Holocaust (Re: avoid the shitstorm!)

[Phil Wise]

----- Original Message -----
From: "lorentzen-nicklaus" <lorentzen-nicklaus at t-online.de>
To: <o.sell at telda.net>
Cc: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Thursday, February 01, 2001 1:21 AM
Subject: Re: Holocaust (Re: avoid the shitstorm!)


[cut]

>   at this point the "nazi-system" does not really differ from the
>   "commie-system", does it? dozens of millions were killed for not being
>   "comrade" enough. rosa luxemburg's famous saying - "freedom is always
>   the freedom of those who think different" - is usually reported wrongly.
>   unlike the legend says, this was never meant as a general statement for
free
>   speech, but only as an intervention concerning internal left debates.
mrs.
>   luxemburg never thought that the "kapitalistischen ausbeuterschweine"
>   (capitalist exploiter pigs[!]) or the "scheißliberalen" (shity liberals)
>   should have the same right to express their opinion as us oh so
"progessive"
>  (whatever that might mean today...)folks. marxist philosopher ernst bloch
>   still said during the 60s "ubi est lenin ibi jerusalem". the "world
civil
>   war" between 1917 and 1989 fooled the best of several generations ...
>
>   (right, it still makes a difference that the nazi-system relied on a
purely
>   wrong and racist philosophy, while communism had - theoretically - some
good
>   points to make. the dead people, however, probably don't care much).
>
[further editing]

Hi everyone

I'm what you call a lurker here - I've got too much going on to really
engage; always makes good reading, though, this list.

Anyway, what Stalinism and German Nazism share is totalitarianism (cf
Arendt), one ostensibly left-wing (but which mutated into the sort of
elitist power structure usually characterised as right wing) and the other
ostensibly right wing but with a surprising collectivist bent.

My favourite definition of totalitarianism (Claude Lefort, I believe) is
that in a totalitarian society, the political sphere, monopolised by the one
official party, becomes identified not just with the state, as with
dictatorships of other sorts, but with society as a whole.  I think that the
technological advances in communication in the twentieth century enabled
this unprecedented situation.  This definition seems necessary, but perhaps
isn't sufficient.

Nonetheless, it seems to me that this extreme realisation of power could
transform a society from any part of the political spectrum, in potential,
and that its existence renders the left-right spectrum redundant in those
cases.

This has to be a major aspect of Their power in GR, what with They having
meaningful control over society (let Them stand in for The Party, which in
this case represents (among many other things) markets) and resistive power
rendered mostly impotent because it is so difficult to think outside the
terms They have demarcated.  Even paranoid/anti-paranoid remains in Their
paradigm.

Vineland carries this into more immediate territory.  Such an expl needs
more detail etc obviously, but I always come back to Their totalitarianism,
realised fully with the image of the rocket threatening "all of us",
figuratively packed into a movie theatre, enjoying our own destruction as an
aesthetic event.

Phil