Pynchon & rap

[jbor]

on 7/13/01 7:43 AM, Doug Millison at DMillison at ftmg.net wrote:

> OK. Here's a post by "jbor"

etc

As I said, and as the full post proves, the debate centred around the
difference between Dora, as a *labour* camp, and extermination camps such as
Buchenwald and Auschwitz.

The point remains. The novel barely refers to and does not depict what was
going on in the extermination camps at Buchenwald and Auschwitz. It does not
depict the Nazi program of genocide which was specifically directed at the
Jews and which was responsible for the slaughter of over 6,000,000 Jewish
people. When I stated that the novel does not describe "the Holocaust", and
that the Holocaust is "absent" from the novel, this was the -- pretty
obvious -- meaning of that observation. This fact is regardless of whether
one decides to expand the definition of the phrase "the Holocaust" to
include the murders and deaths of non-Jewish prisoners and POWs in the
labour camps and elsewhere or not. (Most dictionaries don't, by the way. BUT
THAT WAS NOT THE ISSUE.)

To twist that into "Holocaust-denial" and "Holocaust-denier rhetoric" at
every given opportunity was and continues to be slander. Like everyone else
I am sick to death of this bullshit and I just wish that a metaphorical
Kansas house would fall out of the frigging sky onto Millison's ugly green
cyberhead.

The brief sequence with Pokler watching the "foreign prisoners" in Dora does
not depict what was going on in the extermination camps at Buchenwald and
Auschwitz. It does not depict the Nazi program of genocide which was
specifically directed at the Jews and which was responsible for the
slaughter of over 6,000,000 Jewish people.

The mention of S-shaped spokes in the opening sequence of the novel does not
depict what was going on in the extermination camps at Buchenwald and
Auschwitz. It  does not depict the Nazi program of genocide which was
specifically directed at the Jews and which was responsible for the
slaughter of over 6,000,000 Jewish people.

The reference to a Polish undertaker in a rowboat does not depict what was
going on in the extermination camps at Buchenwald and Auschwitz. It does not
depict the Nazi program of genocide which was specifically directed at the
Jews and which was responsible for the slaughter of over 6,000,000 Jewish
people.

etc

The *absence* of any such depictions in the novel is significant.

best