Herero

[jbor at bigpond.com]

The usual silly, sarcastic stuff. It's got nothing to do with knee-jerk 
patriotism or petty oneupmanship with colonial atrocities.

The development in Pynchon's thought from _V._, where the Herero 
massacres are viewed as prefiguring the Nazi campaign of genocide in a 
pretty simplistic way, to _GR_ and _M&D_ where there is seen to be a 
much broader panorama of imperialist oppression and exploitation at 
play (economic, poitical, religious, scientific et al), reaching back 
for centuries, is clear enough. The letter to Thomas Hirsch in Seed's 
book lays it out in fairly straightforward terms if you need a crib.

Neither the fact that Germans speak German nor the invention of barbed 
wire seem particularly valid criteria to use when trying to fix an 
all-encompassing root cause or origin for "the topic at hand". And the 
broader point the journalist was trying to make with his or her 
examples (the Belgian Congo, the British Raj and French Algeria were 
the others) was that the track record of capitalism is pretty woeful, 
not that Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm and their regimes were Nazi.

best

On 17/02/2006, at 11:47 AM, Charles Albert wrote:

> Naturally......all things evil orignate here.....
>
> Imagine if Time had been a bit more co-operative, the US might have 
> been able to benefit from the example you Australians set with YOUR 
> indigenous people....
>
>
> But back to the topic at hand. Though I agree that it is a trivial 
> distinction, surely a congential echo of my Oppressor forebears 
> (before you xit down my neck for that - the OED finds the "e" 
> perfectly acceptable), I think the use of barbed wire constitutes a 
> paradigm shift in "internment"....
>
>
> But I am probably wrong....
>
>
> love,
> cfa
>
>
> oh, it's so great to be back.......
>
>
>
> On 2/16/06, jbor at bigpond.com <jbor at bigpond.com> wrote:
>> U.S. well before then.
>>
>> best
>>
>> On 17/02/2006, at 8:11 AM, Charles Albert wrote:
>>
>> > What term was used to describe the locations were Boers were 
>> interned
>> > during their war with the Brits? As I recall, these were the first
>> > "concentration camps"....
>> >
>> >  love,
>> >  cfa
>> >
>> > On 2/16/06, Otto < ottosell at yahoo.de> wrote:
>> >> "The terms lebensraum and konzentrationslager were both first used 
>> by
>> >> the German colonial regime in south-west Africa (now Namibia), 
>> which
>> >> committed genocide against the Herero and Nama peoples and 
>> bequeathed
>> >> its ideas and personnel directly to the Nazi party."
>> >> (...)
>> >> Communism may be dead, but clearly not dead enough
>> >> Seumas Milne, Thursday February 16, 2006, The Guardian
>>  >>  http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1710890,00.html
>> >>
>> >>
>> >>
>> >>
>> >>
>> >>
>> >> ___________________________________________________________
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>>