Complicity and _GR_ (was Re: IBM, Disney, Bush: Nazis?)

[jbor]

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>From: "davemarc" <davemarc at panix.com>
>

Thanks for the info about the U.S. civil court.

> I imagine that everyone on this mailing list agrees that the United States
> still has a lot of apologizing (and redressing) to do for its conduct over
> the centuries.  But the US and Nazi Germany are hardly unique entities in
> this respect.  Just look at Australia.  Besides Vegemite, there's the
> equally distasteful,
> centuries-old issue of land rights for the indigenous populations.

Well, the "land rights" issues didn't hit the courts here until the 1970s.
But I agree that complicity in the historical "crimes" we're talking about
is not just a matter of blaming the Nazis, or the German people (eg.
Goldhagen), or "evil" and abstract corporations (Pynchon's "They"). As Doug
has been saying, it's both/and: both the Nazis and the German public *and*
the American and Allied govts and publics have a share in the complicity.
Pynchon's literature is not about demonising the Other -- whether or not
that Other be a Herero boy c. 1922 or a German military official c. 1945 --
in order to absolve himself and his nation and culture (or the reader's for
that matter).

> A-and if "All the talk
> about the judicial system and morality and civil rights is really just a
> smokescreen" (for what???), then I'd rather have the current US smokescreen,
> with all its faults, than the Nazi smokescreen.  I mean, rilly!

I didn't realise that these were the only two options.

> I'd imagine
> that only a Nazi or a Nazi fellow-traveler would prefer the Nazi
> smokescreen!)

Is the insinuation here that someone on this list (or in the "real" world)
is operating behind a "Nazi smokescreen"? A-applying this sort of nasty
tactic merely in order to win an argument sounds eerily familiar ...

best