more Re: pynchon-l-digest V2 #1446

[Doug Millison]

Malign revised (less charitably, "lied about") my previous post:
>  You said nothing about fiction.

Read my post again; I referred specifically to GR. I said, "Yes, 
that's my opinion:  central but by no means GR's only concern; 
Pynchon treats it with nuance, in a way that shatters pre-conceived 
notions about how and why the Holocaust happened."

Malign, struggling under the handicap of a defective understanding of 
WWII history:
>The rocketry program during WWII benefitted from the labor of the enslaved,
>but there would have been a rocketry program in Germany in any case.  The
>science was there; the war was the impetus, the enslaved the handy labor
>source.

Neufeld, in The Rocket and the Reich, notes that without slave labor, 
German's rocket program never would have made it out of R & D and 
into manufacture and delivery. See my earlier, long post today, or, 
better yet, read Neufeld's book. I suggest that you take your 
argument up with the historians who have documented the facts and who 
have reached the conclusions that I pass along for your edification.

Malign, still struggling against the weight of historical evidence:
>To say the Holocaust made rocketry possible is like saying that
>American slavery made cotton possible.

Slavery did, of course, make American cotton manufacture a 
commercially viable enterprise. As slavery also did for sugar; as 
colonialism did for coffee and tea.  Read Mason & Dixon to see how 
Pynchon develops these themes.

Malign,continuing his feverish exercise in straw-man demolition:
>As for the mutual cooperation during the war of international coroporations,
>this has been known since the years immediately following the war, some
>twenty years befrore GR.  The book, The Sovereign State of ITT, discussed
>this in detail and was a popular best-seller in the sixties.

Safe to say, I guess, since you provide no answer to the contrary, 
that Levi and Wiesel didn't fictionalize this historical reality in 
novels?

Do you know of any other novels -- even  those without Pynchon's 
literary cachet -- that exploited these historical facts (the way 
that international corporations profited by supplying both sides in 
WWII and thus profited from the Holocaust and the way that the German 
rocket program and the post-war missile developments that grew out of 
the German rocket program were made possible by the Nazi exploitation 
of slave labor in the A-4/V-2 manufacture, as documented by Neufeld 
and other historians) in a fictional setting prior to Pynchon's 
publication of GR in '73?  davemarc has previously mentioned 
_Slaughterhouse Five_ as a novel that took a somewhat revisionist 
view of American participation in WWII. I don't recall anything in 
that novel about the V-2, but it's been many years since I read it.

If it's "shatters pre-conceived notions" that you don't like, I'll 
take the liberty of revising my own previous post and say that in GR, 
Pynchon has brought to the attention of millions of readers 
(especially college students who weren't around when The Sovereign 
State of ITT, "was a popular best-seller in the sixties") who in GR 
learn, many,  perhaps most,  for the first time,  ugly truths about 
the way international corporations played both sides in WWII and thus 
profited from the Holocaust. Considering the way that popular media 
continue to obscure the role of multinational corporations in WWII, 
and how the popular media specifically in the U.S. fail to shed much 
light on the way that U.S. corporations profited from Holocaust slave 
labor, I will continue to argue that "shatters pre-conceived notions" 
is a fair characterization of GR's impact on its readers with regard 
to the role of international corporations (many of them based in or 
with significant operations in the U.S.) in the Holocaust.

Feel free -- in case you don't have answers to the questions I raise, 
or responses to the points I make -- to substitute your own questions 
and points, and argue against  those instead. That's where you really 
shine.
-- 

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