IBM, Disney, Bush: Nazis?

[Janice Wolff]

It might be reductive to call corporations or individuals "Nazi," but I think that a look at a nice little piece by Umberto Eco in the Utne Reader might be useful.  Back in 95, an issue was dedicated to the characteristics of fascism, and Eco's contribution to the issue was:  "Eternal Fascism," which for me was a compelling read.  
Janice
>>> ericr at sadlier.com 02/21/01 03:15PM >>>
jbor wrote:
> We're well beyond any simplistic Disney = Nazi connection here, aren't we?
> Something much more thoroughgoing and insidious has been going on in Western
> culture -- maybe *human* culture -- for a long long time. And the Nazi
> bureaucracy takes advantage of Zwolfkinder, not the other way around.

That is an important point. It is indeed simplistic to call everything
corporate "Nazi", or to call Disney, IBM, or Presidents Bush Nazi just
because some in the past aligned themselves with Nazis. It absolves one
of addressing the more pervasive dispensation we struggle in. Paying off
a few old Jews absolves corporations of their continuing exploits.

I don't think Pynchon is making an explicit Disney-Nazi identification,
but the echos of Zwolfkinder in our own amusement parks helps portray a
world where all these things are part of The System. Pynchon says the
children _appear_ to run the park, that the adults keep themselves
hidden, a fine metaphor for our own consumerist lives.


> > The aim of these reports is hardly hidden: what other agendas might you mean?
> 
> The anti-George W. Bush or anti-Microsoft agendas of course.

Is that bad? The Nazi interlude taught us that the excitement of a "new
economy", a "return to values", someone to "trust" should be tempered by
skepticism, on open eye.

It is often worth asking about someone or some company, what would they
have done in Hitler's Germany. (Few of us would have been brave enough
to help save Jews et al.; most would have done what we could to survive;
some would have embraced the new dispensation with gusto.) World
corporations had the power to choose, and what they did for Hitler says
something about their business ethics. Most businesses did what they
could to profit. Is that bad? Isn't profit freely pursued the economic
system we cherish? Yep, and that's bad because it helps folk like
Hitler. Maybe there is some kind of "red" agenda behind it. There
certainly ought to be.


> But it wasn't the Nazis who invented the multi-national cartels or the
> weapons of mass destruction or the plastics or the drugs or the
> superhighways or the "official version of innocence" or all the other stuff.
> They were thriving pretty much everywhere as far as I can make out. At
> least, that's the way Pynchon portrays it.

Which is why I agree that getting hung up about Nazis is a problem. They
were just one especially destructive experiment in imperial corporatism.
It didn't begin with them, and it didn't end with them. Which makes the
evil of their corporate collaborators even worse, because it was not aberration.


> But trying to freight Bush and Disney and IBM or whoever as "criminal" and
> "Nazi" isn't gonna change anything.

Well, it might keep them from doing it again, if they know we know.


--
Eric R



**********************************************************************
This email and any files transmitted with it are confidential and
intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom they
are addressed. If you have received this email in error please notify
the system manager.

This footnote also confirms that this email message has been swept by
MIMEsweeper for the presence of computer viruses.

www.mimesweeper.com 
**********************************************************************

Janice M. Wolff
Saginaw Valley State University
Department of English