The real business of the war is all theatre/theater

[Otto]

The real business of the war is all theatre/theater

... which I still read as not being limited to WW II. alone:

"Too fully realised ever to be merely metaphoric, history in Pynchon is
nevertheless always potentially a metaphor for the present; in Gravity's
Rainbow, for example, the German "Zone" of 1945 is, in part, a lightly
disguised version of the fragmentation of America under Richard Nixon. The
same novel now seems uncannily to have foreshadowed today's geopolitical
landscape, with warmongering giant corporations the puppet-masters behind
nation states and anarchists, ecowarriors and third world rebels allied in
resisting their globalising ambitions and repressive methods."
--John Dugdale, "The Invisible Man," New Statesman, 5 May 2003
(Thanks to Rob for making it available)

I wonder what Mrs. Grabar would have to say to this.

> Where did Pynchon get the idea that the real WAR (the War that never
> ends) is "all theatre" or a great cabal of the cartels and technologies?
> Some say 1984. Others say, Richard Sasuly. Still others have other
> opinions.
>
> A reading from the book of Sasuly. Chapter 11, verse on, lines 1-2.
>

I'd like to read more of it.

> "From its birth IG Farben had been at war with the rest of the word,
> with the United States as a main target."
>

There's a remarkable sentence in the German Wikipedia entry on IG Farben:

"Das Vorbild dazu waren die Firmenzusammenschlüsse zu so genannten Trusts in
den USA, wie z.B. Standard Oil. Diese Trusts waren
Zentralaktiengesellschaften, entstanden durch die Vereinigung mehrer
Aktiengesellschaften, die zwar formell ihre Existenz behielten, tatsächlich
jede Selbständigkeit aber verloren. Die Ausschaltung des Konkurrenzkampfes
erlaubte eine Gewinnmaximierung und das einfachere Durchsetzen der eigenen
Interessen."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I.G._Farben_Industrie

It says in the first sentence that the example for IG Farben has been the
American Trust-system, namely Standard Oil.

>
> Sasuly says, the easiest victories for the USA were won by the soldiers
> for the U.S. Alien Property Custodian. Easy as pie in the sky. Right?
> Well, not exactly.
>
> And I feeeeeeeeeeel like I've beeen here before and you know it makes me
> wonder what's goin on ....
>
> During W.W.I, the US APC went straight for the jugular, the patents.
> More than 12,000 IG patents were seized. These were retained by the army
> and navy or sold to US businesses.
>

And the Lusitania was part of the deal, and Pearl Harbour, and Vietnam, and
9/11. Are you able to understand why we from abroad are so critical of
President Bush going for the control of the Iraqi oil instead of hunting
terrorists as he had promised? It's our fear of giant corporations
influencing politics and some JR Ewing or some other popanz defining the
world. We've seen where this can lead to.

> But IG was so good at patents, it came up with thousands more (many were
> old patents dressed up to look like new ones). More importantly, it got
> all the old ones back by making deals, forming CARTELS,  with the USA
> and its businesses.
>

Dow Chemical, the masters of Vietnamese death? Zyklon B is just one
chemical, Agent Orange another. I bet that German stockholders benefited
from the war in Vietnam as they did from WW II. The German society benefited
from Vietnam only insofar as the changes inaugurated by the critical US-Left
of 1965 to 1968 did make their impact here too.

> Even after W.W.II, IG remained a huge and powerful cartel. In the USA,
> IG was making movies and stars and rockets.

No doubt about that.

Otto