insult to the truth

[Otto]

----- Original Message -----
From: <alfredjprufrock at club-internet.fr>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sunday, July 14, 2002 12:51 PM
Subject: Re[2]: insult to the truth


> i'm not sure i agree.
> the massacre of people in congo and africa had been planned for about
> a century of social (and racial) darwinism, explaining after the fact
> the greatness of colonization and "the white man's burden".

Agreed, but not planned in the way of "how can we kill masses of people
effectively in a short time", especially the Belgian colonialism has been
simply committed by greedy people, capitalists, male chauvinists, rapists,
generation for generation.

> i will
> agreee on the singularity of the way the holocaust was committed. i
> can't agree on how singularly it was planned. it is the result of at least
a
> century of racial theory showing the extermination of the inferior races
as a
> necessary episode in the natural evolution of mankind. i think what
> makes it such a singularity is it being carried on under western eyes,
> for once. and on westerners.

I don't think that Hitler needed the Belgian example. No, there hasn't been
a commission in Brussels that has said "let's exterminate them" like the
Wannsee-conference. There were no signs on the Brussels park benches:
"whites only" -- nevertheless it's been a great crime and genocide. I think
Belgium hasn't paid yet for it.

> so to the extent that every genocide is obviously singular, ok. but
> you cannot separate the holocaust from the history of "thinking" that
> led to it, and in this line you will find the behavior of colonizing
> powers in africa.
>

It's the old question of writing the word *holocaust* with a capital *H* or
not. I prefer to do, or I use *Shoah* instead. But French, British, Dutch
and especially Belgian colonialism and its crimes of course has always been
one of the arguments for the German nazis that everything they had done had
been ok, compared to what others had done. I don't buy that argument.

> O> Don't be too hard on him. What gives the Shoah its special quality,
makes it
> O> a historical singularity, isn't the number of murdered human beings
only but
> O> the way the Holocaust has been planned & committed.
>

Otto

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