Just a thought

[Otto]

>
> On the day when the death of one of HST's advisers/radiation biologist
James
> Stewart "Stew" Otto (er, any relation, mien herr?) was in the papers, a
> little thought on the war:
>

I hope not, but thanks for the excerpt. This is absolutely Pynchon-related.

I must think of what kind of "poor" guy (in nearly every objection) Hitler
was before he went into "politics" - eh, those fascist Munich groups no one
believed of they could ever become important. Seems as if this was an error
since there were more of those poor fuckers out there deprieved from stable
money & ontological values and not knowing what and whom to believe. In fact
there were millions of them, both of my grandfathers included.

So I agree that many grown-up Germans in 1939 shared some kind of either/or
opinion in the sense of "If the world doesn't give us Germans justice then
there shall be no world anymore."

>From the last part of the quote (wars are reactions to our failed search for
love) I'm reminded on Erich Fromm's "The Art of Loving."

I strongly recommend a reading of Jef Geeraerts "Black Venus" and "The Good
Murderer" (I doubt if the first is still available in English, but should be
on the library, and that the second ever has been translated at all) where
this Belgian ex-colonial tells about his "adventures" in Kongo. He's heavily
relying on Fromm, but somewhat unreflected and he is a good example of a
minor novelist who has read Joyce, Beckett, Miller etc. (but not Gaddis or
Pynchon), trying to imitate a modernist style, someone who adds myths to his
fiction to "give it a spiritual deep dimension" but in the end only using a
shallow Fromm to have a justification for homicide and sexual abuse under
colonial circumstances. An anti-Pynchon, but very revealing.

Otto

> War, then, is the act of restaging
> early traumas for the purpose of maternal revenge and
> self purification. Wars are clinical emotional disorders,
> periodic shared psychotic episodes of delusional
> organized butchery intended--like homicide--to turn a
> severe 'collapse of self esteem' into 'a rage to achieve
> justice.' Wars are both homicidal and suicidal--every
> German in 1939 who cheered Hitler on as he promised to
> start an unwinnable world war against overwhelming opposing
> nations knew deep down they were committing suicide. Like
> all homicides and suicides, wars are reactions to our
> failed search for love, magical gestures designed to
> ensure love through projection into enemies, by 'knocking
> the Terrifying Mommy off her pedestal' and by 'killing
> the Bad Boy self.'"
> ~~ Lloyd deMause, "War as Righteous Rage and Purification"
> (http://www.psychohistory.com/htm/war.html)
>
> TTFN
>
> frodeauxb