pynchon-l-digest V2 #1666

[Doug Millison]

rj:
>Of course there are hidden agendas!

Assuming for the moment you're right, and that writers who write 
about Nazi war crimes and the corporations and individuals that 
supported the Nazis do so with a "hidden agenda" in mind,  what would 
you say is Pynchon's "hidden agenda" for introducing the Holocaust -- 
via his depictions of the slave labor victims at Dora and other 
direct representations  -- into GR, or the earlier instance of Herero 
genocide at the hands of the Germans in V.?

rj:
>I'm a little more skeptical than you are about the "general public" reacting
>with disgust at connections made between Nazism and current political
>figures and corporations.

Well, disgust and a desire for justice has been a common theme for 
quite awhile now  in the ongoing coverage of reparations to the 
Holocaust victims by the corporations that profited from their labor 
and their suffering-- hardly a day goes by without an article about 
that in the major metropolitan U.S. newspapers, a stream of coverage 
which certainly taps into, stiumulates, nurtures, a public 
fascination with crime and criminals and punishment and retribution 
and justice.   As U.S. newspaper readers and TV news watchers begin 
to see, with the publication of this book about IBM and the Nazis, 
that a beloved U.S. brand name -- and not just those big, nasty 
German companies that have already agreed to pay reparations for 
Holocaust slave labor -- may share in the guilt for these crimes, 
we'll see some of those feelings displaced onto IBM.  General Motors 
managed, through an enormous public relations effort, to put its Nazi 
collaboration cat back in the bag over the past couple of years, but 
it won't stay there forever -- that story keeps bubbling up and will 
forever I expect.  IBM may manage to do the same, but the connections 
have been uncovered and publicized, and will continue to circulate 
and chip away at its cool blue image.

As long as the charges about Bush dynasty links to the Nazis stay 
confined to historians and journalists who can be marginalized by the 
corporate media and academics who share that worldview (and funding), 
those charges will retain a lunatic fringe taint. Arguably, that 
marginalization will only make them all the more palatable to the 
"general public" -- the sort of folks who, for example,  are ready to 
make Timothy McVeigh a martyr if he manages to maneuver his execution 
onto what would undoubtedly be the highest-ever rated reality TV 
program. In this regard, it might be worth looking again at M&D and 
at the things that Pynchon has to say therein about history and the 
role such fringe "historians" -- the kind of folks that you sneer at 
and marginalize so often here -- play in keeping alive the truth of 
what's happened in our collective past.
-- 
d  o  u  g    m  i  l  l  i  s  o  n  <http://www.online-journalist.com>