factory system, rockets, death camps, atom bombs

[Doug Millison]

Otto:  "Doug, it's the rocket, not Auschwitz. And GR is a warning 
(too, among other
things), a warning repeated in the Luddism-essay, pointing out to us. In
1973 and 1984 we all were in danger being killed by rockets, not by
death-camps."

Good point, Otto, but I'm not so sure Pynchon isn't equating the 
rocket with Auschwitz. After all, in this essay he says that, "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."  In addition 
to providing slave labor for  V-2 production (as Pynchon depicted in 
GR), what else do the "German long-range rocket program and the death 
camps" have in common?  They're based on the factory system that 
grows out of the Industrial Revolution, and they demonstrate the 
deadly ends the Industrial Revolution's developments have been 
twisted to serve.  Marry up that system with those missiles and 
nuclear weapons, and you get the Mutally Assured Destruction 
strategies -- foreign policy based on "acceptable" holocausts -- 
that Pynchon goes on to alludes to in this essay.

A threat of death camps in '73 and in '84 may not be completely out 
of the range of Pynchon's speculation -- or, our speculation, perhaps 
more importantly for those of you who don't like talking about the 
author --  either, given the way he brings in the U.S. government 
plans to round up protesters in concentration camps and uses it as a 
plot device and setting in Vineland.  In '73 when GR appeared, and 
during the 60s when Pynchon was working on it,  we might also talk of 
"death camps" in a larger sense of the word, to include places like 
Vietnam where this same factory system was killing innocent people by 
the millions, to profit the same kinds of corporations (in some 
cases,  the same corporations) that use the War in GR to boost 
profits, or, to land on an M&D locale Pynchon may have already been 
thinking about and researching:  southern Africa with its apartheid 
system, camps, mines and other industrial operations that grow out of 
that same mortal fascination with profits and factory production 
systems.

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