NP? "On the Contemporary Relevance of the Manchurian Incident"

[Doug Millison]

"[...] Just goes to show: stage an unprovoked attack; lie about it; ignore
the world's sentiments; let policy be set by a cabal of fanatics with
visions of grandeur; encourage racist, condescending views of other
peoples; and things can spin out of control. The world today is a far cry
from the world of Herbert Hoover, Chiang Kai-shek, and Wakatsuki Reijirô,
men at the helm in their nations as of Sept. 1931; there is only one
superpower whose leaders' provocations, ignorance, fanaticism and racist
condescension can trigger another world war. Not a war between
evenly-matched blocs, this time, but one nation's war against the world,
defined at the outset as endless. [...] "

from:

On the Contemporary Relevance
of the Manchurian Incident
by Gary Leupp
http://www.counterpunch.org/leupp0922.html



...a piece worth reading, offering fruit for intertextual speculation with
regard to the world of foreign affairs and diplomacy in the background of
GR (and the rest of Pynchon's works).


"Don't forget the real business of the War is buying and selling. The
murdering and the violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to
non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways.
It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It
provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be
taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more
prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death's a stimulus to just
ordinary folks, little fellows, to try 'n' grab a piece of that Pie while
they're still here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of markets."
Gravity's Rainbow p. 105