP Gates WAS RE: Nazi ideology

[Kevin Won]

Interesting persective on Gates vis. Hitler.  I personally think that corporatisim has replaced nationalism as far as following ideological formulations to their logical conclusion.  I'm currently reading _Hitler's Willing Executioners_, and I'm really smacked in the forehead with the general idea Goldhagen (I think that's his name anyway) puts forth that the holocost is a logical conclusion of early Christian identitiy-forming (Jews killed Jesus so are therefore inferior and subhuman) matched with a uniquely powerful sense of culture/homeland, "volk," which, followed to its logical conclusion, lead to the holocost.  In Goldhagen's view, Hitler acted as a boiler to an already fermented eliminationist antisemitistic volk-mash:  Germans were Jew-killers without and before Hitler not unlike Americans are so basically "economic"  the way we are.

I'm not sure if I got this idea obliquely from Derrida in _Specters of Marx_, or if I thought it up on my lonesome, but it seems to me rather "classical Deconstruction" (as far as I can abuse those two terms to make my point here) that the goal of capitolism is its own unraveling--in other words, Microsoft wants a completely uncontrolled "competitive" environment where the "strong" survive and "natural market forces" sort out the powerful from the weak, but, all the while, the "goal" is to become a monopoly, which is the antithesis of these exact forces, where there is not competition or sorting out but just "one."  And Microsoft cheats anywhere they can to stave off the "natural market forces" with hundred-dollar handshakes and anticompetitive winks and nods to "partner corporations."  When Doug mentions Dan Ballmer's idea of BOGU (see below if you don't remember what it means), it makes me think that the very pathway to destruction followed by Christian/volk ideology followed to logical conclusion is awaiting Microsoft.  

Returning back to GR for a moment, I think there are very strong reflections of these ideas that run through the text.  Of course there is the reference of the Nazi mindset has trasmogrified via metempsychosis (met-him-pike-hoses) to the boardrooms of corporate America (Gates is rather pasty-white now isn't he?), and the Moby-Dick/Rocket monomania mimics the illogic of following systems to their 'logical' conclusions.  

I'm rambling now so I'll stop with that.

kevin

>>> Doug Millison <millison at online-journalist.com> 06/08 9:34 AM >>>
Paul Mackin said, "I don't suppose Hitler wanted to lose any more than Bill
Gates wanted to be broken up. However great success can cause great
blindnesses and unavoidable mistakes in judgement (it would seem)."

I don't think blindness or unavoidable mistakes have anything to do with
Microsoft's crimes -- eyes wide open all the way. In the course of my work
as a journalist, I had a chance to spend several hours with Bill Gates back
in '92. He was pugnacious, belligerent, completely full of himself, and
unabashedly proud of his goal to crush all competition; he was also filthy:
unwashed hair flaked with dandruff, eyeglasses smudged and filmy. On
another occasion, I spent about an hour talking with Steve Ballmer, Gates'
No. 2 -- another bully. Ballmer is the one who apparently described, on
network television, Microsoft's approach to doing business as B.O.G.U. --
Bend Over, Grease Up.


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