pynchon-l-digest V2 #1576

[Doug Millison]

And I'm reminded of rj's interminable effort to erase the Holocaust 
from GR, in an interpretive move that would seem to advance a reading 
of Pynchon's novel which, by suppressing the manifold direct 
allusions to the Holocaust in the text, could support the neo-Nazi 
revisionist history project and the globalizing, corporate forces 
this project currently serves.

Happy New Year!

"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. Since 
Hiroshima, we have watched nuclear weapons multiply out of control, 
and delivery systems acquire, for global purposes, unlimited range 
and accuracy. An unblinking acceptance of a holocaust running to 
seven- and eight-figure body counts has become - among those who, 
particularly since 1980, have been guiding our military policies - 
conventional wisdom. [...] As well-known President and unintentional 
Luddite D. D. Eisenhower prophesied when he left office, there is now 
a permanent power establishment of admirals, generals and corporate 
CEO's, up against whom us average poor bastards are completely 
outclassed, although Ike didn't put it quite that way. We are all 
supposed to keep tranquil and allow it to go on, even though, because 
of the data revolution, it becomes every day less possible to fool 
any of the people any of the time.
--Thomas Pynchon.

rj:
>  I'm reminded of the way the Nazi intelligentsia
>similarly "translated" and then enlisted selected excerpts from Nietzsche's
>works to justify their conceptions of Aryan supremacy in the 20s and 30s,
>and the subsequent campaign of ethnic cleansing they put into practice.
-- 
d  o  u  g    m  i  l  l  i  s  o  n  <http://www.online-journalist.com>