Re: Libération article on Edwin Black

[Otto Sell]

----- Original Message -----
From: Eric Rosenbloom <ericr at sadlier.com>
To: Discuss.List Pynchon <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Friday, February 16, 2001 10:37 PM
Subject: Re: Libération article on Edwin Black


jbor wrote:
> The line of argument goes something like
> this: establish a connection between a company (eg IBM), a political
figure
> or family (eg the Bushes), or indeed a critic (eg Paul de Man) or literary
> interpretation, and Nazism, and in that way you will discredit them for
all
> perpetuity. The hidden agenda is in the promotion of some alternative
> company or political figure/clan or critic or interpretation (or, indeed,
> simply the author of the alleged exposé himself.) The Nazis were "evil"
> therefore IBM ( ... etc ) is "evil". QED. It is a strategy which is
> simplistic and manipulative and quite offensive in its reduction of WWII
and
> its consequences to the status of rhetorical instrument, to the mouthpiece
> of propaganda.
>
>     "By 1945, the factory system - which, more than
>      any piece of machinery, was the real and major
>      result of the Industrial Revolution - had been
>      extended to include the Manhattan Project, the
>      German long-range rocket program and the death
>      camps, such as Auschwitz.It has taken no major
>      gift of prophecy to see how these three curves
>       of development might plausibly converge, and
>                 before too long. ... "
>                                  (T. Pynchon, 1984)

>The foolish and dangerous idea is that defeating Nazi Germany
>(and Fascist Italy, and Imperialist Japan), we defeated evil.

Very good - does anybody really believe your grandfathers and fathers came
over here twice just "to save democracy" in Europe - or because there were
financial interests?

>Industrial capitalism is still the norm, and new international laws
>and treaties are being drawn up to better favor of the freedom
>of global capital. And the USA wants to build more rocket bombs.

Think of it - the whole world's watching. None of us can afford another Cold
War, another race of arms.

>So I don't think it's unfair to tarnish today's company with its past.
>They did not simply respond amorally to an opportunity, but Hitler
>too responded to their needs. And those needs are still the same.

Let them pay -and all the others too. But I see even with our own Red-Green
government here that they are doing the kotau, going down on their knees if
the industry begins to murmur: "Jobs, jobs!"

>"I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration." --Adolf Hitler

Oh yes, for the idea of the assembly-line, not only for the Autobahn - Roger
in a Horch 870b, a car itself a myth and of course hand-made, not on an
assembly-line (GR 626).
As a German (even if not by birth, but by law and his own feeling, think of
"the German mania for subdividing" - GR 448) Hitler embraced the opportunity
of mapping the general idea of achieving higher effectivity through the
division of labour to a different coordinate system (GR 159): the nazi lager
system of organized mass murder -- in which the word "labour" applied to the
Jews was a synonym for death, as Goldhagen explains in the 12th chapter of
his book.

Otto