Corroboration for Doug (was Re: Sanders ...

[jbor]

----------
>From: Doug Millison <DMillison at ftmg.net>
>

> I do not believe, contrary to the assertion made
> here repeatedly by "jbor", that Pynchon agrees with or favors this
> colonialist story -- a storyt which blames the victim and exculpates the
> perpetrator -- of why the Herero are dying.

>From Pynchon's 1969 letter to Thomas Hirsch

        [ ... ] I doubt it was only firepower
    and aggressiveness that beat the Hereros during that "complex and
    terrible" time. I think the Hereros had as much to do with it as von
    Trotha did. For perhaps the same reasons the Incas, with everything
    going for them, let a crippled and hopelessly outnumbered one-time
    hog drover from Estremadura hand them their ass. This is why I
    find Steenkamp's pamphlet so fascinating, though I don't know how
    valid his arguments are. He attempts to explain the declining birth-
    rate among the Hereros with numbers like over-population and
    Vitamin E deficiency, and to discount the notion, apparently
    widely-held at the time, that the Hereros were deliberately
    trying to exterminate themselves. But I find that perfectly plausible,
    maybe not as a conscious conspiracy, but in terms of how a perhaps
    not completely Westernised people might respond. They had no concept of
    property in the European sense before the missionaries came, they felt
    themselves integrated into everything, like mystics in deep trances or
    people on acid; their cattle had souls, the same souls as their own and
    a possible part of a universal soul, though you'd better check that out.
    But they had no hangups sacrificing cattle, it was part of a universal
    scheme, and so it's doubtful if they'd have hangups sacrificing
    themselves either, given a unified concept of creation, which shows up
    in religions all around the world, Christianity being a glaring
    exception.

This is the same (published, with Pynchon's explicit permission) letter
which begins, in part:

        [ ... ] Trying at the
    moment, in fact, to work into the novel I'm writing now more of the
    Südwest material. For some reason I can't leave it alone, and I'm glad
    you and possibly others have been picking up on it. When I
    wrote _V._ I was thinking of the 1904 campaign as a sort of
    dress rehearsal for what later happened to the Jews in the '30's and
    '40's. Which is hardly profound; it must occur to anybody who gets into
    it even as superficially as I did. But since reading McLuhan especially,
    and stuff here and there on comparative religion, I feel now the thing
    goes much deeper.

best