Rex and the BLGVN

[jbor]

[...] 
> Pynchon is using the historic destruction of the Vietnamese Troskyites to
> expand his critique of the dark side of ideological purity and its progression
> towards hypocrisy, violence and repression.

I think that Rex, so quick to take murderous retribution against Weed, is a
micro-level representation of the same phenomenon.

> Revolutions have usually  included
> infighting and bloodshed. How quickly the upper class american revolutionaries
> turned on their fellow soldiers in Shay's rebellion; how quickly did the once
> united states devolve into civil war. The French revolution was also a bloody
> mess, but Napolean is rarely described as a murderous dictator,

Pieter Geyl's excellent _Napoleon: For and Against_ might disabuse you of
this false assumption.

> Lincoln never. 
> The number of Trotskyites killed does not qualify for the term mass murder and
> Ho  avoided creating a mass murderous dictatorship like that of Stalin or Mao,
> and Vietnam has a far more humane post colonial history than Pinochet or
> Sukarno to pick proteges of capitalist dogma.  I don't know exactly where Ho
> falls in Pynchon's moral universe, but  it i! s truly a stretch of the text
> and of history to say he is putting him in the same category as Pol Pot.

The point remains, however, that Pynchon does foreground a historical fact
that is sometimes overlooked or deliberately glossed over, that Ho Chi Minh
was a communist dictator who eliminated political dissidents and opponents
(207.27-9). That the scale of the Cambodian genocide is greater doesn't
exonerate the North Vietnamese regime.

There's also a reference in the text to the South Vietnamese refugees who
were driven from their homes after the fall of Saigon (347), which is
personalised in the story of Thi Anh Tran (182-3).

best
 
> As I see it Rex, like Frenesi shows the hairs breadth that can separate the
> extreme left from the extreme right. In his violent outrage for revolutionary
> purity he acts as an instrument of state repression and undermines the
> potential  power of  the PR3 movement as  an experiment in freedom  and
> nonviolent civil disobedience. Weed Atman shows the hairs breadth that can
> separate the pursuit of freedom from the pursuit of personal indulgence, a
> math professor from a cultic guru. I wonder if some of the arguments  among
> p-listers about the characters in this story are a demonstration of the
> teetering balance of the american experiment, the furious differences we see,
> looking at the same facts and people.
>