pynchon-l-digest V2 #1671

[Doug Millison]

rj:
>  But I
>think that the culture of blame which is being perpetuated in these
>so-called "reports" is also quite despicable, and that it is the same
>"culture of blame" on which Nazism thrived, which they exploited,
>manipulated.


rj, you're just offering flamebait, but I'll give you a serious answer instead.

rj suggests that a journalist who writes a book detailing the 
business relationship of IBM with Hitler's regime, or one who 
examines Bush family's collaboration with same, perpetuates the same 
"culture of blame" the Nazis exploited as they identified their 
enemies and launched their genocidal project.  Hogwash.  He might 
just as easily find himself guilty of exploiting that same "culture 
of blame" when he points his finger and blames those journalists and 
historians, and even the occasional P-lister for passing along what 
they have to say on these GR-related topics.

rj's equivalency argument breaks down, and becomes quite distasteful, 
when you stop to think that the Jews -- and Gypsies, and other victim 
groups -- were not in fact guilty of any of the "crimes" that Hitler 
and the Nazis fabricated or hallucinated or otherwise spun out of 
thin air as reasons for their extermination, within that "culture of 
blame".

On the other hand, Bush, Jr. has taken action -- the bombing of Iraq 
-- that can easily be identified as criminal; one reason the U.S. so 
strenuously opposes the implementation of an international court is, 
after all, because it could find itself accused of war crimes when 
this sort of bombing kills innocent people. The kind of baggage that 
Bush, Jr. brings with him to the White House -- including his daddy's 
Gulf War tactics, that have properly been identified as criminal, in 
the defense of America's oil interests, and which would appear to be 
of a piece with his pre-WWII era ancestors -- indeed calls out for 
scrutiny and investigation, all the more so now that Bush Jr. has 
shown himself to be a trigger-happy defender of corporate interests 
the same way, and in the same geopolitical theatre, his father was -- 
not to mention, in the context of the same geopolitics of oil that 
Pynchon makes such an important part of GR.

Then there's IBM, sharing responsibility for crimes to the degree 
that it supplies computers and consulting services for governments 
that currently -- or in the past; if I were an ambitious young 
journalist I'd be researching the article about IBM and apartheid 
right now --  mistreat or harm their citizens or resident aliens or 
refugees, violate human rights, commit genocide, etc.   IBM, and a 
host of other multinational corporations are in fact guilty of crimes 
-- as well as practices and actions that could easily be considered 
criminal if their true costs were taken into account, even where they 
manage stay within the letter of the law --  just about everywhere 
they do business.  It doesn't take a "culture of blame" to expose 
this, only a judicial system that values  justice and seeks to stop 
those individuals, corporations, and governments which are hurting 
people and the planet.

So, we see rj equating the fabrication by Hitler and the Nazis of 
reasons to blame and exterminate otherwise innocent victims, with 
journalists and historians and other writers who uncover the facts of 
actual crimes and link them to specific individuals, corporations, 
governments. No equivalency, in other words.  His argument falls 
apart rather dramatically when you realize that in that second 
category we'd have to include  the writer Thomas Pynchon with his 
willingness to name IG Farben, von Braun, Shell, & etc., in a GR 
context that positively invites us to trace their connections to 
present-day corporations, individuals -- where should we look for 
today's equivalent of Blicero? Pynchon asks and answers, on the 
boards of directors of large corporations -- and governments, in 
novels that don't hesitate to depict crimes (the Holocaust; the 
genocide of the Herero, American Indians; extermination of the dodo; 
& etc.), that ask serious questions of who's responsible, why and how 
did this happen, and which provide at least partial answers to those 
questions.

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